The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) by Mark Reynolds

Author:Mark Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Mark Reynolds
Published: 2014-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

THE GARBAGEMAN COMETH

Jack sat on the cement step behind the café. His laptop had undergone a metamorphosis since the morning, its design subconsciously altered, streamlined so it could move more easily from place to place, allowing him to take advantage of the morning shade behind the kitchen with its view of the junkyard. A bottle of Pepsi stood within arm’s reach, sweating a dark ring upon the concrete. Just to the right of the door was a large Dumpster, the dark blue paint flaked with rust and discolored with spilled and crusted residue. And just around the corner from that, the ice machine hummed tirelessly.

But that was not what Jack was listening to.

The lid on the Dumpster would no longer stay closed. Once or twice, he saw an enormous scorpion’s tail emerging from beneath the garbage bags and loose trash like a shark’s fin cresting the water’s surface, dark crimson, the stinger fat and armored and darkening at the tip to jet-black. He had noticed leathery wings within the Dumpster also—they were nearly hidden by the shadows and the mounded trash, but he had noticed them: dragon’s wings. And of course, there was the sound, that low growl that might have been an enormous purring, the low rumble of a well-tuned engine, waiting.

Sometime in the last few days, a manticore had slipped from the junkyard and taken up residence in the Dumpster.

He didn’t have time to deal with it. The pieces were coming together, and he was gathering them up as fast as his fingers could strike the keys. It never came evenly; that would be too simple: just pieces and chunks, ill-sized and inconvenient, the time and place, the way and the means always a matter of its own choosing. His craft was gathering the pieces and setting them down. He did not create the Word; he merely conveyed it.

The tale always took on a life of its own.

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