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

by Peter Meredith

  Me? Jack wanted to ask. He was feeling weak as well. His energy and his will to fight drained from him with every passing second. He wanted to argue that someone else should break the circle, but then he saw that he was the only one who was empty-handed. His sword lay a few feet away, but was outside the very small circle of protection that the crucifix afforded.

  “I guess,” he mumbled beneath the fury, and then fished out the bottle. It was disappointingly small, a few ounces at most. He’d been hoping for something larger, closer to the size of a canteen, something he could have thrown from where they stood, huddled together.

  “We need to get closer!” Jack yelled. He was amped up with fear, certain that if he got too close to the portal he’d be sucked in. “And hold onto me. Don’t let go!” Hands gripped him as he edged forward with tiny shuffling steps.

  They were so tiny and hesitant that Detective Richards stepped on the back of his boots on more than one occasion. “Get moving,” Richards growled in his ear.

  Jack ignored the detective. His entire being was focused on the yawning pit. As he neared the edge, he saw the phantoms lined up, millions deep, each eagerly waiting their turn to get back into a land of the living, eagerly looking forward to despoiling exactly what they desired and turning it into another hell.

  The cold and the wind slowed him, as well. His flesh hardened and stung, his eyes watered, the tears freezing on his lashes, the air in his lungs felt like spikes, and the knuckles of the hand with the outstretched bottle were so cold that they felt as though they were on fire—and yet his palm was warm—the Holy Water was not turning to ice as it should have.

  The water danced and jiggled in the bottle as his hand shook from the cold, but through some mysterious force, not a drop left the bottle until he was at the circle of glyphs. The spell to open the portal was the inner ring of blood runes. Just like the Holy Water, Dr. Loret’s blood was unaffected by the cold of the portal; it was still fresh and wet.

  Loret was a different story. His corpse was frozen solid and hoary with frost and ice. His face was forever contorted in a look of utter shock and agony.

  Jack, with his head turned from the fearful cold rushing out of the pit had a perfect view of the doctor and so horrible was his fate that Jack felt a pang of sympathy. But it was a brief feeling. He had run up against the edge of the outer ring of glyphs and the bottle in his hand was no longer warm, it was blistering hot and the contents were frothing and bubbling.

  “Now! Now!” Cyn screamed in his ear, while Richards thumped a meaty hand on his back.

  Am I supposed to say something? Jack wondered. A prayer or some sort of religious invocation? “In the name of Jesus Christ,” was all he could think to say, before he upended the bottle.

  It was hard to tell what happened next. There was a flash of light and what felt like a discharge of electricity that ran up Jack’s hand and into his arm. The bottle broke and, very strangely, there was the sound of glass falling on pavement. It was a merry, tinkling sound.

  Jack had his eyes closed and now he saw the earth reclaiming itself, sealing the hole into the void like a puzzle putting itself together starting with the edges and working inward. The last of the phantom spirits came screaming out of the shrinking hole and then it was gone and the night was suddenly quiet. It was a numb sort of quiet; however, as if they had just left a rock concert.

  With a nervous finger, Jack touched the cement within the circle...and then yanked his hand back. “It's freezing,” he said, and even as he watched, mist began lifting from the ground.

  “What did you say?” Cyn asked. She had a pinky stuck in her ear and was giving it a hardy wiggle.

  “I said...”

  Richards grabbed Jack’s shoulder in a tight grip. “Shush,” he said in a quiet tone and then pointed. Jack followed his finger and saw that the six mummies had reformed once again and were lined in front of his cousin, Robert, who stood with a hand on a tremendous oak tree. It had a trunk of great girth and threw a deep shadow over him.

  “That was something,” he said and then laughed briefly, tiredly.

  Richards brought his shotgun to his shoulder. “I should kill you right now,” he said.

  The threat left Robert unfazed. He made no move to duck behind the tree. Perhaps he couldn’t. Even with the gloom of the tree hanging over him, he looked exhausted. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” he replied and then cocked his head. “Listen.”

  The wind was gone, as was the psychic storm they’d been battling, now there were only natural, earthly noises: a strange scritching, a hollow thump of wood being hammered on, rusty chains rattling. And there weren’t just a few of each of these sounds; they were coming from everywhere and they were gaining in strength.

  Jack jerked in surprise. There was a strange noise almost under his feet, as if a giant gopher was digging upwards out of some dank subterranean tunnel. But it was no gopher. Something...or rather someone was buried under the cement drive and was now trying to fight their way to the surface.

  “Yes,” Robert said. “They are coming. All those demons have bodies now and they want out of the ground. They want to see the sun and the moon and the stars. Well, not the sun so much, but they do want out and they are awfully hungry.”

  “Then all the more reason I should kill you now before they get out,” Richards said, still with the gun poised, yet he did not shoot.

  Robert shook his head. “Like I said, I wouldn’t do that. Right now, I’m their master, but if I die, then they won’t have a master and you’ll really have a problem, because you can’t really kill these things. You might be able to exorcise them one at a time, but that would take a heck of a lot of priests and how many people will die in the meantime? Millions, I would think.”

  “You raised demons?” Cyn asked. “That makes no...why? Why on earth would you do something so horrible?”

  Robert took a deep breath and ran a tired hand through his black hair. “I wasn’t lying when I said that it was your fault. I raised Hor simply to see if I could. I mean, I knew it was possible, but I was drawn to the power. I freely admit that, but then Loret,” he paused to point at the slowly thawing corpse on the ground, “went crazy with fear, which got the police involved and so I had to tie up loose ends and things just sort of snowballed.”

  “I was a loose end?” Jack cried, realizing now why he’d been targeted. “I’m your damned cousin! Weren’t you the one who was always going on about family?”

  Robert lifted a single shoulder in a lazy shrug. “You are the last bastard in a line of bastards. Clipping your diseased branch from the family tree was really a duty. You see, this is my destiny. The spells are my birthright. They all should have come to me.”

  Jack was ready to start spitting curses, but Father Paul pointed the bible at him and hissed: “We should not be wasting our time like this. We should either consider capturing him or fleeing.”

  This made Robert laugh. “Capture me? Do you know why I chose this cemetery? Calvary has a unique history that few people remember. In the early part of the last century, influenza and tuberculosis epidemics were so bad that it caused a shortage of gravediggers, forcing people to dig graves for their own loved ones. Many of those people were so poor that they could afford neither coffins, nor shovels. Think about that. How deep do you think they dug with a diseased corpse sitting next to them? What if it was winter and all they had to dig with was a trowel?”

  The visual Robert painted seized his four enemies and each turned to stare into the night, realizing that there were likely tens of thousands of bodies out there covered in nothing but a foot or two of dirt.

  Movement next to the Ford caught Jack’s attention: the grass in front of one of the grave markers suddenly bulged and began to press upward. Jack pointed at it, his eyes growing larger and larger. “Right there,” he said as a head pushed up out of the dirt. It was Orin Haymech...dead Orin Haymech.

  There was little flesh left on its moldy bones, but it had long, long st
rands of wet, muddy hair and there was more mud clogging the eye sockets in its skull, and when it turned toward Jack its mouth was filled with grave dirt and worms. They came squirming out to fall on the remains of the black suit he wore. Most of the suit fell apart when Orin stood.

  There were many others like him. Some in better condition or with better made clothes that hung on their skinny shoulders. Some were disturbingly fresh appearing.

  One lady wore what appeared to be a wedding gown that was still satiny white in parts—her face fell off and dropped into a fold of cloth where her bosom had once been. One man came walking out of the dark still in his entire suit; his pants only staying up because of the suspenders he wore. As he walked, a horrible slop that was part decomposed intestine and half-curdled blood leaked down out of the legs of his pants.

  Jack couldn’t stop staring as the cemetery came “alive” around them. He was jerked into action as a hand grabbed his shoulder and started pulling him backward. “Come on.” It was Richards hauling him away from the corpse of Loret and the bloody glyphs...and the Ford.

  There were too many of the walking corpses all around the car to even think of making an attempt at getting to it.

  “Wait!” Jack said and shook off the hand that was pulling him away. The rapier, his only weapon, was just feet away; he grabbed it and ran. All of them ran. The living corpses were everywhere; however they were positively swarming back in the direction of the gate, so they had no choice but to run deeper into the cemetery.

  It felt like the exact wrong direction to Jack. With all his heart, he knew they had to get out of the cemetery, no matter what, but Richards was leading them and he seemed loath to leave the winding drive that meandered through the grounds. Jack understood to some extent. Although the grass appeared normal, he had a nervous feeling that if they ran across it, hands would reach up out of it and trip them up and then drag them under.

  And yet, their feet slapping on the pavement seemed to draw every corpse in the graveyard right to them and eventually they were cut off with hundreds forming a veritable wall in front of them.

  With a deep breath and a nervous glance at the brown grass, Cyn cried: “This way!” She charged off down a grassy slope that was, for the moment, free of the creatures. Jack followed with light steps, ready to leap at the first sign of a bony finger creeping up out of the dirt like a blind mole.

  Cyn was running strangely, high up on her tippy-toes as her fashionable, but poorly chosen, stilettos kept stabbing into the earth, pinning each foot in place.

  She had been heading for the tall, rock wall that surrounded the grounds but in seconds that direction was cut off as well as the dirt in front of it erupted and foul bone-creatures clawed their way into the night. There were literally thousands upon thousands of corpses pushing their way to the surface.

  It was a sight that stole their breath.

  Few of the corpses wore anything but stretched-over drum-tight flesh and the furry bubbles of black mold. They were horrors. There were some that were terrible and sad. These were the smaller ones. They were the living bones of Irish children who had, for their brief lives, been uncared for and unwanted by society and in death, dumped in mass graves.

  “Not this way!” Cyn screamed, breaking to her left.

  The hell-children followed, while all around more of the dead swarmed, moving to block them from escaping.

  These weren’t cartoon caricatures of zombies. They could stumble along at a pretty good clip, depending if they had all of their appendages or not. And they weren’t stupid, not exactly. They were cunning in their way and very, very evil. They exuded evil; they polluted the very air with the stench of it. It was a noxious cloud that hung over the cemetery, making it difficult for the older men, Father Paul and Detective Richards, to keep up.

  They sounded like broken horses and with Cyn limping, it was up to Jack to make sure they made it out of there. Had he been alone, he might have made a run for one of the walls, but since the others would never be able to keep up, he headed for a row of stone buildings; mausoleums built for the rich or well-connected.

  With the dead closing in on them, there was no time to be choosey and Jack went to the first in the line. It was a strange little building, somewhat styled after a miniature cathedral, complete with a cross-topped spire and stone cherubs on each corner. In the dark, the granite slabs that made up its walls were dull and dreary; in fact, the entire structure was as spooky as hell and had this been any other night, Jack wouldn’t have gone in on a dare.

  Now, he was practically begging to get in; however, there was an old hasp on the door with a newish Yale lock clapped on it. Jack took one look at the lock and started on to the next crypt, but Richards held him back. “They’re all going to be locked. Give me your sword.”

  “Why? I need it...”

  Richards ignored him and grabbed the rapier out of Jack’s surprised hands and slid it down into the very slim opening between the hasp and the door. “It’ll be ok,” Richards assured and then heaved back on the grip of the sword. It was obvious that he expected the hasp with its rust and its aged appearance to break before the gleaming sword did. In this he was wrong.

  The sword snapped right off just above the cross-guard.

  “You...it...my sword!” Jack cried, his mouth falling open.

  Richards handed him the pommel, muttered: “Sorry,” and then stepped back, hoisting the shotgun to his shoulder. Jack turned away just as the detective pulled the trigger.

  Now the hasp was broken and with a heavy shoulder slamming into it, the door swung open, squealing a cry like an old woman. Richards didn’t barge right in. This was a house of the dead after all. He stood with the gun at the ready, only the dark in the little building was absolute and revealed nothing.

  Cyn stepped forward, thrusting the shotgun she’d been carrying into Jack’s hands. “Watch our backs,” she instructed and then pulled out her phone and lit up the interior of the death house. There wasn’t much to see: a lone marble coffin sat upon a granite pedestal while next to it was a viewing bench that had likely never been used a single time. The bench was marble, angular and, because it was flat and literally as hard as rock, was only just functional. The dust coating the room was a quarter-inch thick and likely older than Jack and maybe even older than Richards who, with his deeply pouched eyes, looked to be in his forties.

  Jack only caught a glimpse of the inside of the mausoleum before he turned back to the night and the night creatures that were charging down on them. The closest of them was thirty yards away; they only had seconds to get to a place of safety.

  “Is it clear?” he asked. “Tell me nothing’s alive in there, because we have all sorts of trouble out here.”

  “Yeah, we’re good,” Richards answered, his voice coming to Jack in an echoey manner that suggested the interior of the mausoleum was much bigger on the inside. It wasn’t and nor was it “clear.” There was indeed something alive in it that had no right to be alive; thankfully, it was trapped under a thousand ponds of marble.

  The second Jack was through the door, Richards slammed it shut and braced it with his shoulder. It was a solid door, but they had been down that road before. “Break out a good prayer, Father. We’re going to need it.” He jutted his chin toward the heavy, leather-bound book in Father Paul’s hand.

  “Have faith,” the priest said and then squinted down at the bible, unable to read a word.

  “Let there be light, right Father?” Cyn pointed her cell phone light at the bible just as the door shook from the first attack.

  Jack, who had little faith in anything just then looked around the single room for something to brace the door with. His eyes fell upon the marble bench. He rushed to it and strained at it until his eyes bulged with the effort, but wasn’t able to move it. Then he went to the marble coffin and ran his hands along its dusty surface only to pull his hands away with a squeak when something moved inside of it.

  “Do you have anything yet, Fathe
r?” he asked and heard the sound of his fear radiate off the walls and come back to him.

  “I do.” Father Paul cleared his throat, took a breath of the fetid air and began: “Lord in heaven...” It was a long prayer, beseeching the Almighty Father in Heaven for aid in the face of death, and help in destroying the spawn of hell, and for power to drive out the evil in the world.

  It was a long prayer because Father Paul kept changing it and adding to it—all in vain. The undead beasts kept piling up outside the walls of the mausoleum and it was all Jack and Richards could do to keep the door closed.

  Eventually, Cyn pulled the light from the bible. “It’s not working! We need to use the glyphs again. Does anyone have a knife?”

  “In my back pocket,” Richards grunted.

  Cyn had the knife out and after a quick, steadying breath she sliced open the soft part of her forearm. She wasn’t timid about it, either. The cut was deep and immediately ran with blood that looked black in the dim light. “Father, I’m going to need you to hold the phone. Alternate between showing me the glyphs and giving me light to work by.”

  Her hair hung down in her face and without thinking, she swept it up in a bun, leaving a maroon line of blood in her thick blonde mane.

  Father Paul looked at the blood in her hair and the blood coursing out of her arm with his throat working. “Blood sacrifices? I’m very uncomfortable with assisting in a satanic ritual but I will do this on the condition that we all agree that we will need some forgiveness when this is over.”

  “Yes, yes,” Cyn agreed. “Just hold the light steady!”

  It took three minutes for her to draw the circle perfectly and then she repeated the arcane phrase: Hrr vahl Evi ah hurrumm fd. Hrr ah huroon ksa hrer, mkr, hrr fd fdhra, three times.