The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (28 page)

She found herself thinking back to
the previous morning, to a simple breakfast of pancakes and coffee. To a
relaxing soak in a tub after a long sleep that left her strangely refreshed,
the morning air crisp and cool, the floor pleasantly solid and refreshing
against the soles of her feet. She felt right with the world, then. She
remembered talking with Jack; not about anything important or weighty, but
somehow she remembered all of it as if it were the secrets of the universe
revealed, whispered into her ear by some guardian angel. She remembered it
because, over all the years of her life, she could not remember a time when she
felt more at ease, more at home within herself. It had all been right for that
brief time here in the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, only herself and Jack Lantirn and
no one else; no one threatening to destroy them, or making impossible demands
on them.

And then it all changed, the ganja
god’s paradise lost.

And suddenly, more than any other
time before, she desperately wanted to be riding the Dreamline. Riding it
forever
!

*     *     *

Jack sat on the rooftop staring up at
Ellen atop the stairway and thinking. Originally, he had been at his desk.
His
desk
; the phrase still sounded wrong. He felt like an intruder, a usurper
of the Writer’s throne. The Cast Outs were nothing more than local land barons
come to challenge the reign of an upstart boy-king pulling tickets from his
pocket like unearned titles.

He had typed nearly a page, just an
outline of some ideas: a strange knight in a strange land, an amalgam of times
where the Medieval and the Old West and the distant future and the Puritanical
past all crashed together in a blender. It was a good idea, he thought, but one
that was, for the moment, without direction. Just vague ideas and images,
substance without form, empty words on a page. Distractions kept pulling him
away, some his own fault, some the fault of others; neither changed the fact
that he wasn’t getting anything done.

And the clock was ticking.

The Writer said he would have as much
time as he needed, but not as much as he wanted, advice not overly helpful. And
since the Cast Outs had managed to kill him, a prospect the Writer believed
impossible, his information was circumspect.

And as if he didn’t already have
enough to deal with, a sixth person arrives at the Saloon. Oversight. He liked
her—beautiful, edgy, her candor and grit—but it didn’t change the fact that she
didn’t belong here. There were only five tickets out; she made six. So now
what? Kick her out? Send her back to the Wasteland? What if he was wrong? If he
sent her away—allowing for a moment that such a thing was even possible—she
would almost certainly die. He wasn’t willing to make that kind of decision.
But at some point, he had to finish the tickets—all
five
of them. Then
what? He would be gone, the other four with him, and Oversight would be left
behind. Would Kreiger look after her, punish her, or simply leave her to the
Wasteland? Would she or Kreiger even survive? For the Tribe of Dust, he cared
not; the welt on the side of his head testified to their disregard for his
wellbeing. Jesus might turn the other cheek, but Jack was no messiah, had never
applied for the job and absolutely did not want it. They could all rot in the
Wasteland, their bones picked clean by insects, their lives forgotten by
everyone … and Jack wouldn’t care one bit.

Oversight was another matter.

But such arguments were moot. The
tickets weren’t on the verge of being completed. The truth was he had no idea
what to do about
any
of them. Writing was not a switch in his head;
there was no on or off for him. He was always imagining, always writing in his
mind, and what came, came. And when it didn’t … well, you crossed that bridge
when you got to it.

Only here it was, and he had nothing.
Just a lot of half-formed characterizations, dialogues without sense or
sequence, half-baked and contradictory settings and situations. No sooner did
he start to get an idea, but then he thought of Ellen, or Alex, or Lindsay, or
even Leland Quince, and like that, the idea was gone. It slipped away that
quickly. Then the words turned to garbage, forced and lifeless, flat and dull.
He would print up the page, study it a moment with a red pen in hand, and cross
out the entire thing. Nothing worth saving. Nothing worth salvaging. Just
garbage. His wastebasket was full of them.

They deserved better. Instead, they got him. Just Jack. Jack, the loser.
Jack, the nobody. Jack, the one who would get them all killed because he just
didn’t get it. Jools was right. He had a way of creating expectations in others
that he could not possibly fulfill. He was, to everyone including himself, a
disappointment.

And he was all they had.

“She deserves better,” he said
softly.

Beside him, Nail nodded absently.
Whether or not he was agreeing, or simply nodding to the sound of Jack’s voice,
he didn’t know. But the gargoyle seemed to be looking at Ellen. Her back to
them, she was unaware they were watching over her, and Jack wanted it to stay
that way … for a little longer, anyway.

He turned to Nail, then back to
Ellen. “What do you see?” he asked softly.

Nail turned, offering Jack a blank
stare; curiosity, but not comprehension.

“Do me a favor, huh?” Jack said, his
voice so low that only the gargoyle would hear. “If anything happens, no matter
what, look after her. I know you’re not really supposed to. I know you’re
supposed to protect the Nexus, or the Caretaker, or something like that. But
protect her.”

Nail’s mouth opened slightly, the tip
of his tongue protruding like a dog’s. For a moment, Jack thought he saw actual
understanding behind the liquid black of Nail’s eyes, the message—perhaps not
the words, but certainly their intent—making it through:
copy that, Houston; message received
.

“You understand me, don’t you?”

Nail turned away, staring back up at
Ellen, his expression unchanged.

Then again
, Jack thought sourly,
maybe I’m
just losing my mind
.

So what else is new?

*     *     *

The group had splintered since the
incident with the disappearing gumball machine. Alex wasn’t exactly sure why,
or what happened, or even why it should matter so much. Maybe it was what they
called a watershed event. Maybe it wasn’t even the event itself, but the
culmination of several things that climaxed in, of all things, the
disappearance of something that shouldn’t have mattered in the first place. And
from that event, a thousand possible outcomes were pouring down.

He hadn’t made much headway in understanding
it, either.

They didn’t eat lunch together. Nor
dinner either. As someone became hungry, they simply drifted to the candy
machine or the bar, a handful of coins in their hand from the large pickle jar.
They would find something to eat then drift away again like ghosts in an old
hotel.

Alex tried to keep an eye on both
Oversight and Lindsay. The little girl seemed to regard him as a big brother.
And she was smart; a hell of lot smarter than he was at seven—almost eight, she
probably would have corrected. He made sure she wasn’t overlooked. And as for
Mr. Quince, he did his own thing, and Alex didn’t particularly care to find out
what that was. Ellen and Jack passed occasionally through the Saloon. He
thought Jack was spending his time upstairs writing, which was good news. If
their getting out of here hinged upon his writing, well then, more power to
him. Of Ellen, he didn’t know. She would disappear for a while, then reappear,
moving like a wraith, light of foot, a little pale and a little out of touch
with the reality around her. She looked sick … or in withdrawal.

Well, not his place to judge. Not
her. Not Jack. Not any of them.

Evening came, the darkness spreading
across the Wasteland, sand and sky turning to black. All day, Alex had been
unable to get the business mogul’s offer out of his mind. There was something
almost right about it, an element of common sense and expediency that ran like
a thread through Mr. Quince’s carefully woven tale. And that scared him. At
exactly what point did Judas decide that betraying Jesus was the best course of
action?

And Leland might be right. Only Jack
was here by choice. The rest of them were poker chips in a game that Jack, the
current Caretaker, and the Tribe of Dust, failed former Caretakers, were
playing. Did any of them matter to Jack or Kreiger, or were they simply a means
to an end: control over the Nexus and the godhood that position promised. What
did he owe Jack, really? Alex liked a lot of people, but he wouldn’t
necessarily trust them with his life, or trust them to do what was right
instead of what was easiest. Maybe Mr. Quince was right. Maybe Jack wasn’t the
man for the job. He seemed to want to go home just like the rest of them, and
that meant that he was planning to use one of the five tickets for himself. Why
not? But there were six of them now. Someone would be left behind, and Jack
would be the one to choose. The rules of the Nexus—so far as anyone understood
them—seemed to indicate that Jack could only succeed in sending them back if he
used all the tickets. Just two or three or four wasn’t enough. It was all or
nothing. But there were only five tickets, not six. All or nothing.

All or nothing
.

Oversight alluded that none of the realities created by the tickets would
be permanent if any were incomplete. She pressed him for more about Louisiana and the bayou, and he told her what else he remembered. Precious little as it
turned out, but she liked to hear him talk about it. She told him that back
when Kreiger first tried to control the Nexus, he sent her to a place like what
he described. But something happened. Kreiger failed. Her world was undone and
she was dragged back to the Wasteland where she had been ever since. She had
not offered details, but her point seemed to be that Kreiger’s failure had
become hers. He was her master; she shared his fate.

If Jack failed, would they share his
fate? Would they be cast out like him? The very idea made his blood run cold.
For all it lacked, the Saloon was heaven compared to what lay outside of its
shelter.

The small waiting room was all
shadows, lit only by the flickering candy machine, and the plum-colored shaft
of failing day. Memories of daylight. In this twilight, you could look out at
the quiet desert and almost believe that a person could survive out there in
the Wasteland for a time. Not forever, no, but perhaps for a time.

Out in the main room, a song started
up on the jukebox.
Far Behind
by a post-grunge alternative band,
Candlebox; Jack’s taste in music was out-of-date.

Oversight appeared in the doorway.
“Something to drink?” she asked, a bottle of beer extended out to him.

“God, yes,” he answered. It was
ice-cold, the glass slippery in his fingers. Back in the real world—the
other
real world—he would have been denied this simple pleasure.
Underage
. In
that respect, the Saloon wasn’t all that bad. “You have no idea how much I
wanted one of these earlier. I couldn’t find one anywhere.”

“The Nexus is capricious in what it
metes out,” she answered, sitting down on the opposite side of the bench from him,
one leg drawn up, her foot resting between them. “Only the Caretaker gets what
he wants all the time, and then only when he knows precisely what he wants. The
rest of us are not so lucky.”

“Where are the others?” He had been
lost in thought so long that he hadn’t realized the rest of the Saloon had
lapsed into a thick silence only partially concealed by the music from the
jukebox. Oversight was the first person he’d seen in half an hour.

“Jack’s in his room. Lindsay started
to drop off an hour ago. Ellen finally offered to take her upstairs and get her
ready for bed. I haven’t seen either of them since. Quince is in his room,
also.”

Alex knew about Leland. He’d made it
a point to keep track of the businessman since their earlier conversation, his
mistrust well-deserved. He saw the businessman heading upstairs an hour ago
with a book scrounged from one of the Saloon’s many bookshelves.
The Art of
War
. Alex hadn’t realized that Mr. Quince was a military buff, but it kind
of made sense; the man certainly liked winning. “So it’s just you and me.”

He had intended the remark to sound
lighthearted, a joke to ease his nervousness. It failed. It was impossible for
him to look at Oversight without feeling something, a kind of blind passion,
directionless and desperate. And as he felt its pulse like lifeblood surging
through his heart, he found it impossible not to hear Mr. Quince’s remark come
back to haunt him, reminding him of how Oversight, the object of this
desperate, aching want, was owned—owned the way you owned a vintage automobile
or a well-trained dog—by Kreiger. It was an outrage! She deserved better. They
all did. To argue anything less was to imply they were all simply markers in a
game of high stakes poker.

“What’s wrong, Alex?”

“Huh?”

“I can see your face in the dark.
You’re thinking something. Not something good, either.”