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

by Mark Reynolds

  Oversight squatted down beside her, voice softening. “With whom?”

  “No one wanted to play with me. Jack is upstairs and Ellen is in the bathroom. I think she’s sick.”

  “And Alex?”

  “He’s talking with Mr. Quince.” Lindsay leaned close to the woman’s ear to impart a secret. “I don’t like Mr. Quince. He’s mean.”

  Oversight nodded noncommittally. “Go back to the other side of the tracks where it’s safe. I’ll come over and play catch with you in a moment.”

  Lindsay looked back at her, surprised. She thought Oversight was too old for things like playing catch; too old for a lot of things. “You will?”

  “Promise. Just swear to me that you’ll stay away from the Tribe of Dust. All of them. Don’t talk to them, don’t give them anything, and don’t take anything they give you. They’re not to be trusted.”

  Lindsay looked back at Reginald Hyde who smiled good-naturedly as he scratched the puppy behind its ears. “But he was going to—”

  “No, he wasn’t. He doesn’t give anything freely. He simply hasn’t told you what it will cost. Now go back to the other side of the tracks and wait for me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she answered glumly, walking away. She looked back only once.

  And Papa Lovebone blew her a kiss.

  * * *

  “You forget yourself,” Hyde remarked, eyes following the little girl.

  “I’ve forgotten nothing, least of all what you are.”

  “Oh, you’ve forgotten all right. A soft place to sit, some shade and a little food that wasn’t still squirming as you shoved it in your mouth, and you forget everything. You’d better not forget why you’re here.”

  “I told you. I’ve forgotten nothing.”

  “And still you chose to care about them. I would say that makes you stupid.”

  “And what does your inability to care make you?”

  “It makes me God. But you’ll learn that soon enough, just as Eve did. The minute you start thinking for yourself, God drops a flaming hammer on you the likes of which you can’t even imagine, construct.” The last word a slur.

  “You’re not God, just a fat dabbler in sad magicks: bone mojo, and dream sendings, and even sex juju when you don’t get distracted and end up masturbating. If you had the Nexus, you would be frightening, but only because you are so petty that you would reduce the concept of God to a bland, impotent description of a self-indulgent hedonist. You don’t scare me, Lovebone. The barrier keeps you from harming them. It doesn’t keep me from harming you.”

  “Pleeease! When God’s horny, you bend over and grab your ankles. Nothing less. Do you understand?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You know he’s going to win, don’t you?”

  Oversight said nothing.

  “I said: you know he’s going to win, don’t you? Well, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” But the word was so meekly spoken that it might have been impossible for anyone but herself to hear.

  “Of course you do. So I suggest you do as you’re told because we’re going to spend a long time together in Elysium, and if you don’t behave, it won’t exactly be a paradise for you, construct.”

  “You stay away from the little girl, Lovebone. I mean it. The others can fend for themselves, but you stay away from her.”

  Lovebone shook his head, bemused. “It’s a mistake, what you’re doing.”

  “And what is that, fat man?”

  “You’re thinking of them as real; as alive.” He stretched out the last word into a long, dangling taunt.

  “They are.”

  “They’re not.”

  “They matter!”

  “No, cutie-pie, they don’t.” Lovebone’s expression was that of a teacher trying very hard to drum a lesson into a very dull student—or one deliberately refusing to learn. “When I look at them, do you know what I see? Dead things. Zombies. Gray skin, white eyes, dropping gristle, taut strings of rigor mortis-constricted muscle and tendon. Scarlet cinema freaks. They’re all dead, each and every one of them. As dead as doornails and milkmen. And they don’t even know it.”

  Oversight looked back at Lindsay, the little girl standing dutifully on the other side of the tracks, leaning against the glue-and-ad-plastered back wall of the Sanity’s Edge Saloon, watching her. Oversight ran her tongue carefully along her teeth, deep in contemplation. For the first time ever, her mouth was dry—and she knew it. She could never go back to the Wasteland again. How could you live for even one day in Heaven and not despair every moment thereafter without?

  She drew the bone knife and extended the blade towards Lovebone like an accusing finger. “Just leave her alone, Shaman, or even the Nexus and your mad leader won’t be able to save what I’ll leave behind of you. Never forget that you survived solely because Kreiger knew he might one day need you. He protected you from the likes of the dregs, and Rebreather, and even from me. Don’t count on that aegis forever. You’re a lackey, just like me, so don’t ever forget your own place in the tapestry, Cast Out.”

  The term held such venom that Lovebone actually retreated a step. “Very well, construct,” he said haughtily. “Have it your way.”

  He reached down, lifting the puppy by the scruff of the neck. “I was going to give this to the sweet meat for the tickets, but I have no use for it, now.” Huge, dark eyes looked at Oversight, playful and innocent and just a little bit sad. Familiar looking, she thought, but didn’t know why. A pink tongue poked out between its teeth, and it started to squirm and whimper.

  Oversight reached for it, and Lovebone’s other hand shot out, grabbing the animal’s tail and tearing it out, one long, solid bone like something torn from a fish. The puppy emitted a single, horrified yelp, quick agony cut short as neatly as if by a razor, and fell apart. All that was left behind was a glom of ratty hair clots, the mangled carcass of a lizard, and a swarm of scorpions and beetles that tumbled across Lovebone’s arm and fell to the sand, scuttling for cover. Where once there was a small animal, now there was only Wasteland garbage and an excruciating smell; rotting meat; putrefaction.

  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 as
ked, 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.