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

by Mark Reynolds

  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.

  Then the shape began to lumber forward, a thickening of the fog that heaved towards them like a shambling wave of gray mist. It wasn’t hurrying towards them. It didn’t need to; they couldn’t escape.

  Leland reached out, grabbing Lindsay’s shoulder and drawing her closer to him while his other hand groped for the doorknob, his feet shuffling backwards until he felt it stick painfully into the small of his back. His hand clamped down upon it, palm slick and trembling, his brain praying against all reason that the door wouldn’t be locked.

  The knob turned, Leland stumbling backwards into the gas station and dragging Lindsay down on top of him just as the thing charged, taking on form as it descended on them from the fog.

  * * *

  The gate was scrolled ironwork, ornate and strong, the archway it blocked off carved from granite and cut with inscriptions. The key to the gate hung almost absently on a simple hook just beside it. What had Ariel said: Not like a vault, but a prison. If that was true, what were they setting free?

  From the corner of his eye, he saw the Sons of Light turn the corner, and hesitation fell away to hardwiring. Feet apart, Alex stared down the corridor, guns at arm’s length, firing repeatedly. No cover but
the bare walls, the Sons of Light died in droves, the passageway littered with the injured and the dead as reinforcements pushed forward, eager to supplement the piles. Alex knew it would only be a matter of time before they could use their own dead for cover.

  A hand threw something towards him and he fired, the bullet taking most of the fingers away in an enchanting aerial dance of flesh and bone and blood, delighting the red. The hurled canister clattered upon the stone floor, smoke gushing out in long, billowy ribbons. More canisters were tossed. He shot one out of the air, but not the other. The hallway began filling with smoke.

  You can’t shoot what you can’t see, he thought. And numbers are on their side. Already, they were firing blindly down the corridor, their strategy simple: fire enough bullets and eventually you’ll hit something; keep firing and eventually you’ll kill it.

  “We have to get out of here,” Alex said.

  “This way!” Ariel shouted, already fleeing down the steps behind the ornate doorway sealed behind the iron gate.

  Alex scrambled backwards after her retreating voice, crouching beneath a barrage of gunfire before breaking into a desperate run down stairs that wound deep beneath the massive building that held the Court of Fathers. The stairs ended in an enormous chamber, the walls honeycombed with holes, each lit by a single candle, the air acrid with smoke, the earthen floor deep with wax drippings. He realized that they were standing on the canyon floor upon which Janus had been constructed centuries before, the vaulted chamber a shrine around which the entire city had been built. At least four other sets of stairs led into the chamber, but Alex knew better. The chamber was a trap, a funnel for all byways and passages and corridors of the city from which the Sons of Light would surround them, bullets from all sides, all directions. This was the end.

  Iron stands of lit candles spiraled towards the room’s center, twisting around the broken remnants of a stone doorway, shattered until only the base and a fragment of the arch remained around a simple wooden door. He caught up with Ariel, approaching it beside her, filled with a mix of awe and disbelief. It was only a door. Not a gateway into heaven, but a simple door, one that would look most at home on a garage or an old tool shed. Intricate sigils and diagrams of paint and colored sand inscribed the packed earth surrounding the outlandish archway along with splatters of what Alex thought might be fresh blood. Wooden crosses surrounded the edifice, at least a hundred or more, each bearing the sacrifice of a single cat eviscerated and nailed to the wood with frightening care. The room buzzed softly with blowflies, the thick, cloying stink of the candles a thin mask over the stench of rot.

  “What is this?” he asked. They had fought their way here to the center, to the very heart of Janus, but for what purpose? He had been so certain that he would know once he saw it, that somehow Jack would grant him understanding when he did what he was supposed to do. But what he saw was just a common door: recessed panels, dark wood finish, brass knob; a perfect addition for an early 1900’s American home. Nothing more.

  Ariel shook her head, unable to explain, but moving towards the doorway as though drawn to it.

  “What do we do?” he asked.

  “Open it.”

  “But it doesn’t go anywhere,” Alex protested. “It’ll probably fall over the minute we touch it.”

  “No. Open it.”

  “But—”

  “Just open the door, Alex. That’s why it’s there. A doorway is simply a means of moving from one place to another. That’s all. Open it. Trust him.”

  “Trust…” His voice trailed away as he caught her expression, her eyes fierce, her face washed in orange light. There was a sense of wonder in her stare that he had not seen since the first moment he met her; that long ago morning when he found her facedown upon the floor, relishing the smooth touch of finished wood because it was something never before experienced. It was that expression that enchanted him, and which enchanted him still.

  That’s what witches do, boy.

  Alex opened the door just as the Sons of Light burst into the room from all sides, weapons raised, eyes mad with bloodlust and holy fervor. Behind it was … another door!

  It hung impossibly in what Alex knew could not be reality as he understood it. He knew it with the same certainty that he knew the next doorknob would not turn when he tried it. The way was impassable, the door a ruse, a red herring, a lure bringing the unwary to their foolhardy end. Something in his chest turned cold, sinking like a stone. He felt his eyes slide shut, a softly murmured curse seeping from his lips.

  And from the fringes of the darkness, he heard them coming.

  * * *

  Hauling Lindsay by her jacket, Leland propelled her through the back door of the gas station, scrambling after and slamming the door behind them both just as the little room with its manual cash register and paintings on black velvet was completely destroyed. Leland heard the crash of the large front window, splinters of glass shattering against the door at his back. There was a more solid crunch, what he guessed might be the front of the building or possibly the counter. More things bounced against the door, and he knew it wouldn’t hold against what was out there. Nothing would.

  And for no reason at all, he found himself recalling parts of his life with vivid clarity. His secretary’s name was Melissa Geller. She had been mildly infatuated with him for a time, but he had no use for office romance; bad for his concentration; never fish from the company pier. His indifference cooled her desire and she was presently engaged to a CPA named David Hoffmeier. The invitation to their wedding was on his desk where he left it before leaving for his meeting in New York. He hoped the meeting would somehow afford him an excuse to decline. David was a cocksucker; Melissa could do better. One of the people in New York he was going to meet was a withered crone whose controlling interest he had just succeeded in buying out. Her name was Ramona Jankoviak. He joked to his financial officer as they sewed up the deal that the old bitch pissed icicles. Hal laughed and said goodnight; they would talk more on the plane the next day.

  Leland felt short of breath, almost faint as he found himself trapped in the backroom of a gas station suffering flashbacks on his life that seemed to be no more. His world was reduced from skyscrapers and board meetings and opulence to a tiny backroom with a bare mattress on a metal bed frame, a few boxes of canned oil and out-of-date travel maps. You’ve lost your mind, you know. This is the fruition of a complete, mental breakdown!

  The room offered nothing but a backdoor and a window overlooking the fog-shrouded swamp, a few featureless gray trunks rising from the glassy water like the legs of tall animals grazing in the clouds. The door might be an exit, or just a closet, or maybe nothing at all.

  Lindsay was shrieking at the top of her lungs.

  “Stop it! Stop it, godammit!” Leland yelled, shouting back because he secretly wanted to join her.

  Lindsay’s mouth clamped shut, face stricken, eyes filled with tears. Behind him, Leland could hear the crashing and shifting of something heavy as it rooted about the rubble of overturned goods, broken glass, smashed wood, snorting like an animal searching out some small morsel.

  “Check that door,” he ordered. If it was a closet, maybe there was something in it he could use as a weapon. If it was nothing more than a backdoor, well, they wouldn’t be any less safe out there in the swamp.

  Lindsay grabbed the door and started pulling and twisting at the knob until it became clear that she would have no luck. “It’s locked,” she protested.

  “It can’t be. There’s no lock on it. Get away.”

  He crossed the room just as whatever was outside rammed the door, the bottom panel splitting apart, causing a thick cut of wood to crack loose and drop upon the floor, the edges of an enormous claw retreating back from the new hole.

  But Leland had already seen something wrong about the backdoor, something hard to explain but gnawing at him all the same. The door was too heavy, too ornate, solid wood boards in what was otherwise a swamp-shack of cast
off parts. It wasn’t right. In fact, it was a hundred different ways of wrong. The door seemed purposefully out of place, an artist’s wet dream, the kind of thing he might have expected from Jack.

  Revelation came suddenly and with earnest.

  Leland turned the knob easily, and opened the door, stepping through to a world unlike any he had ever allowed himself to imagine.

  * * *

  For one moment, Alex was aware of the door in front of him opening from the other side, of looking at someone who looked a little like Leland Quince and a little like no one he knew: shabbily dressed, hair in disarray, face bruised and haggard. But he was smiling. The image standing before him posed like a reflection of his own face upon the water; water he was falling into, the sensation brief and dizzying.

  He heard the gunfire, saw the smoke, but could only stand and stare at the impossible door behind the door, feeling like a fool. The rage that burned in him had gone cold, the red demon turned silent. Why, Jack? What was the point? If all I was going to do was die, why didn’t you just let me live out my time in the Saloon, let me spend a few days drinking beer and eating junk food and making love to Oversight (Ariel November now)? What was the point of any of it?

  And then the other door opened, and Alex felt himself yanked out of his body and catapulted through. He lost something, a feeling like a weight falling away; thoughts in his head on the verge of forming simply danced into oblivion. He felt the tears upon his face that might have been joy or sorrow or empty rage run from his eyes as he fell forward through the doorway.

  So this is what it’s like to die, he thought, and experienced a feeling like déjà vu: a cement culvert, heat shimmering off the concrete as afternoon turned into evening. Staring down at his sneakers, splatters of white paint on the laces, on his denim coveralls, he rounded a corner, two men standing tight together, arguing. Don’t know why or what about and don’t care. Head down, he pressed on, pretending not to see. Give ‘em a wide berth; don’t say anything or do anything; pretend you didn’t see and just walk on. More heated words then a single explosive crack, the ping of a bullet off the cement. He stumbled and fell, landing on a stone, stabbing him, sharp and painful. But I’m okay, thank God. I’m all right. The pain would be bigger. There’s only an empty feeling in my chest where the rock is sticking into me. The bullet didn’t hit me. It missed. It missed, of course. Just a rock. My feet got tangled. Got tangled and I fell on a rock. Otherwise, I’d be…