The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (54 page)

Because he had finally arrived—just like he promised.

And he had a lot of work to do.

The din fell away as all eyes in the
room found him, and the world became a tomb, the turning of the earth poised
upon his silent stare. He raised his hands to the gathered crowd, not surprised
by what he saw. He was different. His entire body had changed: new, powerful,
majestic,
perfect
. The raw power of his new form just a physical
representation, an external expression of his inner greatness, an attempt by
the flesh to actualize what was too vast to define, too immense to contain. Fire
coursed through him—through his veins and arteries and capillaries—burning as
it transformed the world around him into shades of liquid red, a crimson haze
descending over his vision.

His new form was encased in metal,
bands as flexible and tight as skin, as impenetrable as steel, spiked and
bladed, his touch lethal. He was a weapon, a destroyer of worlds.

For reasons he did not know, words
rippled through his mind then disappeared, lost forever:
Leland Quince, Wall
Street’s Wrecking Ball, back in the saddle
.

He turned his crimson gaze upon the
gathering hordes, seeing into their frightened eyes and knowing each one of
them in turn. He smelled the sweat of their terror, and it was sweet. A glance
opened their souls like cheap paperback novels, children’s books with large
words and simple pictures, scrawling simplicity. He saw the flaws in each and
every one of them that it was in his nature to find. Everything was flawed.
Everything was imperfect. Everything!

Except him. He was perfect. Powerful.
Absolute. Eternal.

—
Gentlemen, I’ve called you all to
our first meeting to discuss some changes that need to be made
—

All around him, they fell to their
knees, hands clapped over their ears, wailing in agony.

—
We’ve reached that critical
juncture where it’s time we looked closely at ourselves and asked that
difficult question: What am I doing wrong?
—

The Sons of Light flailed the ground,
ears frothing with blood. Some gibbered and screamed hysterically, eyes wide
and utterly insane, while others gouged relentlessly at blood-effused sockets.

—
For a great many of you, the list
of personal failings will be long. But what concerns me most is your own
self-delusion. You’ve lost focus, your judgment clouded by fear and inadequacy.
You have completely lost track of what you were doing, and where you were
going, and have wallowed in your own incompetence while pursuing scapegoats to
little or no end, your efforts wasteful, your thinking flawed … I’m here to
change all that
—

The bedrock began to quiver, perhaps
from the screams of the Sons of Light, perhaps from the screams of the city of
people above, all realizing that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Or
perhaps it was Janus itself, the city sensing what was to come and weeping
inconsolably at its own inability to avert it. Armageddon was not a mythical
battlefield from the stories of end times, not an abstraction or an instrument
of the zealous to frighten the faint-hearted. Armageddon was real. Armageddon
was now.

—
Change can be difficult; painful.
But nothing worthwhile ever came without effort, a price
—

Dogs howled in the streets as the fog
thickened and turned sickly yellow and poisonous. Petitioners raced to the Hall
of Fathers, bowing to the steps, kissing lifeless statues of self-proclaimed
saints, begging the shrieking priests therein for absolution. Some simply
congregated with others to read final passages, hug one another and weep.

Far below the tangled streets and
byways of Janus, deep within the city’s heart, Leland Quince, who could no
longer remember that name as anything except the fleeting images of a dream
lost upon waking, slowly raised his armored hands and stretched forth his
fingers, hearing the bones pop, the muscles creak, the fibers of each and every
element of his flesh shift as energy fired through him like an overloaded
circuit. He knew every strand, ever cell, every particle of his own being that
snapped and hissed with raw, unbridled power. It was a delicious sense of
self-awareness, one he had never known before, one he planned to relish for eternity.

From his fingertips, the energy
within him began to spurt in blue-green sheets of liquid fire. And the rapture
that shot through him was better than anything he had ever known.
Anything
!
Convulsions erupted within his perfect flesh, stiffening his limbs, lancing up
his spine and unleashing still more fire.

The surrounding screams fell away …

(You’ve burned them all up! Destroyed
every one of them!)

 and he heard only his own laughter,
a high, rich ecstasy that blew like the whirlwind.

Fire exploded from his fingertips in
great fans of energy, arcing solar flares lancing through stone, mortar and
timber like paper, as if the whole malignant city was nothing more than a
mountain of old parchment or dusty attic books; kindling for the fire. The
white tiles of the Wall of Penitence exploded under the heat, the iron turned
to slag, the prisoners to dust. Cement turned to powder and stones fell apart
like a child’s creation of toy blocks. Confessor’s Row collapsed, the stone
running away in molten streams, losing cohesion, losing all sense of itself.
Rivers of molten rock flowed through the streets and causeways like rainwater.
The Hall of Father’s did not burn so much as erupt in a blinding firestorm that
heralded the end and the beginning. In moments, the Guardian City, the city of portals and gateways that was called Janus, was completely consumed by flame.
Sometimes, the only way to fix something is to start over. Destroy the old, and
build anew. And this time, it would be perfect.

—
My name is Armageddon. My time
has come—

*     *     *

Alex Foster awoke on the floor, face
pressed against hard, lacquered wood. He could taste dust and dirt on his lips.

This was not at all what he expected
death to be like.

He crawled slowly to his knees, the
weight of weapons and guns and ammunition now gone. A stained flannel shirt, a
T-shirt and jeans replaced the blood-colored coat.

“Alex?”

Beside him, Ariel November looked
around, wearing shorts and a tank top and cheap, department store sneakers. She
looked so utterly and completely normal—beautiful, but normal—that for a moment
he almost didn’t recognize her. But she was looking at him with a kind of
amazement, that astonished expression she kept in reserve for those things that
she inherently knew but had never before experienced firsthand; a face of
innocence. She was looking at him and the plain room, the peeling wallpaper and
unmade bed, his disheveled clothes and puzzled expression.

He hugged her suddenly, desperately,
and together they held each other in the backroom of a gas station.

Lindsay was standing to one side,
watching them, tears on her face. “I wasn’t sure I would ever see you two
again,” she confessed. Behind her, a closed door that seemed somehow familiar.
He was sure he had never been here, but somehow the back door of the small room
was reminiscent of something he had seen before; maybe moments before …
maybe
somewhere else
…

On the floor, a long knife carved
from a human thighbone. It lay there, forgotten, like a thing without a
purpose, a keepsake without relevance.

There was a small scraping sound at
the other door, as if an animal were scratching to come in. Further away, a car
horn was beeping loudly. Alex released Ariel and stood up, opening the door. A
dog ducked in happily, tail wagging. It had a thick, mottled coat, different
colored eyes, big ears and a long muzzle that suggested it was a mix of every
known stray in the hemisphere. The mongrel ran straight to his sister.

“He remembered,” Lindsay said,
hugging the dog about the neck while it licked her face. Alex wasn’t sure what
she was talking about.

Again, the car horn, louder this
time:
squaaawwwwwnnnk
!

Alex walked out through an atrium
with its small cash register and an assortment of quick snack items and
cigarettes. Outside, parked at a pump island, was a man in a long Buick. He
looked up, double-chinned and dressed in an ugly brown suit, and flashed Alex a
friendly smile.

“Wa’n’t sure if yaw open this
mornin’,” he said with a deep southern drawl. “Been layin’ ona hawn fah a
minute an’ a half.”

Alex looked at him, looked at his
car, looked at the new chrome trim detail. He glanced at the signs on the
gasoline pumps: unleaded for $1.56 a gallon. He looked up at the sky. Behind
him, the sun was rising, burning away the mist that still clung to the tall
swamp trees where the Spanish moss hung like thick strands of hair. The sky was
pale blue and clear for as far as the eye could see.

This was his world; a world he
understood. It was a world of McDonalds’ French fries and cable TV and shopping
malls and $1.56 a gallon gasoline. Gone was the world of Wasteland dregs,
guardian gargoyles, bone magic, Red Knights, and crazed sorcerers battling one
another over custody of a dead saloon that controlled the universe, or
universes, or maybe just the borderlands separating the lost dreamer from the
lunatic. He was at last where he belonged. He, Alex Foster, owner of a rundown
gas station and crab shack left to him by his father, home of the best crawfish
for thirty miles, a fact because no one else sold them within a thirty-five
mile radius.

And Ariel November and Lindsay were
with him.

Alex found himself staring up at the
sky overhead and wondering if the sky over the Wasteland was as blue. “Thank
you.”

“How’s that?” the man asked.

“Nothin’. I guess my head was
somewhere else.”

“I’m not su’prised,” the man said
with a knowing smile, looking past Alex at the gas station behind him. A pretty
young woman stood in the doorway, her legs long and bronzed under the sun, arms
stretching over her head as she looked at the world around her in wonderment.
Lindsay had taken the dog to one side of the driveway, and was apparently
trying to teach him how to fetch a stick, a skill the dog seemed indifferent
to. At least, this morning.

“Hey, yaw ‘kay?”

Alex turned back to the driver of the
Buick. “Yeah,” he said distantly, swallowing as he felt a grin steal over his
face. “I’m okay. I think everything’s gonna be okay. So what can I do for you?”

“Fillah up, kid.”

So he did.

THE FINAL NAIL

IN THE COFFIN

Jack woke up to sunlight, not sure
how long he had been asleep. No more than a day, he hoped. He understood
everything so much more clearly now.

But was it in time to save them?

He made his way to the bathroom,
thoughts shuttling between random, unconnected trivialities and blank
whiteness. He was naked, but did not remember how. His skin and hair were
clean; he did not remember that either. Returning to the bedroom, he spied a
neatly folded change of clothes near the foot of the bed next to his sneakers,
and little else. Bereft of clutter, the bedroom seemed overlarge and useless.
The nightstand remained, nothing on it but an empty juice bottle he had no
recollection of drinking. And there was the tall grandfather clock, its
arrhythmic ticking of the wrong time as perplexing as the array of
counterweights behind glass—tools, sharp objects, broken gears—and the face
with its thirteen numbers and two extra hands that served no discernable
purpose. Beyond that, the room was empty.

As was the closet.

As was Leland’s room.

He pulled on the jeans and T-shirt
left out for him, a feeling of normalcy returning slowly like the morning after
a fever; feeling good would take more than just some extra hours of sleep, but
it was a beginning. And beginnings were always the hardest part.

Music drifted softly down from the
iron stair, “Glycerine” by Bush looping over and over. He followed the song up
to his writing room, perhaps the only place left in the Saloon still relatively
intact, though he thought he left it in greater disarray this morning.
Had
it only been this morning?
If he’d slept into the next day, the barrier
would have failed, and the Cast Outs would have overrun the Saloon.

No, he could not have been asleep
more than a day. It wasn’t possible.

Was it?

He had recollections of the morning,
the room: dark and cramped and warm, books and magazines and stray papers
scattered upon the floor in reckless abandon. But between then and now, someone
had straightened up: coffee spills cleared away, broken things discarded,
papers scrawled in chicken scratch or covered from corner to corner in typing
now neatly stacked upon the desk by the computer. The last manuscript was still
secreted away in its blue notebook, untouched. The books and magazines had been
returned to the shelves, still in no discernable order. The Jabberwock was on,
a fragment of something he’d written still displayed on the screen:

Alex turned back to the driver of the Buick. “Yeah,” he said distantly,
swallowing as he felt a grin steal over his face. “I’m okay. I think
everything’s gonna be okay. So what can I do for you?”

“Fillah up, kid.”

So he did.

Jack stepped out on the roof.
“Ellen?”

“Up here.”

He followed the sound of her voice to
the stairs. She was sitting near the top where it was the least finished, the
most unstable. He clambered over the unfinished wall to the bottom of the
landing, sat down and looked up at her, amazed she would venture so high;
amazed even more that the top of the stairs could hold her. It would never hold
them both.

“You look a lot better,” she
remarked.

“Thanks to you.”

She shrugged and let a silence fall
between them. There were pieces of the broken coffee cup from a few days ago
lying forgotten on the steps, the brown coffee stain dried and almost
imperceptible against the wood. How many days had it lain there, he wondered?
How many days had he?

“Was I asleep all day?” he ventured.

Ellen nodded distantly, eyes looking
across the Wasteland as it cooled beneath the evening sun.

“Everyone else left this morning?”

Again, she nodded, still staring
outward.

He waited a moment before asking,
“What about them?”

Her body stiffened a little. “They’re
still out there, if that’s what you mean?”

“What have they been doing?”

She gestured for him to move a little
closer, but as he did, he felt the stair shift uneasily under his weight. He
stopped, sitting down carefully, ears attuned to the first creak of twisting
wood, bending nails, the whispery crack like a dry stick that would mean their
deaths; the Nexus lost for a rickety old stair; anticlimactic.

Ellen overlooked his caution,
pointing towards the edge of the sand where the Wasteland dropped off into the
bottomless chasm that marked the limits of reality. Reginald Hyde sat
cross-legged near the edge, intent upon something that Jack could not make out.
At first, he thought the man was wearing some kind of suit, a tight patchwork
of black, swirling designs. Then he realized it was Hyde’s own skin he was
looking at, tattoos of scrawled images, diagrams and words chiseled into every
inch of his flesh, the black ink crawling down across his flabby naked legs and
arms, up his massive belly and drooping chest, and encircling his neck like a
collar. Jack stared harder, squinting into the distance, but could make out
none of the details of the tattoos. Concentrating on them only seemed to make
them shift and blur as though alive, a writhing nest of insects or a knot of
snakes. And Hyde’s illustrated flesh was stapled throughout with long segments
of bones and strings of animal fangs punched through his skin like crude,
tribal piercings.

Jack looked about for the telescope,
curious as to whether Hyde’s activities represented some aspect of Kreiger’s
plan to steal the Nexus, or simply the newest phase in the Cast Out’s growing
madness. But like so many other things—things overlooked or taken for
granted—the telescope was gone. Nail paced the empty widow’s walk from edge to
edge, looking at Hyde then to the other side and something else equally
worrisome.

“And the other two?” Jack inquired
softly.

Ellen’s eyes remained dutifully fixed
upon the distant horizon, the flat break between the white sand that changed
color with the day’s end, and the evening sky. Her hand gestured off in the
other direction from Hyde, the way that followed the steel rails back across the
endless expanse of open Wasteland, back to reality.

Perhaps a hundred yards away, surely
well outside of the shrinking barrier that protected the Saloon, Kreiger and
Rebreather stood in guarded conversation along the edge of the rails. While
he’d slept, dregs had swarmed over the tracks like carnivorous beetles, eating
them away. Sand was dug out from under twenty feet of rail, the ties pried
loose, steel left hanging over an open pit like the shallow grave of some
otherworld giant. One rail was snapped apart and pried out of alignment, the
other badly twisted, both scored and chipped. In another reality, they would
have been impassible, but here anything was possible.

Or maybe not.

Above him, Nail paced furtively.

“Can they do that, Jack?”

He looked up, startled by Ellen’s
question. She was looking at him now, her expression asking not so much for an
answer as some measure of reassurance.

“No,” he said. “The most they can
hope to accomplish is to delay it. The train and the tracks aren’t really
subject to the rules of reality; the ones that say it should derail if it slams
full-speed into a broken section of track. The train and the rails are just
physical representations, a means to an end. It doesn’t have to be a train and
it doesn’t have to run on tracks. That’s just a convenient way of thinking,
like the sun setting in the west, or the moon in the night sky. They can delay
the way back to reality, but they can’t stop it.”

And as he said it, he heard a voice
in his head add:
You think—you hope! —but you don’t really know, do you?

“But if they delay you enough, won’t
you run out of time?”

He shrugged, a gesture he hoped would
express his indifference to her train of thought, and not his discomfort.
“They’re running out of time, too. Every minute they delay, their power fades a
little more. And power for them is the difference between being the most feared
creatures in the Wasteland, and being dead and forgotten. It’s as simple as
that.”

Again that sly, too-knowing voice:
You
hope—God! How you hope! —but you really just don’t know, do you, Jackie boy?

Ellen nodded, uncertain whether she
believed him or simply appreciated that he would tell her what she wanted to
hear.

“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Will they be all right?”

“Who? Lindsay and the others?”

She nodded, her attention now fully
devoted to him. “I read what you wrote about them. It was still on the
computer. Will they be okay?”

“Yes,” he nodded, the answer to this
question, at least, he readily knew; understood. “They’ll be fine, now.”

Then Jack waited; waited for the next
inevitable question, the one he could not answer, but was expected to.
What
about us?
she would ask.
There are two of us, and only one ticket. Who
stays and who goes?
It was what she was wondering. It was what he was
wondering, too.

But Ellen never asked the question,
and for that, he was grateful. Instead, they both sat in silence upon the
half-constructed stairway, staring out at the horizon as if looking for rain
clouds they knew they would never find, or some hint of distant mountains lost.

“Hmm?”

“Why do you always come up here?” He
wanted to add some explanation for the question about how it wasn’t safe, or it
was uncomfortable, or it was too exposed. Instead, he let the question hang out
there alone, a cloud in an otherwise empty sky.

She shrugged noncommittally. “I don’t
know. I guess it’s … it’s like hope.”

He waited, wanting her to explain.

“High places always make me feel more
hopeful. You can see everywhere from up here. The whole world is laid out
before you, and it’s like you could choose anything. You can go anywhere, or be
anything. Everything’s possible from way up high. I think the Stairway to
Heaven is supposed to symbolize that in part. It’s hope and optimism. You keep
working on it, building it higher and higher, trying to attain what’s up there
just beyond your reach. You may not get to heaven climbing a stairway, no
matter how high you build it, but sometimes its enough that you try. I think
God appreciates the effort.”

She smiled, staring off at the
distant horizon far away over the rails and the squatting form of Lovebone,
past the other members of the Tribe of Dust that paced the edge of the barrier
like wild dogs awaiting the fall of darkness. The brilliant sapphire blue of
day was starting to darken in the direction that they conveniently thought of
as east.

“I guess I never saw it that way
before,” he confessed.

“Really? How do you see it?”

He considered for a moment then lied.
“I never really thought about it.”

*     *     *

Gusman Kreiger crossed the cooling
sands towards the distant, hunched form of the mumbling bone priest, staying
clear of the barrier. Not for fear, no; his hands had healed very nicely, thank
you for asking. But it cost a great deal of energy and that was coming in
shorter and shorter supply of late. He gave the barrier a wide berth so that
Jack would not realize how very small it really was, or how little time he
actually had left. Jack had surprised him. Never again.

Kreiger gave Hyde a similarly wide
space; he was no longer certain of the bone priest’s grasp upon sanity, such as
it was here in the Wasteland. The fat man’s skin was covered over every inch he
could reach with spells and bindings to hold the animal spirits to his will,
augmenting his power with theirs. The writing etched into his flesh, old words
in ancient tongues, bound the mana of Wasteland creatures into Reginald Hyde.
And as he bound the pure essence of beasts and dregs unto himself, he lost a
little more of Reginald in the crowd of his own psyche. And the
spirit-saturated bones piercing his flesh only made the home of Reginald’s mind
that much smaller and more dangerous.

Hunched before him was a thick-browed
gerrymander, enormous jaw hanging slack to reveal rows of large crocodile teeth
and a head of bone-tipped tentacles that draped across its skull like
dreadlocks. Such was the nature of the insanity that vomited them up from the
Wasteland.

Indifferent, Hyde chanted, eyes
rolled back to the whites, one hand palm up in supplication, the other holding
a small knife, the tip razor-sharp.

As Kreiger watched, the slack-jawed
dreg began to quiver, muscle and sinew turned traitor as if eager to escape its
flesh prison and flee the bone priest. But against this instinct, the dreg
leaned forward, spine arching, chest outthrust as if an invisible hook were
tearing its skeleton out, dragging it through an invisible keyhole. Its back
bent further and further until the spine cracked suddenly like dry sticks
beneath the heel of a boot.