The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (40 page)

TWO: MESSENGER

Lindsay walked to one of the seats,
the aisle spotless, the red carpet springy and clean. Everything about the
train was new: the seats brightly polished steel, the velvet cushions thick and
comfortable, the carpet unstained, unworn. As if the train rolled off the
assembly line that very morning and screamed into the Sanity’s Edge station,
she its first passenger.

To her right, she saw Jack and the
others staring blankly at the train, waving at a place she no longer was. Their
movements appeared slow, and for a moment, looking through the golden glass at
them, the scene reminded her strangely of looking at fish in a tank. She raised
her hand to wave back, forgetting that they wouldn’t see her through the
reflective glass.

Then the train started to move.

Outside, the others seemed to freeze,
locked in eerie poses as if the fish bowl they seemed to be in had frozen
around them. Their hands were stuck in waves of silent good-byes, sad expressions
carved on immobilized flesh like unwavering statues.

Lindsay looked away, and the station
was left behind, the featureless landscape passing by, blue on white stained by
the golden hue of the glass to become a world of green sky over a golden earth.

Then the train accelerated.

Her head pushed back into the seat,
her body pressed into the cushions, acceleration like invisible hands pressing
down upon her, making it hard to breathe. It felt like one of those rides at an
amusement park where they spun you around so fast that you could barely move,
everyone screaming all the while to go faster.

Only there was no one screaming, no
one minding the ride, no one playing loud music and exciting the passengers—
“Raise
your hands if you want to go FASTER!”
And there was nothing
amusing
about this ride. There was only

(
Jack
)

a train speeding headlong through the
walls of reality, not stopping until it reached

(
your new life
)

wherever Jack told it to go.

Lindsay squeezed her eyes tight,
trying her best not to be afraid as the train sped up even more, the new
momentum crushing down upon her, squeezing the air from her chest, suffocating
her—

Jack said I would see the others. He promised. He wouldn’t lie;
wouldn’t break his promise. He’s the Caretaker.

And just as suddenly, everything
stopped.

Lindsay jerked from her seat as if
startled awake, not because the train had ceased moving, but because
everything—literally
everything
—had changed.

The train had vanished
altogether
to leave her sitting on the neck of an enormous, steel eagle adorning the
corner of a skyscraper, a gentle wind brushing her face. Her feet dangled over
empty air, the world a mile below. She scooted back a little on the neck,
trying to find a more comfortable position, and again looked down between her
feet. One of the laces of her sneakers had come untied, she noted. And far
below the dangling shoelace, she saw things moving. People, distant and
ant-sized, though they didn’t look like ants. Tiny fuzzy specks, they looked
more gray than anything; gray specks darting about the base of the monstrous
buildings she was perched above. But it was too far to tell for certain. The
specks could be people, hot dog carts or even semis.

“Cool.”

A gust of wind pushed her from
behind, not enough to make her worry about falling—perhaps it should, but it
didn’t—but enough to lift the baseball cap off her head and send it flying
away.

“Hey!” she shrieked, snatching after
what was already well beyond her grasp.

The hat turned on the wind and angled
straight towards the building where it was caught by the Caretaker standing on
the ledge between two stone angels. “You have to be careful up here,” he said.

“What are you doing here? Are you
coming with me?”

“No, Lindsay. Actually, I came to ask
for your help.”

“Okay,” she nodded. “What can I do?”
Below her dangling feet, wisps of clouds rocketed on hurricane winds. The gray
specks became too tiny to see as the skyscraper grew even taller, a rising
colossus. But she didn’t notice; she was listening to Jack.

“I told you that you’d see the others
again,” he said, leaning against one of the stone-faced angels, hands fidgeting
with the brim of her cap.

“Are Alex and Oversight here?” she
asked. “Did they come with you?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head.
“They’re all still back at the Saloon with me—”

“What do you mean? You’re right
here.”

“No, I’m more like a message, a… a
recording.”

“A recording?”

“Something like that. I’m not really
here, so I left this message for you for when you arrived. It’s the best way I
can think of to explain it.” He shrugged his shoulders apologetically. “Sorry.
There are still a lot of things about the Saloon I don’t fully understand, so I
can’t explain them very well.”

“That’s okay, I guess,” Lindsay
replied. “When will you guys get here? Am I going to have to wait up here the
whole time?”

“No.”

That was a relief. After the initial
thrill, there didn’t really seem to be anything to do up here, and nothing much
to look at. And she wasn’t exactly sure how she was supposed to get down. What
if she had to go to the bathroom?

“The others will be along shortly.
That’s where I need your help. I think the others grew up too much. It’s not
their fault, I know, but I can’t very well teach them anything until I make
them
unlearn
some things. You see, that’s the problem. They know things,
and the things they know aren’t really the right things. I can help; I can make
them learn new things that will make them happier. But I have to make them
unlearn first. That’s where you can help. I can’t simply break them of their old
ways. I need you to help me … explain things to them.”

“What things?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll let you know what
they need to hear so they’ll understand. In a way, they already know what I’m
going to show them.”

“So why show ‘em?”

He smiled gently. “Because they don’t
believe it. They need to be shown that what they already know—
really know
—is
the truth. Will you help me?”

Lindsay shrugged. “Okay.”

“Thank you.”

He stared across the divide of empty
air for a moment, and that was when Lindsay first noticed the battered gray
overcoat Jack was wearing. It looked like the coat worn by the bad man in the
desert, the man with the mask, the man who didn’t speak. She had never seen
Jack wear the dusty old coat before and wondered where he found it. She thought
she should ask him, but found herself asking instead, “Do I have to
unlearn
anything, Jack?”

He shook his head. “No. One of the
great things about being a kid is that you haven’t really had the opportunity
to learn a lot of the
wrong
things. There’s nothing I could show you
that you don’t already understand, and too many things that would do more harm
than good.”

She wasn’t sure what Jack meant, but
thought if she asked him to explain, it would only become more confusing. “So
what do I do?”

Jack rubbed his chin thoughtfully as
if trying to come up with a solution that she knew he already had. Adults
always thought kids were stupid about things; Jack wasn’t so different, she
knew.

Then he nodded as if the answer had
suddenly come to him. And, to Lindsay’s complete astonishment, Jack walked
straight towards her, moving easily upon the empty air as if stepping across
some invisible walkway between the distant ledge and her perch on the eagle’s
neck. Clouds passed below Jack’s feet; not dangling like hers, but
walking
on open air. She felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle and stretch, a
shiver crawling up her spine, shaking her chest and head, making her lips start
to tremble.

“Remember,” Jack said gently, “It’s
not really me here; I can’t fall. I just need to make sure you don’t fall.
Understand?”

She nodded uncertainly, not the least
bit reassured.

“I need you to give the others a
message for me. Alex and Oversight and even Mr. Quince.” He was directly in
front of her now, crouched down so they were looking eye to eye, her seated
upon the metal neck of the eagle, him balanced upon nothing. His hand was
holding out her hat like an offering. “Will you do that?”

“What about Ellen?”

“I’ll take care of Ellen.”

Lindsay felt herself nodding, tendons
creaking in her neck as she reached out to take her hat, fingers unable to feel
the object she held, her skin cold, numb, the whisper of wind as if through
distant treetops, a dark …
forest
…

Jack, meanwhile, cupped a hand to her
ear, whispering secrets.

The sound was like the buzz of
hornets in an empty metal can. Then the hornets became the swirl and rattle of
B-B’s. And the B-B’s became ball bearings. And the ball bearings became
boulders, great rocks crashing against the inside of her skull, smashing it
apart.

Blood dripped unnoticed from her
nose, warm over her skin before dropping silently on her shirt. Her eyes became
pools of white surrounding islands of shrinking color, empty blackness. Then
Lindsay’s eyes rolled back in her head, the islands disappearing. Her mouth
opened as if to speak, or maybe to scream, but the only thing that came out was
a small string of saliva that drained down over her chin and fell upon her
shirt by the widening stain of blood.

Like Jack, Lindsay now understood.

THREE: GRAY PILGRIM

Reaching for Oversight’s knife, Alex
saw his hand draw out like taffy before his eyes, first fingers then wrist then
forearm, all stretching out in turn as the train started to rocket forward,
molecule by molecule. One moment the knife lay a foot away from his right
sneaker. Then a dozen feet. Then a hundred.
Then a thousand
. All in the
blink of an eye. Had he only thought to close his eyes, even for a second, he
would have spared himself the sight of reality tearing itself apart at the
seams.

His fingers, miles away and still
growing, wrapped around the knife, the polished handle fitting smoothly into
his grip, a tie line to reality as the dark train came apart around him. Not
some horrific catastrophe of tearing bolts and sheering metal, but the simple
unbinding of every seam, every joint, every screw. The great, greasy pieces of
steel simply flew apart; flew out in all directions like scattering birds. He
was the center of an explosion, immune, witness to the world left behind in its
wake.

For one horrifying instant, Alex
hurtled alone through the black emptiness, nothing surrounding him, nothing
supporting him. Just Alex—no-good, do-nothing directionless Alex—moving at the
speed of light.

Then reality found him.

He fell upon his back, the wind
knocked out of him, vision reduced to sheets of black and red dotted with
bursts of white light as he sucked painfully at the air, each breath hard-won
and agonizing. He was dimly aware of lying upside-down upon a slope, the back
of his head aching and wet. He still clung tightly to Oversight’s knife, his
hands normal, familiar if a little shaky …

… but his clothes were different.
He was wearing a battered, gray
overcoat—he was certain he hadn’t been wearing it when he boarded the train!

“Hang on, hang on!”

Alex turned, wincing at the sharp
stab of pain in the back of his skull, and saw a curly-haired man with
wire-rimmed glasses crawling carefully down the crumbling embankment he was
sprawled at the bottom of. Wearing a friar’s robe and cassock that barely
contained his ample proportions, the man scrambled to his side, an assortment
of crosses and beads and saint’s medallions jangling from his neck. He huffed
and wheezed, a sheen of sweat on his neck and forehead, but smiled broadly.
“That was quite the tumble you took there, my friend. Let me help you.”

Alex took the man’s hand with his
left—the one not holding the knife—and allowed himself to be eased to a seated
position. “Thanks.”

The man in the friar’s robe only
smiled good-naturedly. “I’m just glad I happened by and was able to help. No
one’s kept up the roads since the signs first appeared.”

Alex rubbed gingerly at the back of
his head, feeling a small, painful knot, but nothing serious. The wetness he
felt was mud; he had fallen down some kind of a run-off gully, the back of his
hair now plastered with stagnant water.

“Sometimes I wish it would just
begin,” the other continued. “More than anything, I hate the waiting.”

Alex gave him a puzzled look, and the
man waved it down, misunderstanding his confusion. “I know, I know. All things
in their own time. But through God’s greatness, we will stand against this evil
and not falter. Evil is meant to test us—
strengthen
us—but it can never
win unless we fail in our faith.”

No part of that helped Alex learn
where he was, or what he was doing here. He had hoped Jack would have given him
some kind of understanding, an intuitive knowledge of what was expected of him
in his new life. But so far, this was no different than before; he was still
clueless. As for the Good Samaritan who believed God held all the answers, if
that was true, He wasn’t sharing.

The friar went quiet, studying Alex
with all seriousness. “Are you all right, young man? You seem fit enough, but
you look … confused. That bang on the head didn’t jar anything loose did it?
How many fingers do you see?”

“Three,” Alex answered correctly. “I
just don’t understand anything that you’ve been telling me. You mentioned
signs. And evil. What evil?”

The friar arched his eyebrows, mouth
pursed in a silent whistle. Then his hands caught Alex’s face, pulling his
eyelids down with his thumbs and staring directly into Alex’s pupils, refusing
to let go. “Forgive me. I’m jabbering like a bird when you probably have a
concussion. Possibly a subdural hematoma.” The offered diagnoses, like much of
the friar’s conversation, seemed solely for his own benefit. “You don’t tumble
twenty feet down a gully on your head, and get up and say ‘how d’ya do?’ ”

Alex grabbed the large man’s wrists
firmly, knife momentarily forgotten in his lap, and pulled the man’s hands
away. “I’m fine, really. I just stumbled is all.”

“But you know nothing of the signs?
Of the rising storm of evil?”

“I’m … not from around here.”

“Well, that’s clear enough. But where
could you be from that you haven’t been affected by the signs?”

“Look, my name’s Alex. I come from…”
He hesitated, wondering if the valley was an appropriate answer to a friar on a
roadside? Probably not. But then the Sanity’s Edge Saloon was an even worse
one, wasn’t it? He settled on a half-truth. “From beyond the wasteland.”

The other sat back heavily, thumping
down in the clay and broken shale of the gully, and staring at Alex with mouth
open, eyes agog. The man raised a hand to his face, meaty fingers patting
trembling lips like a child working through a profound dilemma particular only
to children. He tried to say something, managed only a startled squeak, then
cleared his throat and tried again. “Beyond the wasteland?”

Alex immediately wished he had said
something else. Was being from beyond the wasteland significant here, or was it
simply insensible, an indication that he was a lunatic? “Yes. Why?”

The man’s fingers thrummed nervously
upon his lips, eyes distant, concentrating and half-focused. He seemed to be
looking at Alex and at nothing, both at once. Finally, he murmured. “You’re one
of them, aren’t you?”

“One of whom?” Alex asked, hand
edging towards the knife in his lap. This friar could be anyone or anything:
friend, foe, fanatic. The fervent stare and creeping smile reminded him of the
expression he saw on some of the vagrants in the city, the ones pushing
shopping carts filled with returnable cans and headless mannequin torsos while
spouting on about salvation.

“You’re one of them! One of the
warriors from beyond the wasteland!” The man now bubbled with excitement, hands
clapping his temples, eyes ecstatic. “Of course, of course! You’re one of the
warriors whose coming was promised by God. ‘There will come from beyond the
wasteland prophets of God, gray warriors that shall engage the Destroyer and
his minions in the final battle. And they shall gather in the city of gateways,
and this shall be a sign unto you that the time of the Red Knight is at hand,
and Armageddon shall follow. And you will know these warriors by their devotion
to goodness, for they are innocent to the ways of wickedness and evil.’
Third
Book of Revised Prophets and Revelations
, Chapter 7, verses 12 through 15.
You are one of the gray warriors—or is it ‘grim’ warriors; the revisionists are
still debating the translation of that passage.”

Alex only shook his head, of no
opinion on the matter whatsoever and still more than a little confused. He
started to his feet, and the other was immediately there, hoisting him up with
a grunt.

“You must be one of the warriors,”
the man persisted, speaking as if Alex was deaf or elsewhere, some strange
primitive with no understanding of the language. “Why else carry so many
weapons?”

Looking down, Alex was startled to
discover the friar was correct. Under the long, gray coat he did not remember
wearing was an assembly of weapons he had never seen before. On his hips, a
pair of six-shooters with smooth, sandalwood stocks. Holsters below his arms
concealed a Glock and a .45. On his left wrist, a brace of steel throwing
daggers. A pair of knives in his right boot. On his belt, a Kukri blade and a
long sword. Across his back, a long, thick bar of steel sheathed alongside a
heavy-headed war hammer with a three-foot haft. He drew it easily, inspecting
it, startled less by the weapons than the knowledge that accompanied them. As
he felt each weapon, studied them each in turn, he knew exactly what each one
was and how to use it—how to make each perform their own deadly trick, though
he’d never known anything like this before.

“This must be yours also, then,” the
friar said, picking up a leather satchel that lay upon the ground. It might
have been a photographer’s equipment bag, only Alex knew it didn’t contain film
or spare lenses. Amidst the spartan contents—of which he could not even
guess—the bag contained one thing of which Alex was absolutely certain:
ammunition, and lots of it.

“What’s your name?” Alex asked,
shouldering the heavy satchel.

“I’m … uh.” It was the friar’s turn
to hesitate, as if, in his amazement, he might have forgotten. “I call myself
Brother Bartholomew.” Then he cleared his throat uncertainly, as if his answer
might not be entirely true, and quickly changed the subject, “You are one of
them, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m one of them.” Whether it
was true or not, Alex neither knew nor cared; it would work for now. His
understanding of this world extended only as far as the weapons he carried,
everything else a mystery. Brother Bartholomew—
he
called himself that;
what did everyone else call him? —seemed to understand this place, and while a
bit overzealous, he did seem willing to help.

Bartholomew’s smile broadened,
shifting from one foot to the other like a child that needed to pee, and
shaking a finger at Alex. “I knew it. I
knew
it. My parents said I
should be a phrenologist, but I knew I was destined for bigger things. The
Almighty needed me, and I answered because I knew He had a role for me. That
must be why we met. You are on your way to meet the others in the city of
gateways.”

“I’m not really sure where I was
going,” Alex confessed.

“No, no, no. That’s all right. That’s
why I’m here, don’t you understand? I’m your guide. I’ve found my purpose in
life, my reason for answering His call. It is you. I am to lead you into the
city of gateways.”

“How can I be meant to go to a city
I’ve never heard of or know where is?”

“Of course you do. You were on your
way there when you fell,” Bartholomew persisted. “This road leads to Janus, the
city of gateways. Our meeting is God’s will. I am meant to bring you to Janus
where you will battle to destroy the Red Knight and his witch before they can
bring about Armageddon. It has all been foretold in the book of
Prophets and
Revelations.
Well, all except the part about our meeting, but I’m certain
God planned that as well. A minor incident in the greater scheme; not worth
mentioning, to be sure, though a footnote would be swell. ‘And one of the gray
warriors fell by the way, and was aided by the Lord’s servant, Brother
Bartholomew, and together they entered the city of gateways.’ Yes, that does
have a nice sound to it, doesn’t it? Maybe for the next revision?”

Alex shrugged uncomfortably. This was
wrong. He was no warrior, and the incident at the Saloon proved it. If
Oversight hadn’t stepped in and saved him, he and the others would be dead. He
was a hero by accident only, and not a very good one.

“Brother Bartholomew,” Alex said,
interrupting the man’s reverie. “How far to the city, Janus?”

“Oh, not far, not far at all. I
expect we should make it there by nightfall if we start right away. I’d
anticipated a more leisurely trip, but I see we need to get you there as
quickly as possible.” He flashed a broad smile then started scaling the crumble
of scree back to the road. “I knew God had a plan for me. I knew it.”

*     *     *

Brother Bartholomew set a determined
pace, making better time than Alex would have imagined. It was all he could do
to keep up, the weight of the weapons heavy, a cruel testament to a life he was
expected to live.

Or had been living for some time.

The afternoon gave way, and fog
gathered in the shadows, reducing distant landmarks to featureless shapes. The
road they followed snaked along the canyon wall, winding steadily downwards.
After half a mile, the topside landscape disappeared from view. Good riddance,
Alex thought. Just a featureless desert for as far as the eye could see. The
sometimes-cobblestone, sometimes-packed earth road crossed numerous dry washes
like the one he had woken up in, the road crumbling away from neglect. More
startling was the occasional appearance of guardrails, steel-reinforced
concrete and cables hinting to a world too modern for cobblestone and wandering
friars. Like the Glock that rode above his old six-shooters, Clint Eastwood
meets the
Terminator
. Jack’s handiwork; somehow, the Caretaker was
responsible.