The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (6 page)

This is what it feels like to start
over,
he thought,
the realization both liberating and unsettling. He had no keys because he had
no locks; locks kept things safe, and he had nothing to keep. He was back to
square one.

10:59. Time mocked him.

And he was still missing a guide.

Jack took the ticket from inside his
jacket and read it again, no better understanding of its nuances than before.

Staring up at the clock—it was now
11:00—he felt time stretch out like an elastic band reaching into oblivion, a
track stretched into the unknowable darkness at either end of the rail.

Then the big hand on the clock rocked
back and jumped, the gears clunking into place, loud in the silence as Jack
realized he was actually holding his breath, waiting.

It was 11:01.

The silence of Cross-Over Station was
shattered by a screaming train whistle. Startled, he stumbled backwards away
from the tracks; feet tangling and making him fall. He glanced up
self-consciously.
Right on time, just like the Writer said
.

If only he could say the same for the
Writer.

With a final whine it stopped, and
the door in front of him slid back automatically. He stared at the train car,
then back along the length of the train. He could no longer see the engine,
obscured now in a thick bank of white steam and smoke. The train’s other end
was still lost in the tunnel.

No one got off. No one ran through
the doors behind him, late and scrambling to board before the train pulled
away. Three minutes remained and he was still alone on the platform in a
deserted station, no one else anywhere to be seen. No passengers. No conductor.
Maybe not even an engineer.

The open door waited on his
indecision.

Jack glanced at the clock. In a
minute, it would be 11:05, and then the train would leave.

This is crazy,
he thought.
You’ve pissed away all
your options. This is the only one left. Don’t piss this away, too?

He would have preferred to follow the
Writer on board. He would have liked someone who could answer his questions—of
which there were many—or give him a little direction—of which he had none. But
he was alone.

Maybe that’s the way it should be.
Maybe it’s time you learned to do it on your own. The Writer gave you a
direction. It’s up to you to follow it.

Tightening his grip on the straps of
his bags, Jack climbed on board.

Inside, the train car looked like an old movie theater,
maroon velvet and red leather, nappy threadbare seats showing bared metal worn
through the paint along the edges of the armrests. And the air had a faint,
salt-sour odor of dust, the kind you might expect to find in a forgotten corner
of the garage, or in the floorboards of an old attic. There was no one aboard.
No luggage in the overhead compartments. No half-read newspaper or folded-up
jacket left behind to hold someone’s seat while they were off searching for the
club car. The train was deserted.

Jack tossed his duffel bag and laptop
into the first pair of seats, creating a small billow of dust, and leaned down
to look out the windows: empty rows of benches, a deserted platform, an ancient
clock.

He heard the familiar
cuh-clunk
of the gears, the hand moving to 11:05 with a sound mysteriously like a loud,
throat-clearing cough.

Far away from Cross-Over Station, a
copy paper box filled with explosives and a crudely-made detonator exploded in
the basement of the Stone Surety Mortgage Company. Placed near the gas main two
nights before by the Writer, the resulting blast completely obliterated the
company right down to the foundations. The explosion was heard as far away as
the city, dulled and mistaken as the tick of a train station clock. It was the
Writer’s way of cutting Jack free from his past with a slight editorial jab
against the impersonal attitude of big business; the Writer hated banks ever
since the Depression and he enjoyed the soapbox. The stolen computers were
discarded that same night in a Dumpster behind Stone Surety, the only purpose
in their theft to alarm the company into making a blanket policy that would
keep Jack from coming to work today as well as send him home early yesterday,
thereby guaranteeing the Writer’s meeting with Jack.

But Jack knew nothing of these
things.

At exactly 11:05, the train left
Cross-Over Station; not with the gradual grinding of steel wheels hauling tons
of rolling metal inexorably along behind it. No, when Heavy Metal departed
Cross-Over Station, it did so at something approaching three-quarters of the
speed of light.

One moment, Jack was staring out the
window, ticket in hand. The next, the entire world outside was reduced to a
smear, as if reality itself were nothing more than wet paint on glass being
rubbed away by some great invisible hand, streaking out, disappearing. The
whistle screamed first with a shrill, ear-splitting shriek that quickly ground
to a low wail, then a still lower groan before disappearing altogether in what
Jack distractedly thought must be something akin to the Doppler-effect. The
world outside became a smear of non-distinction, boundaries disappearing,
colors burning into a brilliant white like the blazing eye of the noonday sun.

All of this occurred in that briefest
of moments before Jack was pitched to the floor. He remembered nothing else
about his last moments on this side of reality.

THE SANITY’S EDGE SALOON

The floor of a train is not the most
comfortable way to travel.

When Jack came to—mouth dry, forehead
throbbing—he was staring up at sunlight slanting through a haze of dust,
drifting like sparks suspended in amber, stars in the firmament, and trying to
remember how he came to be lying facedown in the aisle way of an empty train
car. Through the windows, he could see a cloudless sky, but little else, and
with the exception of the breeze through the open windows of the train, the
world was still.

“What happened?” he wondered aloud.

There was no answer.

He probed gingerly at the small knot
on his forehead, swollen but not badly; no big deal in the great scheme of
things. But it still hurt like hell. He could do with some ice if he could find
some. Aspirin, too.

He climbed to his feet, knees
rubbery, ready to surrender to the marginal safety of the nappy, too-worn
carpet scuffed with black smudges, bits of petrified gum, and a litter of
splinters and paper scraps like years of forgotten chits punched from a million
train tickets. The aisle alone gave him some measure of understanding as to why
no one had chosen to ride in this car for what he could only assume was years,
if not decades.

Through one side of windows, he saw
the back wall of a building; weatherworn clapboard blasted smooth by the wind
and bleached by the sun until it resembled old driftwood. By all appearances,
the weather might have been wearing away at it for centuries. He saw ragged
posters and signs pasted across much of the surface, the same elements scraping
the older ones into obscurity: slogans washed out, messages faded like the
ghostly barn-side ads for Mail Pouch Chewing Tobacco. He saw an invitation to
“Come in and Stay at the Sanity’s Edge Saloon — Rooms Available for Train
Passengers.” A sign reminded folks that coffee was still five cents inside at
the bar, which apparently served Corona, Red Wolf, and Dixie Blackened Voodoo
Lager as well, their colorful signs worn away at the corners. Ringling Bros.
and Barnum and Bailey’s Circus was in town, featuring the P.T. Barnum Freak
Show. And near the bottom, someone had hastily painted what now seemed to be an
incomprehensible message:
SAVE US, MILK BOY!
It all felt reminiscent of the
JUST STEPPED OUT
sign at Cross-Over Station. He was
pretty sure P.T. Barnum’s Freak Show had gone the way of Barnum himself more
than a hundred years ago.

The door to the train car stood open,
exiting upon a narrow platform adjacent to the clapboard wall of signs, ten
feet of worn wooden decking covered by a suspended roof that came nearly to the
edge of the train. A window and door looked out on the platform; both similarly
empty. No one was waiting for the train, or kissing missed relatives, or
gawking at new arrivals. This station, like the train, like Cross-Over Station,
was deserted.

What he saw when he looked out the
other side of the train caused his fingers to dig into the seatback until his
knuckles turned white, desperate to keep from fainting.

A desert. White hardpan as flat as a
board and stretched to the edges of the horizon. No trees or rocks or scrub
brush. Not even a cactus or scorched tumbleweed. Nothing but hard, bleached
earth burned salt-white under the unrelenting sun. In the far distance, he
could just make out a thin seam of gray between the whiteness and the blue sky,
like a mountain ridge or a line of low bluffs. If he didn’t know better, he
would swear he was parked outside of some obscure outpost on the very edge of
the Sahara overlooking the widest part.

But he did know better. You can’t
cross an ocean by rail. And what desert was this flat? He should see
scrub-grass, haphazardly strewn rocks, or, at the very least, dunes. Even the
Nevada Salt Flats had mountains visible in the distance. This place had
nothing, the epitome of infinity actualized, Stephen King’s wasteland, a
fragment of the mind trying to imagine the perfect example of nothingness.

With effort, Jack turned his
attention back to the wall of posters and ads. “Come In and Stay at the
Sanity’s Edge Saloon — Rooms Available for Train Passengers.”

The Sanity’s Edge Saloon
?

Let’s not dwell too long on sanity
right now, huh Jack? You might open some unpleasant doors. For instance, are
you sure this is even reality and not just the latest phase in a colossal
nervous breakdown? Or do you think sane people sell all of their possessions,
abandon their life, and follow a stranger blindly out into the middle of
nowhere? You could be in a rubber room right now wearing a straitjacket and
suffering a psychotic episode, hallucinations and all?

That voice in his head had, of late,
developed a knack for cutting through the bullshit he cleverly wove around his
thoughts, and searching out the ugliest possibilities he so carefully hid away.

Maybe this is all a dream?

Not now! I need to figure out where I
am.

The remains of his ticket lay under the corner of a nearby seat, punched
into confetti as if by some deranged conductor, some mystery ticket agent who
climbed aboard the train somewhere along the way, stepped over his fallen body
and validated his ticket with maddening vigor before wandering on through the
cars, perhaps whispering his telltale line “tickets, please,” so as not to disturb
the passenger who was obviously so tired he had decided to nap facedown in the
aisle.

First thing’s first. Get off the train.

The heat struck him as he stepped through the doorway, a late July,
dog-day heat that burned the eyes and tightened the skin as every pore opened,
the effort ineffectual. Cut off by the bulk of the train, the desert breeze
became a stifling mix of coal smoke, oily fumes, and the bone-dry, pure earth
smell of the desert. It made him wonder about the signs that promised beer. Was
it too early?

He glanced at his watch and saw
digits flickering, random and meaningless, insensible. He shook it, looked
again, but they remained.

“Damn!” He stowed the broken watch in
his pocket. He’d seen digital watches freeze or go blank, but he’d never seen
one flash random symbols and digits like it was intercepting a secret radio
frequency from Mars. Maybe a chip jarred loose when he fell, making the watch
go crazy.

Did you just say go crazy
?

He opened the door to the station, seldom-used hinges groaning, glass
rattling in the frame. Yellow flakes of old varnish drifted away, the breeze
catching and dispersing them, so much dust. If he was the caretaker and this
turned out to be the place, he had a lot of work to do.

The door stepped down into a small,
claustrophobic waiting room; the kind from small towns where few people boarded
and fewer still got off. Just a room, walls and ceiling painted bright white,
black curtains hung over windows noticeably off plumb.

He looked more closely, realizing it wasn’t
simply the window that was crooked, but the entire wall! Neither from age nor
disrepair, but actually designed to be off-kilter, the room a product of a
nonlinear architect with no respect for building codes, the standards of formal
architecture or Jack’s fragmenting sanity.

He peered out the window of the
sloping wall, leaded glass warping the view of the tracks as they ran away from
the station across a bare twenty feet of sand before proceeding out over the
edge of a cliff. From there on, they were aloft on empty air; an unsupported
track sailing straight off the edge and out into the open space until it was
lost from sight, a glinting sliver of sunlight trailing into distant, empty
nothingness.

That settles it, Jack. You’ve gone
mad.

The room contained little else: a
wooden bench below the window, a candy machine on the adjacent wall, its
interior flickering unsteadily as if on the verge of shorting out. Through the
open glass face, Jack saw a bologna and cheese sandwich in a triangle of
shrink-wrap, a can of beef stew with a silver spoon and a linen napkin
rubber-banded to the can, half a dozen different kinds of candy bars,
snack-bags of pork rinds and potato chips, a sample-size tin of aspirin, a
banded stack of worn one-dollar bills, a single, plain-wrapped,
glow-in-the-dark condom and an open Styrofoam cup with a warning printed on the
sides:
caution
— contents hot!

He could no more fathom what vending
machine would mix snack foods with condoms then he could understand why a hot
beverage—not that whatever was in the cup was still hot—was placed on the top
shelf in an open container. But the flickering suggested the machine would not
survive much longer, and that the likely result of feeding it fifty cents was a
small bout of frustration and the loss of said fifty cents.

On the opposite wall was a train
schedule mounted over a small magazine rack and an uncomfortable looking chair.
The magazines were all out of date, dog-eared and worn. The chair sat in front
of a hole in the wall like crude camouflage, a couch covering a cherry soda
stain on the rug. But the hole, chewed through the wallboards as if by a rat,
was easily a foot and a half around, exceeding the chair’s meager capabilities.
Frankly, whatever needed a hole that big, he had no desire to meet.

The train schedule made less sense
than anything else, mostly sly puns, song lyrics, or obscure literary
references. He recognized the one-way train he had come in on, Heavy Metal,
though its apparent destination was, in fact, Midnight. And while it was slated
to arrive, it had no scheduled departure time, the epitome of
one-way
.

Jack was again struck by the feeling
of being on an unused sound stage for an old
Twilight Zone
episode or
Tales
From the Dark Side
. He was a million miles away from the world of this
morning—or whatever the last time was that he was in the world of litter-strewn
gutters, lost jobs, and disappointed lovers. What was he supposed to do here?
Was someone going to explain his caretaker duties to him? Was this even the
place the Writer was referring to, or had he foolishly stepped off the train at
some one-horse junction, a fly speck along the tracks between Cross-Over
Station and his final destination which he knew only as the “special place?”

Maybe you should get back on the train
while you figure this out.

Good advice, he thought. Logical.
Sensible.
Timid
. The kind of advice he had decided to stop following.

Well, if you won’t go back aboard the
train, what will you do?

The breeze knocked the door loosely
against the frame, the glass clacking softly. The candy machine buzzed and
crackled on the verge of some terminal electrical short, the lights inside
flickering painfully. The empty silence of the place mocked him, waiting for
answers he didn’t have.

“Okay,” he declared, pleased to hear
a voice in the emptiness, even if it was only his own. “In for a penny, in for
a pound.”

Through the doorway of the waiting
room was the Saloon proper, a large open room with bat wing doors across from
him leading out into another endless expanse of desert. He stepped out to a
covered walkway that fronted the Saloon, and stared across the dusty hardpan of
white desert that ended only at the farthest edges of the horizon in all
directions save one: the abrupt lip of the cliff only a stone’s throw away.
Other than the train tracks, there was only the Sanity’s Edge Saloon—the
place’s identity stenciled in red on the front bay window and confirmed on a
large white sign nailed to the porch roof. There was nothing else anywhere. The
building seemed to be the only thing in the universe, an inverted trapezoid
that grew wider as it went up, snubbing conformity and bourgeois right angles
and parallel lines.

Jack stared up at the building,
trying to fathom why it seemed to pull towards the cliff’s edge. Even a couple
of the windows and the main doorway had a tendency to list that way. Only the
Pepsi machine, like a silent glowing sentinel beside the bat wing doors, seemed
immune.