Guardians of the Gates - Part 1, The New Breed by Jeff Schanz (best short books to read .TXT) 📕

with monsters or unearthly entities. Most have normal jobs and contribute to the organization in all sorts of ways, like hacking servers, procuring supplies, booking travel, digging through data, monitoring social media, creating tech, erasing records, experimental chemistry, running think tanks, offering a friendly place to stay, even expunging parking tickets. Despite some banality, every kind of help is welcome to The Saints. Perhaps ninety-five percent of all Saint members fit this category.

The field agents constitute the military might of The Saints. They are usually strong, fearless (or crazy), and have exceptional fighting skill. In days of yore, being a Saint field agent was regarded as a position of honor, much like a modern-day famous athlete or movie star. Though field agents avoided fame, their service garnered unspoken respect, and Saint field agents were characteristically found in the social circles of the power elite. Nowadays, that is not necessarily the case. With so many other equitable opportunities for a physically exceptional person today, being a part of an ancient, dying group that denies you glory or credit for your deeds, offers no salary, and doesn’t even have its own t-shirt logo, has become a hard sell.

Brother Augustine was not a field agent. Like most Saint members, he never sought fame or fortune for his work. He only sought answers for the world’s mysteries. And those same questions, and their even stranger answers, intrigued Sebastian and Marcellus as well. So, like the only real father-figure they ever knew, they endeavored to join the cause. The Saints needed the boys, and the boys thought they needed The Saints. So, despite the lack of cool gadgetry, or outfits, both brothers became the youngest ever Saint field agents at eighteen.

Marcellus joined the Marines at age twenty-two. Although he was only an enlisted man, his ties with The Saints, and his exceptional fighting skill and strategic mind, got him placed into an elite group of soldiers. Their unit was not listed in any file or record, and their job was not printed in any military manual. Marcellus’ squad was a small group of Saint field agents who happened to be U.S. Marines, an “off-the-books” experiment in utilizing legitimate military men to handle Saint business, who miraculously showed up in areas that had paranormal trouble. The men did their job exceptionally well and the government funding benefitted the cause greatly. For several years, it seemed to work as advertised. But the experiment ended after a fateful mission investigating suspected rift creatures where all members of Marcellus’ squad, including himself, were killed.

Sebastian buried his brother in the city cemetery of Savannah, Georgia (near where they both had been living). The loss of the only soul that truly understood him sent Sebastian into a deep depression that lasted for years. The rage and darkness, that he had learned to suppress as a child, grew in magnitude. Sebastian’s side hustle of underground street fighting and cage matches was stepped up in frequency as an outlet for his rage. Though it served to momentarily pacify him, it didn’t ultimately calm his destructive nature. But something else did. His dead brother started talking.

Hearing voices was nothing new to Sebastian, but hearing the dead talk was a skill he didn’t think he had. Marcellus talked openly and often, the lack of physical mouth being no hindrance to expressing his opinions. More or less the same ol’ Mars (Sebastian’s nickname for Marcellus), carefree and cavalier. And perhaps because he no longer had any mortal fear, Marcellus seemed to have even less of a filter for his commentary than he did when he was living. He was far closer to a watermelon-smashing comedian than a somber, chain-dragging spirit. Marcellus freely discussed anything and everything, including his own death, “It hurt,” his funeral, “The turnout was lame,” and his flippant impressions of the afterlife.

Sebastian not only could hear his brother, but he could see him as well. Not just as some wispy energy fluctuation that could be interpreted as the shape of somebody, rather as a full-fledged body that couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than Mars. In essence, Sebastian still had his brother, he just couldn’t touch him.

Sebastian recovered to a sociable state, quit street-fighting, and dug deeper into his Saint persona, dedicating the remainder of his life to destroying the kinds of things that killed his brother. With the money Sebastian had saved up from his street-fighting days, he invested in a small business. Luckily that business was modestly successful and it gave him a consistent (albeit shoestring) budget that allowed him to subsist above the poverty line for a single man. He got a tiny apartment above a bar in Savannah, assuming he’d live there alone, forgetting that a roommate came with him. A unique roommate. In Savannah, a ghost residing in your house is by no means uncommon, but a ghost that watched TV all day, nagged you about personal issues, and complained that you never brought home any hot women, would be strange even to the most avid paranormalists. However, that was Sebastian’s life.

Sebastian was a businessman, a street fighter, a Saint field agent, and roomies with his dead brother.

 

 

 

 

He understood why he joined. Why he stayed was less certain.

Sebastian knew the council of Saint elders would lash into him about the events in London. He had been seen by civilians, he left two dead humans out in plain sight, and he hadn’t followed procedure with Jillian. In Sebastian’s mind, The Saints had become more about staying secret than about being relevant. That wasn’t what he signed up for. But nobody truly knew what they were signing up for with The Saints. There were no real names, no real structure, and very little accountability unless it had something to do with keeping The Saints secret. But somewhere in the chaos that The Saints operated in, Sebastian had found room to do what he needed and wanted to do, and he had flourished. As long as he stayed alive, he could still think of no better job to have.

A few details remained to be taken care of in London before Sebastian could hop a flight back to the states: the return of the sword to Edwin’s antique shop; the return of the motorcycle with an envelope of cash for the trouble; and an Amazon gift basket of teas and biscuits for Jillian from a secret admirer. He dropped an encoded email to the Saint council with an extremely brief and obscure explanation of the mission results (intentionally obscure to be unusable as evidence if it got somehow intercepted and decoded). A detailed debriefing would have to come face to face, as was mandatory with the Saint council, but that would only be by request from them. Hopefully, they would wait a while before making that request, if at all, so he could recover from this plane ride before he got on yet another plane to go explain himself in front of the council.

There was nothing remarkable about the flight back to the states besides the incredible boredom. He was dog tired, managing to sleep some of the way, though he could never find true comfortable and relaxing sleep while being wedged in a seat that was too narrow for anorexic women, and not enough legroom for jockeys. Add an awkward seat neighbor on one side who smelled like sour curry, and a little boy on the other side whose bladder wasn’t able to keep up with his Pepsi consumption, plus the constant “ding” of pilot announcements and flight attendant notifications. The overall recipe produced an extended fatigue that would take days to overcome. If he could manage to keep his car on the road once he got back to Savannah, he’d have plenty of time to snooze away the stress at home.

Well, maybe not plenty of time. There was a possible global disaster to avert, and humankind to save, and all that. But even Batman would require a few hours' sleep for that bill. Of course, Bruce Wayne had Alfred to conjure up revitalizing meals and concoctions to ease his exhaustion, plus the convenience of a custom bat-lab, equipped with expensive electronics, surveillance, and experimental wonders that made government spending look chintzy. Not to mention an enormous mansion to seclude himself from unneeded distractions. Sebastian had a pantry with a couple boxes of cereal, a laptop with slow wi-fi, and the distraction of a bar downstairs that did a fair business until the pre-dawn hours. Sebastian didn’t even have the comfort of the bedroom in his one-bedroom apartment. That was given to his brother. Though Marcellus didn’t sleep, it had the only cable outlet in the apartment, and his brother was a TV-phile.

It was early afternoon when Sebastian arrived in Savannah. The old Jeep Cherokee sat where he left it in long-term airport parking. It managed to stay on the road all the way back to East Bay Street where Sebastian carefully rolled it into a small alleyway, and smaller garage. As usual, the bar music thumped its muffled greetings behind the wall as he ascended the staircase up to his little apartment. The bar downstairs featured a strange mix of old-world Irish folk tunes and modern-day rock from its jukebox. It did contain an assortment of party hits from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, and sometimes the patrons made use of that and spun a more varied playlist. But when left solely up to the proprietor, a steady combination of U2, The Cranberries, Dropkick Murphys, and various fiddle-filled Irish folk tunes were the loop of audio entertainment. The irony, unknown to most of the local stool-warmers and the tourists who wished to soak in the Irish history of Savannah, was that the proprietor wasn’t Irish. He wasn’t even married into it.

Daniel Castelli was Italian by birth and American by swearing an oath as a citizen. He found out that to make it in Savannah with the tourists, you had to ride the wave of Irish nostalgia. His bar, called “Lucky’s,” was bought off a real Irishman, and Daniel retained the intent of selling the sentiment of Irish pride and the stereotyped love of liquor. Any reservations he may have had about that mission statement ended with his first St. Patrick’s Day, when both locals and tourists transformed mountains of green dollars into “the wearin’ of the green,” and poured money into his till while he poured beer into their mugs. After that day, Daniel became “Danny Boy,” and attempted to be the first known Italian to be dubbed an honorary Irishman.

He had an arrangement with Sebastian, who also bought and transformed an existing business. Sebastian’s company operated a tour of the haunted sites of Savannah. Besides the Irish pride, deep-rooted American history, proximity to the beaches, and good old-fashioned southern charm, the biggest draw to Savannah was the attraction of its long-dead residents. Deemed one of the most haunted places in America, Savannah ran its share of successful and charming tours of the best known ghost-infested hot spots. Most of the tour companies had the same general vibe, but Sebastian made a unique arrangement with Danny Boy that gave his business a little welcome twist. He called it “The Spirits of Savannah Tours.” It was a combination of rolling bar and spooky hayride. The haunting spirits were supplied by the afterlife and the liquid spirits were supplied by Danny Boy. Though only a limited bar was allowed aboard the trolley, it was enough to increase the entertainment value. Plenty of doubters and folks who had not the faintest belief in supernatural beings, entities, and happenings would slide their credit cards through the reader just the same as the ghost enthusiasts. In fact, it was more likely that a non-believer would spend the most hard-earned cash on such adventures to playfully mock it as phony. They’d also be more likely to purchase a t-shirt commemorating their completely “false” encounters with the deceased locals. Sebastian