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

by Peter Meredith

  “Better,” the priest answered. “I believe the nitro is helping, but we should get him straight away to a hospital.”

  The detective tried to sit up but found that he was strapped to the gurney. He pulled away the O2 mask that had been covering his face and said: “No. We need to get to the Waldorf and find Robert. Consider that an order.” His words were stronger and his face was returning to its normal warm brown color. Still, he was in no position to give orders or do much of anything besides rest.

  “I will, but I’ll make the arrest,” Jack answered. “Any more excitement and you’ll drop dead and won’t be any use to anyone. It’ll be ok. I’ll take Cyn with me. I just need your badge and your cuffs.”

  Richards started shaking his head, but Father Paul wagged a finger at him. “This is non-negotiable,” the priest told him and then relieved him of his ID and handcuffs.

  “Thanks so much for volunteering me,” Cyn said. “That was right manly of you.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Jack said and lugged the fancy suitcase from the back. “We’ll be dressed in these outfits and besides, we’ll have Father Paul riding shotgun just in case Robert has any more surprises. You don’t mind, do you, Father?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation, but he eventually said: “I do not mind, Mister Jack. We’ll be confronting the root of this evil and I should be honored to be there, even it means my death.”

  “Death? Wait,” Andra’s mom said, tapping Jack on the shoulder until he turned back to her. “Can you drop me and my boy off, first? I have an aunt who lives uptown...or you can point us at the nearest subway and that would be good, too.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs...”

  She didn’t quite understand that he was looking for her name at first, but then she said: “It’s just Ms.” The way she said Ms, it should have had two Zs at the end. “Ms Sheila Crawford.”

  Her son piped up as she was about to go on: “Our neighbor, Joey calls me Andra Crawfish. I don’t like it, none. But I think he got eaten, so I guess he won’t be calling me that no more.”

  “No, I guess he won’t,” Sheila said, pulling her son close to her. After a second, when she looked back and forth from Jack to Cyn, she added: “Hey, I want to thank you and all for saving us, but I have to look out for my son. We can’t go anywhere near whatever is the root of all this mess. I’m just sorry, but no.”

  “We really need someone to look after that man back there,” Jack said. “But if you can’t, I guess I understand.”

  She shook her head, making it clear she wasn’t going anywhere near the Waldorf.

  Jack was running out of time and compromised: “I can drop you off anywhere between here and the hotel, but I should warn you against taking the subways. If one of these things gets on a subway car with you and you can’t get off before the train pulls away from the station, you’ll be trapped and it’ll kill you both.”

  “What about one of the ferries out to Staten Island?” she asked.

  “That might work,” he said, but he had no idea.

  Safe for the moment, Jack and Cyn buckled the strange gear on. It made Jack feel like a turtle...but a safe turtle. Cyn swam in her outfit. Even with the straps pulled as tight as they could go, the arm guards became wrist guards because they wouldn’t stay in place and her helmet rattled on her head as though she was wearing a bucket.

  She straitened the helmet and declared them ready for battle.

  Jack turned the ambulance south and drove out of Queens and into Brooklyn and then across one of the lower bridges into Manhattan. It wasn’t an easy ride. The ambulance swayed and rocked as they dodged in and out, and sometimes over, gangs of the undead.

  It was the same sad scene played out over and over. Along the way they picked up four more people fleeing from the creatures, one of whom was a policeman who was no longer coherent, driven into madness by the magical fear given off by the creatures. With spit flying, he babbled endlessly about “demons” and “monsters” and could only relax as long as Father Paul prayed in a loud voice.

  None of the survivors they rescued would go on to the Waldorf.

  Brooklyn had been as bad as Queens with the sole exception that the bridge was almost wide open. Just as before, people hadn’t fled at the first sight of the creatures. For the most part they had locked their doors and hunkered down.

  The same was true for Manhattan, where the buildings were even taller and the danger seemed far away across the East River. It was closer than most people realized. According to the static-filled two-way radio, the police were fighting for their lives at five main points: the mid-town tunnel, which Cyn had smartly ordered them not to take, the Queensboro Bridge, and three subway stations all located on the Upper East Side.

  Lower Manhattan was still relatively empty, though they did pass a few hundred bloody corpses and a few dozen of the bone creatures. They sped down the highway on the east side of the island and were at the ferry station just as the sun was starting to rise.

  “Get as far away from the city as you can,” Jack told Sheila and the others. “Even if you have to walk across Staten Island and New Jersey, do it.”

  Cyn gave them all the cash she had on her and Father Paul blessed them, mainly to calm the police officer, who had wild eyes. Then the four of them were alone again and the silence in the ambulance was heavy.

  “Here’s the plan: we hit the Waldorf and snatch up Robert,” Richards said, in a dry whisper. When Cyn raised a soft, golden eyebrow, he amended his statement to: “Ok, you snatch him up, and then you bring him down to me. I’ve never in my life beat a confession out of a prisoner, but I think I will today.”

  Chapter 22

  The Waldorf Astoria, Manhattan, New York City

  Jack was slow to get the ambulance moving. Now that the sun had cracked the horizon, they could see the smoke hanging above the eastern part of the city like a shroud of doom, while behind them, the open stretch of the harbor glinted with morning-gold.

  It was practically an invitation to give up and run away and Jack was sorely tempted to. Next to him, with her own gold spilling down the back of her black vest, Cyn kept her face sturdily forward to where they could both feel the undead in a vast swarm, some close, some far, some strong like beacons, but for the most part they were a blur on the mind, a great mass of heart-stopping evil.

  Although she kept her face straight ahead, Cyn’s eyes went to the side mirror more than once and Jack was sure that if he mentioned something about leaving, her will would fail her and she would be quick to abandon their self-appointed duty.

  “Damn,” he whispered under his breath, stuck the vehicle in gear and drove north where the sounds of battle grew—it was a good guess that the police lines holding the approaches into Manhattan had fallen. They passed people who were running south. Some carried bags or suitcases stuffed to overflowing and some ran with improvised weapons: canes or golf clubs, and some went crazy when they saw the ambulance and ran at it with faces contorted in fear and begging words on their lips.

  Jack only stopped once.

  A girl of maybe twenty with a heavy suitcase in one hand was trying to save both her meager possessions and her life. She had the same wild eyes that the police officer had, which meant that she was almost beyond saving. As Jack knew, once the madness set in, only luck could save a person.

  And she didn’t look particularly lucky. Her face was a teary mess. She was dressed only in a peasant blouse and a short skirt in below freezing weather, and one of the wheels on her suitcase had snapped off, so she was forced to drag it along like an unwilling dog…and there was a long-dead coffin creature after her.

  It was nearly all bone with only the thinnest of tissue holding it together. It wasn’t even an intact skeleton. It had only a few molars left in its gaping jaw and was missing an ulna, a handful of carpals and all the toes on one foot—and yet it was as deadly as all the rest.

  Its power didn’t rest in its bones or the ratty connective tissue that couldn’t pos
sibly be holding it together. Its power rested in whatever hell-beast had taken up residence in its remains.

  Thankfully, the spirit was rather run of the mill and so Jack slid out of the ambulance carrying only the rapier. It had a good blade, although not the sharpest, and yet Jack made short work of the creature. Since it was, essentially, unkillable, it attacked in the thoughtless way they all did—at first. It reached out a bony claw and Jack hacked it off. Then it reached out its other hand and he took that off as well and then followed it up with a slash that toppled the skull right off.

  It shattered when it hit the pavement.

  “Get in,” Jack said, ushering the girl to the back of the ambulance. He didn’t really want to take on more passengers since he was heading further into danger, however, he didn’t trust the skittish look in the girl’s eyes. She was apt to go anywhere if left on her own.

  As he opened the back of the ambulance, she began to babble out her story. “They came up out of the sewers…like rats. They were like rats, you know. They could fit in the smallest…”

  He wasn’t listening. He needed her to get in quickly so he could get out of there. They had wasted too much time already. Robert had at least a four-hour head start, meaning he could have a two-hundred mile lead, or he could have raised the dead in three more of the gargantuan cemeteries located in the city.

  “You’re safe now,” Jack said, giving her a little shove in the bottom, to help her up. “And look, there’s a priest. Father, can you give us another version of that psalm about the valley?”

  He began the psalm for probably the thirtieth time that night: “Yea, though I walk in the shadow…” Jack shut the door on the remainder and ran around to the driver’s seat.

  “She was cute,” Cyn said.

  “Huh?” Jack hadn’t thought so, not that he had really paid attention. He had been more worried about the bone-creature to notice anything more than a soft girl and a tangle of brown hair and large pouty lips. Perhaps there had been something about her which had elicited some sort of primal protective instinct within Jack, but cute? “I guess. I really didn’t notice.”

  Her look was unreadable, not that Jack could spare more than a moment to read it. The bones of the creature were sliding back together; it would be whole again in seconds and its next attack wouldn’t be so mindless—they weren’t stupid; they learned and they had a whole bag of tricks to use.

  Jack raced northward where more and more buildings bore the signs of fire and smoke, where there was blood in the street and sad-looking bodies lying in the gutters, unmoving.

  There were creatures roaming everywhere. Not as many as in Queens, but enough to keep the humans penned in their skyscrapers. Few had the courage to chance the streets. For the most part, they remained high up, thinking that by being encased in glass and steel that they would stay safe until whatever was happening passed them by or was dealt with by the authorities.

  Jack saw very few “authorities.” A handful of police cruisers flew by, frequently going in the wrong direction, and a couple of ambulances passed them, their drivers giving the black-clad Jack a hard look as they zipped by. Jack was driving at a quick, but not dangerous pace. He’d been swerving back and forth for the last hour or so and had almost crashed enough times to know that a steady pace was better than a literal break-neck one.

  Still, it seemed like no time before they pulled up in front of the Waldorf Astoria. It was, as always, an impressive building, tall and grand, opulent in every sense of the word, from its gleaming marble floors, to its shining brass, to its million dollar frescos adorning its walls.

  Jack stuck the heavy helmet on his head and armed himself with one of the shotguns and filled his pockets with extra shells. Then, feeling somewhat silly since he was wearing the heavy black tactical garb and carrying the tremendous shotgun, Jack stuck the rapier through a slot on his belt that was supposed to have been reserved for pepper spray.

  The sword looked ridiculous. It looked childish, as though Jack was a five-year old who couldn’t decide which Halloween costume he wanted to wear. Ridiculous or not, he trusted the steel blade more than the gun.

  Cyn was equally ridiculous appearing. She swam in her heavy bullet proof vest and the shotgun was nearly as long as she was tall.

  Their odd appearance was probably why the cowering hotel employees behind the locked glass doors didn’t rush to let them in when he hammered on the glass with his armored fist. Flashing Richards’ badge, an actual symbol of authority, was the only thing that got them moving. Jack slapped the badge against the glass and barked: “Open up! It’s the police.”

  Cyn, who was, as always, strangely calm even though they were out on the street and twice as vulnerable, smirked as she said: “Very authentic. You’re positively making me peckish for doughnuts.”

  “That’s a thing in England? I thought it was just an American stereotype that all cops ate…”

  He bit back the rest of his sentence as there was a clank of keys on glass and the deadbolt drew back. The door opened and Jack came busting inside, followed by Cyn and a city’s worth of cold air.

  “Thank God you’re here,” the doorman gushed; his relief at seeing what he took to be the police evident. “We had called you guys...” He choked on his words as he saw Cyn fully. With her armor hanging loosely and her helmet like a mop bucket on her head and turned slightly to the side, she was so clearly not a police officer that the hotel staff, who were all gathered at the top of the stairs in a frightened knot, began pointing and whispering to each other.

  The same snooty manager that Jack had dealt with two days before, came hurrying down as if his meager authority was greater than the two shotguns that Cyn and Jack carried.

  “Who do you think you are?” he demanded. “Impersonating a police officer is a crime.”

  Cyn pulled off the black bucket that was supposedly protecting her head, causing the manager to step back in surprise. He hadn’t been expecting the golden hair or the impish smile or the ice-blue eyes. “Where’s my mum? Did she check out or leave? Is she still here?”

  Jack did a double take at the questions. He had been so focused on getting to Robert that he had plum forgotten that Cyn had family in the city.

  The manager, getting over his shock, answered: “M-Miss Childs...I didn’t know that it was you. I-I suppose your mother is upstairs in her room. We aren’t supposed to leave the building, you know. No one is. It’s all over the news. They’re saying that no one is supposed to go outside. It isn’t safe on account of the terrorists.”

  “Terrorists?” Cyn asked, looking confused.

  “Yes,” the manager said. “You don’t know what’s happening? There’s another terrorist attack going on. It’s supposedly being contained, but if you ask me it sounds like there’s a full scale war going on. We’re having a difficult time keeping the guests calm and in their rooms.”

  Jack, his heart racing faster, grabbed the manager’s coat. “What about Robert Montgomery?” he asked. “Did either the father or the son check out?”

  The manager began to puff up and looked as though he was about to begin spouting hotel rules once more, when Jack stepped back and leveled the gun at his midsection. “You see what’s going on out there? It’s not terrorism, you idiot! Robert is responsible for all of that. If he’s here, you have to tell us.” The manager’s uncertain hands began to flutter in front of his tailored vest where the gun was pointed and yet he also began to shake his head, still clinging to his rulebook. Jack pressed the barrel of the gun into his soft stomach, saying: “He’s a criminal and anyone who harbors him is a criminal, too, and they’re going to pay.” Jack was completely serious and the manager finally saw that he had reached the limit of his authority.

  “Mr. Montgomery...he is well, I-I don’t know where he is,” the manager said, and then pointed at the long marble front counter. “I-I c-can f-find out if he’s checked out.”

  “Please,” Jack answered, lowering the gun. “And hurry. We don’
t have a lot of time.”

  As Cyn went to call her mother and the manager hurried to check on the status of the Montgomerys, Jack went back to the door and waved toward the ambulance, where Father Paul was watching through one of the back windows. The rear door opened and a very haggard Detective Richards slouched out into the cold with Father Paul under one arm and the girl they had picked up hurrying so close behind them that she was tripping on their heels.

  Jack pointed to the doorman. “Get the door and hurry, there’s one of them nearby.” He could feel one of the creatures a block or two away and hoped that it wasn’t looking in their direction. If it was, they were going to have a tough time keeping it out; the front of the hotel was composed of a triple bank of glass doors that wouldn’t stand up to an assault from even one of the creatures.

  “And we’ll need to turn off the lights in here,” Jack said. “We have to make the place look as dark and uninhabited as possible. Start with the chandelier.” Just up the steps from the doors was a wide open area where guests could meet or mingle; it was lit by a number of ensconced lights and one tremendous crystal chandelier. It was a beautiful piece that was, more or less, a beacon for the undead, screaming: There are people inside, come eat them!

  “Is Montgomery here?” Richards asked. He was once again grey in the face and shaking from walking up the fourteen steps to the lobby. In his right hand was his 9 mm. It had been useless against the undead, but would do the trick against either of the Montgomerys.

  Jack pointed at the manager. “That guy’s checking it out for us, but I don’t want you to worry about that. If he’s here, we’ll get him, and we’ll make him talk. In the meantime, I want you to rest. In fact...” Jack turned to the doorman, who’d been hovering a few feet away. “Excuse me. Can you also find out if there’s a doctor staying in the hotel? I don’t care if it’s a plastic surgeon or a dentist or whatever. This man is having a heart attack.”

  With Father Paul’s help, Jack led the detective to a nearby French chaise which was embroidered with gold thread. From across the lobby, the manager watched in alarm as Jack laid Richards back and then lifted the policeman’s legs up so that his filthy, graveyard-mudded shoes sat on the cushions.