wheelchair faster, scanning the weedy gaps between the big white buildings for the graceful sweep of an overhead monorail track. He wanted to get out of this endless aisle of the dead. As he took yet another deep breath of that speciously sweet cinnamon smell, it seemed to him that he had never wanted anything so badly in his whole life.
19
JAKE’S DAZE WAS BROKEN abruptly when Gasher grabbed him by the collar and yanked with all the force of a cruel rider braking a galloping horse. He stuck one leg out at the same time and Jake went crashing backward over it. His head connected with the pavement and for a moment all the lights went out. Gasher, no humanitarian, brought him around quickly by seizing Jake’s lower lip and yanking it upward and outward.
Jake screamed and bolted to a sitting position, striking out blindly with his fists. Gasher dodged the blows easily, hooked his other hand into Jake’s armpit, and yanked him to his feet. Jake stood there, rocking drunkenly back and forth. He was beyond protest now; almost beyond understanding. All he knew for sure was that every muscle in his body felt sprung and his wounded hand was howling like an animal caught in a trap.
Gasher apparently needed a breather, and this time he was slower getting his wind back. He stood bent over with his hands planted on the knees of his green trousers, panting in fast little whistling breaths. His yellow headscarf had slipped askew. His good eye glittered like a trumpery diamond. The white silk eyepatch was now wrinkled, and curds of evil-looking yellow muck oozed onto his cheek from beneath it.
“Take a look over your head, cully, and you’ll see why I brung you up short. Get an eyeful!”
Jake tilted his head upward, and in the depths of his shock he was not at all surprised to see a marble fountain as big as a house-trailer dangling eighty feet above them. He and Gasher were almost below it. The fountain was held suspended by two rusty cables which were mostly hidden within huge, unsteady stacks of church pews. Even in his less-than-acute state, Jake saw that these cables were more seriously frayed than the remaining hangers on the bridge had been.
“See it?” Gasher asked, grinning. He raised his left hand to his covered eye, scooped a mass of the pussy material from beneath it, and flicked it indifferently aside. “Beauty, ain’t it? Oh, the Tick-Tock Man’s a trig cove, all right, and no mistake. (Where’s those goat-fucking drums? They should have started by now—if Copperhead’s forgot em, I’ll ram a stick so far up his arse he’ll taste bark.) Now look ahead of you, my delicious little squint.”
Jake did, and Gasher immediately clouted him so hard that he staggered backward and almost fell.
“Not across, idiot child! Down! See them two dark cobblestones?”
After a moment, Jake did. He nodded apathetically.
“Yer don’t wanter step on em, for that’d bring the whole works down on your head, cully, and anybody who wanted yer after that’d have to pick yer up with a blotter. Understand?”
Jake nodded again.
“Good.” Gasher took a final deep breath and slapped Jake’s shoulder. “Go on, then, whatcher waitin for? Hup!”
Jake stepped over the first of the discolored stones and saw it wasn’t really a cobblestone at all but a metal plate which had been rounded to look like one. The second was just ahead of it, cunningly placed so that if an unaware intruder happened to miss the first one, he or she would almost certainly step on the second.
Go ahead and do it, then, he thought. Why not? The gunslinger’s never going to find you in this maze, so go ahead and bring it down. It’s got to be cleaner than what Gasher and his friends have got planned for you. Quicker, too.
His dusty moccasin wavered in the air above the booby-trap.
Gasher hit him with a fist in the middle of the back, but not hard. “Thinkin about takin a ride on the handsome, are you, my little cull?” he asked. The laughing cruelty in his voice had been replaced by simple curiosity. If it was tinged with any other emotion, it wasn’t fear but amusement. “Well, go ahead, if it’s what yer mean to do, for I have my ticket already. Only be quick about it, gods blast your eyes.”
Jake’s foot came down beyond the trigger of the booby-trap. His decision to live a little longer was not based on any