Strange that this should seem so familiar.
He felt Ariel November’s hand clasped tightly within his own, the feeling of it warm and comforting. His last thought: If nothing else, I would like to take this with me to whatever lies ahead.
* * *
He stood in the great hall, smoke-filled and ill-lit and impossibly full of noise and commotion. He was alone at the center, the way behind him gone now, a doorway that would never open again.
He could not remember before. Not really. He was different now; the correct term was transmogrified. He knew things previously unknown, things once impossible in another life, already distant and fading. Everything made perfect sense now that he had arrived. That was the key. He had finally arrived where he was supposed to be, where he was meant to be, where he wanted to be. Everything would be all right now. In fact, everything would be better than all right. Everything would be perfect.
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 do
or, 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 illustr
ated 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.
The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) Page 48