The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (18 page)

Ellen seemed about to say something,
glanced across at Reginald Hyde who was now staring at—or was he
reading?
—Lindsay. She kept her mouth closed, and tried to think back to things she knew
in her life before, wondering if the gaps and holes were simply selective
rejection of the mundane, forgotten trips and lost brain cells, or if the Tribe
of Dust was actually hinting at a far greater truth.

“That’s our offer, Jack. We want the
Nexus. Give it up, and all of you will be spared. Drag this out, and the gloves
come off. Do we understand each other?”

“You’re lying,” Jack said softly.
“You’re offering no guarantees except your word, which you said yourself we
can’t trust. You’re just trying to scare us.”

“Oh no, Jack,” Kreiger said
innocently. “I’m trying to scare
them
, a nightmare to drive them awake
and see you for the sham you are. What have you done in your life, Jack? Have
you made any headway in any area at all, or have you simply spent your time
lamenting the things you do, and wishing for opportunities you don’t make
happen, opportunities you don’t deserve to come your way and give you the
chance to do you know not what?” When Jack failed to answer, Kreiger looked to
the others, twisting the argument home. “You’ve tethered your fate to a sinking
ship. Better than you have left their bones in the Wasteland, Jack, trying to
hold the power of the Nexus. Ignorance is not a crime, but forcing others to
suffer for it is.”

“I’ve heard enough, Kreiger. I have
work to do. You and your Cast Outs stay outside of the perimeter. Nail will
make sure your pets do the same.” Angry and humiliated, Jack momentarily
allowed himself to forget that Kreiger was right: he didn’t know what he was
doing, and he didn’t want to be responsible for the others, and he wanted very
much just to go home. Blood from the dead dregs still stained the sand, the
rotten stench prickling his sinuses. God, how he wanted all of this to be over.

But not Kreiger’s way. Jack turned
around and started walking.

“Hide behind your walls then, Jack.
You haven’t changed the outcome; you’ve only delayed it. I know every secret
you thought might save you; you have nothing left. To the rest of you, those
who have the most to lose and the least hold on the outcome, I will pledge to
make your life anything you want. No wish is too big, no desire too great. This
to anyone who brings me the tickets: the Nexus is all we want. The rest of you
are free to go.”

Leland Quince turned to Jack. “You
have these tickets, don’t you? The ones you talked about earlier?”

The Cast Out had probed the wall for the weakest point in the stone, and
he had found it. “Come on, Nail,” Jack said. “They won’t try crossing again
today.”

The gargoyle turned and followed,
wiping blood from his face with the backs of his paws. The no-man’s land would
remain inviolate, the entire confrontation orchestrated by Kreiger to test his
mettle and theirs, to demonstrate his knowledge and Jack’s ignorance. Jack was
reeling, uncertain of everything, especially himself. But nothing about their
confrontation seemed to have taken Kreiger by surprise. In one move, the Cast
Out had thrown down the gauntlet and drawn first blood.

“Determination will decide this
battle,” Kreiger called after them. “Determination and steel.” Then the Cast
Out turned away, dismissing Jack as one might a fraudulent painting hung with undue
circumstance. “You have neither, Jack. Admit that, and you might save yourself
and your friends a lot of pain and suffering. Make no mistake, the Nexus is
ours, and your trespass upon what is ours shortens with every breath you draw.
The rest of you remember my offer.”

From the nothing of the Wasteland, a
trio of nomad’s tents sprang up, striped black and maroon like the dried husks
of a venomous spider, the smell of sandalwood introduced to the desert air. The
dregs curled down upon the border, lumps of sinew, claws and teeth, waiting
like shamans in training for the call from God whom they might have confused
with wizards or madmen.

A more somber group returned to the
Sanity’s Edge Saloon, one lingering behind to stare at the retreating Cast Outs
before following the others back.

A LESS THAN PLEASANT

GATHERING

“Well?”

Jack held a wet washcloth to the left
side of his head because it made him feel better; the bleeding had long ago
stopped, the injury not that severe. Considering a bullet ricocheted off his
skull, he should probably count himself blessed. But the fact remained, he was
living in a saloon perched on the edge of nothingness surrounded by strangers
and enemies, both expecting things from him that he wasn’t sure he could
deliver, and his head was pounding. And on top of all that, Leland Quince; the
man’s open question an accusation hanging in the air.

“Well what, Mr. Quince?” Jack asked
back.

“How much of what Kreiger said is
true?”

“Some of it. All of it. None of it.
How the hell should I know?”

“You’re the
Caretaker!
” Quince
hollered, the word somehow taking on improbable importance. “If you don’t have
the answers, who does?”

“Kreiger didn’t tell you anything I
didn’t already try to explain to you on the platform half an hour ago. If you
choose to listen to him over me, that’s your prerogative.”

“You were blithering on the platform.
You had no idea what was going on, or what you were supposed to do, and you
still don’t. What you call an explanation sounded more like the ramblings of an
escaped mental patient. Why would you expect me to listen to that?”

“Because it’s true.”

“Just like the fact that you don’t
know what you’re doing. That’s true as well, isn’t it? Our lives are in
jeopardy and you haven’t got a clue what to do or how to do it.”

The bar yielded up scotch and
ice—neither had been there this morning—and Leland was pacing the floor with a
glass of it, sometimes gulping, other times pointing with it for emphasis.
While Jack found a washcloth to clean the blood off his face and neck, Alex
offered up his spare change for the Pepsi machine outside, buying cans of soda
for the others. After that, an uneasy silence, long minutes of uncomfortable
stares: accusation, confusion, loss.

Until now.

In all fairness, Leland Quince might
be correct. And Jack hated him even more for it. “I know more about what I’m
doing than you, Mr. Quince.”

“Do you? Do you
really
? Then
make those three madmen out there disappear. Make those animals they dredged up
from the sand go back where they came from. Hell, just bring the trains back so
we can all go home. That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? What a
Caretaker is supposed to do?”

“Believe me I’d like nothing better—”

“Where are the tickets, Jack?” Quince
cut in. “You’ve been talking about them. Kreiger says you have them. So where
are they?”

“Why?”

“Because you have no right to decide
my future. I decide; not you. I want the train to come and take me back to my
life. And don’t tell me I don’t have a life back there because I do.”

“I know,” Jack said quietly.

“No, Jack, I don’t think you do.
Because if you did know, if you understood for even one second, you wouldn’t be
standing there telling me you knew something about what you were doing. I don’t
know whether to believe those three lunatics or not, but I know one thing:
they’re the ones in charge, not you. And as far as I can tell, they have no
issue with us; just you.”

“We’re in this together, Mr. Quince,”
Ellen said, eyes never leaving the safety of the floor. Since their return,
she’d sat against the wall, looking as if she wanted to melt into the wood.
“Jack will do whatever he can to get us out of here.”

Leland Quince rolled his eyes.
“Excuse me if I don’t find your analysis of his capabilities very credible. And
in case you forgot, you’re in the same boat as the rest of us: stories without
endings, bad scripts the studio’s giving one last rewrite to before dumping us
for good. That is how we all ended up here, right Jack? You’re the writer they
commissioned to rework the ailing storylines?”

Jack shrugged uncertainly. He didn’t
want to believe it was true, didn’t want to believe that Ellen, Alex, Lindsay,
and even You-Can-Call-Me-Sir-Or-Mr. Quince were nothing more than imaginary
fragments of characters that would fade away from disinterest, or that his very
existence depended upon him not allowing that to happen. They were more. Hell,
they were no different than anyone else he had ever met. What did it say about
everything he had ever known? What could he trust to be real? “I don’t know why
we’re all here. I don’t know how we were chosen,” Jack explained, patience
giving way to exasperation. “But we’re here now, so let’s try to work together
so that we can all get out of here.”

“We already know how to get out of
here, Jack,” Leland said. “Just give Kreiger the tickets, and we can all go
home.”

“No!”

“Then send us home yourself,” Leland
challenged.

“I will.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

Leland’s scotch exploded against the
wall in a wet flurry of glass and ice. “
That’s what I’ve been trying to tell
you, Jack!
You don’t know! You’re in charge, and you don’t know. Our fate
is in your hands, and you don’t know. So give me one reason why we shouldn’t
consider Kreiger’s offer?”

“He won’t honor it,” Alex said.

The businessman turned. “And you
think Jack will be able to send us on our way, keep us safe from those
monsters
?”

“I think … I think he’ll try,” Alex
said, words chosen too carefully.

“I don’t doubt he will,” Leland
replied diplomatically. “Jack will
try
. But will that be good enough?
We’re being asked to trust our lives to his good intentions. Jack will try;
Kreiger will succeed.”

This time, Alex said nothing.

“Let’s be practical. Jack will
try
to send us home. Kreiger
will
send us home. Jack doesn’t know what he’s
doing. Kreiger has been doing this for a long time. I don’t believe for a
minute everything Kreiger said, but I know what I saw. Does anyone doubt
Kreiger could send us home if he wanted to?”

“Why would he want to?” Ellen asked.

“For the exact reason he said. The
tickets mean nothing to him. We mean nothing to him. It’s just as easy for him
to send us home as not. We’re simply standing between him and his precious
Nexus, and I say we let him have it. It’s nothing to me. I didn’t even know
what it was an hour ago. I only want to go home. What about the rest of you?
Does anyone else want to get the hell out of this place?”

“This isn’t open for discussion,”
Jack declared firmly.

It was exactly the opportunity Leland
had been waiting for, and the businessman pounced. “So there it is. This isn’t
about us at all, is it Jack. This is about you and this place. Maybe Kreiger
and his associates aren’t the power mongers you paint them to be. Maybe you’re
the control freak, the megalomaniac. Just because we met you first, that
doesn’t necessarily make you the good guy.”

“Kreiger is not getting the Nexus and
he is not getting the tickets,” Jack stated flatly. “This isn’t about me or
you. This is about a maniac controlling the source of creation. I’m the
Caretaker. The protection of the Nexus has been entrusted to me, and so long as
that office holds, no Cast Out shall re-enter the Sanity’s Edge Saloon.”

“And I’m telling you again, you have
no right to choose,” Leland argued back. “We’re all people. We all have lives
on the other side of this insanity. Some good, some wanting, but they’re
our
lives, not yours. I, for one, want to get on with mine. Your truck with them is
your business, Jack, not ours. Do what you like, but you have no right to
involve us or make us suffer for your invented principles.”

Leland turned to the others. “You
don’t like me and I don’t really care. I don’t honestly like any of you very
much either. But we have an opportunity to escape this place. I’ve seen too
much this morning to allow myself the luxury of believing that this place isn’t
real. Maybe it’s some kind of
Twilight Zone
reality; I don’t know and it
doesn’t matter. But I don’t need to understand it to know that we can all die
here. Those three out there are completely insane. You don’t need to tell me
that. But they’ve promised to send us wherever we want to go if we help them,
or destroy us if we resist. They control
everything
outside of this
building. Jack controls the saloon. That’s it. End of story. We’re all
prisoners living on borrowed time, and our savior is the goddamn bartender.”

“Would you just shut up,” Ellen
grumbled.

“Someone has to be the voice of
reason, and it obviously isn’t going to be him. I say we vote on what to do
with the tickets.”

“We’re not voting,” Jack said
matter-of-factly. “This isn’t a committee or a board decision. Majority rule
does not apply. The fate of any one of you is shared by all of us. All of the
tickets must be completed or none of us will live through this, and if even one
ticket falls into Kreiger’s hands, then everything is lost. Kreiger’s testing
us, looking for the weakest link. But once he has the Nexus, all deals and
promises will fall by the wayside along with all of us. He killed the Writer;
he’ll do the same to us when he has what he wants. I won’t allow that to
happen. There isn’t a choice here, not for any of us. Not you. Not me. Not even
the Tribe of Dust. Only inevitabilities. We do what we have to do, and live or
die as a consequence. That’s all there is.”

Though heartfelt, Jack knew his
speech fell on deaf ears. He’d just drawn a second line in the sand, and these
four were now trapped in the middle, a no man’s land between warring trenches.
He started up the stairs. “If we’re going to get out of here, I have to get to
work.”

*     *     *

Ellen watched him go, watched Leland
storm about in frustration. No one wanted to be controlled, railroaded towards
the future, manipulated like characters in a book.

She had no desire to return to her
old life. The Sanity’s Edge Saloon was strange, but it was also quiet and
distant and non-judgmental; she could easily spend the rest of her life here.
What did the Saloon care what she was on the other side of reality? It was the
magical djinni, its services available without reservation or judgment. No
matter what she did before, it didn’t matter here. But back in the world—back
in the place Leland Quince was so desperate to return to—it mattered a lot.
Back there was a doctor with his own ideas about a drug regimen, about
rehabilitation, about burning out the bad part of her, cauterizing her free-will
and sterilizing her soul. Back there was the vague inklings of something done
while riding the Dreamline, something bad, something involving Lenny and his
fumbling, junk-sick hands crawling over her breasts, ragged nails scraping her
nipples, slithering down her pants, … and a screwdriver, yellow plastic grip
slick with blood, so much blood…

She shivered as if from some desert
wind, or the chills of a bad trip, heroin comedown, the shattering end of a
mescaline ride.

“Ellen?”

Lindsay was staring at her
expectantly. “Hmm?”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, sure. I was just—”
Just
what? Just remembering the fact that she might have killed someone on the other
side of reality? Just remembering that her father had her committed to an
asylum? Just remembering that as early as this morning, she was going out of
her mind?
“—tired of listening to them argue.”

Lindsay nodded, her expression
serious.

“Did you need something?”

The little girl leaned closer,
whispering in her ear. “Where’s the bathroom?”

Ellen stifled a smile. “Up the
stairs, first door at the top. Be careful of the floor.”

Lindsay nodded, not bothering to ask
after the aforementioned floor, and trotted up the stairs.

When she was gone, Alex walked over.
“Do you think, back in the real world, Lindsay’s really … ya know?”

Ellen lowered her head. “I’m trying
not to think about it.”

Leland was back behind the bar. He’d
found a new glass, and was filling it with ice cubes. “Probably,” he said.

Alex looked at him darkly. “You’re an
asshole.”

“It doesn’t make it any less true,”
he replied.

Alex shook his head, walking away. “I
need some air.”

“I’m right, you know,” Leland Quince
said. “About Jack, too.”

Even their brief meeting had left
Ellen with an indelible impression of Gusman Kreiger; the man was a sociopath.
If he seemed reasonable or rational, it was because it served his ends to be
so. And when those ends were met, his transformation would be both
instantaneous and horrific. Dealing with Kreiger was like handling poisonous
snakes; being bitten was inevitable, and that first bite would end the battle
of wills forever. “You know Kreiger’s probably lying,” she said.