The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (52 page)

The cab jerked sharply, the wheel
trying to tear free of Leland’s grip. He fought it to a stop, but not before
slewing all the way across the road and nearly into the ditch on the opposite
side, skidding to a halt on the left shoulder amidst a cloud of dust and
grinding dirt and gravel.

Hands fixed to the wheel, knuckles
white and gripped into painful knots, Leland looked over the dash at the edges
of a mist-shrouded world staring back at him in the stillness, trees hung with
Spanish moss like knotted clumps of human hair. Fifty feet away, concealed by
twilight and fog, a small gas station, alone and deserted.

He turned, a monstrous urge in the
back of his skull to backhand the little girl. “What the hell—”

But she had already popped the door
open, and was running towards the deserted gas station, heedless of his
complaint.

“Godammit!” He shut off the engine,
nearly breaking the key in the ignition, and threw his door open. The ditch
alongside the road gaped at him, the front tire inches from the three-foot
gully of swamp water. The tire was completely blown, the rubber shredded
halfway around and laying there upon the rim like the discarded skin of some
unidentifiable reptile. Leland stared a long time at the drooped front corner
of the cab, the little girl momentarily forgotten. What were the odds of a
functioning spare in the trunk?

Cursing, he slithered along the
fender until he could safely round the front of the cab without slipping into
the brackish gully. Sometime during the night, they had traveled out of the
mid-western cornfields and farm towns and entered what Leland could only
imagine was the Deep South. He had never been there himself, not to the
backwoods dives and roadside honky-tonks and bait shacks and white-trash
hovels. He remembered the airports and the cities: Atlanta, Orlando, Shreveport, but none of this looked anything like his world. The trees were rising out of
a swamp, its surface a mirror-smooth reflection of the grayish haze.
Moss-carpeted trees dangled loose heads of hair, eerie in the stillness, the
air filled with the disquieting sounds of insects, birds, and God knows what
else.

And the all-too-recognizable scuff of
a little girl’s sneakers running upon packed dirt and gravel.

“Lindsay!”

“Mr. Quince, come on! It’s somewhere
over here!”

Her voice was coming from the gas
station off the road. If he was lucky, the place might actually open sometime
in the next few hours and offer to sell him a new tire, doubtless overpriced.

“Lindsay, wait up!” he yelled out.

“It’s here, Mr. Quince! Hurry!”

“What’s here?”
How could she see
anything in this fog?

“The
doorway
!”

*     *     *

The third
Book of Revised Prophets
and Revelations
foretold the Red Knight’s coming:
In the company of a
witch will he travel, the Red Knight, moving as a storm into the center of the Guardian City. He shall scatter the faithful before him, and wherever he shall pass, there
will be rivers of blood.

It was no accident that the Court of
Fathers was built at the very center of Janus, protected beneath the layers of
the surrounding city, lost within its heart, even unto itself.

An elite squad of the Sons of Light
guarded the narrow backdoor through which prisoners were escorted—through which
Ariel November was escorted the day before—sworn to fight to the last ounce of
their strength, the last drop of their blood, to prevent the harbinger of
Armageddon from penetrating the very heart of the city. Each aware of his oath,
they watched intently, eyes glistening with manic ferocity, lips drawn into
thin, determined lines that might have been furious smiles, and they offered
silent prayers to God, thankful that they lived in such times as these, and
could be called upon to make such a sacrifice.

But it was really nothing more than
that. A sacrifice.

Fog descended rapidly, the day
turning cold, rain clouds become an unseasonable mist clinging wetly to every
surface it touched. They stared through the haze of gray, a clinging, damp fog
that thickened almost imperceptibly until everything about them was lost in its
greedy clutch: dampening stone, drowning sound, transforming the Guardian City into small pockets of silence, isolated pools of death.

Nearly half a dozen fell before
anyone even realized what was happening. The Red Knight simply walked from the
darkness of a narrow crease between buildings, his shadowy form materializing
out of the vapor like a blood-drenched wraith, weapons out before him firing
round after round, not stopping to reload. No smoke, no hiss-crack of black
powder, just an earsplitting explosion and agony. And for some, there was not
even that. Just oblivion.

That fast, the Sons of Light fell
before the Red Knight.

Alex walked straight at them, guns blazing,
the surreal impression of being a kid again, playing some shoot ‘em up game
with his friends in the backyards and empty lots of the neighborhood. He simply
strode forward, fingers working the triggers of both pistols, guiding them by
instincts that felt borrowed and dreamily unreal.

And all around him, the Sons of Light
perished.

So long as he gave the rage
direction, it rewarded him with power: raw, undeniable, unquenchable power!

Five guards fell instantly, dead or
mortally wounded, as he stepped from the small alleyway, guns blazing. Three
more were killed simply reaching for their weapons, hands grabbing those
ridiculous flintlocks, fingers barely grazing the pommels of swords before
tightening into useless claws of death. Alex fired the last four rounds in his
guns, hitting two more of the Sons of Light and dropping them to the damp
cobblestones in screaming heaps. Only two shots missed; bullets spanged against
the stone and disappeared into the thick fog. His targets were moving now.

The half that remained of this elite
squadron of the Sons of Light charged ferociously, weapons in both hands,
screaming like a horde of berserkers in a blind battle-rage. Some aimed black
powder pistols or crossbows upon him, swords held in second.

Like magic, Alex holstered each
pistol as the last round fired—instinctively aware of how many bullets he had
used; like a piece of himself; the back of his hand—and drew another gun from
beneath his coat. And even as he was raising the Glock, his left hand was
holstering the emptied pistol and going for the .45. He dropped to one knee as
a gunshot cracked like thunder behind him, filling the air with the smell of
burnt sulfur. The lead berserker of the Sons of Light pitched forward like a
severed marionette, his throat a mass of ragged skin, gristle and blood. Others
stumbled upon his falling corpse, and the charge faltered.

Alex gazed back, a single glance
confirming what he already knew. Ariel November stood a few paces behind him,
striding through a cloud of fog and black powder smoke in her stolen leather
coat, discarding a spent flintlock.

Then Alex was firing as fast as his
fingers could flex the triggers, brass casings spilling to the ground,
soundless under the echoing blasts. And each explosion, each kick of the guns,
was a rush that fed the rage; made it happy; made
him
happy. And the
rage spoke to him, urged him forward:
Never stop! Never, never stop! Go on
and on and on and on and…

The witch touched his shoulder,
reality’s reminder, and he ceased abruptly, the shroud of silence falling back
over the cobblestone street. The spent shell of his last round spilled to the
wet stone with an absent plink.

He had killed them all.

Alex strode over to one of the dying,
the man bleeding profusely from a wound in his neck, the blood no longer
spurting from the shattered artery, but burbling weakly down his blood-soaked
coat, his heart already failing. He caught the dying man by the hair. “That was
stupid!” he growled. “Fighting in the open, no place to hide; you never stood a
chance.”

The man’s jaw flexed silently, eyes
unresponsive, unaware, already too far down the tunnel to realize what was
happening.

Alex released him, offering a
disgusted sneer. “You should have blown this entrance up, destroyed every way
in but the front, forcing me through the main gates. You might have stood a
chance. Stupid!”

“Leave him alone,” Ariel reproved,
stepping over the bodies. “Let him die.”

Alex shrugged, fingers blindly
shuttling bullets into emptied chambers and magazines as he walked after her.
There was no question that the Sons of Light would discover this and redeploy.
And when they did, he would be ready.

“They would never concede to destroy
the ways in,” she continued, explaining the slaughter with an indifference
reserved for explaining the rules of reading the New York Times. “Doing so
would concede weakness, both in themselves and their faith in God. They would
rather die first.”

“Hmm, glad I could help,” he said,
side-stepping a body between him and the wide double doors and pulling them
open. His eyes darted from side to side, adjusting to the dim lights of the
corridor. “We need to go deeper. Which way?”

“Down,” Ariel whispered, gaze
searching frantically. “I can
feel
it—the center—like it’s alive; huge
and pulsing and …” Her voice trailed away, searching for a way to describe it.
“
Bleeding
.”

“How’s that possible?” Alex asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know,
but we have to hurry.”

He watched her walk back to one of
the guards lying dead on the steps, scanning until she found the one with an
insignia painted on his shoulder, what he guessed was a symbol of rank. She
grasped the man’s head firmly in her hands, thumbs holding his eyelids open,
her eyes fixed on his, face inches from the corpse. When he asked what she was
doing, Ariel told him simply, “Necromancy.”

Mostly, he tried not to think about
it, loading his guns while he waited

“
We’re looking for a doorway
,”
she said softly, her thumbs sinking into the sockets, lifting the eyes, drawing
them up in a pulp of dead flesh and blood. “
An iron gate, ornate, large. As
big as the corridor and locked from without … not like a vault, but a prison.
It’s down …
”

*     *     *

… here somewhere.”

Lindsay was standing in front of the
station, turning in place and trying to take in the details without knowing
what details to look for. A faded sign proclaimed this to be
Foster’s
.
Painted beside it in small, sun-faded letters was a list:
GAS, MAPS, SNACKS, SOUVENIRS, CRAWFISH
. The last was outlined in red.

Leland did not notice the sign or
Lindsay’s vacant, searching stare. Truth be told, he had not heard a thing
she’d said after mentioning the doorway. He ran to the gas station and pressed
his face to the front window. All he saw was a short counter with a wire rack
of old travel maps and brochures and a manual cash register. Displayed for sale
on the wall behind the counter were cans of motor oil, cigarettes, candy bars
and chips, and paintings of Elvis and The Last Supper on black velvet. A sign
propped in the corner of the window read simply,
CLOSED — Please Come Again
. There was a single door near the counter leading into a
backroom, but nothing else.

“What are we supposed to be looking
for?”

“M-Mr. Quince?”

“You’d think it would be … grander,
this doorway. Less like a Steinbeck novel.”

“Mi-mis—”

“What?”

“What’s that?” Her voice was a papery
whisper.

“What’s what?” he asked, turning.

Lindsay was pointing unsteadily back
the way they came, the fog so thick that the yellow cab—scarcely fifty feet
away—had nearly disappeared. But something was near it, a looming shape,
indistinct, enormous. And while he couldn’t see it, he could definitely
hear
it: a snuffling, grunting noise like a rooting boar or an enormous bull
readying itself to charge.

“Lindsay,” he whispered, voice small
and weak as it echoed through the fog to his own ears. “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” she replied back.
“But I think maybe we’re too late.”

There was a sudden, booming snort,
and the sound of metal being punched—
crushed!
It made Leland think of
crumpling a beer can. And the mental image brought with it the strangest urge
to be holding that crumpled beer can, to have drained the last drop from it and
feel that satisfying buzz, that sensation you only ever got from the first
beer, every one after paling in comparison. His mouth felt as dry as
sand—wasteland dust—as the yellow, boxy shape that he knew was his cab lurched
to one side with a scuffing noise and tipped into the gully along the side of
the road. More sounds of metal crunching, but not that same satisfying
first-beer-out-of-the-pack sound. No, not anymore. Just the sound of a
headlight popping, glass shattering. Something made of metal snapped with a
thin
twik
sound.