The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (27 page)

Bone mojo!
Oversight thought viciously, staring
at the writhing insect pile with a mixture of revulsion and awe.
Fucking
bone mojo!

Lovebone discarded the spent shank
like the picked-over remnants of a too-large meal. “Don’t ever forget who made
who …
construct
.”

OUTCOMES

“You’re out of your mind.”

The businessman glanced up from the
painful-looking scab on his hand, the crusty scar mottled and dark, the
surrounding skin reddened. He had been massaging it with a kind of mute fury,
not really paying any attention. Now Alex’s empty accusation hung in the air
between them. “Am I?”

“I can’t just betray him.”

“Why? You don’t owe him anything.
Christ, Alex, you slept on the bench of a train station last night and ate
Pop-tarts for breakfast. Homeless people do better begging at the mouth of a
subway tunnel. Jack hasn’t done anything for any of us. If he did—hell, if he
was even capable—this conversation we’re having wouldn’t be necessary. But it
is. If Jack were capable as a Caretaker, he would have sent us home already. That
he hasn’t indicates that he doesn’t know how.”

“I don’t think it’s as simple as all
that.”

“Among my holdings back in the real
world is a book publishing company and two magazines. Some of those overpaid
sons-of-bitches can spew out a novel in a month. A
month
, Alex. Writing
isn’t as hard as writers would have you believe. String some words into a
sentence; string some sentences into an idea. A little gratuitous sex and maybe
a biblical reference for artistic styling, and you’re done. The reason Jack
doesn’t know this is because Jack isn’t a real writer. His aspirations to the
contrary, he is simply not a writer, and never will be.”

Alex stood up, the conversation—what
he was sure Leland Quince would later refer to as their
meeting
—over.
“Forget it.”

“And what about Oversight?” Leland
asked, returning his attention to the chess game. “Can you forget her?”

Alex stopped.

“I’ll let you in on a secret, Alex.
The same way we’re part of Jack’s little game, Oversight is part of Kreiger’s.”

“She’s not with him,” Alex declared,
realizing as he said it just how petulant and hollow it sounded; the desperate
retort of a lying child.

“No? And how do you know that?”

He was about to say he had asked her,
but realized she never answered him.
Ask me again … another time
. Not a
yes or a no. A secret whose truth he probably didn’t want to hear—one she
knew
he didn’t want to hear. “I just know.”

“Intuition and fifteen cents won’t
buy you a cup of coffee, Alex.”

Their conversation, Alex was
beginning to understand, was not over. Not by a long shot.

“You’re half-right, though.” Leland
informed him. “She isn’t in league with Kreiger; she’s enslaved by him.”

“What?”

“Don’t act so surprised. You’ve seen
what he can do. The man has real power, the power to change
reality.
It’s beyond imagination, Alex. He owns Oversight, body and soul, like
everything else outside of this saloon. This world is his, and Jack is kidding
himself if he thinks otherwise.”

Alex’s mouth opened then closed. He
had no response.

“All I want is to go home, Alex. I don’t
think that’s too much to ask. But the only way out of here is on the train, and
it only comes when a Caretaker completes a ticket. I want whoever can finish
those tickets the quickest to have them. If you care about Oversight—and I
think you do—then you should be listening very closely. Kreiger will bargain
for those tickets. If you want to make a life with her part of that bargain, so
be it, but we need the tickets first. They’re the only leverage we have.”

Alex found himself walking away like a man asleep, but Mr. Quince’s voice
chased him, unwelcome. “Think about it. My way guarantees a life you’ve always
wanted. Otherwise, if you’re lucky, you’ll go back to your life from before.”

Before
. Going nowhere. Doing nothing. Being
nothing. A life that was a waste of the air that kept him alive.
Before
.

And it might be again.

He stared out the large window at the
vast emptiness of the Wasteland, Oversight and Lindsay playing catch in the
sand with a red Frisbee ring. They were laughing.

Alex leaned against the sill and
watched. It was the first time he had seen Oversight laugh. Hell, it was the
first time he had seen a genuine smile on her face, and he had the impression
that smiling was something she had not done in a very long time; time beyond
belief.

Leland was right; no matter how
wrong, he was still right. There were five tickets—they all knew that—and six
of them in the Saloon. Someone would be left behind. And Oversight simply
wasn’t part of Jack’s plan—not that Jack seemed to have a plan. He was hiding
upstairs like a child in a closet hiding from the lightning.

Alex placed his forehead to the
window. If there was any other way, any other option, it had to be explored. He
could not simply allow this to happen. The Wasteland was a haven of cruelty, a
living nightmare; horrible creatures in a hellish world doing terrible things.
Looking out over the vast, dead expanse, Alex could not free his mind of the
memory from the previous day; Nail slaughtering the two dregs. Necessary.
Horrifying. The carcasses dragged back and devoured by their own, the smacks
and slurps of blood-slicked lips.

A shiver coursed up his spine as he
flashed to Oversight being killed out in the Wasteland, abandoned by Jack and
the others. He saw her beaten to the ground, her knife just beyond the reach of
her fingertips, and the creatures lunging up from the sand in droves as thick
as Iowa corn, her sun-golden flesh to feed their ravenous hunger, her warm
blood to slake their desert-born thirst. Or would she fall prey to one of the
Cast Outs? The fat one had a particular stare, one he had seen on street
corners in the shifting eyes of roving toughs; not gang-bangers, but the
desperate residue that fell outside of the gangs and watched from doorways and
alley corners as the women walked by, unaware.

If there was any possibility of
saving her, it had to be taken. It simply had to be.
But how?

Alex set the question aside and went
out to join Oversight and Lindsay under the sun. Maybe the solution would
present itself?

Leland Quince said nothing, not even
looking up as Alex passed. He simply played his game.

*     *     *

Ellen had migrated to the top step of
the Stairway to Heaven.

She waited quietly in the bathroom,
listening at the door for Lindsay to leave. She hated herself for it, but she
simply couldn’t deal with the sick feeling that slithered around her insides
like a handful of slippery insects. It wasn’t a drug comedown; she knew those
and they never felt like this. It wasn’t even a feeling of being sick so much
as a feeling of things not being right. It was like walking on a wooden deck
and feeling the boards spring beneath your step, or feeling a building sway in
the wind. And while she kept telling herself that everything would be okay,
that she had nothing to worry about, it didn’t keep a part of her from
clenching in terror, the kind that shriveled the stomach and tightened the
shoulders and calves. And as hard as she tried, she couldn’t put her finger on
the source of the
not rightness
. It wasn’t the idea of playing catch
after the previous night’s dream, and it wasn’t the unusual pissy smell in the
outer hallway that should have been coming from the bathroom, but wasn’t. It
wasn’t even the danger of the crouching beasts out in the Wasteland, or the
confusion over the missing objects. It wasn’t any one thing, and it was barely
all of them. It was simply …
something
.

She heard Lindsay’s footsteps going
down the stairs and gave the little girl a few minutes to be well on her way
before sneaking out. She skirted the foul emanation from Leland Quince’s room—
what
was he doing, peeing in the corner?
—wrinkling her nose as she moved quickly
up the steps.

Against Jack’s advice, she followed
the stairs all the way up to the last possible step, navigating missing boards
and forgotten spindles, the ground visible over thirty feet below. It made her
stomach cringe and her hands tremble, but at least she knew why.

More importantly, she was finally
alone.

No one in the world but you, and
that’s how you like it
.
Typical Ellen.

But that was the problem with the
Saloon, the problem she’d missed the morning before, but which she was acutely
aware of today: the people. Without them, it was possible to feel a kind of …
purpose
,
a sense of structure though the physical attributes of the place suggested otherwise.
That was why she sat unafraid on the last step of the Stairway to Heaven, and
looked out over the Wasteland. The stairs should have collapsed under her
weight. But she knew it wouldn’t. She had faith in the Saloon … of a sort.
Yesterday, when it was just her and Jack, she could almost feel the sense of
purpose in the structure. And the purpose of a stairway was to take a person
up. She trusted that.

But Jack could not bring himself to
trust it in its entirety. He trusted parts of it—like trying to believe in
gravity
sometimes
. That wasn’t how it worked; it was all or nothing, a
leap of faith. Jack could not make the leap. He was resisting the Saloon, and
that left him stuck in the middle, lost to both his old reality and this new
one.

She understood other realities. You
either gave yourself over to them, or they ripped you apart. Bad trips were
nothing more than the sufferings of those that resisted. Like throwing yourself
off a building then fighting the gravity that pulled you down; it was pointless,
so you might as well enjoy the ride.

Of course Ellen knew just from their
conversation over breakfast the other morning that Jack had no experience from
which to draw. He didn’t do drugs, didn’t trip, didn’t heed the call of the
madness. His vices were coffee and the occasional drink, and his only forays
into another reality came from his imagination … and the leash on that dog
seemed a little short.

She stared down over the edge, the
top step nearly perpendicular with the back corner of the saloon. Down below,
the roof over the platform. Below that, the rails that traveled in both
directions forever, strands of distant silver suspended in emptiness far out
into the endless chasm; the edge of the world.

Jack simply didn’t understand.

Like you have room to talk. In
another world, you’re still wearing a straitjacket and methodically chewing
your twice-daily Thorazine
.

And now the Saloon was too crowded.
Jack might never learn the truth about this place, a truth she could sense but
not define. Everyone here was cluttering it up, projecting his or her own needs
and wants. That was part of what she thought was making her sick. Everything
about this place was becoming a jumble of needs and wants and desires all
grappling for attention, for control, and knocking everything over in the
process.

No wonder things were disappearing.

Down below, she saw Oversight
standing opposite the fat Cast Out, the one who talked with a lisp, the
stereotype child molester and chronic masturbator. In her distraction, she
hadn’t seen them before, and had no idea who had come out to talk with whom, or
what their conversation might have been about. She was too far away to hear,
but could see that it wasn’t a pleasant discussion. Oversight was holding a
knife, the blade punctuating an angry conversation. The fat man was grinning,
holding something that Oversight was blocking from Ellen’s view. He seemed
amused.

Oversight knew too much about the
Cast Outs and the Wasteland. She was not one of their own; not one of the
Saloon’s people displaced for a day and a half. She had something to do with
what was wrong about the Saloon, but like everything else, Ellen could not put
her finger on it.

Oversight turned and stormed away,
and the fat man wandered back towards the distant tents, generals leaving a
negotiation in a huff, nothing agreed upon except their differences.

Ellen turned away, looking up at the
too-bright sun, seemingly normal in a world that was anything but. Despite the
cool wind that blew the color of the blue sky overhead, sweat burst out upon
her back, neck, and forehead, each glistening droplet milky with the faint
trace of opium, amphetamines, and latent LSD as they melted from her pores,
were wrung out of her flesh and left upon the surface of her skin to evaporate
into the Wasteland air, leaving behind nothing but a faint aroma, a smell both
sickening and sweet.

And she was crying, hesitant tears
moving down her cheeks.

Oh God, Ellen, what the hell are you
doing?
she thought
dismally.
You can’t help Jack understand any of this. You don’t even
understand it yourself. What the hell use would Jack have for an ex-junkie
Dreamliner, anyway?