“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.
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 Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 46