Daylight disappeared, night gathering around the Writer as the dregs crowded close to him, only the thinnest crack of bright summer blue coming down from above. Algernon stared up into the seam of sky, his voice a raspy hiss as his chest locked tight around air it refused to draw or relinquish without a struggle. “The ticket’s … gone, Kreiger,” he gasped painfully. “I’ve … passed it … on.”
“I know that, Algae. I know.” Beneath the reasonable tone—so polite, so genteel—was something softly sadistic, a cat toying with a dying mouse.
Kreiger pressed the bent frames to the Writer’s face, letting him see through the fractured lens. The third dreg, the strong one with black-in-black eyes and wolfish face, held the Writer’s cane valise in sharp-taloned hands, the wicker torn apart as if sent through a combine. It was also empty.
“You wouldn’t believe what my gerrymander did to your agent,” Kreiger remarked, and the dreg dropped his mouth open in a joyless grin, revealing thick rows of fangs, a jaw impossibly large for its skull. “The question you need to answer, Algernon, is who does have the ticket, if not you?”
The Writer squinted, trying to focus through the splits in the lens; trying to see the slash of brilliant blue. Please go to Cross-Over Station, Jack, he prayed fiercely. Believe, and go to Cross-Over Station.
“I’m sorry, Algernon. I can’t make out what you’re saying.” Kreiger leaned down, a cupped ear placed dramatically close to the Writer’s mouth. “Or is the name caught in you’re throat? Shall I have one of my dregs open it up and take a look?”
“Go back … Kreiger. The new Caretaker … she’s already … gone ahead.” Would so small a piece of misdirection buy Jack time? Time enough to learn about the Nexus and how it worked before Kreiger and the other Cast Outs fell upon him like wild dogs? Go to Cross-Over Station, Jack. Please!
“What’s her name?”
The writer deliberately pursed his lips and stared up at the sky, that brilliant shade of blue. Not the sun-bleached color of the Wasteland sky, but a blue like that blue from so long ago, the fields of France, staring up into the sky. So blue you could almost dismiss the thick smell of cordite and the moldering stench of blood and dirt—so much mud—the black silhouettes of branches overhead, the snarls of twisted wire. Between the clouds of vanilla-smoke, the blue of the sky. You could almost feel it against your skin like the splash of the sea. You could escape into that blue if you tried, if you knew how, if you knew where to go … if …
“Her name?”
Such a brilliant shade of blue. New summer. High June. The color of carefree youth and endless days and warm nights, innocence and freedom and the boastful courage and spirit that experience has not yet wrung to caution and cowardice. If I could take but one thing, I would like to take the memory of that single, brilliant color …
“It looks as if I’m losing you, Algae. And there are still so many secrets locked inside your head, caught in your throat, balanced upon the tip of your tongue.” Kreiger looked to one of his monsters. “Gerrymander, Algernon has something he’d like to share with us, a secret he wants to tell. But he can’t find the words.”
And with chilling calm, he said: “Look for them, won’t you?”
The Wasteland creature took Algernon’s head in thick-clawed fingers, prying his mouth open until the bones snapped and the flesh tore, the Writer’s screams lost in a thick, wet choke of his own blood.
CROSS-OVER STATION
While an empty alleyway bore witness to the death of the Writer at the hands of his ancient nemesis, Jack walked up and down Main Street searching for a train station, oblivious. He had already closed out his bank accounts and stopped for breakfast at a fifties-style diner. Neither had taken as much time as he thought. Amazing how easily one’s entire life’s savings could be collapsed into a simple debit memo. He carried it to the teller window where it was brusquely exchanged for cash.
And just like that, his last connection was broken, nothing holding him here but old habits.
Breakfast, what was to be the glorious start to a fantastic day of unimaginable surprises, proved equally unexciting. They served good coffee, he had to admit. Three cups later, he found his nerve and left. But good coffee aside, breakfast was otherwise ordinary.
As it so happens, it was the last ordinary thing in Jack’s life.
He started at the corner of Main Street and Locust and headed towards Seventh, looking from side to side for Cross-Over Station. Few businesses operated along this section of Main Street, and those that did discouraged walk-in traffic. On one corner was the distribution center for the local newspaper, a somewhat-battered dispenser chained to a post just outside its doors, empty. On the opposite side of the street, a small nameless bar with boarded windows and dead neon promises of three kinds of draft beer and live nude dancers. It was closed.
Halfway down the block, Jack found the newspaper kiosk that the Writer said he would meet him at. It jutted from the corner of an alleyway, an afterthought forgotten like the empty newspaper dispenser. A simple wooden box liberally painted in pine green, sun-blistered and flaking, full of magazines and unattended. He thought that perhaps he was somehow missing something; that the owner was simply crouched inside ripping open newspaper bundles or inventorying candy bars. But after a couple minutes, Jack was forced to conclude the stand was abandoned.
He scanned the headlines of newspapers and supermarket tabloids, nothing catching his attention. There was speculation about the extra-marital affair of Hollywood’s latest rising star. The Dow fell yesterday. More gossip over the private life of a member of the British royal family. One astrologer’s predictions about actresses currently appearing in this month’s top-ten rated television shows. Magazines covered the back wall, promises of in-depth stories on world events, business advice, sport-fishing tips, golf hints, make-up suggestions, sexual pleasure. A buck caught in a camera-man’s cross-hairs stared at him from across the stand. An airbrushed woman, naked but discretely concealed by strategic banner boxes and artfully placed hands, smiled invitingly. Her expression, like the eyes of the white-tail—like the place itself—was empty.
“She’s not for you!”
Jack turned, startled by a man standing not two feet from him in a filth-covered overcoat, scuffed work boots, and threadbare pants that might have been faded brown or grime-darkened khaki. The man’s face was shadowed with dirt and beard bristles in which he stored bits of leaves and dried residue—maybe a previous meal, maybe phlegm, maybe vomit; Jack didn’t care to know which. But the man’s eyes were as bright as glacial ice, and more than half-mad.
“She’s mine! She’s not for you!” the vagrant shouted again.
Jack stared back at him, hands clutching tighter at the straps of his bags. “Okay.”
“Do you know where unicorns go when they die?” the vagrant demanded, thrusting his grizzled face towards Jack like a tortoise stretching from its shell. His breath reeked: rotting teeth, cheap wine, sweet junk gone bad. “Do you?”
Jack slowly shook his head, no.
“Anywhere they want,” the vagrant answered crisply. “Do you understand? Do … you … understand?”
Jack nodded, yes, but it was a lie. He understood nothing.
Seemingly content with his willingness to listen and nod in all the right places, the man’s lids drooped, his face going slack, bright eyes fading to bloodshot and yellow. He turned away and wandered off, disappearing around the corner while mumbling something to no one in particular about the failure of the gold standard.
And Jack was alone again. He looked up and down the street, feeling out of place, breakfast settling unpleasantly in his stomach. He secretly wished there was someone he could look to, someone he could trade quizzical glances with as they both wondered about the secret insanity living and dying in back alleys all across America. Then they might dismiss the observation altogether with the suggestion of coffee at a little café down the street. But he was alone, this section of town completely deserted
, silent but for the distant caw of a lonesome crow.
Jack looked back at the empty kiosk, feeling as though he had sneaked onto the back lot of a sound stage and was prowling an empty movie set, the props set up but the extras yet to emerge from the studio cafeteria, the stars still hiding inside their trailers, waiting for their cue.
Jack let another awkward, silent moment go by then decided that perhaps the scene had already been shot; that he was not too early, but too late. He looked quickly at his watch: 10:53 a.m. Then he peered down into the deep alcove that the kiosk guarded, and saw a pair of very large, glass doors, art deco design with handles made of tarnished brass piping, the glass deliberately soaped over to guard against curiosity. Jack looked up quickly at the stone archway he was under, and saw raised lettering in brushed-steel under a half-circle of ornately carved brick: CROSS-OVER STATION.
He looked again at the double doors, out of place at the end of the shallow brick cave, as if at any moment, time would suddenly pop the clutch, drop itself into gear, and he would find himself caught in the midmorning rush of office workers, white-collar stock speculators, and graveyard shifters bound for work or home, all filing through these doors to reach their trains.
But Cross-Over Station, like the newspaper kiosk, was a relic, an ancient uncovered ruin abandoned in time like a leftover story-line prop. It was dead.
He started forward, the shadowed corners of the alcove wedged with a thick layer of neglect and filth: discarded cigarette butts, flattened and rain-soaked mats of paper, a lost glove, broken glass, something that resembled a used condom. A small shadow slipped quickly into the darkness and disappeared, a rat maybe. Jack reached for the brass handles and swallowed, arm bracing for the possibility that this would all end in folly, that the door wouldn’t budge, that the Writer was insane, and that he himself was the biggest fool this side of heaven.
He pulled on the door, and was actually amazed when it opened. He jerked his hand away almost reflexively, the quick reaction to grabbing something hot, and watched as the door swung closed.
About this, at least, the Writer had been telling the truth! Jack was only just realizing that up until this very moment, and in spite of everything he had done so far, he still hadn’t entirely believed him.
Maybe even more startling was the discovery that some part of him, deeply rooted and terribly frightened by everything he was doing in his newfound madness, actually wanted the door to be locked, wanted this to end, wanted him to go back to his normal, ordinary, usual existence.
But that could never happen now.
When he reached for the handle again, it was with an anticipation that made his heart trip, the pounding in his ears so loud he would have sworn that anyone standing next to him just then would have heard it; would have known. Possibilities were unfolding before him. Forget the broken bits of mortar around the entranceway. Forget the smashed bottle of cheap wine still half-wrapped in a paper bag. Forget the condom and the glove and the debris and the scurrying rat. Forget it all. Cross-Over Station was real! And he never even knew it existed. Whole realms of possibilities were opening up before him, waiting only on his willingness to look. All he had to do was seize them. Ever forward, never back.
Precisely because there is no back. As the Writer pointed out, there was nothing left for him to go back to except a place he did not want to be. This was his second chance.
Not far away, the Writer’s lifeless body sprawled in an alleyway under a broad sky of bright summertime blue, the lower-half of his face destroyed.
Jack entered Cross-Over Station.
Whatever he imagined, whatever he tried to prepare himself for, the station failed him. Beyond a small atrium was a vast space where long wooden benches like church pews faced a single track—a single track! No arrivals, just departures. A world trapped in its beginning.
Your ticket did say “one-way.”
Perhaps that was why the station was abandoned. Cross-Over Station was like stepping over the threshold of some post-apocalyptic wasteland where everything was left behind but the people: empty benches, discarded paper cups, the occasional newspaper. But no sign of habitation. No spilled coffee, or smoldering cigarette butts, or hastily discarded wads of gum stuck to the benches. Everyone had walked out of this place a long time ago, and no one had ever come back.
Covering the ticket counter’s glass front was a small sign reading, JUST STEPPED OUT — BE BACK MOMENTARILY. A pair of feet walked between the two statements, the kind of friendly sign one could buy at any office supplies store. Only this sign was ancient, the glue on the tape long ago turning to a useless amber crust, the card dry and yellow, as brittle-looking as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The sign might simply have been a relic, saved and reused for more years than anyone cared to remember. But Jack had the impression that it had hung there since before the Eisenhower administration, and whoever had stepped out would not be back. Not ever.
Just like you, Jack.
In college, he read Stephen King’s The Stand, a book about a plague that wiped out most of the population, leaving behind all of the machines and buildings and relics of the modern society, but none of the people. Whole towns silenced, an empty world of artifacts. A reminder of how one’s entire life was composed not so much of places and things, but the people relative to them. And standing here in the gloom of an abandoned train station, a silver screen actor fifty years too late for the scene’s final take, he was reminded of this fact. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon; for the rest of your life …
Jack walked down the aisle between the rows of benches, feeling as if he was entering a church of invisible parishioners, the sound of his footsteps loud in the dead silence. He stopped at the lip of the platform, the yellow caution line nearly gone now, rubbed clean by the scuffing and dragging of a million passing feet boarding and leaving the trains over the countless years that Cross-Over Station was in vogue. Travelers moving back and forth, work to home and back to work again, traveling salesmen, vacations to distant relatives. All gone now, erased with the passage of time. Cross-Over Station was dead, an empty shell abandoned by the creature that had outgrown it.
An enormous clock stood atop a wrought-iron pole, its face at least eighteen inches across, large antique hands pointing to black, gothic numerals. 10:57. Jack confirmed the station time with his wristwatch, surprised that it was still running, much less that the time was correct. It wouldn’t be long now.
So where was the Writer?
Jack glanced back at the doors, hoping to see a shadow fall across them, hoping to see the Writer bursting in at the last moment. Ah, good to see you again, Jack. So glad you decided to come. Didn’t have any problem finding the place, did you? The outside looks like hell, but in its day … Well, time to reminisce later. Are you ready for an adventure?
Yes.
But the Writer was nowhere to be seen. Jack waited at the edge of the faded yellow line, reading and rereading the sign on the opposite side of the tracks: DO NOT STAND AHEAD OF THE YELLOW LINE UNTIL THE CONDUCTOR HAS GIVEN THE SIGNAL TO BOARD.
He looked again at the clock. 10:58.
Jack started patting his pockets to waste time, making a mental inventory of the contents in an effort to reassure himself that nothing was lost or missing—nothing other than what he already knew was lost. He assured himself he still had his wallet, half of his life savings kept inside, the rest stowed in his duffel bag. Beside his wallet, a pen—what writer didn’t carry a pen? In his front pocket, some change and a small jackknife. He suffered a moment of panic over his missing keys before remembering that he didn’t have keys anymore. His apartment keys were in an envelope on the windowsill, and his car key was lost in the parking lot of Stone Surety Mortgage. There was nothing else. All that he had was what he carried.
This is what it feels like to start over, he thought, the realization both liberating and unsettling. He had no keys because he had no locks; locks kept things safe, and he had nothing to keep. He was back to
square one.
10:59. Time mocked him.
And he was still missing a guide.
Jack took the ticket from inside his jacket and read it again, no better understanding of its nuances than before.
Staring up at the clock—it was now 11:00—he felt time stretch out like an elastic band reaching into oblivion, a track stretched into the unknowable darkness at either end of the rail.
Then the big hand on the clock rocked back and jumped, the gears clunking into place, loud in the silence as Jack realized he was actually holding his breath, waiting.
It was 11:01.
The silence of Cross-Over Station was shattered by a screaming train whistle. Startled, he stumbled backwards away from the tracks; feet tangling and making him fall. He glanced up self-consciously. Right on time, just like the Writer said.
If only he could say the same for the Writer.
From out of the right tunnel, a deep rumbling like a stampede charging towards him, louder with every passing second. A single light emerged from the darkness, a cyclopean eye streaking like a comet. The train thundered in, a black locomotive that did not seem particularly emblematic of any one era of the steel rail, but might have been a mongrel of all of them. A few of the cars bore the passenger line trademarks: steel casing with windows and stripes of blue and red. But other cars were blackened iron. The words HEAVY METAL were stenciled upon the engine’s enormous black barrel, looking more like a steam locomotive from an old western than a modern diesel. It ground to a halt in a wafting cloud of white vapor and coal smoke stinking of oil and soot-blackened filth. The car that came to rest in front of him was a simple passenger car, brick red, windows along its length but no one inside. No faces pressed against the glass, greasy fingerprints and clouds of breath. No hands waving to friends and strangers alike. Like the station, the train appeared empty.
With a final whine it stopped, and the door in front of him slid back automatically. He stared at the train car, then back along the length of the train. He could no longer see the engine, obscured now in a thick bank of white steam and smoke. The train’s other end was still lost in the tunnel.
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 6