The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (20 page)

“No,” Jack confessed. “But it seems
to make sense. For all its convenience, nothing is
convenient
. Cliché
would be a more appropriate term. All of the dispensers require coins. Sleeping
arrangements are inadequate, but there are plenty of blankets in the closet.
The place is defended not so much by an impenetrable barrier of magic, but by a
gargoyle. The place creates elements of reality like symbolic gestures; reality
lenses to focus the power that the Nexus generates. I’m not saying I understand
all the inner workings, but I am beginning to understand the premise upon which
they seem to operate. The emphasis on the tickets and the trains, for one.
Those tickets aren’t for passage to Chicago. They’re tickets back to reality.
So why externalize that as a train and a ticket? I don’t know. I think I know
the
what
, but I don’t know the
why
.”

“Kreiger knows why,” Leland said,
coming down the stairs.

“Why do you say that?” Alex asked
from behind the bar. “If he really knew what he was doing, he wouldn’t be out
in the desert, would he?”

Leland didn’t miss a beat. “Were you
speaking in complex sentences when you were three weeks old? Probably not. So
why can you do it now? For the same reason that Kreiger can probably succeed
where once he failed. Experience. Kreiger’s been around. He’s learned not to
yield to the rules imposed upon him by his surroundings like Jack does. Kreiger
makes the rules and the reality in the same step.” Leland turned the corner to
the waiting room, adding “That’s the difference.”

Alex shook his head, the room silent
but for the sound of Leland plugging coins into the candy dispenser. Coins slid
down into the malfunctioning guts. Buttons were jabbed.

Then something thumped the machine.
“Come on!” Leland grumbled.

A fist banged the vending machine
again. “
Come on
!”

The machine replied with a loud
whirring, cicadas on a hot July afternoon, and an eerie green light flickered
erratically from the waiting room.

“Give it to me, you son of a bitch!”
More fist banging. There was the clunking sound of metal feet rocking up and
down on a wooden floor. “
Come on
!”

The light flickered angrily, a
bright, arrhythmic, gassy green. Leland Quince rocked the machine back and
forth, banging it against the wall, hollering: “
Give it! Give it
!”

And there was a soft thumping sound,
and everything stopped. Leland stepped calmly from the waiting room, breathing
hard, staring at a package of Ho-hos with angry satisfaction. He stopped
halfway to the stairs, realizing he was the center of attention.

“Did you want any coffee, Mr.
Quince?” Jack offered. Honestly, he didn’t know what else to say.

Leland Quince only stared back at
him, part incomprehension, part thinly veiled hatred. “What I want is to go
home.”

Then the businessman retreated back
upstairs.

UNDER COVER OF DARKNESS

It was shortly after midnight when
Leland Quince slipped away from the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.

He waited quietly in his room,
planning. And while he planned, he studied the room’s antiquated trappings: the
hand-carved wood on the bureau, the worn and cracked leather straps on the old
steamer trunk, the oil-soaped floorboards. And as he stared at each thing in
turn, Leland Quince put himself to the task of selecting from each a flaw. It
was his unique talent, how he won; how he
always
won. All he had to do
was find the break in the surface, the chink in the armor. The beautiful
headboard had a knot in the wood, ugly and black and shrunken with age, it left
a jagged black hole with gobs of yellowed finish caught up in the grooves; sure
sign of a carpenter too cheap to scrap bad wood. Someone had carved his
initials in the steamer trunk with a jack knife; a fine thing turned over to an
ill-behaved child. The wall bowed slightly; poor craftsmanship.

He could find the flaws in people, as
well. Most especially in people. And they always had flaws. It made them easy
to manipulate. Faults existed like wounds in the flesh, and for those with the
nerve, it was a simple matter to reach a finger into the gory hole and twist
while the other danced fits of pain. It was a talent he had exercised over the
course of many years, and it served him well.

The rules had changed dramatically
since this morning, but some things remained the same. Leland’s assets were
beyond him now: his cadre of lawyers and consultants, his money and credit cards,
the host of assistants that swarmed about him until he failed to notice their
presence, all gone save the tools he carried in his head. And right now his
head was telling him that this was a war, and a war was not something you lost
graciously. War was something that you won at all costs, and you won by never
forgetting the first and only rule: there are no rules.

Leland understood this. He wanted to
win; would win;
had to win!

Jack might want to win, but he wouldn’t. The young man’s flaw was mediocrity,
and while that was good enough back in the world—a suitable quality for any
mailroom assistant or filing clerk—this was not the world Jack once knew. Here,
mediocrity got you dead, plain and simple. Not just Jack, but everyone with
him.

That Kreiger would win out over Jack seemed inevitable. The only question
was how soon, and who would benefit? A push from this side might secure the
favor of the crazed Wastelander, the one who promised anything.

Anything
.

These critical analyses helped
restore equilibrium, and redirect the uneasy shadows looming in his mind,
aftershocks of self-doubt and failure. Staring at the blistered windowsill—the
finish had been applied on too hot a day, and never properly set into the
wood—he made himself believe he had not already succumbed to madness.

So just after midnight, Leland Quince
crept down the stairs and into the main room, unnoticed in the darkness. The
two girls were sleeping in the room next to his, and Jack was hiding upstairs,
most likely curled up on the floor like a child. He heard the other one snoring
softly from the waiting room.

His eyes wandered over the room,
adjusting to the darkness, picking out details. And when he was satisfied that
he could navigate the darkness, he walked into the backroom with the sink and
the network of pipes, and stepped out through the door.

Escape was that easy.

Leland crossed the tracks and marched
out into the Wasteland. Only three tents alone on the silent sands, no sign of
Kreiger, his monsters, or the other Cast Outs.

Leland kept walking until he was a
dozen steps from the nearest striped tent. And there he stopped. He called out
softly, his voice deliberately low, a harsh whisper that would not draw
attention from the saloon behind him. “Kreiger?”

The darkness gave no reply.

“Kreiger? It’s Leland Quince. I want
to discuss your offer.”

Silence. Under darkness, the desert
air turned cold.

“I’ll come back in the morning,” he
suggested, letting himself believe the decision had been mutually agreed upon.

Turning, he found the darkness behind
him crowded with horrifically malformed shapes, a teeming assemblage of
monstrous jaws and dead eyes and lanky, water-poor limbs, sinews standing out
like tightly wound cables.
Wasteland dregs!
As motionless as stone, they
walled away his retreat, and for the first time that night—perhaps for the
first time ever—Leland Quince questioned himself, felt fear grip his entrails
like ice, bony fingers reaching for his heart.

“Mr. Leland Quince, Wall Street’s
Wrecking Ball. I expected you somewhat …
later
.” Leland spun around,
found himself face to face with the leader of the Tribe of Dust. “Still,
enthusiasm is a trait I feel should be recognized and rewarded. Light?” Kreiger
offered.

A dull orange circle of torchlight
flared to life around Leland and the newly appeared Tribe of Dust.

“Something to eat?” From behind his
back, Kreiger produced a tray of
hors d’oeuvres
. “You must be famished
after such a long walk.”

“I didn’t come here to play games,”
Leland said. “Were you serious about your deal? Will you send me anywhere I
want to go? No tricks?”

Gusman Kreiger turned his head
thoughtfully, setting the tray down upon a three-legged table that had not been
there a moment before. “Mr. Quince, I am always serious. Anywhere you wish; the
venue of your choice: business mogul, world leader, god-emperor. I really don’t
care. Be the world’s greatest lover or the world’s most notorious villain; it’s
all the same to me. Name the stakes and I’ll see to it that it ends up on the
table.” Then the sorcerer’s head lowered, shadows darkening his face. “But if I
don’t get those tickets, I guarantee the only thing you’ll get out of me is an
eternity in a place that will make the deepest pits in the darkest hell your
pathetic mind can imagine look like a weekend in Cabo. Do we understand each
other, Mr. Quince?”

Leland looked backwards at the Wasteland dregs gathered on the edge of
the light, teeth grinding, claws clicking in anticipation. “Tell your goons to
beat it. Call it a demonstration of …
goodwill
.”

“As you say, Mr. Quince.” Kreiger tossed a glance at Rebreather and
nodded. The tall Cast Out flicked his hand, a gesture incapable of shooing
flies or even stirring the air, but somehow able to sink the army of dregs back
below the sand as if the dust were no more than water, their bodies no more
than smoke.

“Better?” Kreiger asked.

“Much.”

“You understand that I will have the
Nexus, with or without your complicity. But your help will make it easier for
me, and for that convenience I am willing to reward you to the fullest extent I
know how.”

Leland didn’t doubt Kreiger’s
determination, but he still needed to know why, needed to find the weakness in
the sorcerer’s tungsten surface. Kreiger knew something, and Leland needed to
know what it was, and why it made Jack’s failure certain. “Jack thinks he can
beat you. The other Caretakers did.”

Kreiger offered a grin both sickly
and genteel, and from behind his back produced the tall scepter that Leland saw
him with that morning. “Jack cannot beat me without this, Mr. Quince.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing much really. Here nothing is
much of anything. It’s all just symbolic representations of function. But then,
what of reality isn’t, eh, Mr. Quince?” Kreiger chuckled softly before
remembering his audience—constructs were oblivious to the subtler aspects of
multiple planes of existence. “It’s a lightning rod, Mr. Quince. A lightning
rod I stole. Think of it as a key to a clock that needs winding; a key the
Caretaker doesn’t even know is missing. The Saloon’s power is not replenishing itself.
The barrier Jack created is rapidly draining away what little reserves remain.
When it’s exhausted, the barrier will collapse, and I shall march the Tribe of
Dust over him as if he were nothing, an illusion, sunlight on a tabletop. His
power is slipping away from him with every passing second, and he isn’t even
aware of it. The game is fixed, you see, and the house
always
wins.”

Quince looked at the lunatic messiah
with his white suit and different colored eyes, and wondered why: Why deal? Why
not wait Jack out? There was something more, some kind of flaw to Kreiger’s
plan. “What if I wanted to be on the winning side?”

“The tickets, Mr. Quince. I told you,
it’s all symbolic. Not just here, but everywhere, along all of the lines. The
tickets are symbols of Jack’s control over the reality-making machinery of the
universe. Without them, Jack can never master the Nexus, and the power will
force him out like it forced out the rest of us. Two millennia surviving in the
Wasteland has made me wise, Mr. Quince. I doubt Jack will fair so well. Nothing
personal, you understand. It’s just that I want out of the Wasteland, and he’s
in my way. But I’m willing to be reasonable. Get me the tickets, and I’ll send
all of you back. No malice or ill will. And if you happen to bring me those
tickets, then to you goes the one thing which few of us ever get in life.”

“And what’s that?”

“A choice, Mr. Quince. The
opportunity to go anywhere you want, be anyone you want, do anything you want.
Choice is not a birthright. It is the Holy Grail, the rainbow’s end; everyone
searches for it, but few actually obtain it. Help me, Mr. Quince, and you earn
the right to choose.”

Still unable to pry the veil of
Kreiger’s secrets, Leland now knew the rules of the game, at least. Kreiger,
like all Cast Outs, was a prisoner, and there was no escape from this place,
not ever. Then something changed. The lightning rod, a tool of the Caretakers
and a key of sorts, fell into his possession; how was unimportant and Kreiger
would lie about the details anyway. Jack’s power was slowly diminishing, and he
wasn’t even aware of it. Kreiger could be trusted because the prize he
offered—freedom for those in the saloon—held no value to him. The master of the
Nexus would not care for what became of the riders of the tickets. The master
of the Nexus was the master of all reality. He wouldn’t care if some had it
better than others because whoever held the Nexus had it better then
all
.
Kreiger would keep his word if he helped him, and Kreiger would win whether he
helped him or not.

The decision was obvious.

“I’ll get you the tickets. You agree
to send me wherever I want to go; no exceptions; no conditions.”

“Agreed.”

*     *     *

Curled on the floor of his office,
Jack dreamed; not the slippery amalgam of pasted realities that was the
normative property of dreams, but images like a picture show playing upon the
screen of his sleeping mind. It was like the dream he had the night before he
boarded the train, the dream in which he saw someone very much like the leader of
the Cast Outs.

And in that dream, that man shot him.

Now he was walking across a desert,
flat and barren, the sand as white as sun-bleached bones and rock hard with the
passage of uncounted aeons, the glare of the sun unmerciful. In the distance, a
small speck, insignificant except that it was substance in an endless expanse
of white, a lonely raft adrift in a vast sea.

He came up behind it, moving with the
swiftness of dreams, and realized it was not something, but
someone
.
Wearing a long, gray coat, Jack mistook him for the Cast Out, Rebreather, but
he was too small, too …
human
. The gray-coated figure sat cross-legged
on the sand, hunched over something kept tight in his shadow. Scattered upon
the ground were dozens of sucked-out shells, carapaces of large insects
apparently eaten. The only sound a clattering like the trembling of manic
fingers thrumming the arms of the restraining chair before the current is
turned on.

Jack circled the hunched-over
creature slowly, but saw no response, no acknowledgment. The other did not
appear to even notice him.

A Smith-Corona typewriter balanced
atop an orange crate, its cast iron case scratched and worn, keys fragmented
and chipped, some broken loose and scattered upon the ground. The ribbon spewed
from the machine’s mouth like a length of vomited gut, bleached to a dry, faded
gray, the center of the fabric pounded until it had nearly split lengthwise.
The single sheet of paper in the machine was scrolled back over, taped together
into an endless loop and typed over until it was completely black save for the
narrow frame of margins. The madman typed regardless, fingers never stopping
their frantic abuse of the darkly stained keys, splattered with dried coffee or
chocolate perhaps; some bizarre accident that left them stained and gummed with
the dark gore.

But the longer he stared, the more
Jack realized it was neither. In his maniacal dedication, the other had pounded
apart the flesh of his fingertips, staining the keys with his blood.