The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (32 page)

He nuzzled her hand, a child not
comprehending the swirl of words surrounding him, but sensing their intent.

“Forgive me,” she said, lifting his
chin, thumb brushing the tears below the creature’s only eye as she placed the
blade against his throat.

The Dust Eater only stared, a lamb
that knows in that last moment what is to come.

Her blade sawed upwards in a quick,
glimmering arc.

A slow wheezing breath, and for one
moment, Jack thought Oversight had spared the Dust Eater’s life; thought she
could not bring herself to kill something so pitiable. But the shuddering
breath that filled the silence did not come from the Dust Eater. It came from Ellen.
She pushed away from him, running into the hall, the bathroom door slamming
behind her.

The only sound from the Dust Eater
was a damp thud as it pitched forward, dropping to the floor amid a widening
pool of blackness.

THREATS, WARNINGS, AND

ULTIMATUMS

Jack stared around the gloom, eyes
touching on the others and moving away, heart slamming in his chest. Darkness
edged in around his vision and his legs felt like jelly. The monster from the
Wasteland lay in a pool of its own blood, the night transforming it into
something less serious: a large stain of black paint or spilled ink, nothing
more. Dawn would reveal otherwise.

How had this happened? How had
everything spun so out of control, and I never even saw?

He closed his eyes, forcing himself
to focus on nothing. Just blackness. Blackness. Breathing in. Breathing out.
Slowing his heartbeat. Not screaming out loud. Not dying. Not going mad.

“Jack?” Alex said.

His eyes opened, hand rising sharply to cut the young man
off. “Shut up! Whatever you have to say, I don’t care.”

It was impossible to forget that only
minutes ago Alex had been looking to split his skull open with a pry bar and
steal his computer, hand it over to Kreiger and doom them all. Impossible to
forget, and maybe impossible to forgive. He expected it of Quince, though not
to the extent the businessman had gone: a deal with the mad wizard, promises
and the offer of servants. No, he hadn’t foreseen that. Not Quince, not Alex,
not Kreiger or Oversight or this thing called the Dust Eater. So what did that
say about him as a Caretaker if he couldn’t even take care of four desperate
people who only wanted to go home? Not a Caretaker at all, really. More like a
victim … like them. Leland had tried to sell him out, the man’s loyalty bought
with nothing more than empty promises and a couple slaves. A better deal than
Alex, which only made the young man seem foolish by comparison.

Quince stood in the hallway, looking
less a man caught in a lie than a man whose intentions were foiled and was
already working on something new, a way to salvage the situation.

He felt so tired. He just wanted to
sleep, a long, lazy sleep that lasted into the cool of the morning, Saturday
mornings of old. But he doubted he would get it—not today or tomorrow; maybe
not ever. This insanity had to stop, and he was the only one who could stop it.

He was the Caretaker.

“Nail, are you all right?”

The gargoyle, fur matted and tangled
with gore, looked up and nodded.

“Good,” he gestured at the Dust
Eater. “Pick that up and follow me. Everyone else stays here. No exceptions.”
His gaze leveled on the businessman. “I need you, Mr. Quince. I’m sure you’ve
guessed that by now. But I won’t let you sacrifice all of us, either. Cross me
again, and I’ll have Nail smash your legs. You can live well enough locked in a
closet screaming in pain, and it won’t interfere with my plans at all. Do you
understand?”

Leland narrowed his eyes, jaw working
in silence.

“This is my Saloon,” Jack said,
taking a small chess piece from his pocket, the black queen, and tossing it at
the businessman’s naked chest. He caught it reflexively, hands knowing what it
was, what it meant, even before his eyes saw it. And that look of knowing
almost made Jack smile. Almost. “Never forget that.”

Slowly, Leland Quince nodded.

“The same goes for you, Alex.”

Lindsay seemed on the verge of tears, and Jack wondered what he must look
like to her—what they all must look like; a masquerade of children playing
adults, fighting with playground rules. How much had she seen that she would
never forget? Monsters tearing at one another, adults screaming at each other
like schoolyard bullies, Oversight slicing the Dust Eater’s throat and leaving
him facedown in a pool of his own blood? Or was it that when everything was
over and the blood spilled, nothing was resolved? Threats were still being
made, posturing and defiance. It wasn’t over. To a child needing answers,
wasn’t that the most terrifying thing? It simply wasn’t over.

“Lindsay, come here,” Alex said,
holding out an arm. She fell into his embrace, clinging to his neck and sobbing
quietly against him. “It’s going to be all right.”

Jack wasn’t so sure. And therein lay
the problem.

“Come on,” he said, the gargoyle
following with the Dust Eater’s corpse over one shoulder like a sack of
laundry. As he passed Leland Quince, he felt the man’s eyes upon him and found
himself wishing that somewhere in all the chaos, Leland Quince had been
wounded, even crippled.

Jack stopped before the bathroom,
knocking lightly. “Ellen? Are you all right?”

There was no answer.

*     *     *

Ellen lay curled on her side, face
pressed to the tiles, cold and hard. The door to her back was locked. No one
could get in. Not even Jack, though the concern in his voice was plain.

Not now, Jack. Please, not now.

She wrapped her hands over her ears,
muffling all sound, and curled herself tight, a developmental reversal, a
reversion back to the fetus and beyond. Back in time. Back in the world. Back
to a point of simplicity. Singularity. The sounds from without would eventually
fade and go away. Eventually, everything would fade and go away.

Even Jack.

God, how she wanted to be flying.
Wanted the Dreamline. Wanted a lot of it. Enough to kill, maybe. Enough to set
her free. Enough…

… to make the widening pool in the
darkness something other than what it was, something that did not resurrect
thoughts recently buried, easily exhumed.

She stared across time; stared
through eyes of days or weeks ago. And Lenny stared back at her. Lenny, her
connection and sometimes friend—friend when she had money and wanted to get
high, wanted to ride the Dreamline. Lenny looked back at her in amazement. It
was almost comical, his mouth open, his eyes wide. It made you want to laugh,
except there was nothing funny about the flat expression in his eyes. It was
the stare of a fish lying upon the shore, choking in the air, drying under the
sun. It was the stare of something dying, or maybe already dead.

Yes, there was the flatness, the
deadness in his eyes. But there was also the amber-colored handle of the
screwdriver he held in his hand, the steel shaft still buried in his throat.
Blood spilled out in thick gushes from the hole in his neck, spreading upon the
floor in a widening pool of …

…
darkness
.

On a bathroom floor in a saloon on
the edge of sanity, Ellen sobbed quietly, trying to pull herself back from the
image, make it go away. But it chased her and she had nowhere left to run,
nothing that would drive it away or set her free.

The dead-eye fish stare looked at
her, the pale, trembling fingers limply holding the screwdriver which Lenny
used to crack vending machines, car doors, and even to mug people if he needed
a fix really bad. For some reason, Lenny could not pull the screwdriver from
his neck. He was too weak, or too stoned, or too something. Or maybe, she had
sunk it in too far, wedged it too deep in the muscle, the artery, the gristle,
the …
whatever
. Lenny was a dead man. He was staring at her with his
dead eyes, one track-marked hand limply holding the screwdriver while the other
dangled uselessly down by his shriveled penis. Lenny’s pants and underwear were
around his ankles, his member slowly deflating, descending as she watched with
strangely lucid fascination. The skin of his dick was blue-veined and marked
with small red sores like towns on the blue highways of a road map.
This way
to Peterville
, she thought, and remembered a hysterical sound in her ears,
a sound like a choked laugh that might have been a sob or a muffled scream.

She knew that she was also
half-naked, her jeans wadded in a pile somewhere, her underwear … well, maybe
she hadn’t been wearing any; she couldn’t remember and supposed it didn’t
matter. She was simply standing there in a T-shirt, staring wide-eyed at the
dead man in front of her who would not fall down in the widening pool of his
own blood, knowing, in that secret part of her mind where all things are stored
that she didn’t wish to deal with, that Lenny had gotten her high, had peeled
off her clothes, and was preparing to enter her with that diseased piece of
meat he called a dick.

That was before she killed him.

But the funny thing was he wouldn’t
fall down. She must have put the screwdriver in his throat, though for the life
of her she could not remember doing it. But he simply stood there, staring at
her; staring with his dead fish eyes; staring with empty accusation. But he
wouldn’t die. He wouldn’t drop down and die. He just stared. Stared.

Welcome
, a voice said from a deep corner of
her brain,
to the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

The brass frog in the corner, the one
with the obscene phallus, was gone. The towels it held upon upraised hands, the
mother-of-pearl soap dish that rested in its gaping mouth, lay upon the floor
as if dropped suddenly, forgotten like the frog itself.

*     *     *

The Tribe of Dust stood waiting as he
marched across the sea of sand changed to indigo by the night. The sky was
lighter in the east; morning was near.

Another day in the Saloon, and what
do you have to show for yourself?
Jack thought despairingly.

If they’d let me alone, stop trying
to steal the tickets and turn the others against me, I might be done by now.

Or you might not,
a voice thought back quietly
.
Excuses are for those who fail.

Shut up!

He stopped in front of them, somehow
knowing just as they did where the line of the barrier stretched; where he was
safe from them; where they could not reach—not
physically
.

But it was closer than two days ago;
maybe twenty-five yards closer. Looking back, he could read the flickering sign
on the candy machine in the waiting room. Could he do that two days ago? He
didn’t think so, but he wasn’t sure.

Beyond the Cast Outs, farther than he
remembered, a single tent of black and crimson. Nothing else. No distant smell
of fire or glow of light. It was as if the Wasteland was slowly taking them
back, wearing to dust their magical creations, sucking the life from their
self-made worlds.

If that was true then what about the
missing gumball machine? The missing basket chair? Were they all being
reclaimed by the Wasteland?

“Hello, Jack,” Kreiger remarked.
“Nice night. The day promises to be hot, though. What do you think?”

Kreiger knew; not the details,
surely, but somehow he knew. The Cast Out was playing with him.

“I found something of yours in my
saloon,” Jack said, a quiver of rage in his voice like a steaming kettle
forgotten upon the stove, boiling over, burning up. “I thought you might want
it back.”

The gargoyle stepped forward,
unceremoniously dumping the wrecked carcass of the Dust Eater upon the hardpan,
a dead sounding
whump-thump
as it fell into Kreiger’s part of the
Wasteland, the empty part.

The Cast Out stared down, lips pursed
tightly together, a serious glare as if he were chewing back an outburst of
rage and finding the slice too big to swallow. Hyde’s perpetual smirk melted
away, and he looked to Kreiger expectantly. Rebreather’s mask left his feelings—if
he had any—hidden. When Kreiger spoke, his words were pleasant but clipped,
bitten off the moment they escaped his teeth. The leader of the Cast Outs was
surprised
.

And outraged.

“What do you mean
your
saloon?” Kreiger said, eyes never leaving the dead body before him, some rude
sacrifice to a pagan god, or maybe simply a gauntlet tossed at his feet. “I’m
closer today than I was yesterday, Jack. And closer yesterday than I was the
day before. Your world is shrinking, little man. This silly wall of yours is
drinking the energy from the Saloon faster than you could ever imagine—not that
you imagine very well. I think that was made clear from our first meeting. No,
you arrogant prick, it is not
your
saloon. It was
Algernon’s
Saloon. You’re living on borrowed time and borrowed property, and I’m here to
collect. And if you think this won’t earn you a substantial penalty, you are
sadly mistaken.”

“The Saloon is mine. I’m the
Caretaker.”

“As were we once. Do you think we
sprouted from the sand like those witless monstrosities that skitter upon the
Wasteland, eating dust and blood and one another? No. We were all Caretakers,
just as you are now. And soon, you will join us in the Wasteland. You will join
us because you cannot hold the Nexus. You cannot bend it to your will. And
those who cannot make it bend are broken.”

“I don’t have time for your
doublespeak, Kreiger. I just came out here to warn you. There won’t be any more
night deals. No more cloak and dagger. You’re done with them. Your monster is
dead. He’s been dying since the day he arrived in
my
saloon. Oversight’s
no longer yours either. She’s mine now. Nothing stays in my Saloon and remains
unchanged. So save your breath. No one else will be coming out to meet with
you. And no more of yours will be coming in. Go back to what little is left of
the Wasteland and the comfort you can dredge from it, and leave me alone.”