The smell of Texas Trash Pie dragged Marcus out of the flashback. One second he was back in the war, watching Rainy sell him out for a lousy drink server job. The next he was behind the bar at Slipgate, watching two elf girls moan their way through pecans, chocolate, and sugar.
It was insane. This "unreal world" walking into his restaurant felt more honest than Rainy ever had. No lies here. Just forks scraping plates and happy sounds over a slice of Texas.
It is what it is, man, he told himself. Look at them. You cannot fake that. You just cannot.
They did not devour the pie the way they had inhaled the burgers earlier. The frantic hunger was gone. They ate it slowly, reverently. They took small bites, savoring the crunch of the pretzels and the melt of the chocolate. Every bite seemed to disappear as if it carried some small piece of their fear away with it, replacing the horror of the last ten minutes with sugar and fat.
Tiny pleased sounds escaped them—quiet little hums of surprise and delight that bubbled up from their throats. They probably did not even know they were making them.
Marcus slid into the booth opposite them. He rested his arms on his knees, the rifle stock bumping against the table leg, and just watched.
He shook his head with a soft, tired chuckle.
"Y'all just lived through hell," he said, his voice low and rumbling. "And now you're eating heaven on a plate."
They did not catch the words. Not exactly. The idiom was lost on them.
But when he tapped a fist gently against his chest, right over his heart, and added, "This... this is just Texas," they understood something.
They understood the offering.
Liri gave him a small, shy smile around a mouthful of pie, chocolate smudged on her lip.
Eira's eyes warmed. The tension in her jaw loosened, revealing the beautiful woman beneath the terrified refugee.
For the first time since they had walked into The Slipgate, the room felt less like a war zone and more like the place he had meant it to be. A shelter. A place where the past stayed outside, and the pie was always warm.
Shells, Bullets, and Shock
The silence that followed the meal was heavy, but it was no longer screaming.
When the plates were scraped clean, devoid of even a crumb of crust, and the last swirl of whipped cream had vanished from Liri's lip, Marcus excused himself with a stiff, curt nod. He needed to move. He needed to do something with his hands other than grip a rifle or serve pie.
He headed back toward the kitchen, his boots thudding softly against the checkered tile. The air in the diner was a olfactory dissonance—a bizarre, layered blend of caramelized sugar, warm vanilla, and the sharp, acrid sting of burnt gunpowder. It smelled like a bakery had exploded inside a firing range 1.
He walked to the utility sink, shoved aside a jug of industrial bleach, and grabbed an old, dented metal coffee can he used for grease or loose screws. It was an impulse he didn't question; his brain was trying to organize the chaos, to tidy up the impossible.
He walked back out to the main floor and went to work.
He crouched near the worst of the mess, his knees popping, and started picking up the spent brass. The shell casings were scattered across the linoleum like metallic confetti. He picked them up one by one. The brass was still warm to the touch, oily from the chamber.
Clink.
He dropped the first 5.56mm casing into the can. The sound was too loud in the quiet room, a sharp, tinny note that made Liri's ears twitch.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
He moved with the methodical plodding of a crime scene investigator, gathering the evidence of a murder that hadn't left a body.
"They evaporated," he muttered, the words directed more to the scuffed floor than to himself. "Big as trucks, mean as hell, and they just... evaporated."
He plucked a shotgun shell—a red plastic hull, smoke still curling faintly from the crimped end—from under a prep table. He rolled it between his fingers, feeling the ridges of the high brass. It was real. It had mass. It smelled of sulfur.
Real.
If the ammo was real, the fight was real.
He bent lower, peering under the bottom shelf of the dry storage rack where something gleamed in the shadows. He reached in, his fingers brushing against dust bunnies, and closed his hand around a piece of deformed lead.
He pulled it out and held it up to the light. It was a rifle slug, a copper-jacketed round that had mushroomed perfectly upon impact. The tip was bent back, mashed flat, and scarred with deep grooves.
It looked like it had hit bone. Thick, dense bone.
"Y'all were made of something," he whispered, his voice rough. "That's for damn sure. You bled, you broke, and you took hits."
He straightened slowly, his lower back complaining, and scanned the battlefield of his dining room.
There was no blood. No pools of black ichor. No shredded gray flesh or chunks of bristle. There was absolutely nothing to mop up except the normal kind of disaster—shattered ceramic plates, splintered wood from the broken table, and deep, ugly bullet scars gouged into the drywall.
If a sheriff walked in right now, he would look at the damage and assume a drunk had driven a truck through the wall, or maybe a bar fight had gone wrong with baseball bats. Nobody, not in a million years, would look at this room and reconstruct a firefight with interdimensional pig-monsters.
He turned the bent bullet in his fingers one more time, feeling the jagged edge of the copper jacket, then dropped it into the can with a final, heavy thud.
Whatever those things had been... the world, or the Gate, or physics itself had decided it did not want their bodies to remain. It had scrubbed them out.
But it had left him the brass and the lead.
Souvenirs, he thought bitterly. Proof I haven't lost my mind.
Normal Customers in a Not Normal Room
He had just scooped the last casing into the can when a sound came from the front of the diner.
Bump.
It was soft. A hip checking the door. Then, the sick, warped little ding of the bell he hadn't had time to fix.
The sound made Marcus's heart jerk violently into his throat. His pulse spiked from resting to combat-ready in a microsecond.
His hand abandoned the coffee can and flew automatically to the sawed-off shotgun leaning against the prep station. His fingers wrapped around the cold steel of the barrel before his brain forced him to stop.
He froze, listening.
No crashing timber. No guttural snarling. No wet, heaving breath. No massive shadows blocking out the sun.
Just voices. Murmuring. Human.
He edged to the side of the prep station, peering past the corner of the bar toward the front window, keeping his profile low.
Two people stood outside on the concrete step. Actual people.
It was a middle-aged couple. The woman wore a bright pink windbreaker that swished when she moved and had oversized sunglasses perched on top of her dyed-blonde hair. The man had a tucked-in polo shirt that strained slightly at the belly and the comfortable, aimless swagger of a road-trip tourist looking for a bathroom and a burger.
The woman pushed the door open. The damaged latch groaned, and the bell dinged weakly again as they stepped inside.
"Oh, I like what you've done with the place," the woman said, her voice bright and piercing. She gave the room a polite, sweeping once-over, seemingly oblivious to the bullet holes or the shattered table shoved into the corner. To her, it probably just looked like "rustic" remodeling in progress.
The man hung back half a step, his eyes flicking past the empty tables and landing squarely on the booth where Eira and Liri sat frozen.
"There a Comic-Con in town or something?" he asked, half-amused, gesturing vaguely at them.
Marcus straightened up fully, the coffee can heavy in his left hand, his right hand smudged with carbon and gunpowder.
For a heartbeat, he stared at them. He thought he might be hallucinating. The transition from life-or-death monster defense to "table for two" was too abrupt, too jarring.
Then, the old habit kicked in. The mask of service.
He dropped the last casing into the can, slid the can under the counter with his foot, and wiped his grimy palms quickly on his jeans. He grabbed two laminated menus from the stack.
"Morning," he said, his voice level, though it felt tight in his throat. "Grab any open table you like."
They smiled—oblivious, happy—and picked a spot near the front window, far away from the "construction" debris.
The woman smiled up at him when he walked over and handed her a menu. "Thank you, hon. Do you have sweet tea?"
"Yes, ma'am. Fresh brewed."
"Perfect."
The man nodded, looking around. "This place new? Don't remember seeing it on the GPS."
"Couple weeks," Marcus lied smoothly. "Still breaking it in. Still fixing up a few rough edges."
The woman tipped her head, lowering her voice conspiratorially as she glanced toward the sisters. "Are they in costume? For a show?"
Marcus followed her gaze. Eira and Liri were stiff as statues, their pointed ears plainly visible, their otherworldly clothes standing out starkly against the red vinyl.
He let out a small, practiced chuckle. "Something like that. I think there's a convention out near Dallas. They stopped in on their way through. Method actors, you know? They stay in character."
That seemed to satisfy her curiosity. She nodded sagely. "Oh, fun. Well, the costumes are beautiful."
"I'll get those teas," Marcus said.
He turned and walked back toward the bar, passing the sisters' booth. He didn't stop, but he raised one finger to his lips as he approached.
Quiet.
Eira's eyes tracked his hand. She gave a microscopic nod. Liri mirrored the gesture, simple and obedient, terrified to make a sound.
They stayed silent. They had not moved an inch since the couple entered. Their shoulders were hunched, a little less rigid now that Marcus had engaged the intruders, but they were still coiled tight.
The empty pie plate sat between them like an altar that had already done its work, a testament to the strange communion they had just shared.
Marcus set two glasses of ice water in front of them without asking. They did not reach for them. They watched him with an intensity that was unsettling, tracking his movements, trying to learn the pattern of his breathing, trying to understand how he could switch from killing monsters to serving tea in the blink of an eye.
The older one, Eira, spoke softly. The words were in her own language, rolling like liquid music over the table, too low for the tourists to hear. Marcus did not understand the syllables, but he understood the tone perfectly. It was calm. Deliberate. It was a reassurance.
Liri looked up at him. She whispered a single word in English, testing the weight of it on her tongue, like she had been turning it over in her mouth for minutes.
"Safe?"
Marcus met her wide, violet eyes. He looked at the tourists reading menus. He looked at the shotgun hidden behind the bar. He looked at the coin in his pocket.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "You're safe. For now."
She let out a tiny breath, a puff of air. The tightness in her shoulders eased a fraction.
Eira's gaze softened, a flicker of gratitude passing between them.
From the corner of his vision, Marcus saw the couple at the window close their menus and look around, expectant.