“Ellen, please,” he said, struggling to keep his voice calm, keep the hysteria from turning his request into a scream. “Get dressed. We have to get out of here.”
Then he charged up the steps.
The Jabberwock was already on, the screen a waiting page, blank and empty. Half of the books and magazines from the shelves were gone. As was the wastebasket, the Jabberwock’s printer, the stereo. The plant had shriveled to a yellowing stalk of wispy, weed-like leaves tangled together into witch hair; there was no life in the Wasteland save that which came from the Nexus. Plants required living soil, drawing life from static surroundings, unlike the dregs and vermin roaming the Wasteland—sloth-like bottom-feeders preying off one another. When a plant exhausted what was available, it died, doomed by the very nature of its existence. The Saloon was nearly empty. The plant, unnoticed and ignored, was dead.
Below, the clock kept chiming. He had lost count, but no matter; he knew what time it was. It was time to go.
Jack snagged the blue folder from his desk, taking out the entire stack of typed pages that was the last manuscript, Ellen’s ticket home, and jamming them into the pneumatic tube. Some of the sheets slipped from his shaking fingers, wafting across the desk to land upon the floor. He snatched at them, stifling an urge to scream. There’s no time for this. No time for anything. They had to go!
He scooped every last page up in double-fistfuls of paper, thrusting them into the brass and copper tube suspended from the wall, which eagerly sucked them down with a distracting shuuuup! noise. Turning too quickly, he knocked the pot out of the coffee maker, and it shattered on the floor. Something in his head said this should matter. Something else said that while it should, it did not.
He pulled on his sneakers, not bothering to tie the laces. No time.
On the Jabberwock’s screen, the familiar gold ticket floated. He reached for the ENTER key and hesitated, staring down the brass rabbit hole where the pages had disappeared. It all depended upon this. The world balanced upon events happening like a scripted page.
But how could it? How could any of it? Especially when others didn’t want it to.
That was the key. What they wanted. What he couldn’t let them have. Jack glanced around quickly then closed his eyes, concentrating on something he needed, something that wasn’t there … but should be.
In the lower right corner of the keyboard, a hot swelling in the plastic bubbled up before flattening and hardening, the surface turning from bone to brown to bright red. Small black letters rose out of the new key’s surface: ICE.
He pushed the ENTER key followed by the new red key, and turned away, broken glass skittering from under his feet as he raced towards the iron stair. Already words were streaming across the screen, sentence after sentence funneling into the Jabberwock and down through the Saloon’s machinery that coiled tightly around the Nexus of all realities.
Jack averted his eyes from the far wall as he left. The bookcase was gone, only bare wall where it had been seconds earlier. Every book, magazine, trinket, and collectible in the room had disappeared—the cost of the new red button.
Nothing lasts forever.
“Is everything okay?” Ellen asked. She was pulling the baggy sweatshirt on as she moved to meet him at the foot of the stairs. “I heard something break.”
“Nothing important,” he said, and hoped it was true. In his absence, the bed had also disappeared.
“Jack? Is this … is this the end?”
He was shaking his head as he led her to the stairs and down. “I don’t know. I just don’t—”
His voice died away as he looked out the window at the infinite stretch of Wasteland behind the Saloon. Ellen bumped into him, her hair still tangled from sleep, her face open confusion, and was about to ask what made him stop when she saw for herself, her hand leaping up to his arm, holding it for support, for simple human contact. Neither spoke or moved; they only stared.
Out on the vast, white sands, the last remnants of the Tribe of Dust stood shoulder to shoulder, gunslingers in a spaghetti western ready for the shootout with the sheriff, high noon in the O.K. Corral. Their backs to the sun, they were walking shadows, portents of destruction and death. Their approach held Jack spellbound, and he knew what it was that made birds freeze beneath the baleful eye of a hunting snake. He might have stayed frozen until they walked out of sight and into the backdoor, but a sudden scream from across the abyss, a piercing whistle, familiar and shrill, broke the spell.
The last train!
Jack started down the steps. “Ellen, come on.”
When she didn’t respond immediately, he reached up and took her arm, pulling her. “Ellen! Come on!”
She tore her eyes from the approaching Cast Outs, following him down to the first floor. It was completely empty but for the solitary ticket booth and Alex’s pry bar. It lay upon the floor, the forgotten tool of a thief who’d pilfered the Sanity’s Edge Saloon of all of its belongings, all of its reality. There was an outline on the floorboards, a dark place where the bar once was, but nothing else. Once crowded with furniture, the room seemed enormous now, and Jack felt like an intruder, a trespasser in someone else’s private residence. They didn’t belong here, and he knew by her expression that Ellen felt it too.
In the empty room, the ticket booth stood apart, surreal, ready for the next patron to step up to the window and buy a ticket; the lie of normalcy.
Another burst from the belly of the train, a banshee’s scream cutting through hesitation like a razor.
“The last ticket’s over there,” Jack said. “Go check it.”
“Where are you going?”
Jack knew she was terrified, that she was starting to suspect something more was going on than he had led her to believe. “I want to grab the pry bar,” he said. “For a weapon. Just in case.” Then he gave her a gentle, reassuring kiss. “It’ll be okay.”
“We’re leaving together,” she said firmly.
But he had already turned away, pretending not to hear.
Ellen hesitated a moment then ran over to the ticket booth. On the edge of the counter, a single ticket poked halfway from the wire mesh window like bait in a trap. She picked it up cautiously, as if the paper might be coated with acid, or poison from the skin of a frog captured in the Orinoco Valley. But it was only a ticket; a single ticket.
Passenger’s Name: ELLEN MONROE
Departing: THE SANITY’S EDGE *
Destination: HOME
Time: NOW
* This ticket is good for one passenger only on the above listed train, is non-transferable and non-negotiable. This station is not responsible for any lost articles or luggage.
Ellen looked at the ticket, reading the same few lines over and over in disbelief. She looked to the ticket booth as if it were playing some cruel trick, and it answered her wordless accusation by slamming the shade down across the window, the words SOLD OUT in bold, black script on the shade. She felt her hands start to tremble, her mouth open, wordless mumbles as she tried to figure this out; make sense of the insensible; find the piece of information that she seemed to be missing. But though she reread the words on the ticket until tears blurred them into obscurity, searching in vain for loopholes or clauses, she still came back to the same inescapable conclusion: Jack had lied.
The train’s whistle screamed again, and she flinched even as anger tightened every muscle in her frame, tears of rage burning her cheeks. The train was coming; there was no turning back now, no changing what was set in motion.
“What did you do?” she screamed.
Jack stared at her wordlessly from across the Saloon, the pry bar in one hand. He did not look away, only holding her gaze apologetically. “This is how it has to be.”
“No it doesn’t!” she screamed back. “You made it this way. You’re the one who’s making everything happen here.”
“It’s not as simple as that. There are rules—”
“Fuck the rules! This place doesn’t have r
ules any more than dreams have rules. Jack, you have to come with me. You’ll die if you stay here. Just get on the train with me. It can take us both; take us wherever.”
“But —”
“No. You said we were leaving. Both of us.”
“It can’t be that way.”
“I won’t go without you.”
“Ellen, please.”
“No, Jack. Not this way. Come with me, or I stay too.” She swallowed desperately, the very words choking her. “Whatever happens, we’ll get through it so long as we stay together. But you have to get on the train with me. Please!”
He was looking at the ground, shaking his head.
“Please!” she said. “It took me too long to find you. I can’t lose you know.”
He pumped the air with the pry bar as if tapping ghost nails into an invisible coffin, his eyes lost in thought. She thought he looked like someone trying to reconcile a matter between the heart and the head—and failing.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll try.”
She smiled, and Jack wondered if he would ever again see anything so beautiful.
Then the Tribe of Dust burst into the saloon, literally.
* * *
The backdoor blew inward, slivers of glass spraying the waiting room and the Saloon’s lacquered floor in a fan of tiny, shimmering flecks. Ellen jerked back, nearly striking her head against the corner of the ticket booth, the doorframe sparing her from the rain of glittering shrapnel. Reginald Hyde’s tattooed mass blocked the shattered doorway to the platform, the spikes of bones and talons and fangs bursting from his illustrated skin like the spiny carapace of some monstrous insect. He stared, eyes red-rimmed and crazed, only dimly aware of his surroundings: the emptied Saloon, the broken shards beneath his naked feet. The only emotion upon his face, that which might have expressed the last fragment of sanity he possessed, was wonderment.
The large window behind Jack shattered in a rain of glass fragments and splintered window frame, Rebreather’s boots thundering against the planks as he straightened himself, a tall, granite mass eclipsing the light.
And standing in the main doorway, batwing doors held wide like a showboat outlaw entering a saloon in that same bad western movie, was Gusman Kreiger, pristine in his cream-colored suit and Panama hat, the stolen lightning rod in one hand, different-colored eyes flashing feral amusement made more frightening by the whiteness of the teeth he showed in his cheerless grin. “Good morning, Jack. Sleep well?”
Jack raised the pry bar protectively, brandishing the heavy steel like some mystical talisman. Surrounded and cut off with Ellen trapped on the far side of the room, he waved the pry bar at Kreiger and the other Cast Outs, a ridiculous weapon in the hands of an equally ridiculous hero.
And while only a few feet away, Rebreather took no notice of him, discounting the Caretaker much the way a man discounts a bothersome fly, convinced if he ignored it long enough, it would simply go away.
Perhaps Rebreather was right.
“What say we end this on an amicable note, Jack?” Kreiger said, glass fragments crunching beneath hardened boot heels, the iron tip of the lightning rod knocking loudly upon the wooden floor, the sound reverberating through the still air of the empty room. “I’ll let you and the girl walk out of here unharmed. All I want is the ticket. Leave it behind, and you can go.”
Hyde, who had been staring dazedly around the room as if upon the glory of God, or a peephole in a burlesque tent at a county fair, turned sharply upon Kreiger. “You promised her to me.”
Kreiger’s eyes slid sideways, his smile never wavering. A wordless warning passed between him and the corpulent bone priest, and Hyde cringed.
“And I am breaking my word with you, Reggie, so that I can end this with Jack. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?” He allowed a brief, meaningless pause for the protest that would never come, then: “See, Jack, I can be reasonable. Now why don’t we put an end to this?”
“Fine. Walk away and leave us alone,” Jack said, substituting bravado for courage.
“Amusing. But I had in mind a somewhat different exchange. All I’m interested in is the ticket that construct over there is holding.” He flicked his fingers in Ellen’s direction as he might a chair, or a distant ocean. “Just leave the ticket behind, and you can both walk away. That’s all that interests me.”
“And what’s to keep you from going back on your word; killing us the moment you have the ticket?” Jack asked, the end of the pry bar already wavering; it was heavy, and he was afraid. Afraid Kreiger was right. Afraid Kreiger already knew that; knew everything. Afraid that he had screwed up for the last time, and would pay for it. And Ellen with him. He hoped she wouldn’t hate him for it. Let me keep that much, at least.
Kreiger only shook his head. “Jack, there isn’t enough energy left in this wrung-out mop to make a dull butter knife, much less a weapon that could stop me. You know that as well as I. If I really wanted to kill you, I could have done it by now.”
“I still have the ticket, which means I still possess the Nexus,” Jack said, hoping his voice carried the conviction he lacked. “It won’t obey you until I concede. And the moment I do, our lives are forfeit because you’ll never take the risk of my coming back the same way you did.”
Kreiger laughed. “You’ve got salt, Jack. I’ll give you that. Who knows? You might even last a while in the Wasteland. You’re tenacious, resourceful, full of spirit. You remind me a little of myself from a long, long time ago.” Then his smile melted, eyes turning cold. “But I’ve grown wiser since. I don’t need to kill you. The Wasteland takes care of its own problems. All I’m offering is the chance to live a little longer, Jack. Just surrender and leave.”
The pry bar turned slippery with sweat as Jack frantically turned ideas over in his head and came up with nothing. No escape. No way out. No way to fix it. Maybe Kreiger was right.
“You can’t have the Nexus so long as Jack doesn’t quit!” Ellen said, slowly climbing to her feet.
“Not true,” Kreiger replied, but his tone was guarded, eyes less open, toothed smile more like a shark’s grimace, or the pain-filled grin of a rotting skull. “He’s already lost.”
“No!” she pressed. “You just want him to think so. You need him to give up. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be wasting time asking. You want him to believe that you’ve already won—”
“Want him to?” The question was nearly a protest of rage. “My dear, I don’t think it makes a bit of difference what I want him to do. It’s already done. That I’m standing where no Cast Out has stood in the history of time itself proves that it … is … over!”
“It doesn’t prove anything!” she shouted back. “Jack, whatever you do, don’t give him the ticket. It’s the only thing holding him back. Don’t you understand? You’re still the Caretaker.”
“Not for long,” Kreiger interjected.
“Forever! Jack, you are the Caretaker. You are!”
“No,” Kreiger stated, head tilted in disdain. “He’s not the Caretaker. He’s lost. It’s over!”
Outside, the bone-grinding squeal of burning metal, the thumping of air smashed before the racing train as it screeched into the station like a falling bullet. The whistle let out one final, furious shriek that drove needles into Jack’s eardrums, and when it stopped, there was a massive sigh from out on the rails as the thundering chrome worm sagged down upon the tracks to wait.
“It’s not over!” Jack hissed.
“Jack, whatever invulnerability you possess as the Caretaker of the Nexus does not extend to your charges. Even here. I may not be able to kill you, just as I couldn’t a week ago on the sand, but the Nexus won’t save you from pain. No Cast Out ever died in the Wasteland who did not succumb to that predator.”
“I’m prepared to take that risk,” Jack said, drawing the pry bar back, ready to swing.
“Are you?” Kreiger asked. “Lovebone was right. I did make him a promise. I’ll break it to make you leave �
� or keep it to force you out. Whatever it takes.”
Reginald Hyde turned his head towards Ellen, tongue moving slowly across his lips, and Ellen shrank, arms crossed tightly. A dark fear showed through her defiant stare, an innate knowledge of the kind of animal that hid inside of Lovebone’s tattooed flesh.
“The question, Jack,” Kreiger went on, “is whether you want to call it quits and leave, or figure out which you hate more: the sight of your Ellen Monroe writhing in agony, … or writhing in pleasure to another’s ministrations?”
Lovebone smiled obscenely like a child promised something sweet as a reward for good behavior, and a blackened vitriol oozed from between the crooked jags of his teeth, staining the cracks in his lips.
“Stay away from her!” Jack warned.
“Then give me the ticket!” Kreiger shot back.
“Ellen, get out of here!” Jack shouted. “Go to the train.”
“Move, Ellen Monroe,” Kreiger said mildly, “and you’ll learn the hard way how it feels to breathe with only one lung.”
And for one moment, the world waited on Ellen Monroe: her next move, her next act, her next thought. But her heart refused to let her go to the train without Jack. And her body refused to go even an inch nearer the door because it would put her an inch closer to Reginald Hyde—and a million miles would still be too close to the fat, drooling, sorcerer rapist. She held the ticket in her fist, the paper crushed between fingers gone cold with terror. “Jack?”
It was the most desperate sound he could ever have imagined, and it was coming from the one person he knew in his heart he loved more than his own life, had instantly grown to depend upon for all of his happiness. And the worst thing about it was that he had no answer for her. There were no words that would make it right, no speech that could explain it, no gesture that would assuage it. Hers was a question for which he did not have an answer.
As if he ever did.
Kreiger hung his head. “For the love of God, Jack, you truly disgust me.” And he turned to Lovebone. “Reggie, she’s yours.”
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 52
