The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead A Post-Apocalyptic Epic

by Peter Meredith

  But Jack knew it couldn’t last. The bullets weren’t slowing down the undead creatures. They came on—two from the front of the house and one from each side. Hor wasn’t with them. Jack could feel him at the back of the house, waiting for them to try to make a run for it, while the Priest of Thorthirdes was just outside the front door with the same purpose.

  They weren’t stupid. They knew that it was just a matter of time before the officers would realize that their weapons were useless against beings pulled from the pits of hell, and then the terror would be too great and they would flee.

  It happened quickly. One of the officers was out of his mind. He screamed something, threw down his gun as if it had suddenly bitten him and tried to run. Jack grabbed him and shoved him against the wall. “Don’t, it’s a trap. They’re in the back, too.” The officer was too far gone; his eyes were almost all whites and there was foam at the side of his mouth. He tore out of Jack’s grip and ran.

  Jack took a step after him, but Cyn grabbed his coat and screamed into his face: “What do we do?” She was close to losing it as well.

  “Get upstairs,” Jack said, pushing her towards a sweeping set of stairs. He turned as Richards’ gun ran out of ammo. The detective fumbled for another clip with one of the mummies bearing down on him. Jack saw that even if he got a new clip in his gun in time, he would still die.

  Leaping forward, Jack slashed with the rapier at the outstretched bone-hands of the mummy, taking them both off in a shearing strike and, once again, feeling the ugly, negative vibe run up his blade. The feeling warped his face into a grimace and brought a nasty taste into his mouth. It was very similar to what he had felt when he had fought Hor in his apartment—only it was weaker.

  The mummy was the Incan. It was weaker, both physically and spiritually. In three, lightning fast cuts with the rapier, Jack struck off both of its arms and sent its skull bouncing away.

  “Or maybe I’m stronger,” Jack said to himself as he spun and whistled the sword at another of the creatures, again going for the hands first. He moved with such blazing speed that the second mummy was decapitated in moments.

  “To your left!” Cyn yelled.

  Amanra was closing fast, swinging a deadly clawed hand. Jack was already moving, dancing back to the edge of the stairs. He had caught sight of Amanra in his peripheral vision even before Cyn’s warning. In a flashing blur, he took Amanra’s arm off at the elbow and was just set to follow up the strike with another when there came a cry from the back of the house which was followed up by the sound of flying feet.

  The officer was coming back, running from danger and into more danger. The four people he had abandoned were now pinned with their backs to the stairs with two skeletal creatures in front of them. The officer ignored them all and ran to the front door. He was beyond help. His eyes were spinning in his head and his mouth was stretched wide in a soundless scream. His panic lent him strength and he threw aside the French provincial couch as if it was a cheap futon and the heavy credenza was thrust aside with equal ease.

  “Don’t!” Jack cried, foolishly taking his eyes off of Amanra. He watched as the Priest of Thorthirdes caught the man in the doorway and tore out his throat with one swipe of its claws and he couldn’t take his eyes off the scene as a geyser of blood gushed out to spray the priest, and he saw the wickedness in the priest’s black sockets blaze and, just before Amanra attacked, Jack watched the priest open his mouth wide...wider than humanly possible, and sink his grayed teeth into the officer’s throat.

  And then there was movement to his left, blackened claws raking through the air. Jack threw himself back, but too late. The ancient and splintered bones of Amanra’s fingers tore through his army coat and through the shirt beneath and opened up Jack’s flesh.

  He screamed.

  Chapter 12

  Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York

  The pain was enormous, far out of proportion to the four, quarter-inch deep gashes that ran across the top of his chest just below the hollow of his throat.

  What he was feeling wasn’t normal or natural, or even real. It couldn’t be real. It was poison and acid and fire all at once. He could barely breathe from the shocking pain. All he could do to protect himself was to stumble backwards as Amanra came on, again bringing his arm back.

  Faster than a whip, it came at Jack’s throat, but just then, the heel of Jack’s foot struck the stairs and he found himself falling as the bloody bones whirred an inch from his skin.

  There was laughter in his head and a scream in his ears. The scream wasn’t his own. The Priest of Thorthirdes had tossed away the body of the Lindenhurst police officer and now there was fresh, red blood dripping from its five-thousand year old teeth and strings of man-flesh hanging from the bone of its jaws.

  The other police officer had hit a mental limit. He was staring at the priest with eyes that were glassy and bugging out of his head. And he was screaming fit to wake the dead. It was such an insane scream that it was a second before Jack noticed that one of the lesser mummies had its hand a foot deep in the officer’s belly.

  The weathered, leathery skin of its face was stretched into a gruesome smile as it slowly twisted its arm. It was going to pull something out of the officer; Jack knew it and he had a passing thought: That’s going to be me, as Amanra attacked a third time, stabbing with its hand instead of clawing.

  Then there was a line of silver cutting between them and the hand tumbled from Amanra’s bone and gristle covered arm.

  “Oh, God,” Cyn groaned. Her rapier was no longer the beautiful sweep of shining steel. Like Jack’s, the edge was black and her face held disgust and horror at what had been transferred through the metal and into her hand.

  She should have followed up the stroke with another to render Amanra at least temporarily harmless but she seemed incapable and Jack would have been bitten had it not been for Richards, who lashed out and planted his size thirteen square in the hollow chest of Amanra, sending it flying back to rattle its bones against the credenza.

  The pain in Jack’s chest was still so immediate and overpowering that he could stand only with help. Richards supplied that help, grabbing him by the collar of his army coat and dragging him to his feet—they were retreating up the stairs without interference from the bone-priest.

  It stood at the bottom waiting, while around him the hands and skulls and the pieces of the other mummies came together. Jack felt the same overwhelming desire to run as he had the first time he had faced Hor. Their battle had been in vain. They couldn’t win. They could only hold off death for a time, and not a very long time at that.

  Hor was coming.

  He was their leader, their king. His presence was a force that could be felt in Jack’s mind and in his heart. He was coming and this time there was nowhere to run.

  Unhindered the three of them fled up to the second floor, where they began opening door after door. Jack didn’t know what the others were looking for, probably a way out or a weapon of some sort. He was looking for Robert. His cousin was the one who had started all of this and Jack felt that he was probably the only one who could end it.

  And he would, Jack would make sure of it. When he had a sword in his hand, Jack was very persuasive.

  Only Robert wasn’t behind any of the doors on the second floor and, worse, Hor and the priest and Amanra and the others were coming. Jack felt it deep in the marrow of his bones and in the hard spot behind his breastbone.

  “In here,” he said in a whisper to the others, pointing to the master bedroom. “They’re coming, I can feel it.”

  Cyn surprised him by saying: “I can, too.”

  “I can’t,” Richards said in a strangled voice. “Is that bad? Does that mean I’m next?”

  “No, of course not,” Jack told him, despite not knowing the truth of anything. He pointed at the bed, a huge four-posted king and asked: “Can we move that?”

  The three of them ran to the bed and heaved it in front of the door, Jack cringin
g as he did: the pain in his chest was still like fire.

  “Now what?” Cyn asked. When Jack and Richards only shrugged, she stared at the bed as if it had been a mistake to have moved it. “Then what are we going to do? They’ll get in. You know that they will.”

  The door shuddered under a blow. The three of them glanced back and forth at each other, each hoping that someone else would come up with a plan.

  “We can put the dresser in front of the bed,” Richards suggested. “All three of us are strong enough to hold them back.” As if to belie that statement, a stench reached them that caused them to back away from the door.

  “No,” Jack said, his free hand clutched to his chest which throbbed and ached. The wound made him feel dirty, as if it was already septic and was quickly poisoning his body. “No, we need a real plan.”

  The door bammed! again and now there was a split in the wood. It wouldn’t last. The wood would come apart and then the stench would be mind-boggling. Before too long, Jack would be dead from the poison coursing through his blood and then Cyn would be overcome by the stench and that would leave just Richards, if he could manage to hold out.

  He would die as a raving lunatic. An hour alone, trapped in the bedroom with the undead constantly clawing at the door would snap his mind like a twig.

  This meant that they would need a real plan.

  “What do we know about them?” Jack asked, speaking mostly to himself. “Not much,” he answered.

  He went down the list of what he knew about the mummies: They were REAL! That was the hardest thing to come to grips with and it was also the hardest thing to get beyond. His mind wanted to fixate on the idea.

  “They’re real…and?” he asked. The door thrummed from another blow. Richards went to the dresser and started heaving it toward the edge of the bed. Cyn stood between the two men, holding her rapier in two hands; the tip wobbled as her hands shook.

  “And they were summoned,” she said, answering his question. “Which means that they can be sent back.”

  The door was hammered again—and now there was a gap in the wood. Hor was just beyond it staring in at them. A black shiver went up Jack’s spine. It was a shiver from the deepest part of him.

  “We can’t send them back,” Jack said, turning from the dreadful gaze of the hell-creature. “We don’t know the proper spell…yes, spell. It’s the right word. A spell brought them here…” He broke off as he realized that was wrong. It wasn’t just one spell that had done the job, it had been two.

  The first was the spell that had been written on Jack’s papyrus and the second was the one that Cyn’s mom had been in possession of for years until…what had caused her to give it up? “That doesn’t matter,” he said to himself. He glanced up to see Richards looking a shade of grey.

  Pieces of wood flew out from the door to land on the bed and in his afro. “I need help holding them off,” Richards said.

  “No,” Jack said, forcefully. The answer to their predicament wasn’t in something so mundane as a door; that was for certain. The answer had to be in the supernatural. But that didn’t mean that it was beyond their understanding or beyond the realm of law…everything had boundaries; everything had limitations and rules, even magic.

  It was true, they didn’t know the spell to send the monsters back to hell, but they did know the spell to summon them. Could it be worked in reverse? Again, no, but could they work the spell to their advantage? The true answer: possibly. Robert had added to Cyn’s spell so that meant he could, too…he hoped.

  “Cyn, I need you to make one of the ritual circles,” Jack said, pointing at the empty spot on the hardwood floor where the bed had been. “You still have your phone?”

  She shook her head, but at the same time she reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. “A ritual circle? It won’t work...it can’t work,” she said, her head never ceasing its side-to-side motion.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Jack told her, taking her by the shoulders and pointing at the floor. “Draw it upside down...you know, inverted and only draw your portion. My part opens the portal to the netherworld and yours is a protection spell to keep unwanted things from coming out into the world. It should work in reverse, keeping them out of the circle.”

  “Should work?” Cyn asked in a breathless whisper, her eyes staring at the blank floor.

  From the far end of the dresser, Richards asked: “What the hell? You...you...you’re going to draw on the floor and you think that’ll save us? Don’t do it, Ms Childs. Don’t. Do anything else but that. We gotta figure a way out of here. Check those windows and see if we can get out onto the roof.”

  Jack whipped his rapier around and pointed it at Richards. “You need to shut up. It’s a straight shot out of the windows thirty feet down to brick. And they’re out there. The weaker ones. I can feel them. So, no Cyn, don’t listen to him. Draw the circle now before...”

  Another crash and the top half of the door broke inwards and now the stench filled the room completely. Cyn wavered and dropped her rapier and Richards slumped on the other side of the dresser.

  “Ignore it,” Jack told them after a shaky breath. “It’s bad, but we’ve smelled it before and we’ve felt the fear. That’s all they got. Those are all the tricks they have.” This wasn’t true.

  Hor was almost literally skin and bones, yet he pushed against the remains of the door with the strength of ten men, sending the bed and the dresser screeching back almost far enough for him to get in. Richards and Jack threw themselves against the far side of the dresser, stopping it for the moment.

  “Draw the damn circle!” Jack yelled.

  Cyn looked around: pictures on the walls, a tall mirror, a lamp, side tables finished in black lacquer. There wasn’t a previously overlooked pint of blood sitting out. “With what?”

  There was an obvious answer.

  Jack had dropped his rapier when he had thrown his weight against the dresser, now he picked it up and in a quick, precise move he swept it across Cyn’s left bicep opening a shallow cut. It was such a deft move that he figured the pain would be minimal and yet she shrieked and dropped to her knees.

  “What the hell!” Richards cried.

  “I had to,” Jack said. “Cyn, I had to. I’m sorry, I really am, but you were the obvious choice. We needed blood and...”

  “It burns!” she screamed. “It’s burning me!”

  The blade of the rapier was black. Like Amanra’s claws, the blade was now poisonous. “You’re not dying, Cyn. It’ll fade. The pain will fade.” It was a partial truth; the slashes across his chest were a misery to him, but he could function.

  “Please, draw the circle,” he begged; the door was edging further and further open. “Use your fingers as a brush...yes, there you go.” She was shaking and still crying, but she managed to pull up the pictures from her phone and began to draw the first glyph. “There you go. Great. Spread out the glyphs but not too far. Now you’ll need to change one of them. The one with the ant. Don’t draw the leg on it. That changes the meaning from one to none.”

  Richards, who was sweating and trembling, asked: “Will this work?”

  “Yes,” Jack answered. It had to. If it didn’t, none of them would get out alive.

  The door opened another inch and Hor stuck one leg inside the room. The linens that he had been wrapped in were torn as was the skin covering his thigh bone. The flesh looked like a dried-up rag with a few scraggly black hairs dangling from it. For some reason the sight of it made Richards give up on trying to hold back the door.

  He stood up, went wobbly for a second and then pulled out his gun. Without his help, Jack couldn’t hold back Hor. The monster pushed the door open one handed, scraping back both the dresser and the bed with ease. Behind him, the hall was filled with clouds as if a storm had sprung up under the roof.

  “Draw faster!” Jack yelled. Cyn was on the far curve of the circle, with her back to them; she whimpered every time she put a shaking hand to the wound Jack ha
d given her. He knew the pain she was feeling because he was feeling it too, just as he knew her fear, but at least he could face the creatures and at least he had a weapon in his hand. She only had bloody fingers and crazy scrawled characters and a wild hope that a few ancient glyphs would protect her. She had little faith in the circle and every second or two she would steal a frightened glance over her shoulder at the darkened doorway.

  Richards started firing. He kept pulling the trigger until his gun was empty and their ears rang. The bullets had very little effect: a few bones were chipped and some crypt dust was added to the black swirling darkness but, other than that, the gun was almost useless with the exception of causing Hor to pause before he stumped in to the room.

  When he finally did, Jack swept up his rapier ready for the onslaught; however, Hor didn’t attack right away.

  The creature moved to the right, the bare bones of his one foot scraping on the wood. After him came the Priest of Thorthirdes and then Amanra. Last was the Incan mummy who stayed in the doorway, completing the trap. They brought the darkness from the hallway in with them so that there was a roiling cloud cloaking their shoulders.

  “Draw faster,” Jack hissed through gritted teeth.

  “One minute,” she shot back. They didn’t have a minute. They didn’t even have ten seconds. With a shrill hissing, the creatures attacked.

  Chapter 13

  Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York

  “Stop!” Jack yelled. “Hor, stop.” It didn’t work this time. Hor didn’t even hesitate. “Oh, boy,” Jack said, as the creatures rushed forward, attacking from three sides. Against all logic, Jack attacked as well. Swinging his rapier like a wild man, he sprang forward. He had no form, no precise footwork and no concept of defense. All he cared about was whistling the blade back and forth as fast as he could.