The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (38 page)

It was Rebreather who saved him,
tearing him away from the barrier, Kreiger’s palms raw and bloodied, dripping
upon the thirsty Wasteland dust. And in that brief moment, he nearly killed the
mad giant, glaring at the unreadable menace of the tall Cast Out’s faceless
mask, glass-covered eyes, canvas-concealed features. Instead, he drew strength
from Rebreather’s stoicism, his unwavering faith.

This wasn’t over.

The horrific scream of the great
lunatic engines pounded the desperate silence of the Wasteland again, and
behind him, Papa Lovebone started to cry, the bone priest hanging his head and
blubbering, a spoiled child who has finally realized that life is about
disappointment.

“Stop that,” Kreiger ordered, picking
up the fallen staff, blood slick against the coarse metal.

Again the trains whistled, a noise
like nails raking a chalkboard. Hyde ignored the order, had perhaps not even
heard it, shuddering sobs shaking the wide expanse of his hairless, tattooed
flesh, a quivering echoed by the Wasteland’s bone white surface as the
thundering trains neared, and the region shook at their coming.

Three strides ate the distance
between Kreiger and Lovebone, and he struck the bone priest hard across the
cheek. “I said,
STOP THAT!
”

Hyde looked up sharply, wounded but
obedient.

“We are not done yet. Five trains or
none of them mean a thing. If he cannot call all five, then the place can still
be ours. And I will fight to the last breath to make it so! If you are not with
me, tell me now, and I will make an offering to God of the fatted calf that
Rebreather and I may feast upon it, our last supper!”

Hyde paled slightly, seeming to
gather his wits. He stood slowly, soft delicate hands wiping tears from his
face. “I’m with you, Kreiger. Always.”

In the distance, the growing glint of
speeding chrome and steel, the coming trains.

“We’re not done yet,” Kreiger
promised.

*     *     *

The Saloon came awake as the first
whistle broke the dawn, Jack clumping down the iron stairs, Ellen behind him,
steadying him while Nail followed. Lindsay stared blearily from the bed as dawn
tinged the twilight-gray to a subtler blue. The second whistle made her jump; made
Ellen flinch also. Only the Caretaker and the Guardian were immune, as if it
was all to be expected.

“Jack?” the little girl asked
uncertainly.

“It’s okay, Lindsay,” Ellen said.
“It’s time to go.”

Jack shuffled ahead, unconcerned. He
was a sleepwalker, a dreamer caught in a dream, everything happening for no
other reason than it was meant to,
designed
to. Lindsay would follow
him. She had to.

Leland Quince stared from his doorway
as Jack passed, the businessman already dressed, clothes wrinkled and slept in.
His face haggard and dark with a two-day-old beard.

Again, the distant trains whistled
their approach, and Leland wordlessly joined the procession down to the main
room.

Jack went straight to the ticket
booth, barely noticing Alex as he emerged from the waiting room, pulling on a
T-shirt. Oversight followed, her expression different from the others; not
wonder or curiosity, but resolution. Jack saw that, though he saw precious
little else. He was acutely aware that he was moving on autopilot, staring as
if through straws, everything on the periphery lost in shadow. But he saw
Oversight, saw the pain in her eyes that she tried to hide, and he thought he
understood.

The pulled-down shade of the ticket
booth snapped up loudly, tickets appearing in the half-moon hole cut through
the bottom of the chicken wire. Jack swept them up and turned to the others,
the ones that the Writer said he should look after, take care of.

“It’s time to go,” he said woodenly,
leaning against the booth as if it was the only thing keeping him standing.
“These tickets will send you on your way.”

“And where is that?” asked Leland,
not a baited complaint, but a simple question of no small concern.

“Where I say,” Jack answered,
ignoring Leland’s scowl. He selected one of the five and passed it over to the
businessman. “This one’s yours.”

Leland looked at it then back at
Jack. “What does this mean? There’s nothing on this ticket about where I’m
going.”

Gone was the man’s imperious tone.
What remained was worry: worry that Jack would not forget, would not forgive;
worry that Jack planned to exact vengeance upon him for his complicity with
Kreiger, worry the tickets were Jack’s means to that revenge.

Jack ignored him. “Lindsay, this one
is yours,” he said more gently, handing her the large tag of stiff, dark orange
paper that was the ticket out of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

“Ellen.”

Ellen received her ticket with numb
fingers, unable to stop looking at Jack. Did he know what he was doing, she
wondered, or was he simply pushing the buttons in a desperate hope that
something—some mad combination, some fated sequence—would miraculously work?
Her eyes flicked down to the tickets and she saw only the phrase, “
And miles
to go before I sleep…
” She wanted to ask the others if their tickets looked
the same, if they also had some equally insensible riddle to their destiny, but
she could not make her tongue move, make her mouth spit out the words.

“Alex,” Jack passed him a ticket.

The young man stared at it much as
the others had, a mixture of wonder and trepidation at the strange article
coming into his hand, as if it might be a pass through the gateways of heaven
or hell, a talisman of unknown power.

Jack glanced at the final ticket then
up at Oversight as she quietly separated herself from the rest, moving towards
the bar, refusing to look at them or acknowledge them. He thought he
understood, and if that was true then he had her to thank. “Oversight, this is
yours.”

She turned suddenly, her face stone,
her eyes wide and hard. Ellen felt the breath catch in her throat, wanted to
breathe—needed to breathe! —but could not seem to make her lungs draw air. She
simply stared as the last ticket was offered up to the woman from the
Wasteland. She felt cold, felt herself start to shake.
This can’t be
,
she thought, too much like a dream to be real: standing in front of a bunch of
people more strangers than friends, wearing nothing but a T-shirt—
practically
naked
—and everything around her was horribly wrong! Wasn’t that like a
dream? There was only one ticket left and it was supposed to be Jack’s!
How
was he supposed to get home without—?

The Saloon seemed caught in ice, in amber, in stone. No one moved. No one
spoke. There were only eyes staring at the ticket Jack held out to the woman
from the Wasteland and Oversight’s confusion.

“What are you doing?” Oversight
asked, her voice small and broken, the plea of a child.

“I’m sending you on,” he answered
then turned away, walking out through the waiting room. The door flew open
violently, the glass rattling until it seemed it would break. And as Jack stood
there upon the platform, swaying unsteadily, the first of the trains screamed
up in front of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

*     *     *

The others joined him on the
platform, standing in the shadow of the mighty chrome and silver train, its
windows polished into mirrors. The door to the passenger car stood open,
revealing only darkness.

“Lindsay, this one’s yours,” Jack
said, slapping the metal car unsteadily.

The little girl approached the dark
doorway, stopping at the threshold. “Jack?”

“Hmm?” he said dreamily.

“I don’t want to go.”

He looked down at her for a moment,
her eyes innocent, and he hoped she wouldn’t cry. This was hard enough, what he
was doing to them. So impossibly cruel. He couldn’t bear it if she cried.

He got down on one knee in front of
her, giving her a hug. He placed his lips to her ear and whispered. “Can you
keep a secret?”

She nodded into his shoulder.

“You’ll see all of them again. I
promise.”

He wasn’t sure if she believed him,
but he hoped she did. And he hoped she wouldn’t ask any questions; he wasn’t
ready to explain his secrets. Not yet.

She stepped away from him and walked
over to the train, getting on board. She turned briefly, waving to the others
before proceeding into the darkness. The metal door slammed shut suddenly, and
the train burst from the station like a bullet, a blur of metal, the fleeting
gleam of speeding chrome.

That fast, the little girl was gone.

The next train jerked in front of
them, a blur that made it appear seemingly out of thin air. A blink of the
eyes, and you might think it was the same train, only subtly different,
transformed, altered but not replaced. This train was an old iron locomotive,
the passenger car dark red, the windows concealed behind drawn curtains. The
door opened of its own accord.

“Oversight,” Jack said, looking at
her expectantly.

She walked not to the waiting train,
but to him, studying his face intently. She was only a few feet away, but the
look saw across miles of distance. “You can’t escape now, Caretaker,” she said
softly. “You have doomed yourself.”

“Algernon found a way out,” he
answered softly.

“But he never told you how. And no
one in the Wasteland ever knew his secret. You have condemned yourself to an
eternity trapped in this place, the Tribe of Dust at your throat until the end
of time.”

Jack had no answer to that.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I didn’t understand before. Now I
do. I owe that to you. This is the least I can do.”

“And the most.”

No
, he thought, her sentiment acid in his mind.
I
have certainly not done the most
. But he only looked at her evenly,
betraying nothing.

“Thank you, Jack.”

He nodded, a forgetful, dreamy
gesture, and found himself drifting away as they stood here speaking.
Keep
it together
, a part of him thought fiercely.
And remember the details
.
“Leave your knife,” he said. “It won’t be of any use to you where you’re going,
anyway.”

“Not much use to you here, either,”
she said, distrustful but appreciative, a belief that he knew what he was
doing, knew what he had done. Even if she could not fathom his intentions, she
had to trust him; there was no other way.

She placed the blade of bone into his
open hand, and stepped aboard.

The door slammed shut, and Oversight
was gone.

The next train screeched into its
place in a shower of sparks, rain dripping down the greasy steel as if it had
rumbled all night through a bad piece of
film noir
, the City of Dreadful Night. The door slid back noisily on worn tracks thick with globs of grimy soot,
the oily sweat of gray rain and caked grease oozing from the pores of the
train’s aluminum skin.

“Alex, get in.”

The young man stopped in front of
him, hesitating before the open door. “Why did you do this?”

So very tired.
“I did what I had to do. Just … just
remember. Remember everything …
everything!
Or everything I did will be
for nothing, and you’ll never see her again. Remember, remember, the lady of
dark November. Mind the gap.”

Then he pushed Alex, hard, letting
him stumble over the lip of the doorway and fall upon the floor. “Give this to
her when you find her.”

He tossed Oversight’s knife through the door just as it slammed shut.
Then the train bolted from the station with a banshee scream that drained
instantly to silence as it vanished down the rails like the others before it.

An old subway car stood in its place,
the outside walls painted with frescoes of city gibberish, gang signs and
spray-painted pseudonyms. “Mr. Quince.”

The businessman approached,
florescent lights buzzing and flickering inside, revealing the abandoned seats,
a discarded newspaper, wads of gum stuck to the floor beside stains of
still-wet spittle. An empty bottle of cheap wine rolled absently towards them,
stopping with a soft
chink
as it struck the doorframe.

“Where are you sending me?” Leland
asked.

“Not so far that you won’t recognize
where you are, and not so close that you can ever go back to where you were.
This is day one of your new life, Mr. Quince. Happy Birthday.”

The businessman’s face seemed to
fracture momentarily, resembling in that one brief moment a windshield smashed
by a rock, or impacted with a human skull: fractured and useless and
irreparable. And that fast, the impression was gone, and Leland Quince rose
back to the surface of himself. “For all your posturing, you’re no better than
I am. There is no moral high ground. Not with you. Not with anyone. Well, go
ahead; send me to some shit hole. I don’t care. I’ll fight my way out. You
watch and see. You don’t run me, Lantirn. Nobody runs me.”