“I was wondering when you would show up,” Kreiger remarked, not bothering to look at the horror vomited up from the chaos beyond the edge of reason and sanity. He knew what the creature was, and he was not afraid.
What did the Caretaker have to fear from the Guardian?
At Kreiger’s feet, a small scarab, blue-black as the night-dark sea, skittered across the Wasteland sand. He saw it and nodded, pleased.
“I think this time I will call myself Ozymandius.”
* * *
Ellen tried to stay awake as they drove down the endless ribbon of sun-baked asphalt. But it went without saying that the scenery did not change; infinite plains of gray-white dust the color of old bones and milky clay. The truck’s radio sounded old, the reception weak and a little scratchy, as if they were just on the fringe of the station’s range. She liked the songs well enough, a pleasant mix that she thought she recognized from Jack’s collection, songs from his jukebox, songs they had listened to endlessly over the last few days. She listened to them as the truck hummed along the strip of dark gray towards the horizon, lulled by the gentle sound, the cool flutter of scentless air through the open windows that cooled her faced and knocked and tossed strands of hair about her head.
Her hand played with the wind, riding it up and down with gentle shifts of her fingers like the rudders on a plane, or the tail of a dream flyer.
They spoke idly at first, but there was no common ground, or too much of it. Ellen could not ask Jack where they were going. She understood that she would find that out in due time, and nothing would come from wondering before it was done. Eventually, conversation lapsed into silence, ever-longer gaps in their remarks that stretched out into forever like the highway.
The truck’s bench seat proved remarkably comfortable, much to her surprise; well broken in, the vinyl polished smooth by time and wear, yielding and kind. And the sun warmed her through the glass, making it hard to stay focused, to keep her eyes open.
Ellen tried to stay awake. But like a child trying to stay up late, the more she tried, the more she found her eyes drifting shut, her chin drooping down to her chest, her head lolling to one side and the relative comfort of the seatback.
Somewhere in the vast expanse of limitless possibilities separating madness and reality, Ellen Monroe drifted off into her own dream plane.
EPILOGUE
The truck waited on the roadside ahead, the air smelling of hot metal and baking rubber thick with diesel. She didn’t run up to it. She wasn’t in a hurry. She’d been walking a long time; a little longer wouldn’t make a difference.
Coming up to the cab past the long trailer of pale aluminum skin, she found the passenger door already open. Inside, a man in a plaid, short-sleeve shirt and a mesh-back ball cap with an oil company logo looked down at her. “You need a lift?”
Ellen looked back, sunglasses hiding her eyes. The sun was bright, and staring into the dark cab was like looking into a cave. But she could see him well enough to know what she needed to know: the gray hair trimmed close to hide the baldness, the open expression, the eyes blue and squinted down against years of glare. The only thing hidden behind his gaze was the same sad secrets that everyone hid away, so afraid they might come to light that they stared like timid woodland creatures and begged you to accept them at face value, and to please not look any deeper.
Whatever. He wasn’t a threat.
Besides, she carried a knife on the inside of her right boot in case she was wrong. She’d nicknamed it Nail. “I’m trying to get to the ocean.”
An amused smile pulled at the man’s face. “The ocean, huh? What’s at the ocean?”
“Something not the desert.”
He offered a faint chuckle. “Fair enough. Doing a long haul to City of Industry. Climb in. Name’s Lyle.”
She didn’t offer her name in return, but she did climb into the cab, dropping her duffle bag between her feet. It wasn’t really that heavy anymore. Like any journey, you lost things on the way. All that was left was a few clothes that smelled of long days on the road, a strange compass she didn’t know how to use, and three books: one she had read over and over until the paper started to wear and the spine to crack, another she had never read but which she knew as if its tale was her own, and a third she refused to read, ever. She also carried a small tin on a string around her neck, the kind that peppermints came in. It was rubber-banded shut to keep the contents from spilling: a fine powdery dust as white as bleached bones.
She’d lost everything else, but these things she managed to keep.
The driver dropped the vehicle into gear and rolled back out onto the empty highway after a quick look in the mirror. He took a moment to get the truck back up to speed, secreting glances as he shifted gears. She knew. First he looked at her shape, a little too thin from the road, but all right to look at. Then the sunburn on her arms and face, the way her eyes moved away from his gaze. Then he looked a little closer, catching sight of the pale lines on her hands, inside her wrist, the thin white scars. Maybe too close. Then he would look away, the fiction in his head already writing itself: what she was, what he could be, and maybe … maybe …
She knew. She was a world-class escape artist. She knew all too well.
“You look like you been hiking a long time,” Lyle said, a desperate effort to start a conversation she refused to pursue.
“Yes.” She noticed he didn’t ask her name. Maybe he liked to keep things anonymous; plausible deniability of the soul. Or maybe he was regretting having stopped at all.
“Huh.” He sounded disappointed; perhaps he’d expected more. “Well, you’re lucky I came along when I did. You’re about a million miles from nowhere.”
“No,” she said, offering a quick glance out the front before looking away. “Not so far as that.”
He seemed to think on that for a moment. Or maybe he was waiting for her to say something more, elaborate on her remark. No, not her job; she wasn’t the storyteller in this tale.
“You traveling all alone?”
To that, she would not answer, her face kept to the passenger window, eyes hidden from view as she watched this world roll by. Her hand found the small tin inside her shirt resting atop her heart, her legs reflexively tightening on the duffel bag at her feet, reassuring herself it was there, not stolen or missing or somehow smaller by even the smallest degree.
And she started to cry again.
Strange, those things that are lost along the way.
The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) Page 49
