Free The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) by Mark Reynolds Page B

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.
    No one got off. No one ran through
the doors behind him, late and scrambling to board before the train pulled
away. Three minutes remained and he was still alone on the platform in a
deserted station, no one else anywhere to be seen. No passengers. No conductor.
Maybe not even an engineer.
    The open door waited on his
indecision.
    Jack glanced at the clock. In a
minute, it would be 11:05, and then the train would leave.
    This is crazy, he thought. You’ve pissed away all
your options. This is the only one left. Don’t piss this away, too?
    He would have preferred to follow the
Writer on board. He would have liked someone who could answer his questions—of
which there were many—or give him a little direction—of which he had none. But
he was alone.
    Maybe that’s the way it should be.
Maybe it’s time you learned to do it on your own. The Writer gave you a
direction. It’s up to you to follow it.
    Tightening his grip on the straps of
his bags, Jack climbed on board.
    Inside, the train car looked like an old movie theater,
maroon velvet and red leather, nappy threadbare seats showing bared metal worn
through the paint along the edges of the armrests. And the air had a faint,
salt-sour odor of dust, the kind you might expect to find in a forgotten corner
of the garage, or in the floorboards of an old attic. There was no one aboard.
No luggage in the overhead compartments. No half-read newspaper or folded-up
jacket left behind to hold someone’s seat while they were off searching for the
club car. The train was deserted.
    Jack tossed his duffel bag and laptop
into the first pair of seats, creating a small billow of dust, and leaned down
to look out the windows: empty rows of benches, a deserted platform, an ancient
clock.
    He heard the familiar cuh-clunk of the gears, the hand