The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (16 page)

Jack glanced at Alex, wondering if
the young man might have nothing waiting back in the real world for him,
either. Not the nothing he spoke so glibly about, dissatisfied and
directionless, but the literal
nothing
; the nothing of a satin-lined
casket and six feet of packed earth. Maybe the Saloon was more than a second
chance at a failed life. Maybe it was actually a second chance at life
altogether.

“I have a meeting to get to,” Leland
insisted obstinately. “People depend on me. Whatever you have to do in order to
get me back there, you do it. After that, you can all do whatever you like.
Stay here, set up a hippie commune, discuss your innermost fears in group
sessions and sing campfire songs. I don’t care. Just tell me when the next
train is due.”

“That’s dif
ficult to say,” Jack said.

Leland, arms crossed, head forward, offered
Jack the same withering stare of the CEO from Stone Surety, the resemblance
disarming. “
Try
.”

“I have five return tickets,” Jack
said after a moment. “I need to complete them. Once they’re ready, the train
will come back and pick us up.”

“What do you mean you have to
complete them?” Mr. Quince asked.

“Reality here is …
flexible
. In
order to complete the tickets, I need to write out how the stories end. When
I’m done, the train will come back and take us home.”

You hope.

The others were staring at him, Ellen
included,
her expression
doubtful. It was the most generous afforded to him.

Leland Quince spoke for the group.
“You’re a lunatic.”

“Maybe,” Jack responded. “You asked
what I know. I told you.”

“Do you expect any of us to buy that
load of crap?” Leland demanded.

“I don’t expect anything,” Jack
replied. “I’m simply telling you what I was told.”
Well, most of it anyway.
“What you now know is the extent of what I know about this place.” Also untrue,
but telling them more wouldn’t help his case.

“That’s out there, man,” Alex admonished.

“Jack?”

He looked down at Lindsay. “What?”

“If you’re writing my story, can I
have a dog?”

He hadn’t expected support from a
seven-year-old girl, but who else would believe an explanation like his except
lunatics, children, and those still of a mind to believe. “I’ll see what I can
do.”

“Listen, Jack,” Alex said. “I
appreciate someone who’s been dealt a bad hand looking for a little bit more in
life, but Jesus! Mr. Quince is right. What you’re talking about doesn’t even
make sense.”

“It’s just the way things were
explained to me. There are five return tickets and five of us. Each ticket is
one person’s way back to reality. We’ve all been brought here from various
places. As far as I know, those chapters are done. I was selected as the one
who would design our new realities, the new lives we’ll each step into as
completely as if we were born to them. Don’t ask me how it works. I don’t know.
I just know what I’ve been told.”

But there were so many things the
Writer never told him. How much leeway would he have? Would the Saloon teach
him, or simply punish his mistakes? Was he godlike, or was he the whipped
minstrel composing for the amusement of the Nexus that would, if it deemed his
work satisfactory, print the tickets that would give them back their lives? Was
the Saloon a way station for stories in progress then, an old backyard shed for
the cast-off characters and unclean pieces with no place to be, no story—no
reality!
—to inhabit? And was he merely a hack looking for the imagined nod of approval
from a madman’s western saloon?

Maybe Leland Quince was right after
all. Maybe he was a lunatic.

“If you think I’m buying this for one
second, you are sadly mistaken,” Leland said, poking Jack sharply in the chest.
“You may entertain notions of us kowtowing before you, but I see through your
bullshit, Jack. You’re an ignorant fraud. None of this is real. You’re either a
criminal or a moron, and I don’t have time for either one.”

“If you can’t see that this place is
nothing like anyplace you’ve ever known,” Ellen said, “then you’re the moron.”

“Sweetheart, as far as I’m concerned,
you two were in this together from the start. Nothing you say is of any concern
to me.”

“She’s right, though,” Alex said.

“Shut up!”

“He’s just scared like the rest of
us,” Lindsay said softly.

Jack knew that she was right, seeing
through the businessman’s deliberate masks to a thing that only she, as a
child, could still understand: naked fear. Adults were too practiced at denying
it, at concealing their own and politely dismissing it in others for the sake
of etiquette. But a child would know only too well that the world was filled
with things to be feared; things unknown and more terrifying for it. Leland
Quince, captain of industry, power mogul and business magnate, was in way over
his head and only just beginning to realize it. And he was fighting the rising
panic the only way he knew how, the way he overcame any obstacle: by attacking it.

But that same child’s innocence came
without the wisdom to know the dangers in exposing another’s weakness.

Leland glared at her, his face
flushed, looking as if he might actually throttle the small girl dead on the
spot. His voice came in a tight whisper. “None of you understand a goddamn
thing.”

Stepping off the platform, he scanned
the length of the tracks, gazing upon the wasteland. “There’s another way out
of here. If there’s one thing I know, there’s always another way. Ninety-nine
percent of the world does everything the hard way, but not me. I do things my
way. I always have and I always will. A real man makes his own path. Now I’m
going to find the way out of this place, and if any of you are smart, you’ll
come with me and do exactly as I say.”

“There’s no other way out, Mr.
Quince,” Jack said softly.

“Why, Jack?” he yelled. “Because you
haven’t found it? I know your kind. You settle; take what life gives you and
piss about how unfair everything is. Well I don’t settle, Jack. You’ve been
here for two days, and you said yourself you don’t know what you’re doing. So
how do you know there’s no other way out besides your cockamamie idea? Face it,
Jack. You’re doing what you were told because that’s all you know how to do.
I’ll bet it’s all you’ve ever done, and you hate your life all the more for it.
Just like there’s a part of you that wishes you were more like me. You just
don’t have the guts.”

Jack felt his jaw tighten. “The only
way out of here is the train. And the only way to get the train back is to
prepare the tickets. And the only way to get the tickets ready is for me to
write them. Five of us. Five return tickets. It’s that simple.”

“Really?” Leland said. “If it’s so
simple, what are you going to do about
them
?”

A hundred yards away, three men stood
where once there was only empty desert. The central one wore an ivory-colored
suit, face shadowed by a brimmed hat, a curious staff in one hand. To his
right, an enormous man with a smooth face and head wearing an open robe of dark
satin and loose-fitting pajama pants, his pale, oiled skin obscenely visible.
And to their left, a tall man in a heavy gray coat and broad hat wearing a
retrofitted gas mask from World War I, his clothes powdered in dust as if he’d
been conjured from the wasteland itself, some kind of demon. Weapon belts
crossed his chest, the pommel of a sword visible over his left shoulder, a
curious variation of a long rifle gripped in his hand.

The Writer’s warning rang clear in
Jack’s mind, displacing everything from the last twenty-four hours with its
sheer urgency. He tried to speak but couldn’t, his throat closed as if choked
with a mouthful of dust, bone-white, while words reverberated through his
brain:
Cast Outs! The Tribe of Dust!

“One of them might have an idea how
to get out of here,” the businessman said as he started across the hardpan.

Jack followed him into the wasteland,
thinking that Mr. Quince was, about this, dead wrong.

THE LINE IN THE SAND

Gusman Kreiger watched the misfit
collection cross the sands, the relative safety of the Nexus left behind.

“This is what comes from entrusting
power to crippled, self-indulgent dreamers. The center of all the universes,
the apex of all creations, past, present, and future, rendered an
abomination
.
The Nexus could be anything. Instead, it is a worn down, western cliché with
inconsistent architecture and sub-standard wiring.” He shook his head. “I
should have made Algernon suffer more.”

Rebreather and Hyde were both silent, a rarity for the latter. Kreiger
shrugged. “Well, done is done.” Then to Rebreather he said, “It will not be
possible to kill the Caretaker outright. There is still too much of Algernon in
that place. Even dead, I do not believe he would leave his
protégé
defenseless,
and until I ascertain how much she knows about herself and her new powers, I’ll
not risk all on foolish bravado. Still, she should understand the extent of our
resolve.”

He held up a single bullet, blowing
across it, breath nearly visible like the skirls of heat upon the desert. The
casing shined like gold, the lead tip as dull as a demon’s claw. He handed it
to Rebreather, who immediately chambered the round into his long rifle.

Kreiger cast a brief, withering stare
at the approaching quintet, his focus on the young woman with the dirty blonde
hair and wan expression.
Such an unlikely choice, Algernon.
“Select one
of the constructs … and make her understand.”

“Spare the little one,” Hyde said, a
petition for the sake of polite etiquette like a request not to forego an
after-dinner sweet. “I rather like her.”

Kreiger turned an eye to the
corpulent magi, a half smile even as he wrung the metal of the tall lightning
rod, blue-white light bleeding out from the stamped iron and crystal of the
staff as if trying to escape the channel that drew it in and held it captive, a
slave to the wizard’s will. But Gusman Kreiger was not so easily denied, and
dragged the power back. “Once we obtain the Nexus, you may have anything or
anyone your tragically overactive imagination can conjure, even the skinny, young
woman Algernon has chosen as a successor. A fine, little playmate, as pliable
and willful as only reality can make her, unlike your fading dream creatures or
those pathetic constructs that surround her. But until that moment, all is fair
game.”

Hyde stared at the group coming
closer, eyes moving longingly between the soft innocence of the child and the
wild soul of the young woman. Kreiger knew his thoughts, and found them useful,
if somewhat repugnant. The strongest magic was the magic that came directly from
the source, directly from the Nexus. And that magic was the magic of making.
With it, anything could be made.
Anything!

Hyde wiped the glistening sides of
his mouth with soft, meaty fingers, gaze lingering upon the approaching group
with morbid intensity. “They’re here.”

*     *     *

Leland Quince stopped ten feet from
the trio, hands tucked in his pockets, waiting for one of them to make the
first move. It was a game, a play where all the performers were aware of the
duplicity, the contest, the ever-shifting rules. The first to step forward or
extend a hand acknowledged the superiority of the other. Most mistook it for
courtesy.

But staring at them, Leland became
more and more convinced that these three were unlike stockholders or CEOs or
even house majority leaders cozening influence; these three might not respond
to reason. The fat one, who from a distance resembled a corn-fed Hollywood mogul stereotype, some hedonistic pervert oozing blubber from his silk-pajama
attire with his manicured nails and prissy face, appeared more sinister as he
grew closer. His leering expression was both cunning and bestial, his skin
lavishly tattooed and pierced with a ragged assemblage of animal bones like
some carnival sideshow. Then there was the tall, post-apocalyptic movie
villain, his outfit cluttered with cruel, archaic weapons, the fabric
permanently saturated with dust, wrinkles worn deep and polished like
river-carved stone. An outdated gas mask covered his face, respiring loudly in
the awkward silence. He held a long rifle loosely in one hand. And the third,
the one who looked the most normal—the one who inspired Leland to walk out in
the first place—simply tipped an amused expression at him, the kind one gives a
dog that has chosen to lift its leg to a sofa in the middle of a formal dinner
party.

Leland did not speak, did not nod,
only stared and waited. They would come to him. Fuck all, he was not so far
outside of his world that he could not still assess a situation, know a thing’s
worth within moments: its secret value, its greatest flaw. The man with the
staff and the cunning eyes exuded power, raw power Leland could smell the way a
shark smells blood in the tide. Not power on a conventional scale, not
something that could be bought and sold, political clout or wealthy favors. No,
this was true power: pure, unadulterated, able to take on any form, any
fantasy, any purpose. This was power with the potential to be anything.
Anything!

And this man had it.

Jack was clueless, but not this one.
Leland could feel it. The man with the staff and the white suit would find a
way out of this place. And those who helped him would be raised up, made
powerful; not as kings, but
gods
!

As for those who did not, God’s mercy
on them.

*     *     *

Ellen was a half-step behind Jack as
he approached the newcomers, and instinctively afraid, certain that these three
were the Cast Outs Jack mentioned. The one with the staff wore his polished
veneer like a disguise, his skin a costume; underneath, he was no different
from the monsters he kept company with. The fat one with the tattoos followed
her movements with his eyes, stare raw and slick, stripping her away, looking
nakedly at her and sending shivers up her spine. She crossed her arms tightly
and glanced at the last, the mask unreadable, dangerous. They were the three
wise men on smack, mescaline prophets come to offer tidbits of wisdom and
handfuls of opiates and acid-blots, Halloween tricksters from an LSD trip you
wished like hell would end.

“Jack, stop!” she blurted out, not sure
why; knowing only that he mustn’t go near them. None of them must ever be
within arm’s reach of these three.

Jack looked at her, not understanding
but heeding her advice all the same.
He’s too trusting
, she thought, but
wasn’t sure why she thought that was a bad thing. Jack stopped a pace apart
from the businessman, a kind of rudimentary border forming between the two
groups, no-man’s land.

“Algernon mentioned you,” the elegant
man said with a peculiar accent, looking only at Ellen. He tipped his hat to
reveal two different colored eyes: one bright blue, the other a green found in
the slippery skin atop still water that hides something deep and cold and frightening.
How many people have you killed?
she wanted to ask, but thought in that
same moment that she didn’t want to know the answer.

“I admit,” the man persisted, “I was
a bit surprised at his choice of replacement. Frankly, I thought Algernon’s
tastes ran the other way.  But he was always a man of surprises.”

“Who—”

“I’m sorry, didn’t Algernon mention
me? Shame on him; I’m a rather important detail for someone in your position.
Still, he didn’t have a lot of time. I take responsibility for that. I am
Gusman Kreiger and these are my associates, Reginald Hyde.” The fat man tipped
his head, eyes narrowing as a smile tightened his lips, leaving Ellen with the
sensation that he had just reached across no-man’s land and caressed her. “And
this is Rebreather.” The tall man did not move at all, a monolith of stone,
dangerous and unreadable.

“Who’s Algernon?” Ellen asked,
inching closer to Jack. She did not understand why, did not care to understand
why, only that Jack was familiar and safe, a friend of only a few hours, but a
friend all the same. Maybe her only friend.

Kreiger stared at her as if trying to
fathom her intent. Then he laughed. And Reginald Hyde laughed too, the sound
high and effeminate. “Oh, my sweet, he has certainly left you in the lurch if
he did not even tell you his real name. What kind of a fool follows a crazy,
old man to the edge of madness on the basis of faith?”

Ellen turned to Jack. “Is he talking
about
the Writer? The
one you told me about?”

Jack didn’t answer, only
glaring at Gusman Kreiger.

“Well, not to worry,” Kreiger said. “This whole nightmare can be over
soon if you’re willing to be reasonable. Algernon may have told you very
little, but he told me a great many things, even things about you. I don’t
think he intended to, but a gerrymander can be very persuasive. Algernon told
me almost everything before I had him torn apart and the walls of some
out-world back alley painted with his blood—the same out-world he plucked you
from. So you understand I’m very serious when I say that I would like you to
listen to reason, Caretaker.”

“She’s not the new Caretaker,” Jack
said, stepping forward. “I am.”

Kreiger glanced to Rebreather. “It’s
the hero, then.”

The tall Cast Out raised the modified
long rifle, an adaptation of firearms borrowed across many wars—some
unremembered, others not fought outside his reality—as if it were nothing more
than an extension of his own monstrous arm, his fingertip a hollow bore of blue
steel, and fired point-blank at Jack’s head.

*     *     *

Jack heard Ellen scream his name too
late. Scarcely able to register what was happening, he barely had enough time
to utter a surprised grunt, one hand moving as if to bat the shot aside,
shooing it away like some bothersome gnat. The explosion ringing in his ears,
he was knocked flat on his back, the left side of his head on fire.

He shot me! He fucking shot me!
The thought repeated over and over
in his brain like the curses of a gibbering idiot as he lay there, eyes
squeezed shut, hands clamped to the pain; throbbing; burning.

Ellen and Alex hovered over him. She
was pulling at his hands, saying something to him that could not quite
penetrate the rampant inner screaming:
He fucking shot me!

Already the initial intensity was
beginning to subside, the fiery pain becoming a horrible ache, pulsing waves
like a cracked tooth.
Soon, everything will go dark. But not just yet. This
place is so bright.

“Christ, are you made of steel?” he
heard Alex say, his voice distant, ears still ringing.

“Is he okay?” It was Lindsay, the
little girl who was quite probably dead in another reality blessedly removed
from this one.

Ellen’s hand strayed near his face,
fingers trembling as they wavered timidly between touching and not touching his
forehead, and he saw her blink with astonishment. A smile touched her face, not
the reaction he had expected.

“He’s okay,” Ellen whispered. “The
bullet, it … I think it …
bounced
.”

Bounced? How was that possible? He
was so close he actually saw the rifling in the barrel. How could anyone
survive that? How?

He was not the only one surprised.
Rebreather turned sharply on Gusman Kreiger. “That one has the protection of
the Nexus! He is Algernon’s chosen!”

Kreiger looked down on Jack and the small group attending him, a glimmer
of rage barely concealed behind his gaze. “Algernon lied. With his dying
breath, he lied. Impressive.”

“Stay away from us,” Jack said, sitting
up. He had hoped it would sound like a grand and sweeping proclamation, but
terror had reduced his voice to a creaky whisper, and the very act of sitting
made him momentarily dizzy, his skull pounding with every heartbeat. He
supposed he should simply be glad he hadn’t peed himself.

“I’m sorry, little man.” Kreiger
cupped a hand to his ear. “You have something to say to me.”

Jack let Ellen and Alex help him back
to his feet, trying to ignore the throbbing in his head. He felt a wet trickle
down his temple that turned cool against his cheek, probably blood. “I said,
stay away from us! Stay away from me. Stay away from the Saloon. These people
are under my protection now. You don’t belong here, Cast Out. These people are
safe from you with me.”

“Boldly spoken, charlatan. Anything
to back it up?” Kreiger asked, extending the point of his staff.

As the tip of the lightning rod drew
down on Jack, it began sparking with blue white energy as if rubbing the end of
a grinding wheel. For a moment, it looked as if it had pierced the surface of
water, the air rippling at its touch, its length refracted.

“As I suspected,” Kreiger said,
pulling the staff back. “That’s one, Caretaker. Your wall may keep me and mine
at bay for a while, but not forever. You’re on borrowed time, as much a
prisoner as I am an exile. But what you see as safety is actually the limit of
your tether, so bark and growl all you like; you’re fooling no one. You don’t
belong here. You had no idea what you were getting yourself into and you still
don’t. This wall won’t hold, and when it comes down, your tiny world will
collapse and take you and everyone around you with it.