He nearly jumped, startled by the slender arm clad in dusty, biker leather reaching past him to take the apple juice from the refrigerator shelf and walk silently back around to the front of the bar.
She moves like a ghost! he thought, straightening back up to find her sitting across from him on a barstool, the faintest hint of a smile edging at her lips, amused at his naked amazement. On a positive note, the pale blade had disappeared somewhere.
“Split this with me,” she said, adding, “Alex.”
“Uh, sure.” She knew his name. And they were splitting an apple juice. Both good signs. He reached below the bar for a couple glasses.
One less naive would have realized her offer assured her the contents of the bottle was not deliberately tainted or poisoned; mistrust was a lesson learned early in the Wasteland, the consequences of failure excruciating.
But the idea never occurred to him. He watched her pour equal portions into both glasses then push one over to him. “You never told me your name,” he said.
“No, I didn’t.”
He took a drink to hide his disappointment. Perhaps she had reasons for her secrets just as the others asleep upstairs had reasons for theirs. Perhaps there were things about her life outside of this world that she would rather not share just yet … or ever. He could respect that. His own was a simple story, embarrassingly trite: the classic underachiever going nowhere, doing nothing, and going about it poorly.
She stared fascinated at the juice, rolling the glass to see the liquid cling to the sides. Her delicate caress of the tumbler reminding him of the way she touched the floor, timid and expectant, as if seeing it all for the first time … or perhaps seeing it again after a long absence.
“Were you out in the Wasteland long?” Alex asked.
“Forever,” she answered matter-of-factly.
Another vague answer to protect her secrets. “Well, it’s not so bad here. A little strange, but you have everything you need. I mean, you have a place to sleep, and there seems to be enough to eat for now. The bathroom’s a little rustic, but it works well enough. It could be worse, I suppose. You’ll probably meet the others shortly; they’re mostly okay. Not morning people, I guess.”
She turned away abruptly, staring across the room. Nail stood just inside the saloon doors, a shadow-shape of pure darkness in the morning twilight. The Guardian stared directly at them, and, now that he wasn’t talking, Alex could hear the faint growl coming from Nail’s throat.
“Don’t move,” he warned softly, not realizing she was already sitting stock-still, the bone knife soundlessly drawn and held out before her like a ward, a vampire hunter’s reliquary.
“Nail?” Alex said, coming out from behind the bar to stand between them. “Nail, she’s okay. She’s one of us.”
The small monster’s growl rose as if in contradiction.
“Stop it. Go … go watch the barrier or something. Keep an eye on the dregs. We’re okay in here.”
The gargoyle’s lip curled revealing more sharp teeth supporting his six-inch fangs, but Alex held his ground between them, the gargoyle and the nameless woman from the Wasteland. “I said go!” he tried again, hoping the tone was more stern than desperate.
Nail refused, trying to see past Alex to the woman from the Wasteland.
“Go!” Alex shouted.
Then Nail sniffed the air, turning his head deliberately to catch the various scents and consider each in turn, less intimidated than distracted. He bolted suddenly from the room, claws scarring the hardwood planks, already on the trail of something more interesting … or more threatening.
Alex let out a long breath, turned … and flinched. She was standing only a pace behind him, moving to within inches without a sound. Her eyes caught and threw back the dawn, blackness transformed into amber and fire, ablaze with newfound interest.
“My name is Oversight.”
* * *
Leland Quince woke up at dawn to his own internal alarm clock, unaffected by this strange world or his nighttime foray into the Wasteland.
It didn’t hurt that someone was shouting.
He quickly assimilated his new surroundings; he had awoken to numerous hotel suites and was not easily thrown by unfamiliar settings.
His palm itched, the new scab glaring back at him like a single, red eye. It felt infected.
In the new silence, he heard only a flap like startled birds taking to the air. He thought that was unusual, not remembering any birds in the wasteland, or much indigenous life at all. This world was a corpse; best it were buried and left behind.
He dismissed it as another inexplicable event in an unimportant world he intended to leave behind very soon; sooner than anyone imagined. He went to the bathroom thinking that with any luck, he would be back in the real world enjoying four-star service for dinner.
In one corner, motionless and unseen, the Dust Eater crouched, skin the color of wood planks. Its leering grin widened, clawed hands digging contentedly into the thick varnish of the floor, carving up furrows of gray-white polish like gouges of dead flesh. Baleful eyes watched the window carefully, but the guardian did not return.
Pity. A fight would have been … amusing.
* * *
Jack walked quietly so as not to waken anyone. The bathroom door was closed; he could hear Leland inside. He also heard Alex talking quietly downstairs. Ellen and Lindsay were still asleep in bed.
So who was Alex talking to?
He stopped four steps from the bottom, surprised to see the young man at the bar with a beautiful woman in black leather, her skin dusky, hair dark, eyes darker. She sat on the stool with a kind of artificial calm, hands planted on the edge of the barstool, fingers tight, shoulders taut, anything but relaxed.
“I don’t know what got into him,” the young man said. “He’s like a watchdog or something, I guess. I don’t mind tellin’ ya, I was glad he was there yesterday when those creatures out there in the sand started coming towards us. But I don’t know what set him off this morning. It was weird.”
“The Guardian protects the Caretaker,” the young woman said as if it was clear to anyone what purpose a gargoyle in a saloon on the edge of insanity would serve. “Protecting the Nexus or anyone else here is incidental.”
Jack was simply amazed that this woman, whoever she was, could speak so plainly of things he was only just coming to believe in, much less understand.
“That doesn’t explain why he got so riled up over you.” Alex persisted. “You belong here just as much as any of us.”
“No, I don’t,” she replied.
“Hmm?”
Instead of answering, her eyes shifted to the turn in the stairs where Jack stood quietly, watching, a voyeuristic intruder. She found his gaze and held it. “Caretaker.”
Alex turned around and offered a smile, a trace of disappointment that Jack remembered well from when the train arrived yesterday, interrupting his own private moment with Ellen. “Morning,” Alex said. “I didn’t think anyone else was up yet.”
Jack smiled back, but his attention was with the woman, her remark sparking his curiosity. How could she know so much? How could she know him? Had Alex told her he was the Caretaker? She said the word as if she had an understanding of it, an appreciation that escaped the others in the Saloon, him included.
“Leland’s in the bathroom,” Jack offered. “The others are asleep. Who’s this?”
“Her name’s Oversight,” Alex said, sliding off the stool. “She arrived this morning.”
“Not on the train,” Jack stated.
“Well, no. She walked in. She’s been in the Wasteland for a while.”
“I’ll bet.”
Alex frowned. “What do you mean?”
Jack ignored his question, stepping closer, Oversight’s nonchalant smile masking a predatory stare. “Where do you come from, Oversight? You can’t be a Cast Out because if you were, the barrier would keep you out.”
“She’s one of us,” Alex protested.<
br />
“And if you were one of the dregs, Nail would have killed you already,” he continued, still ignoring Alex. “So if you’re not a dreg, and you’re not a Cast Out, what are you?”
Her eyes darkened, smile disappearing; he had struck a nerve, distant and indiscernible. “An oversight,” she declared. “And your guardian didn’t protect you from me because it has no reason to.”
“She’s okay, Jack,” Alex said, “I’ve been talking to her. She’s okay.”
Alex’s argument was hardly dissuasive, but Oversight’s point was well made. His own judgment over the last few days was circumspect, but he trusted Nail’s instincts implicitly. If the gargoyle had not ousted her, then the least he could do was give her a chance. “I guess I just need my morning coffee.”
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 immediate
ly 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.
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 22
