The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (44 page)

“Okay,” he said. “You navigate, I’ll
drive. Just tell me which direction.”

The cab pulled away from the curb
into morning traffic, the
OFF DUTY
sign on the roof lighted. At the next corner, Leland turned
right, heading south.

They made every green light leaving
the city.

ONE TOO MANY, ONE TOO FEW

“Jack?”

Slumped against the wall, his eyes
working furiously behind closed lids, locked in some inescapable dream. His
skin seemed almost normal in the early light, not the pallid complexion of
toxic residue sweating from his pores; his hair not tangled with neglect, but
tousled with sleep. Nothing to worry about.

But things weren’t what they seemed.

“I couldn’t help but notice that the
two of you are still here.”

A chill ran up Ellen’s spine as
Kreiger called cheerily from across the narrowing strip of Wasteland sand. The
Tribe of Dust leered like pack dogs from forty yards away, Kreiger’s expression
a mixture of triumph and rage all swirled and twitching in his crooked smile,
dancing behind eyes hidden by the shadow of the rising sun, whispering of
madness. She scowled and turned away, touching Jack’s cheek and forehead
lightly; cool and clammy, slick with the rust-colored, spice-sweat.

“I only mention it because I counted
four trains.” He turned to the others for confirmation. “Four, yes?”

“Four,” the necromancer agreed
needlessly.

“And you and I both know there were
only five tickets out of the Wasteland. Which means—and check my math in case I
made a mistake—that the
two
of you have only
one
ticket left
between you.” Kreiger clucked his tongue childishly. “It would seem to me that
there is either one too many of you, or one too few of those confounded
tickets. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Go to hell,” she grumbled, straightening Jack’s hair because it gave her
a reason to keep her back to the Tribe of Dust. She didn’t want to look at
Kreiger. More importantly, she didn’t want him to look at her, to see her in
the naked light of dawn, emotions betrayed in her eyes.

But the Cast Out was not so easily
put aside. “Been there. It looks remarkably like an endless desert of white.”
He narrowed his eyes, saw the quiver along her skin and knew, an expert
safecracker who had found that narrow flaw in the design. “What scares you
most, Ellen Monroe? That Jack might use the last ticket for himself and leave
you behind forever, or that he might actually sacrifice his own life to save
yours, a useless chemical-junkie fleeing reality at every turn. You belong here
with us, Ellen. Maybe that’s why Jack’s leaving you behind. Then again, maybe
he’s not. Maybe Jack’s going to sacrifice himself, trade his life for yours.
Maybe … he
loves
you.”

“
I said, go to hell
!” she
screamed. In the golden light of morning, angry tears stood like veins of
liquid copper against her skin.

The Cast Out smiled, chewing
thoughtfully at the inside of his cheek. “Well, something to think about. I’m
sure you’ll figure it out either way, depending upon which one of you gets left
behind to die.” He turned away, and the others followed. “We’ll talk again
soon. The barrier won’t last much longer.”

And they disappeared, one moment
walking into the sun as it crested the eternal horizon, silhouettes of
blackness moving towards the blazing fire, the next, vanished. Gone.
Disappearing over their own event horizon.

“Come on, Jack,” Ellen said, pulling
him by the wrists in an effort to get him back on his feet. “You’ve got to help
me here.”

Jack did not answer, had not even
heard. Ellen half-supported, half-carried him into the Saloon, wondering if he
had any idea what was going on, or if this was all just random stirrings and
noises, the outside burble of invading reality threatening to wake him from his
dream.

The saloon had changed in the short
moments they spent on the platform seeing the others board the trains,
disappear from their lives forever. More things had vanished.

A lot more.

The waiting room was almost empty.
Gone was the bench, the chair, the rack of magazines. All that remained was the
candy machine, the mock train schedule, … and the horrible, serpentine tail
protruding from the hole in the wall!

Ellen stared at it, eyes wide, mouth
open, scarcely able to draw breath as the urge to scream filled her brain.

The tail simply lay there, the
smallest of its tips tapping gently against the bare wood floor:
thut, thut,
thut
. The drum of expectant fingers, demanding answers, impatient and
possibly dangerous.

Why? She hadn’t seen it since that first
day, that first
morning
! Why was it back?

That’s the thing about tails, Ellen.
They’re never truly gone. Always behind you … but
never
left behind
.

She pulled Jack in after her, his
feet tangling and nearly dumping both of them as she urged him quickly down the
steps and into the near-empty room. The tail did not react, but continued its
expectant
thut, thut, thut
. Like a ticking clock, a reminder that their
time here was drawing to an end. They had come full circle, only the two of
them now. Was the ride almost over, the tail a reminder that tomorrow morning
she would awaken in a padded room in a canvas coat while a doctor (what the
hell was his name?) started her on a regimen of drugs and shock therapy to burn
all of this out of her mind? Was this what it was like to slowly become sane?

Jack weighed heavily against her.

“You have to help me, Jack,” she
whimpered, clinging to him and tugging him along beside her as she followed the
edge of the wall, keeping as far from the tail as possible. The candy machine
pressed up against her, the plastic and metal warm like a thing alive, like too
much of the Saloon. And what wasn’t alive had an animatronics quality like the
artificial creatures that inhabited Disney World: jabbering dead presidents and
creepy tick-tock animals, smiling and waving, but not real, just make-believe.

Like the Sanity’s Edge Saloon
.

She shouted down the idea, a scream
inside of her head that overrode the cynical voice trying to tell her things
she didn’t want to hear.

The tail stopped as if privy to her
thoughts, her doubts, her terrors, and suddenly became interested.

Ellen nearly tripped dragging Jack
from the room, her feet tangling with his as she fled into the main part of the
Saloon. The ticket booth remained, as did the bar and its four stools. But the
Wurlitzer was gone along with the table and chairs, coins scattered across the
floor where the table once stood, the enormous pickle jar broken into jagged
shards.
Why was this happening? Why now? Why so suddenly?
And beneath
the questions, a concern too frightening to voice: what if it didn’t stop? What
if it all disappeared one piece at a time, like a child who has grown up, grown
too old, and is now removing furniture from a child’s dollhouse, each piece
carefully wrapped in a sheet of tissue paper and put aside; put away? What
would happen to her and Jack? Would they eventually find themselves in an empty
building?

Or an empty desert?

Or were they destined to be …
put
away
.

Alone
.

She fought back tears of panic. It
wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not like this. No one was supposed to need
her, rely on her. Her father could tell you; you couldn’t rely on Ellen for
anything. She couldn’t be trusted, and you needed trust from people who were
depending on you.

Jack trusted her, but Jack was a
fool. He was just as extreme as she in the lengths he would go to escape
reality, and just as foolhardy.

What scares you most, Ellen Monroe?
That Jack might use the last ticket for himself and leave you behind forever,
or that he might actually sacrifice his own life to save yours, a useless
chemical-junkie fleeing reality at every turn. You belong here with us, Ellen.
The memory taunted her. She had not
answered then, could not answer now. Maybe there was no answer. Or maybe the
answer would remain hidden until the final moment: Who lives? Who dies?

“Like you care one way or the other,”
she whispered, Kreiger’s face japing at her memory. “Just so you get the damn
Saloon.”

She wiped fiercely at her eyes,
frustrated tears leaving her half-blind, angry and afraid and ashamed. There
was no time for this. Jack needed her.

She led him upstairs, his feet
occasionally cooperative enough to manage the steps; other times, she had to
step up and pull him up after, so much dead weight. She dragged him to the bathroom,
sweat trickling cold and oily down her spine, her shirt sticking to her skin.
She very nearly dropped him into the large claw-footed tub, only just managing
to catch him and keep him from cracking his skull on the edge of the porcelain
as he slipped backwards.

You should be better at this. It’s
not the first time you’ve had to carry someone too wasted to know where he was
or how he got there
.
But while she knew that was true, she could not remember exactly when that time
was, or who the person might have been. It all seemed so long ago, so distant;
a million years and a billion miles separating this moment from that time
before. That was all it was now, really:
before
. Nothing but the past,
ancient history;
before
.

She let Jack slide down into the tub,
the white porcelain making his skin look rusted and jaundiced, almost alien.
She stroked gently at his forehead, brushing hair back from his face. He almost
looked peaceful. When she drew her hand away, her fingers were stained with a
dun-colored sweat. She stared at it in wonderment, inhaling the fragrant aroma
of Christmas and coffee shops and Egyptian mummies, ginger and cinnamon and
sandalwood and muslin. A shiver ran through her as she tried to fathom what it
was that Jack had been doing to himself these past few days.

And what it was that she needed to do
now.

She began deliberately untying his
sneakers and pulling them off his feet. Then she removed his shirt and pants,
placing them in a pile. They smelled spicy and pungent, in need of washing.
When he was down to his underwear, she started running a bath, warm, but not
too hot. Through it all, Jack never woke up.

She found a washcloth and towels on
the floor where the brass frog had been, gone now like so much else. She wet
the cloth with cool water from the sink, and knelt beside the tub to wipe at
Jack’s face. She wrung the cloth out twice before being able to clean away all
of the cinnamon-colored sweat and dried blood. For his part, Jack floated
peacefully, unaware. She sluiced water over his hair, smoothing it back until
he started to look a little more like the person who greeted her that first
morning, a cup of coffee in one hand and a glass of water in the other. He
still had dark circles under his eyes, but they would require more time to fix.

A luxury not at their disposal.

She pulled the stopper on the pale,
rusty water, and left Jack asleep, face resting against the cool edge of the
porcelain while she went downstairs to get a cup of coffee. There was nothing
missing when it came to the great, brass coffee machine that sat atop the bar.
Coffee mugs, sugar, creamer. It was all there, ready and waiting for the
Caretaker; the table was gone and so were the chairs, but there was a spoon to
stir the coffee with. What was it Jack said about the Saloon?
Everything he
needed.

She found the refrigerator empty save
for a small bottle of orange juice. She took it upstairs along with a cup of
coffee, unsure if he would want either. But she would insist he drink the juice
first. She placed both on the nightstand in the room she shared with Lindsay,
and went back to the bathroom to get Jack. Leland Quince’s room was bare to the
four walls, an empty room in an abandoned house left behind long ago. They were
ghosts now, she and Jack; ghosts forgotten in a ghost town saloon.

She wrapped a towel around his
shoulders to keep him warm, and used another to towel him dry before helping
him to the bedroom, feet shuffling methodically as she coaxed him along. The
bed was still open from this morning. No one thought to tidy up unmade beds
before leaving. That was a job for those left behind.

She got him out of the wet underwear,
a little embarrassed and surprised for it, and pulled the covers up around him,
squeezing his hair lightly with the towel to try and get it as dry as possible.
It would have to do, she thought, touching his forehead lightly.

His eyes flickered open then, lidded
and unfocussed, washed-out green, the whites bloodshot, the one dark red and
painful-looking. “Ellen?”

She smiled nervously, glad he was conscious,
but afraid of what he might say, afraid of the questions he might answer. “I’m
right here, Jack.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured sleepily.

“For what?”

“I tried to finish yours.” He closed
his eyes, the crease in his forehead returning for a moment. “I wasn’t … it
wasn’t ready. It had to be good. Perfect … or it wouldn’t work.”