The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (23 page)

Alex’s head bobbed happily. “Cool,
man. You’ll see. We’re all fine here. It’s not like all of the rest of us came
in on the same train, either, did we?”

“No,” Jack agreed, “I suppose we
didn’t.”

Alex went behind the bar, pulling out
a coffee mug and sliding it over to him. The coffee machine was warm to the
touch, a pot already brewed. No real surprise, he supposed, pouring a cup and
spooning in sugar and creamer.

But if Alex was placated, Oversight
was not. Jack felt her watching him, her expression a strange mix of an
ancient’s cynicism and a child’s innocence, as if of two minds: one having seen
this all before and regarding it warily, bored and perhaps a bit threatened by
its bland consistency, while the other having never before seen anything even
so simple as brass fixtures or running water, … or even water itself. Kreiger
had called the others constructs, stories without lives, their pasts invented.
None of them, the Cast Out asserted, were real the way Jack understood the
term. Minds full of memory, but no real past. And wouldn’t someone like that—if
cursed with even a modicum of self-awareness—look at the world with both
understanding and wonder at what was known but never experienced, like a
medical student who has memorized
Gray’s Anatomy
, but never examined a
real body. None of the others seemed to behave this way, but he didn’t know
them all that well either. Maybe, as constructs went, Oversight was simply less
well designed …

… or more aware of her shortcomings.
She could well belong in the Saloon, a construct like the others.

Like the others
.

But then the population of the
Sanity’s Edge Saloon had just increased by one. And there were still only five
tickets out.

*     *     *

The little girl prodded Ellen awake.
“Come on, we gotta get up. Everyone else is already up.”

To a seven-year-old, she supposed the
logic made perfect sense. To Ellen, who had only managed an hour of broken
sleep free from nightmares, the premise was perfectly daft. Raised up on one
elbow, she wiped at her eyes, which stubbornly refused to focus or even stay
open. Blearily, she scanned about, finding the small girl’s face beaming as she
stared back at her. “Is the bathroom free?” Ellen asked.

Lindsay ran to the doorway, leaned
out then back, head shaking gravely.

Figures, Ellen thought, rolling over in bed, and shrugging the covers up
around her head. Her skin felt sticky and oily. Day one after her arrival at
the edge of madness, and she was already feeling the press of going cold turkey
on all of her old habits and crutches. Caffeine was the only drug she’d had in
a couple days, and she suspected she might still be riding down that bad
mescaline/junk trip from before. She felt a desperate need for a shower, but
would settle for the tub. Of course, with the bathroom occupied, the issue was
moot.

A door creaked lightly, and Lindsay
called out, “It’s free.”

Ellen heard the rush of the little
girl’s steps, and the bathroom door shut again, but not before a stern warning
from Mr. Quince: “Stay away from my room.”

Too much
. She threw the blankets aside when
she heard Leland Quince close his door, and sat up, letting her feet dangle to
the floor, the wood against her soles cool and pleasant. She allowed the
feeling to move up her legs, grounding her, prodding her awake. Slowly, too
slowly, she felt herself coming around. Coffee would have been nice, but that
was downstairs.

Ellen stood and stretched, rising up
on her toes and reaching for the ceiling, eyes closed as she felt the taut pull
upon every nerve like stretching a bunched cord, a pleasurable bullet that
moved up her spine, a cresting wave caught at its peak.

She opened her eyes to see Mr. Quince
standing outside his door, dressed in his suit pants and crisp, button-down
shirt, suspenders but no coat or tie. He looked like a new man, a different
man, ready to take charge. There was even a trace of a smile.

She also realized that the oversized
T-shirt she was wearing, the one she found while rummaging with Lindsay in the
closet, had, in her stretch, hiked up to her hips. She dropped her arms,
quickly adjusting the T-shirt back down.

But the businessman only turned and
walked away, having failed to notice; she was beneath his interest. Ellen
grabbed the heap of clothing from the floor, quickly sorting out and pulling up
her jeans. She wanted a shower more than ever now.

As soon as Lindsay stepped from the
bathroom, Ellen went in. The Saloon was not the same as yesterday. Yesterday
she was alone except for Jack. No Cast Outs. No Wasteland dregs. No others.

All of that was gone now.

She made a point to lock the door
behind her.

*     *     *

“Who’s this?” Leland Quince asked.

“Her name’s Oversight,” Jack said,
and glimpsed a shadow cross her face and disappear. The expression that took
its place was both secretive and empty, but she would not look directly at the
businessman or reveal why.

Leland wedged himself beside her at
the bar, sandwiching Oversight between Alex and himself. “So, Jack, what’s for
breakfast?”

Oversight shifted on the stool,
leaning towards Alex, or perhaps simply away from Mr. Quince. What it meant,
Jack had no idea.
Writers don’t know shit.
He had heard that somewhere,
and, while indignant at the time, he had to concede a degree of truth to the
phrase. Writers watched and observed and recorded and imagined. They made
things colorful, or powerful, or more than they deserved to be. Sometimes they
just made things up. But what did they really know? Nothing. As a group,
writers simply made it up as they went along, and hoped no one noticed.

“I’m not a breakfast person myself,”
Leland persisted. “Usually just coffee and occasionally toast. So what does the
common man do in the morning, hmm Jack? Bacon and eggs? Cruller and a cup o’
joe? Or are you a cold cereal guy?”

“It’ll probably depend on what’s
available,” he replied stiffly, not liking the businessman’s taunts. Quince was
too calm, too …
cheerful
; nothing like yesterday’s anger and fear. Jack
didn’t like this personality any better than the one that attacked the vending
machine and smashed his glass against the wall. Leland used pleasantries to
hide the truth, and with the Tribe of Dust waiting just outside, Jack was
losing his patience for games.

What the hell kind of mess had the
Writer left him in?

“We’re running low on change, Jack,”
Alex reminded. “You want me to try and jimmy open one of the machines?”

Jack shook his head. He didn’t like
the sound of breaking into the Saloon’s machinery. What if it broke? How long
they were stuck here was anyone’s guess. If they damaged the Saloon’s food
sources, that period might become considerably shorter … and not for the
better.

Leland rose and walked back up the
stairs, returning a minute later with a one-gallon pickle jar half-filled with
coins. They tinked and sloshed inside the glass as he carried them over to the
corner of the bar, hoisting what might well be over forty pounds of loose
change. “This was in my room; it was being used as a doorstop. We might as well
keep it down here. It’s not doing any good up there anyway.”

“Thanks,” Jack said, unsure what to
make of the new and improved Leland Quince, saccharine and alert, seemingly
waiting for something, ever watchful for the telltale signs.

Lindsay came down the stairs followed immediately by Ellen, both of their
attentions drawn to Oversight. “Who are you?” the little girl asked.

That
, Jack thought,
is the question of
the day.

*     *     *

“This is Oversight,” Alex said, no
small amount of pride in the introduction. “She just arrived this morning.
Oversight, this is Lindsay and Ellen.”

Lindsay’s greeting was more
exuberant, the little girl giving a big “Hi” before taking over Alex’s vacated
barstool. She knelt on the red leather cushion, leaning her hands on the bar
top. The woman in black treated both latecomers to the same singular nod, dark
eyes lingering a fraction longer on Ellen’s.

“She’s been in the Wasteland for a
few days,” Alex mentioned.

Ellen nodded and looked around
uncomfortably for a place to sit before deciding to have a seat on the stairs.

“We were deciding on breakfast,” Jack
told her. “Want some coffee?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Alex pulled another mismatched mug
from under the bar, this one decorated like a cow, splotches of black and white
with a tail curved into a handle.
So long as I don’t have to drink from an
udder
, Ellen thought as Jack filled it and handed it to her while a
Freudian image played in her brain and made her smile.

She thanked him absently, inhaling
the aroma off the coffee, strong and rich and …
smoky
? No, that wasn’t
the coffee. It was something else. And not entirely smoky, it was more like
crisp pipe tobacco, cinnamon and nutmeg, piña coladas, and something vaguely
pungent and sweet and spicy, muslin-wrapped pharaohs in a forgotten tomb, or
the smell of unabashed sex.

It seemed to come from Oversight.

She stole a glance at her while Alex
occupied her attention with his incessant fawning. She was the source, a
perfume that was not exactly a perfume. Not sweet jasmine or honeysuckle, or
even something subtle and musky, this was raw, powerful, alluring and
intriguing. Somehow, someone who should smell only of sweat and dust and dirty leather
smelled …
evocative
.

Oversight caught her stare and smiled
briefly, knowingly, causing Ellen to throw her eyes down, embarrassed. “Has
anyone solved the problem of money for the vending machines?” she asked
quickly, hoping to divert attention away from herself.

“Yep,” Alex announced, hand gripping
the jar’s rim and giving it a small tip, enough to rattle a few coins against
the glass. “Mr. Quince found it.” Leland gave her an uncharacteristically
modest nod. “So, what say we find something to eat?”

*     *     *

Breakfast was as uneventful as it was
unimaginative, scrounged like a Sunday morning meal in a frat house: a box of
cherry Pop-tarts from the candy machine, half a carton of milk, a pitcher of
orange juice, and four small boxes of cereal from an open sample-pack found
under the bar beside half a loaf of sliced bread. They ate with a mismatch of
bowls, plates and silverware; enough for them all, but Jack doubted if he could
have made a place for a seventh guest, or even offered someone a second utensil
if they dropped one of their own. It was nothing like the breakfast from the
previous morning, he thought lamentably, but things had changed since then.

How things had changed
.

The new arrival let Alex do most of
the talking, his babble meaningless, its only purpose to instigate a
conversation that would not come. Oversight listened with only marginal
attention. Relentless, and perhaps unaware, Alex plowed on.

“After my parents split up, they were
always going out of their way to make me feel special. Like, now that they were
only spending half of their time with me, they were trying to make up for it by
doing twice as much. I guess it was their way of letting me know the divorce
wasn’t my fault. Whatever. But there was an upside. When I was eleven, my
father took me to Louisiana for Mardi Gras. It was amazing. We went into the
backcountry and the bayou to do some fishing—”

“Did you see hanging moss?”

Jack looked up, astounded. Not really
paying attention, he had no idea how Alex had managed to come around to talking
about his childhood, but what made him take notice was Oversight’s response in
something other than empty nods or hollow monosyllables.

“Oh yeah,” Alex continued, clearly
pleased by the breakthrough. “It’s all over out there. I saw tons of it while
we were fishing in the swamps. We never caught a thing, but I didn’t care. It
was just so amazing back in there. Hanging moss. Trees sticking out of the
water. Wildlife everywhere. It felt like a different world.”

Leland snorted, but it went unnoticed.

Oversight listened intently. For
reasons unknown, Alex’s tale of childhood vacations in the bayou enthralled the
enigmatic woman.

“Did you see any alligators?” Lindsay
asked around a mouthful of Fruit Loops.

“Umm, yeah, I think so. It was kinda
far away, but I think it was an alligator.”

“Cool,” she said, properly awed.

“Man, I would love to go back there,”
Alex said, scanning windows that opened to vast tracts of empty desert. “Of
course, I wouldn’t mind being just about anywhere right now.”

Lindsay was the only other one to
successfully speak to the new arrival during the course of breakfast, but her
answers were not particularly revelatory:
How long have you been here?
—Forever. —Where were you from before? —Don’t know.
And so on. Jack did
sense a certain politeness in Oversight’s responses to the little girl. Perhaps
she regarded Lindsay as too young to snub outright.