The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (51 page)

Then they drove south.

From morning to evening, they just
drove south.

It was insane. Or maybe he was. Maybe
he had control issues, something to be worked out with his therapist,
two-hundred an hour, a solution from another time, another life—a life of OPEC
oil prices and leveraged buy-outs, Wall Street’s Wrecking Ball. But right now,
he would settle for a simple answer to a simple question: where were they
going?

Lindsay did not reply, only staring
out of her window at the setting sun, a distant pink glow lost behind the
thickening haze in the sky.

The road south proved little more
than a blue line on an interstate map connecting the dots of one small town to
the next, most little more than recovering dustbowl crossroads, shop-front signs
offering to barter:
CASH OR TRADE
. Bland expressions on nameless faces watched them pass,
movie extras with no interest in the yellow cab passing through. Shotgun shacks
and ramshackle farms surrounded by sparse fields of thin, yellowing corn and
thick spans of weeds gave way to wood-lined roads where autumn gold dusted the
edges of the leaves.

All in all, Leland thought he was
being a pretty good sport about this. It wasn’t until after their third stop, a
roadside café serving stew and biscuits from a communal pot—the peculiar aroma
casting doubt on the exact origins of the meat
—
that he began to press Lindsay for answers. He did not
demand that she tell him where they were headed, or what they would find there,
or even what it was that they might be looking for. He drove on in silence and
mostly she did the same. Sometimes she craned her head and looked out the
windows as if searching for something, maybe landmarks. But she said nothing to
him one way or another, only letting him know when she wanted to stop, usually
with a brief, disappointing remark of being hungry or thirsty or needing to use
the bathroom.

It was afternoon before he realized
that she only informed him of the reason so he wouldn’t suffer any false hope
over whether it had something to do with their final destination.

While stopped at a pump station run
by a fearsome-looking dimwit in coveralls, a crude mix of Neanderthal and
Tolkien, Leland noticed something new about the trees. They were greener here.
He was certain this morning that the world was on the edge of winter, but it
looked like approaching summer as they pressed southward.

“Do you know where this road goes?”
Leland asked the thick-browed attendant, the man’s under-bite so severe that
his top lip was concealed by a bottom row of teeth, large and chiseled.

The attendant’s head turned down the
road then came back to Leland. “South.”

“I know that, but what’s south of
here?”

Beetle-brow shrugged and Leland was
reminded of a man who delivered mail around the corporate office. The man
looked like the attendant except for the vicious teeth rising like a ring of
tombstones from his lower jaw. And the mail carrier smiled more; he liked to
tell knock-knock jokes, most of them bad. Leland didn’t suppose this man much
cared for jokes of any sort.

He paid for the gas and was about to
leave when something caught his attention.

Standing on the station porch was a
small girl in a sack dress, one eye bulging and milky gray, her ears pointed
and long; some kind of defect or mutation. She smiled at him, revealing gaps of
missing teeth. Sitting beside her was a tall, long-limbed creature, a strange
rawboned cross between a greyhound and a mountain lion, its front claws ending
not in the pads of an animal but in thickly knuckled fingers with blackened
nails. The creature regarded him with pale, lamplight eyes, narrow slits of
black.

“What’s that?” Leland asked.

“That’s my kitty, Snowball,” the
little girl replied. “Do you wanna play?”

Snowball
leaned its wizened
face up to him, lids low and sleepy …
and spoke
. “Got any smokes?”

Leland frowned and shook his head,
unable to keep from staring. “No. Sorry.”

“Fuck it.” The creature looked away,
grumbling. Then it stood on all fours, skeleton-thin, coat patchy with mange,
and sauntered off.

“Mr. Quince,” Lindsay said, touching
his sleeve and startling him. “We have to go. It’s getting worse.”

And they were again heading south.
That was all he knew; all anyone seemed to know … except for Lindsay, of
course. They were going south, the leaves turning greener as they went.
And
it was getting worse.

It was the falling darkness that
finally forced the question, the closing night a painful reminder of how long
he had been in this cab. The stiffness in his joints, the pain in every muscle
that endured a long, grueling day that was poorly begun and would, by all
appearances, end just as unpleasantly. He kneaded the question over and over in
his mind, massaging it until it appeared in the air of the cab like a conjured
spirit. “Where are we going?”

When she did not reply, he repeated
his question, clearing his throat to get her attention.

Lindsay turned to him slowly, looking
at him with a somnolent expression. “Huh?”

“I was wondering where we were going.
I was also wondering if this was someplace we were going to find tonight, or
tomorrow, or sometime next week.”

She shrugged noncommittally.

“Well, can you at least tell me if
you think we’re close? Should I plan to find a place to pull over for the
night?”

She turned back to the window. “We
won’t find it tonight.”

“No?” he asked, surprised to have
learned that much. “Well, should I find a place to pull in? We could stay at a
motel or something. Or just park along the road somewhere and get some sleep.
I’m tired.”

“We can’t stop.”

“Why not?” he demanded.

“We have to keep going, so we can get
there before they do.”

“Before who gets where?”

“The doorway.”

Just then, Lindsay gestured wildly at
the windshield, Leland’s lapse in concentration causing the cab to drift into
the oncoming lane. It was empty, but Leland swerved back just the same, angry
and embarrassed as the cab jerked and righted back into the correct lane.

“You should pay more attention when
you drive,” she scolded. “We’re going south. We’ll find the doorway there.
That’s where we’re going.”

Leland’s heart was still slamming
against his chest, his cheeks flushed with embarrassment and maybe a bit of
fear. He hated being told what to do. He hated more being wrong. He hated most
that it was a seven-year-old girl doing these things he hated. “That’s the
second time you mentioned a doorway,” he snapped. “Not just south, but south to
find a doorway. You never talked about it before now. Tell me what it is. Maybe
I can get us there faster if I know what I’m looking for.”

“You can’t. Just drive south. We’ll
get there okay as long as we keep going.”

“But what is this doorway? What does
it look like? How … tall is it?”

She shook here head. “I don’t know.
I’ll just know it when I see it.”

“How, when you don’t even know what
it looks like?” he pushed.

“I just will.”

“Comforting.”

He let the silence stew between them
for a minute or so, long enough for her to get comfortable against the door, to
nearly sleep. Then he said: “So where are we going?”

*     *     *

The Red Knight’s hands fell upon the
sandalwood stocks, drawing his guns and firing in the same blinding, singular
motion.

And each shot drew blood.

And each shot killed.

The Sons of Light fired back; Alex
heard their rounds
spang
into the wall, tiles popping and shattering
about him. He knew they wouldn’t hit him. As he started firing down into them,
he could see their expressions and he knew this skirmish was already over.
Self-righteous ire collapsed into cold, shivering terror as they looked upon
him, and knew him for what he was. Not myth or prophecy or symbol, but real.
They could see him now, see the red that filled his eyes, guided his hands and
poured through the strange weapons he carried. They could see the crimson rage
of the Red Knight.

And they were horrified.

A dozen fell dead to his rain of
bullets before Alex pulled back against the wall, squatting low, calves aching
with a kind of fierce exhilarating tightness, a call to action. He slammed the
revolvers back into their holsters, reaching back for the .45 and the Glock
before he realized it was unnecessary; the melee already over, the dead
abandoned where they lay, the survivors retreating.

Reinforcements will come, he thought.
They will come, and they will die. Then more will come, all eager to see, to
know:
Come on boys, this is it. The one we’ve been waiting for. The red
devil’s inside the city. Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!

“Let’s go,” he murmured.

Oversight looked at him, the knife in
her hand frozen amid sawing at the rope on her ankles.

“They think I’m the Red Knight,” he
said, reaching into the leather satchel and drawing out a handful of bullets.
Without even looking, he drew one of the pistols and opened the cylinder with
his other hand. Spent shells spilled out, plunking to the tile like pennies
hitting the glass insides of an empty pickle jar. It was a familiar sound, both
distant and clear, begging him to remember something, remember…

“Are you?” she asked, her eyes on his
weapons.

“Maybe. I’m not sure.” From the
handful of bullets, his fingers worked out the correct rounds and started
reloading. He never looked to see what they were doing; he didn’t need to. His
fingers knew the gauge of the shells by feel, distinguished one round from
another, right bullets loaded into the next empty cylinder, wrong bullets
dropping back into the bag with soft clicks;
use ‘em later; use ‘em all
.
“Does that make sense?”

Oversight quickly wiped her shoulder
against her face, clearing away forgotten tears as she again started sawing at
the rope. “I don’t think it’s supposed to. I’m not sure we belong here, you and
I.”

Loading the gun by feel, the weapon
so right in his hand that it almost felt like an extension of his own flesh, he
wasn’t so sure. Maybe Oversight was merely hopeful. Jack had recast their
roles, and before this moment, he’d thought it all a mistake. But the feel of
steel in his hands, the explosive force of his will, the ability to exact
vengeance upon those who would stop him made him think otherwise.

Alex spilled out the still smoking
cases from the second pistol. Again the plinking sound of brass on tile like
coins plunking upon glass, pennies unspent, things unremembered. Something
distant and close, so near; so nearly forgotten.

He took another handful of bullets,
loading the cylinder without looking, without considering. He was the Red
Knight. This was what he did, what he was, what he was meant to do.

—
Remember
—

He slapped in the cylinder and jammed
the weapon back in the holster.

—
Remember
—

You never know when you might need to
kill again. Kill a lot. Kill ‘em all!

—
Remember
—

But there was still something,
something about coins hitting a glass jar, a large pickle jar like you’d find
in an old time saloon, filled with huge dill pickles or pig’s feet or pickled
eggs or …

—
Remember, remember, the lady of dark November!—

Coins. Lindsay.

(
the center!
)

Alex looked up suddenly. “I know
where we have to go.”

SECRET DOORWAYS - REQUIEM

“What are doing?” Lindsay shrieked.

“We’ve been driving for hours,”
Leland complained. “I have to stop.”

“We can’t!” she said. “Not here.”

He’d been living off what passed for
coffee since breakfast, and while it kept him alert, the side effects were not
altogether unexpected. He had already pulled the cab to the side of the road.
“I’m sorry, but I have to take a piss. It’ll take two minutes.”

“But it’s
dark
,” she whispered.

He scowled. They had driven well into the night, the way growing darker
until the road, sheltered by trees, turned pitch-black, the air thick with an
eerie drifting fog that reduced the world beyond the cab’s headlamps to vague
shadows. And the road just seemed to go on and on.

He shrugged off her warning, but was
not so bold as to turn off the engine, or even close the door behind him. He
left the cab running, the headlights on, and walked towards the rear fender. He
would never admit it, but he understood why Lindsay insisted on well-frequented
places and only for necessities like gas or food.

There were things in the darkness;
things you didn’t want to see in the light.

As his eyes adjusted, he could just
make them out, lumbering in the field alongside the road; no details, only
silhouettes against the darkness standing twice as tall as a bus. They didn’t
look like anything he had ever seen, just shambling brutes, enormous and
indistinct and somehow menacing. Whatever they were, they stayed back from the
road, and for that alone he was thankful.

Lindsay saw them too. He saw the way
she looked out the window as they drove, searching for landmarks that let her
know they were on the right path. Her head would turn as they passed one of the
distant, hulking shadows, drawing back from the glass. She didn’t say anything,
but he knew.

“Hurry up!” she complained.

“Give me a second,” he said, the
process all the more difficult for trying to hurry it along.

That’s when he saw them, three small
sets of eyes reflecting back the taillights from just a few feet away. What
he’d assumed was a clump of sod or dead leaves by the roadside was the carcass
of an animal, a patchy coat of bristling hair, its legs crooked and splayed.
And three pairs of eyes arranged about the head like a spider’s, milky and
reflective, dead. Road kill.

If he hadn’t been trying to pee, he’d
have pissed himself, feet reflexively backpedaling though there was nowhere to
go.
Get a hold of yourself! It’s dead!

But what the hell is it?

He zipped up and jumped back in the
cab, almost stumbling as he stared over his shoulder, the dead thing in the
road visible only in his imagination—a place it might never leave. Part of him
worried that as he turned away, it would attack, the creature playing possum; childish,
like monsters in the closet, but there in the back of his thoughts all the
same. The idea of stopping seemed ludicrous now. Not for the night, or a quick
nap, or even for five minutes. Stopping would only give one of those things—
any
one of those things
—an opportunity to come closer, to snuffle and scratch
its way up to the cab and peer inside. And if it did, Leland would see it up
close and know—the one thing he wanted to avoid more than anything—that this
was all real.

“Mr. Quince?” Lindsay asked.

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

“Uh, yeah, I think so. I’m just
tired.”

“I don’t think we should stop,” she
added needlessly.

“No,” he agreed, hating the fear he
felt at this moment; hating himself for being afraid. If there was a Hell—
and
he hoped to God there wasn’t
—it would not be lakes of fire or tormenting
demons. It would be fear, endless and overwhelming and lasting for all
eternity. He knew that now. Maybe, on some level, he had always known that.
“I’m … I’m not sure it’s safe to stop anymore.”

“It’s not,” she said, looking out the
window at nothing in particular.

“Is something there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “It’s more
like a ‘they’ than an ‘it’”

“So what are
they
?” Outside
his window, he could still sense them as he urged the cab forward, wheels
crunching gravel, putting distance between them and the strange road kill that
was no longer the exception in a reality going insane.

Lindsay stared thoughtfully at the
dark road ahead. “The two worlds are leaking into each other. Once they were
normal in their own way, but not anymore. They’re changing.”

He looked over at her. “What do you
mean, changing?”

“Jack made two worlds, only he put
the wrong people in them. You’re here, and Alex and Ariel November are in the
other.”

“Who’s Ariel November?”

“It’s not important,” she said,
trying to explain something she did not fully understand. “Neither of you
belongs in the other’s world, but so long as you’re here and he’s there, the
worlds are held open at the doorway, spilling into each other.”

“
Leaking.
” It was the premise
of a bad science fiction movie that no one would watch who wasn’t twelve years
old or stoned, and he was caught in it somehow, and everything about it was
very, very real.

“Jack didn’t tell me everything,”
Lindsay said, “and what he told me doesn’t come back except when it wants to.
It’s like I just remember it, but it wasn’t there before. We have to get to the
doorway.”

“Will you understand it there? Is
that it?”

“No. But until we do, the things
outside are only going to get worse. This world is slipping back in time. The
daylight keeps them back for now, but if the doorway stays open too long,
nothing will keep their reality back from ours.”

“And then what?”

On that, Lindsay refused to answer.

*     *     *

Alex walked down the abandoned street
at the base of the Wall of Penitence until he found the side street the Sons of
Light emerged from, their last stand, little boys bringing cap-pistols to a gun
fight. Oversight was a few paces behind, walking more carefully to avoid sharp
stones and debris. He stopped at the bodies, drew one of his guns, and began
prodding each in turn with the toe of his boot, satisfying himself that they
were all dead.

The red was a remarkably accurate
killer.

He selected one of them, the smallest,
and pulled his boots off, handing them to Oversight. “Try these.”

“They’re a little big,” she said,
sizing the boot against the bottom of her foot.

“I’ll make it a point to shoot
someone more your size,” he remarked.

“Are you alright?” she asked, a note
of concern that would have weakened his resolve only a day ago, hungry for
encouragement, eager for even the faintest glimpse of her eyes, her lips, her
skin, her interest.

But he was different now, barely able
to hear the world over the red screaming from within, making him its own, the
voice of reason slipping beneath the rage eager for release. “I’m fine. We need
to go.” He stared down the road, a canyon of brick walls and buildings that
would eventually lead to Confessor’s Row by alleys and streets he no longer
remembered, Lindsay’s ghost too fast for landmarks. “She told me to find the
center.”

“Who?” Oversight asked, stripping
more clothes from the same guard: a tunic, belt and shirt.

“Lindsay
. She told me I needed to find the
center. She told me I needed to find you.”

“You saw her, too?” Oversight asked.
She was in the process of cutting the shirt into strips with the borrowed
knife, and wrapping the rags around her feet to help the boots fit better. She
stopped to look up at him, and he nodded. “She told me a … she told me you
would come for me.” Then more softly, she added, “We need to travel deeper into
the city.”

He nodded. “To the center. I just
don’t know how to find it.”

Oversight quickly pulled the tunic
over her head, the belt tightened to its last notch. Adequate, but not ideal.
“I think I can help you find where we need to go,” she said. “I know the way
from Confessor’s Row to the Court of Fathers. The Court is at the center. From
there, we’ll need to work our way down.”

“Down? Down where?”

“Under the ground. The city built
itself over time, pushing outward, pushing upward. It buried something deep
beneath itself, hidden away in the darkness. That’s where we need to go. Find
the center, and go down.”

“A witch will aid the Red Knight, and
he will bring forth Armageddon,” Alex said, finally believing the friar’s
ramblings. “You are the November witch.”

“I am Ariel November,” she said.
“Oversight was from the Wasteland. Jack freed me from that place, and he gave
me a name; a real name.”

“Ariel November?”

“Yes. You are the Red Knight, and I
am the witch, Ariel November. And we will never return to the Wasteland again.”
She started walking down the street, leading him back towards the beginning
where he first stumbled upon the Wall. The way led up through a tight corridor
to Confessor’s Row; Alex recognized it by the smell of the lime and the stench
of death. The streets were completely empty of people, equipment left behind
where it fell, carts abandoned in the haste to flee. “They seem to be afraid of
the Red Knight. We must make sure they believe that you are who you claim.”

“Shooting them seems to help,” he
remarked dryly.

“You don’t have enough bullets, Alex.
Sooner or later, they will fire back.” She stopped suddenly, finding an
abandoned cart, one of the caged carts used to transport prisoners. There was a
can of red paint, open and left behind; one of the ones used to paint crosses
on the confessed. “This may help. Give me your coat.”

He didn’t question her; would never
question her. He only took off the gray coat and passed it over. She laid it
out on the ground, and quickly starting slapping red paint across the sleeves
and down the front and back until the entire coat was wet with red paint. Then
she started speaking words Alex did not understand, could not even recognize.
They sounded like gibberish, the rant of someone speaking in a forgotten
tongue, exotic and alien.

“What are you—?”

She shushed him with a curt wave of
her hand as the wet paint brightened and flowed together, looking less like
paint than blood, as if his coat had been sopped in a slaughterhouse gutter,
the last raiment of a man dying from a thousand wounds. He was almost reluctant
to take it back, afraid the red stain would spread across his skin. But the
fabric was perfectly dry, no different than before … except that now it was the
color of spilled blood.

“Augmented illusion; glamour, nothing
more,” Ariel said. “Their fear of the Red Knight is the best weapon we have.”

He nodded, pulling on the coat.
“Alright, how do we find the center?”

“It will be hidden below the Court of
Fathers, buried deep in the darkness.” Ariel looked at him. “They know we’re
going there, Alex. If they cannot prevent you from freeing the witch, they will
fall back to the Court, and stop you there. Not a dozen or even a hundred, but
thousands. Every one of the Sons of Light will gather there to defend it.
Illusions and fear may not be enough.”

Alex looked out over the abandoned
streets, fog drifting over the city like a shroud, settling thick and cold into
the dark corners of Janus, the sky clouded with haze, the world robbed of the
little sunlight that penetrated the deep crevasse where the Guardian City
cowered. All the citizens of the city had gone to ground, hiding behind locked
doors and shuttered windows, praying to God in the darkness and counting prayer
beads. But Alex knew the fog would not hide him from an army, just as he knew
the Sons of Light would find them if they waited, or turned and fled. They
needed to go forward, find the center, but he could only fire two guns at a
time. Even with Ariel November’s magic, a frontal assault would be suicide.
There had to be a better way.

“I don’t suppose you know of a
backdoor?”

*     *     *

The fog lingered, the only change in
the gloom a lifting of the darkness to gray and shadows, a faint orange of dawn
to the east. Whether daybreak banished the monsters or simply obscured them,
Leland could not say. He suspected—Lindsay’s claim to the contrary—that they
were still out there, still waiting.

“Stop!”

Lindsay’s scream jerked Leland from
his daze, foot stomping the brake reflexively. The cab lurched forward,
pitching them against their seat belts, hands scrambling for purchase against
the dash. There was a tremendous screech and the sharp, pungent smell of
burning rubber and brake pads followed almost instantly by a loud bang like a gunshot
or a blowout.