Oversight caught her stare and smiled briefly, knowingly, causing Ellen to throw her eyes down, embarrassed. “Has anyone solved the problem of money for the vending machines?” she asked quickly, hoping to divert attention away from herself.
“Yep,” Alex announced, hand gripping the jar’s rim and giving it a small tip, enough to rattle a few coins against the glass. “Mr. Quince found it.” Leland gave her an uncharacteristically modest nod. “So, what say we find something to eat?”
* * *
Breakfast was as uneventful as it was unimaginative, scrounged like a Sunday morning meal in a frat house: a box of cherry Pop-tarts from the candy machine, half a carton of milk, a pitcher of orange juice, and four small boxes of cereal from an open sample-pack found under the bar beside half a loaf of sliced bread. They ate with a mismatch of bowls, plates and silverware; enough for them all, but Jack doubted if he could have made a place for a seventh guest, or even offered someone a second utensil if they dropped one of their own. It was nothing like the breakfast from the previous morning, he thought lamentably, but things had changed since then.
How things had changed.
The new arrival let Alex do most of the talking, his babble meaningless, its only purpose to instigate a conversation that would not come. Oversight listened with only marginal attention. Relentless, and perhaps unaware, Alex plowed on.
“After my parents split up, they were always going out of their way to make me feel special. Like, now that they were only spending half of their time with me, they were trying to make up for it by doing twice as much. I guess it was their way of letting me know the divorce wasn’t my fault. Whatever. But there was an upside. When I was eleven, my father took me to Louisiana for Mardi Gras. It was amazing. We went into the backcountry and the bayou to do some fishing—”
“Did you see hanging moss?”
Jack looked up, astounded. Not really paying attention, he had no idea how Alex had managed to come around to talking about his childhood, but what made him take notice was Oversight’s response in something other than empty nods or hollow monosyllables.
“Oh yeah,” Alex continued, clearly pleased by the breakthrough. “It’s all over out there. I saw tons of it while we were fishing in the swamps. We never caught a thing, but I didn’t care. It was just so amazing back in there. Hanging moss. Trees sticking out of the water. Wildlife everywhere. It felt like a different world.”
Leland snorted, but it went unnoticed.
Oversight listened intently. For reasons unknown, Alex’s tale of childhood vacations in the bayou enthralled the enigmatic woman.
“Did you see any alligators?” Lindsay asked around a mouthful of Fruit Loops.
“Umm, yeah, I think so. It was kinda far away, but I think it was an alligator.”
“Cool,” she said, properly awed.
“Man, I would love to go back there,” Alex said, scanning windows that opened to vast tracts of empty desert. “Of course, I wouldn’t mind being just about anywhere right now.”
Lindsay was the only other one to successfully speak to the new arrival during the course of breakfast, but her answers were not particularly revelatory: How long have you been here? —Forever. —Where were you from before? —Don’t know. And so on. Jack did sense a certain politeness in Oversight’s responses to the little girl. Perhaps she regarded Lindsay as too young to snub outright.
Leland endured all of this with remarkable patience, not deriding Alex or pursuing the issue of the tickets, only drinking coffee, black, and gnawing a piece of dry-toast; neither butter nor jelly could be found. But he paid particular attention to Oversight, noting her careful remarks with Alex much as Jack did, and working meticulously at his palm as if massaging a cramp in his hand.
It was a quiet breakfast, mostly.
Afterwards, while Jack and Alex carried the dishes to the utility sink, Lindsay sat on the edge of the bar, fishing out six pennies from the enormous glass jar. Done, she hopped down and went out on the porch, then reappeared almost instantly. “Who moved the gumball machine?”
It was not the first thing to disappear; it was only the first thing that was noticed. It would not be the last.
CONNECTIONS
As a group, they stared at the empty space on the porch where the gumball machine once stood.
“Maybe a dreg carried it off,” Alex suggested.
“No,” Jack said. “Nail wouldn’t have allowed it.”
“Maybe it snuck in under the sand,” Alex said.
“No,” Oversight said. “Kreiger stores them beneath the sand; they cannot move.”
“How do you know that?” Ellen asked.
Oversight crouched down beside the shadowed track of the gumball machine, fingers lightly touching the darker section of wood. Then she straightened. “You don’t have much time, Caretaker.”
Jack looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“Just that. You don’t have much time.”
“What does this mean?” he asked, gesturing vaguely at the place where the gumball machine was the day before. “And how do you know about it?”
The woman in black did not answer.
“If you know, tell me.”
“You’re the goddamn Caretaker,” she said. “You figure it out.” Then she turned and walked out into the sand. Without a moment’s hesitation, Alex followed.
“Well, Jack,” Leland turned, expectantly. “Why are things disappearing?”
“How the hell should I know?”
Leland’s eyes narrowed, his mouth turning in a faint smile as he went back inside. “Like the lady said, you’re the goddamn Caretaker.”
Jack glanced out at the sand to Oversight then back at the darkened cross on the weathered wood. He didn’t understand. Maybe he never understood anything. But unlike before, he wouldn’t suffer alone for his ignorance. There were others; others who needed him; others he would fail.
“Dammit,” he grumbled, going back inside.
Ellen glanced down at Lindsay. “What say you and I see if we can’t find something to do? Maybe there’re some games or puzzles up in the closet.”
Lindsay nodded and followed Ellen back inside, stopping at the bar to dump the useless pennies back into the pickle jar.
* * *
A hundred paces from the Saloon, Oversight stopped. She crossed her arms and stared out across the vast expanse of nothingness. A few steps behind her, Alex stopped as well, uncertain what to do.
“Why are you here, Alex?” she asked.
“I wanted to make sure you were all right. You … you sounded upset.”
“I’m fine.”
Alex shrugged uncomfortably, a gesture she missed with her back turned, and could only think to say, “It’s dangerous out here.”
“For you.” Then she toed a mark in the sand about a foot from where she stood. “Stay back of this line. It’s the barrier.”
He stared at the line then at the empty air, but could see nothing. “How do you know?”
“I can feel it,” she replied. “The Cast Outs can’t cross it. Neither will the dregs.”
“How do you know so much about the Caretaker and the dregs and that?”
Oversight turned, her stare deliberate, cold. “None of you understand. Even the Caretaker refuses to understand. I know about the Cast Outs and I know about the dregs. I know about the Wasteland and I know about the vermin that live out their lives in the sand like sparks scattered from a dying fire. I know because I have never been anywhere but the Wasteland. It is the only home I have … I have ever known.”
Alex thought she would say more, thought she wanted to, but instead she turned away. Finally, he asked, “So you knew about Kreiger and the Tribe of Dust?”
Silence from her. Then, “Ask me again … another time.”
Alex considered this, unsure where the conversation was going. He never thought much about the future, but he was suddenly afraid of where he was headed and how little he knew about it. How did tha
t line go? Out of the blue, and into the black. “You hesitated a moment ago when you were talking about the Wasteland and home. What was it you were going to say?”
The woman in black was silent. Alex waited.
And waited.
Then, as he was about to give up and walk away, certain the conversation was at an end, she said: “Alex?”
“What?”
“Why did you step between me and Nail?”
Did she really not know, not understand that someone might actually give a damn? Might actually care? Might actually like her?
“Don’t ever do that again,” Oversight said. “I can take care of myself a lot better than you can. Against the Guardian, I would have stood a chance. But he would have killed you. I don’t want that.”
She started walking, her path a gentle arc circling the Saloon, toeing the sand every third step to mark the edge of the barrier.
Alex caught up to her. “Why is it so hard for you to admit that it would be easier if someone helped you?”
She turned back to him, eyes set with grim determination. “This place has no respect for life, yet I have spent over twenty lifetimes here. My knife is made from the thighbone of a Cast Out who thought to use me like his left hand; his error was the last lesson the Wasteland taught him. There isn’t a single plant out there, Alex; not the smallest blade of grass, not the tiniest desert bloom. The entire Wasteland is one giant carnivore, every insect the regurgitated spit of the Nexus. And each is eaten in turn by the next larger, stronger carnivore. There is no base to the pyramid, and thanks to Kreiger and the Writer and even Jack, the system is collapsing upon itself; there is nothing else for the animal to eat, so it’s devouring its own flesh in a failing effort to stay alive. That’s what Jack has to deal with. That’s the dilemma. How does he fix a system so completely broken that it can’t ever be fixed—maybe it should never be fixed? The problem is, Jack isn’t even aware of it himself, and the only people who can tell him are the ones he can’t trust. There are only two ways out of the Wasteland: death or the Caretaker, and Jack has only a limited number of passes to the other side of reality.”
Alex found her stare uncomfortable, but he was no less eager to take in the vast bone-colored sands of the Wasteland. The sun burned down, baking his skin, sizzling his hair, scorching him like a piece of dry, roadside grass
(… not the smallest blade of grass …)
in the summer sun. He wanted a drink, and wanting it made him realize how simple it was for him to get one—just go back to the Saloon, get a glass, turn on the tap, and get a drink; easy as pie—and how impossible it would be out there in the broad stretches of nothingness. Like some purgatorial plane, there was no redemption for the souls lost in the Wasteland; there was only the quiet misery of forever, and the promise of eventual death.
“I … I’m not sure what you want me to say.”
“There’s nothing to say, Alex,” Oversight said, her tone uncharacteristically gentle. “Do you know what I did this morning?”
He shook his head, steeling himself for some horrifying anecdote, the only purpose to remind him that, in her eyes, he was just a boy, ignorant and incapable, of no help to her or even himself; useless and inadequate.
“I touched varnished wood,” she said, her tone betraying the wonder she felt. “I drank the juice from a fruit I have never seen, enough to last me a day. I sat on something that was not sand and felt shade over my head for the first time ever. I hope you never come to understand why that matters.”
Alex wiped self-consciously at the beads of sweat on his lip and forehead, a part of him relieved, a part of him angry. “I just want to be your friend.”
“I’m sorry, Alex,” she said, stepping back. “There are only five tickets. Regardless of who wins, Jack or Kreiger, one of us will not be leaving this place alive.”
Again she walked away. Only this time, Alex did not follow her.
* * *
Lindsay was rummaging in the closet on hands and knees when Jack came down to the foot of the iron steps.
Ellen looked over at him. “Writing?”
“Trying. Gathering my thoughts just now.”
She nodded, unsure what to say to that. She didn’t really know anything about writers per se, how they thought, how they did what they did. It seemed like a lot of bullshit mostly, especially when you considered how much they got paid for the stuff they dumped into movies and television and book racks. She tried it once; nothing grand or glorious, just trying to invent a story in her head. It was like trying to invent a lie, and that wasn’t really that hard, was it? Only it was. After meditating for a couple wasted hours on vague storylines lifted from movies and television shows about characters like badly written soap-opera stars, she surrendered and went to the store to buy a paperback. No, she did not really understand writers, and she didn’t really understand Jack. But she wanted to, and that should count for something.
“Wasn’t there a hanging basket chair in that corner?”
Ellen looked at the empty space. “Maybe. I think so.”
Jack nodded uncertainly, wandering over to where she stood. “Any luck?”
“We’re still looking.” Actually, Lindsay was looking; Ellen was hoping that whatever was found proved no more arduous than Uncle Wiggley, or a pack of Uno cards. And nothing that required going outside. The Wasteland felt dangerous, hostile, a trembling animal starved and injured and angry, lying in wait for anyone unwary enough to venture out.
Distracted, she failed to realize Jack was asking her a question.
“Ellen?”
“What?” she said, startled.
“Do you know where Leland is?”
“Downstairs, last I saw. He was reading an old magazine, I think.”
Jack shook his head. “He isn’t any more satisfied with being here today than he was yesterday,” he said softly. “But instead of being pissed off, he’s as chipper as a clam this morning. It’s like he’s hiding something.”
“Maybe he is,” Ellen replied, careful to keep her voice low.
Jack nodded. “I don’t think his mood and Oversight’s arrival are coincidence.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Gut feeling, I guess. I trust her, and I don’t. I don’t exactly know how to put it. I don’t think she’s like the rest of us. I don’t think she belongs here.”
“None of us belong here.”
“That’s not what I mean. I think she belongs with Kreiger, but I don’t know how, or even why I think so. If she was a threat, I think Nail would have kept her out, or tried to. But he didn’t. So I have to assume she’s not dangerous by herself.”
At least, no more so than any of the rest of us, Ellen thought darkly. “She’s keeping secrets.”
“I know,” Jack said. “But we’re all keeping secrets.”
“Not like her,” Ellen replied. “Most of us keep secrets to protect ourselves. Hers protect the truth she’s hiding. I used to know people who hid secrets like that, drug dealers, mostly. They were all smiles and hellos, good shit, good price, no problem. But they were always hiding something: stepped-on, tainted, narc-wired bag of bad shit that you won’t know about until you’re vomiting blood in an ER somewhere, cuffed to a gurney while a doctor competes for space with an arresting officer trying to Mirandize you while a tube is forced down your throat.” She shrugged, an effort to cover the shiver running up her back. “She reminds me a little of Mr. Quince.”
Jack nodded, giving a vague remark of agreement.
“Look,” Lindsay announced, crawling back out of the closet, strands of hair sticking to the sweat on her forehead. She was holding a large, cherry-red ring, a modernized variant of the Frisbee. “We can play catch.”
Jack was already retreating up the stairs. “I’ll join you later,” he said, and Ellen knew he had no intention of doing so. Jack was bad around people; it was one of the few things about him that she understood completely.
“Ellen, do you wanna play cat
ch?”
She could already feel the uncomfortable trickle of sweat gathering and running down her spine, memories of a baseball rocketing into her skull appearing over and over in her mind as she stared at the large red ring, and pushed down the urge to vomit.
“Can you ask Alex?” she said distantly, her mind suddenly retreating from the gray meat of her flesh, tripping backwards out of her skull in a too-quick effort to escape the diseased meat puppet fighting her. “I don’t feel very good.”
Ellen turned quickly and walked to the bathroom, not entirely certain her eyes were even seeing the floor, the walls, the furniture that leaped out at her. Except, of course, the furniture that had already disappeared. No danger there.
Not for the first time, Ellen wondered if she wasn’t losing her mind.
Behind her, Lindsay watched her go, forgotten.
GAMES
Ellen thought Leland was reading a magazine.
She was wrong.
He sat at a small table in the main room, its surface inlaid with a chessboard, and glanced perfunctorily through an outdated Life magazine, the game on the tabletop commanding his true attention. The mongrel chess set incorporated pieces from a variety of different sets, some pieces missing altogether and replaced with ordinary household items: a black checker for a missing pawn, a salt shaker for a white bishop. Leland found the ragtag assemblage emblematic of the Saloon’s single greatest flaw: indifference. He pushed the pieces around, different strategies, different results, a foundation of maneuvers leading towards a single outcome: the black queen drawing off the white knight and leaving him vulnerable to black’s rook. The white king would fall immediately after. The endgame was never in doubt; all that remained was controlling the moves leading up to that point.
Alex walked into the saloon, glanced at the businessman then made his way to the back of the bar. He searched the refrigerator first then looked under the counter, no sign of what he was looking for in part because he had no idea what he wanted. A part of him wanted a beer, another part wanted something stronger, and still a third thought anything but water would have him throwing up inside of an hour.
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 23