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

by Peter Meredith

  Cyn was half-turned. “They’re way back there. You can slow down.” Jack didn’t slow; the dash showed that it was after four in the morning and he was afraid that Robert was long gone and his father probably was as well.

  He raced straight to the row of crypts, left the car running and jumped out, calling over his shoulder: “Keep them off of us.” He charged inside what he considered “their” mausoleum and found both Father Paul and Richards standing within the circle. “Let’s go!” he barked. “They’re a ways back.”

  Richards swayed as he stood. Jack hooked a shoulder beneath his arm and hoisted him along. The dozens of undead that were bearing down on them leant an urgency that could never be matched. Even with his heart failing, Richards made it to the Taurus in seconds and collapsed in the front seat.

  Even before he got the engine going, Jack handed him the mike to the radio. “We need to stop Robert or his father. Get someone over to the Waldorf to arrest them; trust me, he wouldn’t bring any of the monsters with him. He would think it was gauche.”

  “Yeah, I can make a call,” Richards said, and then flicked on the radio. They were instantly inundated by harsh static and a dozen hysterical voices, a few of them screaming, a few in tears, a few dying. The detective flicked off the radio and then sighed with such exhaustion that it sounded like the last sigh of a corpse.

  “I’ll try my phone,” Cyn said. “What? Out of service area? That’s not possible. Does anyone have service?” Jack had left his phone in his dorm room and Richards and Father Paul’s were both as useless as Cyn’s.

  With the creatures rushing down on them, they had no time left to worry about phones or radios. Jack raced the Ford for the cemetery gates. They were blocked by a single being: the girl with the large hundred-year old pennies over her eyes.

  “Run her down, Jack,” Richards said in a wheeze; Jack had slowed upon seeing her. “It’ll be ok. These are bullet resistant windows. She won’t be able to hurt the car.”

  Hurting the car had been a secondary consideration to Jack. He had always been squeamish over the idea of running over anything, even a squirrel, hell, even a dead squirrel, and so the idea of hitting a child and hearing all of her bones snap like so much kindling made his stomach do a little dance.

  But this was no ordinary child.

  Gripping the wheel, he stepped on the gas and aimed for the child-demon who made no move to step out of the way. Its ugly perma-grin grew wider as if seeing the car heading right for her constituted a long awaited challenge. Jack figured it was going to be a rather one-sided affair: two tons of rolling steel against thirty pounds of bones and a few ounces of dried flesh.

  He knew there wasn’t going to be much of an impact, but it turned out that there wasn’t any impact. Just before Jack ran her over, the girl leapt onto the hood. She slid right up the windshield and should have shot right over the top but she managed to hook a wiper blade and stopped her momentum.

  And there she was leering down at Jack with large, strange pennies for eyes. Jack was so shocked that he came within a whisker of striking a fire hydrant squatting on the other side of the street. He barely got the wheel around and they thumped up onto the curb, throwing everyone to the side...everyone except the girl.

  She went on smiling as she raised a tiny fist made up of tinier bones that had to have all the durability of a like number of tooth picks, and yet when she brought that fist down there was a sharp crack and the glass starred.

  “Holy crap!” Jack cried. “That’s bullet resistant?” There was no time for an answer. The little creature raised that same little fist and Jack had the sinking feeling that the window wasn’t going to hold up under too many more punches. He went with both feet as he crushed down on the brake. The Ford’s tires screamed as the girl almost flew off the front of the car; she only just managed to hold onto the wiper blade.

  “Ighs ish afar rhe,” it hissed and then opened it mouth wide; where there should have been rows of baby teeth, there was only scabby blackness. Jack knew something bad was coming; they all did. The car was silent, each of the four mesmerized by the dreadful anticipation in the air. The silence lasted not even an entire second, then the girl breathed out a cloud of white.

  The cloud washed over the windshield, instantly covering it with a layer of frost and the cracks in the glass grew like lightening, spreading out from end to end. The cold was immediate and intense. A thousand pale hairs stood up on Jack’s arms, his breath came out in a wispy imitation of the demon’s. Worst of all, the Ford’s engine began to hitch as its innards froze.

  “Drive,” Richards said in a ghostly whisper.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jack said, not taking his eyes from the shadow figure of the girl on the other side of the frosted-over glass. His foot found the gas and the engine knocked and rattled louder, but his hand on the unfamiliar gear-shifter stuck the car in neutral and not in drive.

  He was confused as the car only revved louder. At first he thought it was more of the demon’s magic, but then he saw the problem. “It was in...”

  With a crash, the windshield blasted in, covering them in glass that was so intensely cold that each piece seared their exposed flesh, while the air shriveled their lungs. The demon knelt on the remains of the windshield, half in and half out of the car. “Ighs ish afar rhe,” it hissed once more and again gaped its mouth wide ready to bring up another of the white clouds.

  This one would freeze their eyeballs into ice cubes and turn them into frost covered statues...but then a shotgun was thrust over the seat between Jack and Richards.

  “Shut it, you little tart,” Cyn said and then pulled the trigger of the shotgun. The roar of the gun sent a spike of pain into Jack’s ear, but he didn’t care. The demon was blasted over the hood of the car, losing most of the skin of its face, its jaw, her right arm, and both pennies in the process.

  “That’s one way to tell her to sod off,” Cyn said, pulling back the gun.

  Next to Jack, Richards looked greyer than ever. He reached out and put his hand over Jack’s and pulled the shifter down to drive. “Please, go,” he said, again in the voice of a man on the verge of death.

  Jack floored the pedal and raced away, watching the side mirror to make sure that the girl demon was left far behind. He had seen too many horror movies to make that rookie mistake. Only when he saw the little bundle of rags searching for its pennies was he able to breathe a sigh of relief.

  Chapter 21

  Queens, New York City

  The night blowing in their faces felt strangely warm after the cold created by the demon in the girl’s body...at first.

  Very quickly they were all shivering, especially Jack, who had given up his coat to Cyn, hours before. They needed a different car and not just because of the cold, there was the undead to worry about as well.

  Walking corpses were everywhere. It was all Jack could do to weave in and out of them. There was no way he was going to try to run one over, not after what had just happened, especially without a windshield affording the simplest protection.

  The problem was that there just weren’t a lot of cars in New York and, even if Jack knew how to hot-wire a car, which he did not, New York cars were generally equipped with the most high-tech anti-theft devices on the planet.

  This was one of the reasons that Jack took a gamble and headed to where the street fighting had been heaviest. He ran the Taurus up the ramp to the Long Island Expressway, which was a direct shot into Manhattan. A mile away, strung across the street, were eight police cars, three ambulances and two bus-sized fire trucks. There weren’t any people around the vehicles, only bodies and parts of bodies and pools of blood.

  The first responders who had taken a stand there had either died or had run away, leaving behind vehicles that were perfectly serviceable and, in most cases, still running. Jack headed straight for an ambulance—it was a heavy machine, able to crush any of the creatures.

  And it had what Detective Richards needed if he was to have any hope in
staying alive: nitroglycerin to dilate the blood vessels around his heart and oxygen to keep more of his heart muscles from dying. When Jack had his “issue” at the hospital, this was what he had been given. There could have been fifty other drugs to help a man with a heart attack, but he didn’t know them.

  “Cyn stand guard,” Jack ordered as they pulled up. “Father Paul run over to those police cars and get all the shotgun ammo they have and another gun if there is one. I’m going to help Richards into the ambulance.”

  When he jumped out, the noise and the light and the energy of the city caused him to pause. It was after four in the morning and yet it seemed all of Queens was awake, which was no wonder with all of the car alarms blaring and the sirens wailing and the screams and the gunshots.

  Every building for miles around was lit up and there were faces in the windows. Some people stared out with fear stamped on their features and others hid behind curtains like children peeping on their cousins changing. It seemed the largest portion of the population had chairs pulled right up to the glass and were watching the spectacle as nearly a million undead monsters destroyed the city around them; the people watched as if they found everything so entertaining.

  Jack couldn’t understand how so many people could be so calm.

  The creatures knew the people were up there, but they had patience and went about picking the low hanging fruit. They tore down first floor apartment doors or broke into living room windows and they feasted on blood and warm flesh. They were so focused that Jack hoped that his little group would have at least a minute before the creatures noticed them sitting right out in the middle of the street.

  It took thirty-four seconds before Cyn fired her first shot.

  Jack was just easing Richards into the back of the ambulance when the blast sent a wave of goosebumps running up his arms. “Go,” Richards said, shoving Jack away with a soft push. He started fumbling with an oxygen mask, saying over his shoulder: “I got this.”

  There was a second shot and Jack had to leave him.

  He almost ran into Father Paul who was rushing into the ambulance carrying only a single box of shells. It wouldn’t be enough, not if they had to fight their way out of the city.

  The priest was not the bravest of men. Before that night his nerve had probably never been tested, and he was now running on the last dregs of courage. Being outside a car or a building where there was nothing between a person and a very quick death wasn’t easy. It made a man feel naked or perhaps worse than that: skinless.

  And yet Cyn was calmly blasting away the undead as they came charging at her. They were never fast, but the creatures were determined and there were so many of them. With all the strobes lighting up the area, there weren’t shadows in which the creatures could hide; there had to be a hundred of them grinding forward on their bone-feet.

  “Hold them off a bit longer!” Jack yelled to Cyn and then turned to the priest: “Find some nitroglycerine and get him hooked to some oxygen.” He didn’t wait for an answer or acknowledgement; he ran for the nearest police car where there was a shotgun in a rack behind the front seats. It was locked in place which was why the priest hadn’t grabbed it. Of course, the keys to the lock were sitting in the ignition.

  It took fourteen seconds and three shots from Cyn’s gun to free the weapon. Jack then ran around to the trunk and when he popped it open the first thing he saw was a black box that looked like futuristic luggage. Inside that were two sets of riot gear: heavy vests, black helmets, gloves, and arm and leg guards.

  He hauled the case out and ran for the ambulance, where he chucked the case into the back and shut the door. There were two more blasts from Cyn’s gun and he was just about to yell for her to get back to the ambulance when he happened to glance over at Richards’ Ford and saw that not only was Cyn’s rapier sitting in the back seat, there was one of the boxes of shotgun shells that Richards had taken from the Lindenhurst police cruiser earlier that night.

  Unfortunately, between him and the car were two of the creatures. They were both small but that didn’t make them any less dangerous.

  Jack ran to his right in a wide loop, taking advantage of his speed, and coming around the far side of the Taurus with a good enough lead to get in the back seat and shut the door on them. The two creatures immediately attacked the glass with their fists, and that was just fine with Jack. He grabbed the box of shells and the sword and scooted out of the near side of the car, yelling to Cyn: “Let’s go!”

  He ran for the ambulance with the beasts lumbering behind. Cyn beat him into the vehicle and was already reloading when Jack got in. “It’s a might bit sporting out there,” she commented. Her shaking hands belied her calm exterior.

  “Find me the heat, will you?” Jack asked, guiding the ambulance at break-neck speed down the road. He didn’t want to chance taking his eyes from the road and there were what looked like fifty different buttons and knobs on the dash.

  She found the heat and cranked it over to full blast. Then she found the switch for the emergency lights and flicked them off so the world was no longer lit in a mad swirl of red and white.

  They sped along the expressway until the road started to slope down; to their right was a sign that read: Queens Midtown Tunnel. Jack began coasting, feeling dread creep into his belly like a weight.

  Seconds later they saw the opening to the tunnel. It was normally lit with a greenish glow; now, it was a black maw that had Jack’s fear building. The road down into it was five lanes of hell, jammed with cars, a few on fire, a few with people trapped inside, most abandoned. They appeared fused together, one bumper locked to the next. There were skeleton beings all around the cars, smashing glass or dragging people out by their hair.

  “Don’t you dare go down there, Jack!” Cyn warned.

  Of course not, he thought. Going down there would be suicide and yet he hadn’t slammed on the brakes as he should have. Something shadowy, swift and slight had run from behind one of the cars. At first, Jack thought it was one of the smaller creatures, but it was too fast and its gait was too human. It was a boy.

  Jack stared past the boy, hoping to see one of his parents and sure enough there was a woman with three-foot dreadlocks hanging on her shoulders, waving a blanket as seven or eight of the creatures charged her. He had never seen anything so fantastic. Where she got the courage from, he had no idea.

  On instinct, he swung the ambulance wide to the right and then curved it back in toward the woman who had thrown the blanket over the first of the creatures and was now running after her son. Jack cut right behind her and roared through the undead, no longer squeamish about hitting them. How could he be squeamish when a lone woman armed with nothing but a blanket could have the guts to stand against them?

  He blasted the creatures with the heavy duty vehicle and sent bones flying and skulls tumbling.

  Barely slowing he turned back up the ramp and came up along the side of the woman and saw that she was more incredible than he had even guessed. He blinked in embarrassed surprise as he saw that she had fought the creatures almost naked. She had on soft-looking pajama bottoms, but was both shirtless and shoeless. He slowed long enough for her to climb in, scramble over Cyn and then he was going again, chasing after the son who was racing away from them.

  The son took one look back at the onrushing ambulance and his eyes went huge in his dark face. He tried to push his legs faster, but he was spent and gradually slowed, crying in fear.

  He wouldn’t get in the ambulance even when his mother screamed out the window: “Andra! Get your butt in here, right this second!”

  Andra pointed at the front of the ambulance. “There’s one right there.”

  Jack glanced in the side mirror and saw that there was fifty yards between them and the nearest of the creatures and so he chanced getting out, rapier in hand. “Where is...” he started to ask, but then saw the pile of bones and rotted flesh stuck to the grill.

  The creature was still “alive” and trying to fre
e itself from the metal work. With a quick strike, Jack hacked off its head and then used the blade to peel the rest of it away. It fell on the ground, still moving, one arm reaching for a head that it couldn’t possible see.

  “Get in, Andra. We’ll take you somewhere safe.”

  Somewhere safe was a concept that had lost all of its meaning. The streets were alive with the dead. They roamed everywhere and savagely attacked anything that had the least scent of humanity to it.

  The closest bridge to Manhattan, the Queensboro Bridge was a mile north. From an onramp they were able to see the entire sweep of it. There were undead up and down it, all heading west. At the far end, a terrific gun battle was being waged. The police were trying everything they could, from tear gas to machine guns. There was even a water cannon being used to knock the undead back.

  “They’re not going to last,” Cyn said. “One of those sodding big ones like Hor or that girl with the hay-pennies for eyes will come up and put an end to all of that. Oh, please excuse my language. I don’t mean to be so vulgar in front of the wee one.”

  Andra’s mother shrugged and drew Jack’s coat around her, tighter. “That’s all right,” she said. “I can barely understand you; I doubt he knows what you’re saying at all.”

  “I understand her, Momma. She’s from Harry Potter. They all talk like that in Harry Potter.”

  “I guess,” the mom replied in a somewhat stunned voice. “Do you folks know what they are? Are they zombies?”

  Cyn looked to Jack to answer. “No, but they’re close,” he said, feeling an ache of guilt. These people had nearly been killed because he had decided that five thousand dollars was more important than listening to his father’s direct order. “Whatever they are, don’t let them touch you, but if you do get scratched, go see a priest. Speaking of which.”

  Jack pulled back on the door that separated the cab from the working area of the ambulance. “How’s he doing?”