The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (63 page)

Outside, running after the train like
the love-struck hero in some bad romance novel, a silver screen moment poorly
written, was Jack. The bad ending. The hero was supposed to catch the train,
sweep the woman into his embrace. They kiss; cue the music; the camera retreats
into
The End
.

This was all wrong. This was all
completely wrong.

“Jack!”

The sound of her voice seemed distant
and unreal, ears stuffed with cotton, brain buzzing and humming like a can of
angry hornets. Her limbs felt wooden, her flesh numb. Even the sharp pain in
her hands, the prickling stabs in her torn knees, had faded to distant whimpers
for attention; no longer desperate cries of pain, but simple pleas for pity.

“Jack!” Ellen whimpered, not knowing
what else to do. The train was lurching and chugging forward, as if straining
against an anchor, some chain holding it back, and when that gave, the train
would whip-snap like a rocket—a chrome rocket on steel rails that stretched all
the way from madness to the farthest edges of the universe by way of the
Dreamline.

The Saloon was fifty feet away now,
and Ellen realized as Jack hobbled after the train, stumbling and favoring one
leg, lurching in time with the locomotive, that she had never stood this far
from the Saloon, never looked at it from this end.

It looked so small.

Jack was slowly gaining, using the
train’s stalled efforts on the broken rails to reach it in time. To escape. To
be with her.

Outside of the chrome-skinned
machine, beyond the endless rail and the melodrama carrying itself out upon
that short stretch of track, the Jabberwock reached the count of zero, and an
explosion engulfed the saloon, a cloud of all-consuming smoke and dust sweeping
out like a tidal wave, the devouring blast of an atomic bomb.

The explosion rocked the train,
knocking Ellen to the floor. Jack fell, scrambled desperately to his feet, then
started running again, the effort excruciating. He was running as fast as he
could; running to stay clear of the pursuing cloud of smoke; running to catch
up to her.

Ellen tugged uselessly at the door
handle, blood dragged across the bare metal as she pushed and pulled, desperate
to wrench the door open, to get out before the train managed to free itself
like some half-beached leviathan thrashing in the rising tide. If she could
just open the door, she could get out. Maybe the train would have to stop and
wait for her. Maybe it wouldn’t. She didn’t care so long as she wasn’t leaving
Jack behind, leaving him here with nothing and no one. Leaving him here to die.

“C’mon, c’mon dammit!” Then, more
softly, “Jack, I didn’t know. I thought you were on board, I swear I did. Just
run. Please, Jack. Please, God. Just run. Run!”

The door stubbornly refused to budge,
the train struggling ever forward.

The cloud rolled outwards, sweeping
out to engulf Jack as he reached for the narrow step outside of the emergency
door, that slender toehold that would permit him to stowaway, to secret himself
out, to bend his precious rules and forget all about this place and follow
Ellen back into—

Rebreather lunged from the boiling
wave of smoke, coat white with Wasteland dust, one arm hanging limp, broken at
the elbow. But the other swept around the Caretaker, and dragged him down.

Ellen’s hands shot to the glass,
smeary prints of dirt and blood. “
Jack
!”

The ticket fell from her fingers,
instantly falling apart into useless confetti, punched into oblivion as the
train lurched with a final, momentous heave, outrunning the advancing cloud
that swept over Jack and the monster, Rebreather, swallowing them both.

As the train catapulted forward,
Ellen Monroe was thrown headfirst into the door, the blow sufficient to smash
the glass into a spider web of fracture lines, some inked lightly in red, blood
seeping quickly into the seams. She stared for one crazy, chilling moment
through the cracks, reality tilting away beneath her as she fell, and she saw
the world retreat away…

… and away …

… and away …

She was going home.

THE LAST TICKET HOME

The ticket fell from her fingers, instantly falling apart into useless
confetti, punched into oblivion as the train lurched with a final, momentous
heave, outrunning the advancing cloud that swept over Jack and the monster,
Rebreather, swallowing them both.

As the train catapulted forward, Ellen Monroe was thrown headfirst into
the door, the blow sufficient to smash the glass into a spider web of fracture
lines, some inked lightly in red, blood seeping quickly into the seams. She
stared for one crazy, chilling moment through the cracks, reality tilting away
beneath her as she fell, and she saw the world retreat away…

… and away …

… and away …

She was going home
.

“Ellen, can you give me a hand with
this?”

Ellen looked up from the book she was
reading, her eyes taking a moment to refocus. Nicholas Dabble, proprietor of
Dabble’s
Books
, stood before a newly emptied top shelf with a cardboard box of books
in his arms, looking at her through the prim, round spectacles he wore.

“Sure.” She tucked a bookmark into
the paperback—
only a few pages away from the end
—and removed the glasses
she wore for reading, placing them next to the book on the countertop beside a
large, lidded cup of now-cold coffee—cinnamon-flavored with lots of extra
cream—from
Serena’s Coffee Shoppe
across the street. Then she slid down
off the stool where she had spent the entire morning and much of this afternoon
reading, straightened the pleats of her skirt a little, and with a perfunctory
glance around the store—
no customers, so no one needed her help
—she
walked over to the shelf where Mr. Dabble was already waiting.

“Just hold this for me for a moment,
will you please?” He transferred the heavy box to her without awaiting a reply,
and quickly scaled the stepladder that gave him access to the highest shelf in
the store, some twelve feet up. The only books shelved that high were special
interests; books that people did not browse for, but that they actually came up
to him directly and inquired about in hushed tones as they might the advice of
a priest on matters of some ecclesiastical quandary: special interest,
collector’s editions, rare copies, out-of-stock, out-of-print. She leaned one
edge of the box against the ladder, propping it up so that Mr. Dabble could
easily reach the books as needed.

“You’ve been reading that new book
all afternoon,” Nicholas Dabble mentioned by way of conversation. He was taking
the books from the box with extreme care, placing each one exactly upon the
shelf, no shuffling or cramming, his precision akin to a curator placing rare
artifacts into a museum exhibit. The conversation he attempted with Ellen was
done very much without his direct involvement or interest. “Is it good?”

“It’s very … engaging,” she replied.

“Not a very stirring accolade,” Mr.
Dabble observed, a leather-bound edition in one hand, the cover worn and
cracked, once gold-embossed lettering faded nearly to nothing.

“It’s pretty good,” she quickly
added, unsure why she felt compelled to defend the writer’s work. “Its style is
sort of … instinctive, kind of raw and prosy at the same time. It’s a little
predictable, but fast-paced. It kind of holds your interest; makes you curious.”
She wanted to add something else that she noticed about the book, something
that she couldn’t exactly explain. There was something about it that seemed
almost …
familiar
. But she could not quite put her finger on how, and
thought it better not to mention it. It sounded crazy, and she didn’t want to
go back down that road. “I don’t think I’m going to like the ending, though.”

Mr. Dabble nodded, still not paying
her any attention. He listened acutely to everything she said. He always did.
But he seldom offered the usual cues that most people searched for by way of
response: the facial expressions, the turn of the mouth, the widening or
narrowing of the eyes. Nicholas Dabble was adept at human nature, but not human
interaction.

“So you like it.” It was more a
statement than a question, a plain observation from her boss who had the
uncanny knack of seeing through semantics and facades and the whole masquerade
of the human experience, and cutting out the very heart of the matter for open
display.

She considered this for a moment
before answering, “Yes.”

Mr. Dabble paused in his
single-minded task of arranging and shelving his books, turned to her and
smiled warmly. His eyes were a brilliant green, so stirring that they could
easily take someone unfamiliar with the proprietor of
Dabble’s Books
unaware, their penetrating gaze disconcerting.

Ellen never found them so.

“I’m glad,” Mr. Dabble said, a faint
shake of his head that might have been a satisfied nod. Then his eyes darted up
and over her shoulder. “I think we have a customer.”

Leaning against the counter, back to
them, was a man in a worn gray overcoat. “I’ll be right there,” Ellen called.

“Here, hand me those,” Mr. Dabble
instructed, descending the steps and taking the cardboard box from her. “Go and
take care of our customer. We’ll finish this another time.”

She turned and started back across
the shop, brushing the dust from her hands. “Can I help you?”

But the man at the counter had
already left. There was the quiet click of the door as it closed behind him,
and pale footprints on the floorboards. She stared helplessly out the front
picture window and the glass-paned door, but there was no longer any sign of
him. Just the gray overcast day and the near-empty street outside.

“I wonder what that was about,” Ellen
said then shrugged, about to return to helping Mr. Dabble when she noticed the
book lying on the counter. It was the same one she was reading, the one she
distinctly recalled marking the page of and placing neatly aside by her glasses
and her cup of cold, cinnamon-flavored coffee. Only now it was lying out, the
back cover and last page bent backwards and left facedown on the counter.

She glanced back up at the picture
window and the empty street under the gray, overcast sky.

Standing on the other side of the
road, hands jammed into the pockets of his gray overcoat, a man stared at her,
the silent petition of a lost soul, eyes penetrating and haunted … and
strangely
familiar
.

Like a dream.

Eyes staring directly at her; seeing
her;
reading her
.

Her right hand groped blindly, found
the edge of the counter, and clamped down upon it until her fingertips felt
like they were impaled upon nails. The pain became a towline, an anchor that
kept her mind from reeling, kept her eyes from blurring and her knees from
giving out and dropping her to the floor. The chasm between her and the
stranger widened and narrowed and widened in arrhythmic fits and leaps, making
her heart race, and her mind struggle against the waxy wall of emptiness and
no-thought that protected her sanity from the truth.

There was an explosive scream, a
banshee wail she thought must be herself completely losing her mind before she
realized it was not from her that the piercing sound erupted, but the train
thundering down the street without tracks, surreal and enormous, the World Worm
of ancient legend, its skin transformed into metal plates of soot-darkened
steel and polished iron that eclipsed the large picture window and stole the
stranger from her sight. The rolling wheels were like long bursts of thunder, a
hurricane wind blasting scraps of paper and litter down the sidewalks, rattling
the windows and shaking the books on their shelves.

And then it was gone. And the
stranger in gray was gone. And all that remained was an empty street, slate
gray under a sunless sky.

Everything was normal. Everything was
as it should be.

Well, almost.

The only reaction that could battle
free from the pandemonium of rampant images and thoughts and memories awakened
in Ellen Monroe’s brain was a sense of impossible cold. She started shivering
from head to toe like someone caught in the grips of a seizure, or found
suddenly teleported, naked and alone, to the dark, frozen wastes of Antarctica.

“Ellen?” Mr. Dabble said softly, as
if trying to awaken her from a nightmare.

And it was his voice, the sense of
Nicholas Dabble’s presence beside her, which brought everything back, restored
solid ground, shook the creases from reality and made everything right. She
jerked suddenly, turning to him, startled and a little afraid.

“Are you all right, Ellen?” Mr.
Dabble asked. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

She tried to say something, but no
sound was pushed from her throat. Just an empty breath shaped like a vague
word, an uttered oath, a secret prayer.

Jack!

Her hands scrambled to pick up the
nearly finished book, the one left cracked open and facedown by some stranger
who appeared and vanished again with the surrealistic quickness of a bulleting
train; reality’s secret track; the Dreamline. She looked at the page it was
left open to, folded back so that it cracked the cheap glue of the paperback’s
spine; the final page where the mysterious man in gray whom she did not know—
could
not possibly know
—had left her a parting message.