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

by Peter Meredith

  A second later, Richards joined him. He had Cyn’s rapier and together he and Jack hacked off a few hands and fingers and kept the creatures at bay for thirty precious seconds. Just long enough for Cyn to finish the circle.

  “I’m done!” she cried, standing right in the middle of the circle she had created. To Jack it looked awful small and the characters were far from precise. In other words, he was about to put his life on the line with the only thing between him and a bad death was a hunch and some splashes of blood that may or may not be actual characters.

  “Don’t step on any of the blood,” he warned Richards and then hopped over the edge of the circle where he wavered and pinwheeled his left arm as though he had leapt to the top of a mountain with sheer sides and a thousand-foot drop. Richards pushed his arm away and smushed in close; with three adults in the circle there was precious little room. They stood with their backs to each other and their swords out.

  Hor and the priest and Amanra came forward and now the room was altogether black. The only thing that Jack could make out was Hor’s bone-grin. It was lit from within by a spectral glow, which made Hor seem deeply hungry. He came right up to the circle and leered in; he was so close that Jack could see his skull perfectly well. It was scarred and pitted with its great age and there were ancient dust particles in its teeth and along the sutures that held the different bones of its skull together. The dust was fine as cigar ash as though someone had carelessly, or perhaps cruelly, tapped their stogie over Hor’s corpse at some point and then hadn’t bothered to blow them away.

  It opened it mouth wide and, just like with its eyes, there was a blackness that went deep down its throat, miles deep. The blackness went down to where Jack did not want to go.

  “Hrr vahl Evi ah hurrumm fd,” Jack stated in a wandering and shaky voice. “Hrr ah huroon ksa hrer, uh, uh, oh jeeze, um, mkr, hrr fd fdhra.”

  The glow of Hor faded, his mouth closed and then he slid silently back until he was enveloped in the dark.

  “What are you saying?” Richards asked. “What is that?”

  Instead of answering, Jack repeated in a stronger voice: “Hrr vahl Evi ah hurrumm fd. Hrr ah huroon ksa hrer, mkr, hrr fd fdhra.” The darkness and the horrid smell, and the heart-rattling fear grew around them, becoming almost palpable. The very air in the bedroom became heavy and dank, like a cemetery fog. It was an angry black fog.

  “The monster…it’s in my mind,” Cyn said. “I can feel it in my head...and it knows my name. It knows me.”

  Jack raised his voice and, for a third time, spoke in a language no one had uttered in eons. There was a brief shimmer to the air and a light sound of wind rushing away from them...and then nothing. The room looked just as it had—a dark storm with the occasional glimpse of grinning skull.

  “What the hell are you saying?” Richards cried. “Why do you keep repeating nonsense? We should be...we should be doing something to get out of here before it’s too late.”

  “Don’t move, Detective,” Jack said, putting out his hand. Hor came stumping out of the darkness to stand directly in front of Jack. It glared, the black sockets where his eyes had long ago rotted away swelled and grew as did the darkness around him. Hor seemed to be gaining in strength. And the other mummies came closer as well and they brimmed with anger, their bones rattling.

  In spite of this fury, Jack found himself grinning. The spell was working. He could feel it as though there was an invisible curtain all around them. Hor swelled up only inches away; however, it couldn’t cross the barrier.

  “It wasn’t nonsense,” Jack said. “It’s the spell. That’s what the glyphs say. I was just saying: My will for none to cross. My will for none to walk in the light of day...”

  “It’s in my head!” Cyn repeated, urgently.

  “It’s ok, Cyn,” Jack said. “He can’t get us, so try not to think about it. We should all just try to relax.” Cyn nodded but in a manic, spastic manner. Richards didn’t appear to have heard Jack at all. He was once again under the influence of the fear and looked on the verge of running. It would be his death if he did.

  Jack tried to rally them. “Don’t listen to Hor, listen to me, instead. We’re going to make it out of here. The spell is working! Can’t you feel it? Richards, come on. Don’t be afraid, he can’t get us. He can’t hurt us!” Jack spun, very carefully, in place and took Richards by the shoulders and began to turn him so that he wasn’t staring out into the blackness.

  He did the same thing for his cousin, saying: “It’ll be ok, Cyn. Come here, turn around. Put your head on my shoulder.”

  For the next few minutes, the three of them huddled close as the creatures did everything they could to get them to break, mentally. The fear grew and the smell was dizzying and the darkness became hellish. But, for those few minutes, Jack was unflappable and soon the darkness grew less and the air began to clear; they were weakening!

  And then there was the scrape of bone coming from the hall—the creatures were leaving. It was almost too good to be true. Fearing that this was a ruse or a trap, the three humans stayed in the circle for five minutes after the last of the mummies left the house.

  During those long minutes, Jack lost the excitement he had been feeling over his first successful spell casting, if that was even what he’d done. He really didn’t know and he was having a very difficult time concentrating. The pain in his chest grew steadily until it felt as though it were on fire. Soon, the ugly, poisonous sensation in the four gashes spread deeper into his body. It felt as though he was breathing through lungs that were filling with steel wool. His head was swimmy and the floor of the room had begun to rock.

  Cyn was also feeling the poison. Her left arm hung cold and practically useless. Her face was dead white and her eyes went in and out of focus.

  Richards was physically healthy; however his mental state was suspect. “This is real, isn’t it?” he asked, walking around the bedroom, making sure not to touch the blood on the floor. “I…I can’t believe it, and you know what? No one else is going to believe it, either. What am I going to tell the Lindenhurst PD? I got two of their men downstairs. One was eaten. You all saw that, right? That’s not something you can just pretend didn’t happen. There’s going to be an investigation. I’m…I’m screwed.”

  “Yeah,” Cyn said in a breathy whisper. “But first, I think I need to go to the hospital. Jack, too. You look like you might faint.”

  Jack didn’t think going to a hospital would do him any good. No hospital in the world was going to have an antidote for the poison that was spreading through his system. Just like the wicked feeling that had rushed up the metal of the swords he had used against the undead creatures, the poison in his wounds was pure evil.

  A hospital would be a waste, but he didn’t think he had any other choice. “I need air,” he said and then stumbled out of the room. Moving helped and the idea of getting out of the house gave him a burst of energy that carried him down the stairs; however, the energy was utterly sapped when he saw the two dead police officers in the foyer. Their corpses looked as though they had been mauled and the look on their frozen faces was one of eternal terror.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to them and then went out into the cold night. The air stung his wounds, but helped to clear his head—nothing could help his lungs. He coughed with no strength as he stumbled for Richards’ Ford Taurus and only when he thumped against the hood with a strange metallic sound did he realize that he was still carrying the rapier.

  “Get in,” a soft voice said in his ear a second later. It was Cyn, making Jack wonder whether he had passed out standing up. She opened the door for him and he crawled in.

  Richards didn’t head straight for his car. He paused at the top of the porch stairs, perhaps to make sure that it was indeed safe to come out of the house. Jack could have told him that the creatures were long gone; they registered only as a vague evil to the northwest and the strength of the feeling was diminishing.

  After the pause, Richar
ds went to the Lindenhurst police cruiser and came away with a 12-gauge shotgun and two boxes of shells. He wanted to hand the gun to Jack, but Jack was slumped against the far door, his eyes going in and out of focus. Even if he hadn’t been in the process of dying, he really wasn’t interested in the gun. He had the rapier. Yes, it had the terrible smell to it and the aura of evil was uncomfortable, but it had also proven itself in battle where guns had yet to do so.

  Cyn had been listless, but she grew eager at the sight of the weapon and she took the gun and began studying it.

  “It’s very simple. The shells go in there,” Richards said, pointing to a slot on the side of the weapon. “It holds four shells total. You don’t have to pump it, or anything like that. Put three shells in the bottom and one in the chamber. Just brace yourself for the kick because it packs a wallop if you’re not careful. But also don’t be afraid of it, or it’ll get the better of you.”

  “I think I understand,” she answered. “But hopefully we won’t need it right? We can call the other cops on Robert, right? They can take care of him, right?”

  Richards got in the front seat and started the car. He didn’t answer right away. He drove for a few minutes along the forested road and Jack could tell that he was still processing what he had thought was impossible. Coming to grips with the sudden infusion of insanity in their lives wasn’t an easy thing to do, though Richards did have the good fortune to have gone through it with two other people.

  The detective was quickly getting his wits back.

  “I’ll drop you two off at the hospital and I’ll go after Robert. If I kill him, will those things leave?”

  “Maybe...really, I don’t know how to get rid of them,” Jack said. “I don’t even know how we stopped them. Some writing in an ancient language? That worked? It’s starting to feel unreal again.”

  Cyn began nodding. “I know what you mean. Hor was inside my head. That couldn’t have been real. That had to be a dream or my imagination. Or I’m on drugs. I must be. Hor was in my head and he spoke to me and I understood him.”

  Jack remembered the same confused sensation. “It was like he was speaking English and that’s impossible. He was Egyptian and...and besides, English hadn’t even been invented yet when he was alive.”

  They were quiet for a few minutes as that sunk in. The empty road ended at a much busier street. There were people walking their dogs and there were other cars driving about and the streetlights had pleasant fairy halos around them. It was all wonderfully normal. It made Jack smile, although it was just a twitch at the corners of his mouth. He didn’t have strength for more.

  Richards paused, not knowing which way to turn. “They went west, toward the city,” Cyn said.

  “How?” Jack asked. Just the one word sent him coughing again.

  “I can feel them, too,” she answered. “I don’t know how. And...and I had the same dream as you had last night, Jack. I saw that security guard getting killed and I didn’t know what to say. I thought it was crazy that you’d had the same dream. I mean, it made me feel crazy and then Hor...I felt him just like you did, when we were in front of the house.”

  For just a few seconds, Jack was able to forget the deep pain in his chest and the thousand needles invading his lungs with every breath. It wasn’t just happenstance that Cyn could feel Hor and that she had the dream. There was a connection somewhere in Cyn’s words...or maybe it was in her blood.

  First Robert Montgomery, then Jack Dreyden and now Cynthia Childs. The last three heirs to the fortune of Lord Blackburn. “Although I’m not much of an heir,” Jack mumbled under his breath. The only thing Jack had actually received from his great-great grandfather was the papyrus—a spell to open a portal to the netherworld.

  And Cyn would eventually receive the spell to control who...or what came through the portal. And that left Robert.

  “What spell does he have?” Jack asked. “What power...” He couldn’t go on. The pain in his chest flared and it felt as though his lungs had begun to collapse around the needles.

  “Drive!” Cyn ordered.

  Richards took a left, heading west. He kept glancing back at Jack with an increasingly worried look on his face. Jack wanted to ask him what he was seeing. Did he look like he was dying? It certainly felt like he was dying and it wasn’t going to be one of those gently passing into the light sort of deaths either. Jack knew in his heart that when he went, there’d be a gaping hole in the universe and that he’d be sucked in where his screams would never be heard again.

  Amanra had touched him with his diseased claws and Amanra would claim him when he was finally quit of this life, and Amanra would own him.

  “Faster,” Cyn urged. In her worry over Jack, she was managing to ignore her own pain, and the odd fact that her wound was still bleeding. It shouldn’t have been. Jack had been very precise with his cut: a third of an inch deep and an inch long. It should have bled just enough to draw the circle and the runes. But it was still going, running like a faucet.

  Richards picked up the speed and even lit up his dash lights and started his siren. “We’ll be at St. Joseph’s hospital in two minutes. Can you hold on?”

  Jack nodded, or at least he thought he did; he wasn’t all that sure. The lights and the siren were beginning to blur, making everything in his vision turn into a tartan mess.

  Then they were at the hospital. Jack felt himself being lifted out of the back of the Ford and the only thing he knew for sure was that the four lacerations on his chest hadn’t closed either. He was sitting with a lap full of blood that poured everywhere when he was placed on the gurney.

  “What the hell?” someone asked. “Did a bear get at him?”

  Richards opened his mouth for what was likely going to be the first of many lies, but Cyn beat him to it. “We don’t know what it was. It came out of the dark.”

  “Yeah,” Richards agreed.

  Jack passed out at that point. His eyes rolled up in his head and he was gone into the black where he thought he’d be living forever; however, he wasn’t out for more than an hour. He woke with what seemed like a dozen people standing over him. There was a tube down his throat and another in his arm. The smell of burnt flesh was strong in his nostrils.

  He couldn’t breathe. His lungs weren’t working properly. There were still gobs of pain in his chest—the thousand needles had become ten-thousand. And yet it was the smell of burning flesh that had Jack the most afraid. What new hell was in his system that would cause his flesh to burn?

  A masked doctor saw that he was awake and apologized: “Sorry. We’re almost done.”

  Jack didn’t have an idea about what there was to be sorry for until he heard a hiss and felt a sharp sting in his chest. The smell of burnt flesh grew stronger and Jack realized, with some relief, that they were cauterizing his wound. It hurt like a bitch, but it was at least a natural pain.

  “Almost done,” the doctor said, two more times, each apology accompanied by zinging sting and the smell. “Ok, all done. At least with this part.” The doctor had kind, fatherly eyes and they crinkled in Jack’s direction as he smiled behind his mask. Jack couldn’t smile back; his pain and his fear were too great.

  “This is a real stumper, Mr. Dreyden,” the doctor said, stepping back. “Your wound just wouldn’t close and so we were forced to oh, damn...one of the bleeders just opened up again. You’re not a hemophiliac, are you?” Jack shook his head and then grimaced as he was zinged again. “Are you taking drugs? Do you work with chemicals or exotic plants?” Jack kept shaking his head.

  The doctor made a noise of disappointment. “And you don’t remember seeing what attacked you?” Again Jack shook his head as a monitor above his head started beeping. “O2 sats are getting low,” the doctor noted. He turned to a nurse. “Get me an arterial stick. I’m going to go check on the girl.”

  Jack grunted out a noise and reached out with his left hand. “How’s she doing?” the doctor asked. “Better than you, but only by a little. The wou
nd in her arm won’t close. It’s a relatively minor laceration; however, we’re seeing some necrosis around the edges, meaning the flesh is dying.”

  Jack nodded. There was no need to ask if his own flesh was dying; he could feel the death of a million cells every second. He could feel the evil working in his blood. He could feel it not just invading his lungs, he could feel it working its way to his heart.

  He felt as though he was on the Titanic as it sank beneath the frigid waters of the Atlantic and the band was playing, but they weren’t playing anything uplifting, they were playing The Devil Went Down to Georgia. The line: And he was looking for a soul to steal...went round and round in Jack’s head.

  His soul was on the line and he had no way of fighting back.

  Cyn was two beds down and when the nurses finally took a break from trying to save their lives, she stole out of bed and came to see Jack, carrying her IV in her good arm. They’d been in the hospital for just over an hour and already she had dark circles under her eyes and she was so pale that she looked as though a doctor with a pocket full of leeches had been working on her. Even her blonde hair was lank and tired appearing, like a mop propped up in the corner of the broom closet.

  Jack didn’t like the look in those shadowed eyes, they said far more than the doctor’s professionally hooded ones had and they said exactly what he didn’t want to hear and the tears didn’t help. She was in obvious pain, but the tears were for him.

  “I have a confession,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, but it wasn’t my mother who showed our scroll to Robert’s dad. It was me. I-I thought that we could figure it out together and I really didn’t know what the scroll would do. You have to believe me.”

  Of course he believed her and he truly wished he could forgive her, verbally that is, but the tube that they had snaked down his throat wouldn’t allow it. He actually had an issue with the entire concept of forgiveness. Since his mother had died, he had slowly drifted from the agnostic state in which he had been raised to being a straight-up atheist.