The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (62 page)

… or a Jabberwock.

Blood ran from his body, feeding thirsty floorboards where Jack’s rampant
imagination, fueled by the influx of Nexus energy, was busily manifesting all
manner of reality, mundane and magical. Books were heaped along the wall in
stacks, bubbling up from beneath like toadstools, piles tipping over and
spilling across the floor. The plant behind him writhed and pawed the air with
thick, snaking tendrils, its stalk as thick as his waist, the roots ripping out
the small bucket that once contained them to burrow into the floorboards while
thrashing limbs shattered the picture window.

Barely a foot from Kreiger’s hand,
the lightning rod leaned absently against the desk, blue-white streams of
electricity running across its surface. It could save him. There was energy
enough to heal the muscle, to mend the bones, to stop the blood and take back
control of reality run amok. But it was out of his reach.

Twelve inches away; it might as well
be twelve thousand.

His only chance left was the Nexus.

*     *     *

“Jack can’t save you, sweet meat,”
Hyde chided absently, thick feminine fingers reaching for the last ticket.
“Jack can’t even save himself. You’re on your own, and that makes you as good
as gone.” He giggled to himself as if Ellen might not understand his joke—might
not be aware of him at all, though his naked bulk rested squarely on top of
her. “But I’ll tell you what, muffin. I might just save you myself … if you’re
nice to me. You can start by calling me …
daddy
.”

Ellen fought past the poison and fear
infusing her flesh, a lethargy that pinned her arms and legs to the floor like
corpse limbs. As Hyde reached for the ticket in her left hand, trembling as
though stalking a butterfly that might take wing at any moment and escape him,
she fought to bring her right arm up from the floor. It moved woodenly, numb,
asleep. She could not feel her fingers, or even her arm, only a dull ache, a
slow grinding pain in her shoulder as she willed the limb upwards, made
deadened stick-fingers open, threw her lifeless palm up towards Reginald Hyde.

Her hand fell upon Nail’s jawbone,
drawn to the totem of the Guardian; a Guardian sworn by Jack to protect her.

Blue-white fire leaped from the
whitened bone in a startling flash that eclipsed the ghosts clinging like
molted skin to Hyde’s tattooed flesh. It jolted her fingertips and palm like an
electric shock, making her hand come alive, tighten down in a convulsion of
pain. Her arm likewise spasmed with returning life, tearing the jawbone from
Hyde’s shoulder in one ghastly wrench, gut-thread pulling from his skin in gory
rips. Hyde let out a terrific shriek, retreating to clutch his shoulder in
agony. The dancing fetishes and haunts that obscured his face fleeing for a
moment, their images burned away under the jawbone’s witch light.

“
Bitch!
”

He struck her across the face, the
petulant slap of a prim, old woman, or a small girl. It served only to revive
Ellen’s flesh, forcing Lovebone’s venom from her body in a milky sweat that
evaporated under the warmth of the blue-white light of the Guardian’s jawbone.

“Nail!” she whispered fervently,
trying to invoke his spirit as her hand tightened upon the jaw, its long,
powerful tusks standing out like weapons.

And with her remaining strength,
Ellen slammed the great fangs of the gargoyle’s jawbone into the side of
Reginald Hydes’s head.

“
Nail
!”

Then Hyde was screaming, the jawbone
glowing a brilliant sapphire blue, smoke rising from the fat man’s illustrated
skin as he tried with dying fingers to pry the thick fangs from his temple and
neck.

“You’re mine!” he gurgled,
blood-spattered froth running from his lips, lost in the rivulets of red
pumping from his neck and skull. His eyes seemed to be craning, as if trying to
look over his shoulder at the soul that pursued him, that bit down upon his
head. “Your spirit is mine! I … own…”

Ellen kicked fiercely, pitching the
fat Cast Out off of her and into the wall, smacking his head against the
boards. Instantly, an eldritch fire engulfed him, burning neither Ellen nor the
wooden floorboards—only Reginald Hyde. He clawed at his skin, charred black
filling in the spaces between his intricately diagrammed flesh, and the room
took on the smell of burning meat, old grease on a charcoal grill. A last,
guttering squeal spewed from his lips as the Cast Out collapsed, enveloped in
shimmering flames that burned and crackled with a low, growling noise that
sounded to her like the satisfied snarl of some fierce animal.

The fire died away as suddenly as it
began, leaving only a useless frame of blackened bones sprinkled with wasted
talismans and one remarkably untouched jawbone of pure white impaling the
blackened, burned-out skull.

Ellen rolled away, one hand still
gripping the ticket, her knuckles white and painful. She scrambled to her feet,
running towards the missing door and the platform beyond. The train waited, the
doorway pulled back expectantly. She was to ride in the last car; there was
nothing else after it. She stumbled through the doorway, and collapsed upon the
floor, the grooved rubber mat where mud and rainwater collected. Her hands were
ablaze. Her knees felt as if they were broken. Her head seemed ready to split.

Behind her, the door slid softly
shut, and the wheels started in with a slow churring sound as they hauled the
sluggish bulk of the train forward.

Only then did she realize that Jack
was not on board.

*     *     *

Until now, Jack had not fully
realized what it meant, moving the Saloon closer to the Nexus. Only scant feet
of Wasteland dust separated the saloon’s outer wall from the abyss of madness.

His leap had sent him straight over
the edge, the world disappearing beneath his feet along with all rational
thought, all rational
reality
. What remained was simply the insistence
of the mind and nothing else; the winged flight of dreams.

Behind him, Rebreather’s gloved
fingers raked the back of his shirt, snatching at what had already escaped him,
missed by a hair’s breadth only.

But it was enough.

The chain went taut and Jack began to
fall, the Wasteland sand four stories below. There was a brief moment when the
chain seemed to pull him back, steel links little more than elastic bands. But
the moment ended abruptly with a splitting crack as the entire stairway all the
way to the turn of the landing buckled under the combined weight of the two
climbers and the momentum of Jack’s plunge out over the chasm.

Time was fractured into pieces, each
recollected in separate heartbeat moments, like the last images of life burned
upon a dying man’s eyes. He was free, suspended out over nothing. Below him,
and a little ahead, the great bottomless chasm of madness; the endless fall
into a realm without rule or limitation.

A heartbeat, and the moment was gone.

He was being snapped backwards, back
towards the sweeping claw of the gray-clad Rebreather, some twisted avatar of
death or time or evil or whatever—he did not know, and could not begin to
guess. He knew only a spasm of terror, a fear that he had been wrong, as wrong
as he had ever been in his whole life and more. And worse, he had deceived
Ellen, misleading her into believing in him. Perhaps she should have taken
Kreiger’s offer on that first day. Maybe he should have, too.

Another heartbeat; another moment
lost.

Wood cracked. Boards twisted. There
was a wrenching shriek as nails tore loose, and an instant of fear as Jack
mixed his own screams into those echoing all around the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.
Above, Gusman Kreiger was screaming, his agonized wails of pain muffled by
walls and his own thickened pride and hatred. Below, Ellen screamed, a terrible
frightened sound. Lovebone was also screaming somewhere below, the bone
priest’s terror dying away quickly, burning out.

And Rebreather was screaming; an
enraged, cheated, angry scream as he plunged headfirst off the collapsing
stairway, dropping like a stone straight into the hardpan forty feet below. His
cry ended suddenly with a muffled thud, then silence. He didn’t move from the
dent in the sand, the settling Wasteland dust; fallen Icarus; Lucifer cast
down.

Jack hit the roof over the platform,
knocking the wind out of his lungs and sending a spray of stars across his
field of vision as he bounced his head upon the shingles. The remnants of the
stair collapsed directly beside him. Two more inches, and the twisted mess of
lumber would have crushed his arm, or maybe his skull. He couldn’t make himself
care. He only stared blankly up at an empty sky of naked blue, the sun slowly
rising, promising to make the day hot. A shaft of white smote the blue expanse
like a great tower, a needle piercing heaven, a sword thrust into the farthest
reaches of distant space.

The Nexus.

Jack lay there, dazed, listening.
Over the thudding of his heart, the ragged desperate gasps of breath, there was
still the sound of screaming. Kreiger.
Ellen
. More desperate now, both
of them. And something else. The sound of steel wheels grinding against
misshapen rails, fighting twisted metal in an effort to battle the chrome worm
beyond the sabotaged section of track and into the free region of unaffected
rail where it could accelerate to something approaching the speed of light, a
high pitched squeal of burning, warping metal as the last train fought its way
out of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

Ellen must be aboard, he thought,
painfully sucking air into his lungs. He rolled over, easing himself up on one
elbow and looking with sun-blinded eyes at the train.

It was twenty feet away from him and
pushing steadily further. The train was leaving. Ellen was leaving!

Have to get away
, he thought, pulling himself weakly
along to the roof’s edge.
One chance. No time left.

Jack dropped down from the roof to
land on the edge of the platform, his knees singing out in pain. The train was
still moving away, sparks spraying out behind it in great sheets of orange
fire. He squinted at the dingy window in the back of the car, a windowed
emergency door. Someone was inside, but the glare off the dust-caked glass kept
the train’s secret.

Ellen, he thought. It has to be
Ellen.

He rose unsteadily and started after
the retreating train, forcing himself to run as best he could. So little time.
If Kreiger was caught in the trap then he had seconds only. No more. He had to
get to the train. He had to.

“Ellen?”

*     *     *

Kreiger’s fingers clattered frantically
at the keys, line after line of text running across the screen, telling a
story; describing a way out. He didn’t look at the screen; didn’t need to. He
knew what his own words were. And he knew what the voice from the Jabberwock
was telling him.

INELIGIBLE USER!
VIOLATION! FIVE SECONDS TO SHUT DOWN!

“Damn you, Jack,” Kreiger snarled,
the keys turning first slick then tacky with the blood running freely down his
wrists, across his hands, off his fingers.

FIVE

Credit where it was due, Jack had tricked
him; lured him in under the pretense of helplessness. But Jack wasn’t helpless.
Oh, no! The little fuck was far from helpless.

FOUR

Had Jack really known when he broke
the seal, when he moved the Saloon that dangerous fraction closer to the energy
of the Nexus? Was he cognizant of the power he would unleash? Had that been his
plan all along? Lure Kreiger in, make him comfortable then catch him up in the
jaws of a trap.

THREE

Bait to draw in the prey, and jaws to
hold it fast.
That
was what he had told Rebreather. Was he dead now, too? Kreiger wasn’t sure.
Maybe. Hyde was dead, that he knew. Too eager to please the flesh, too ignorant
to know the spirit.
Damn you, Jack!

TWO

The story was spinning out under his
fingertips. A way out, a way through, a way to bring the road home to him. No
fancy trains or silver tracks or endless rails of gleaming chrome such as would
bind the imagination and shackle the dreams of countless Caretakers before
Jack. Algernon was the last in a line of ignorant fools. Jack was … well, Jack
was a different kind of fool. A clever fool. Maybe not a fool at all. Could
have been friends, different times, different places, different circumstances.
“It’s not fair.”

ONE

“Not fair.” Fingers chattering in
lightning rhythm, story unfolding, pages riffling, ways opening. “I’m nearly…”

ZERO

“… free …”

*     *    *

Ellen beat against the smeary glass
with her hands, the sharp slap of pain in her fists cutting through the dull
aching wish that she would simply surrender to the exhaustion and the pain and
the feeling of draining away, and collapse. Blood smeared the glass, splattered
in faint sprays from her sliced palms. The ticket clutched in her hand had
become sticky with blood.