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

by Peter Meredith

  “He seems upset,” Richards remarked.

  “Who cares?” Jack said. “Just lie back and try to relax.” His smile for Richards was a bad bit of acting. He was afraid to go after Robert with just Cyn and Father Paul as backup. There was no telling what craziness they would find up in the penthouse of the hotel.

  Cyn came up a moment later with her shotgun hoist on her shoulder as though it was nothing more dangerous than a bamboo fishing pole. “My mum says she’s going to bloody kill you, Jack, for dragging me into all of this. So you have that to look forward to once we get Robert.”

  “You don’t look too nervous,” Jack answered.

  “About me mum? Hardly. She’s mad at you not at me.”

  “I meant about Robert.”

  “I know. I was just playing. Chances are, he’s gone and if he’s not...” She shrugged the shotgun from her shoulder. “We have these and a right handy priest. We’ve faced that sodding Hor twice now and if he’s there again we have even more firepower. We should be fine.”

  Despite her words, her calm demeanor went a touch south when the manager came up, shaking his head. “Mr. Montgomery hasn’t checked out. He’s upstairs as far as we know.” He held out a plastic card. “Room 4207. I have to warn you that you’ll be responsible for anything you break and that the Waldorf does not condone this activity and will not be held accountable should either of you or Mr Montgomery be killed. Your funeral expenses are yours and yours alone.”

  Chapter 23

  The Waldorf Astoria, Manhattan, New York City

  The elevator hummed upwards, speeding the three of them to a confrontation that only the priest seemed ready to handle. Father Paul had taken a deep breath before stepping onto the elevator and since then he’d had his eyes closed, praying in a soft voice—one that was completely devoid of fear.

  Jack figured the fear would take hold of the priest soon enough, just like it always did with everyone whenever they came into contact with one of the undead.

  “Do you have a full load?” Cyn asked.

  He didn’t know, nor did he know how to check. The only way to find out was to feed shells into the lower port until he couldn’t fit anymore inside. He slid three in and then laughed, feeling foolish.

  “I’m not used to guns,” he admitted.

  “Neither am I,” Cyn said and then worked her right shoulder in a circle. “These big ones sure do land you a right smart kick. I’m going to have a bruise the size...”

  The elevator dinged, cutting her off. They were at the top. Both Cyn and Jack leveled their guns as the door slid open without even a whisper of sound. “The Lord will be with us,” Father Paul intoned and then crossed himself.

  Jack sure hoped so. He went first, holding the gun tight to his shoulder, his hands sweating freely. 4207 was three doors down on the right. Jack nearly blew a hole in the wall when 4205 opened with him creeping by it.

  “Jeeze!” Jack hissed as he jumped back.

  A tall, somewhat bloated old man stood in the doorway. His eyes were bloodshot and his grey hair went in all directions. He was dressed in a rumpled suit and there was a suitcase sitting next to his leg like an obedient dog. “Is it safe?” he asked. “Can we leave yet?” He didn’t seem at all curious about the Indian priest thrusting a crucifix at him, or the barely-out-of-her-teens woman who held an enormous shotgun pointed at his face.

  “No,” Jack snapped. “Get back inside.”

  “Yeah, sure. No need to get so huffy.” He shut the door, but Jack guessed that he was still just on the other side, listening or staring through the peephole.

  Jack flicked up the visor on his helmet and wiped away the sweat that was beading across his upper lip. “Six in the morning and that guy smelled like whiskey. Not that I blame him. Things are pretty...”

  Cyn suddenly grabbed Jack’s arm. “The smell of the ghouls! It’s not here.”

  After a deep sniff, Jack grinned. “And the evil feeling, it’s weak. There’s nothing up here.” He let out a sigh of relief, while Cyn chuckled as though embarrassed. Even Father Paul relaxed.

  “Let us hope this cousin of yours is here,” the priest said, “so we can be done with this once and for all.”

  This put a fade on their relief. It almost felt as though the priest had jinxed their mission with that one sentence. Jack went to the next door down, listened for a minute, and when he didn’t hear anything, he slid the key-card into the slot. The light turned green and he rushed in, feeling like a cop-wannabe.

  He had seen a hundred cop movies and, taking a cue from them, he checked every door and every corner before moving on. It was a lavish suite of rooms that could have hidden a dozen ninjas, but Jack knew that it was empty from the moment he walked in. The air was stale and so altogether silent that no living thing could be there.

  Still, they searched the suite, including the drawers and under the mattresses and couch cushions; they weren’t just looking for Robert, they were looking for any portion of the spells that he had used. Save for some expensive clothes and a few toiletries, the place was empty.

  “Long gone, I suppose,” Cyn said after they had gone through the place twice. “Ok, I guess it’s time to face the music. Time to explain things to my mum. And we both know that she’ll want to talk to you,” she added, lifting an eyebrow in Jack’s direction.

  “Great,” Jack answered without any enthusiasm. He figured that he would get the third degree from her mother and he wasn’t wrong.

  Father Paul left to check on Detective Richards and Cyn went to change out of her blood-covered pantsuit, leaving Jack in the clutches of his second cousin, once removed.

  Rebecca Childs: fiftyish, stern, and sharp-eyed, plied him with question after question concerning the night’s adventures. She was especially interested in the two spells. “How did you figure out the language?” she asked in her light British accent as she studied the pictures that Cyn had taken, holding the phone at odd angles or squinting in at it.

  “I didn’t,” he admitted. “I just figured out the primer my father left along with a warning not to show the scroll to anyone. I blew it, badly.”

  Cyn came into the room and sat on the couch that Jack had used for a bed two nights before. She had on comfortable jeans, a pale sweater and above both she was strapping on the armor—she didn’t look up at Jack’s admission.

  “Yes,” Rebecca said. “That is water under the bridge, I suppose. But this primer…we had one also and ours, like yours came with a warning. I tried every combination possible and couldn’t figure out how one matched the other.”

  “That’s because they didn’t,” Jack said. “The key to the primer wasn’t the warning. My father used to sign his letters to my mom: I will love you forever my dear, my child and never leave you. He’d sign them that way even before they had children. It didn’t make much sense to her and when she asked him about it, he would only shrug. But on the warning note he only wrote: Jonathan. I guessed that the rest of his usual message was written in the hieroglyphic hybrid language.”

  Rebecca groaned as if she should have seen it. “Yes, of course! Your great-great grandfather used to write the same thing on his letters to his wife, Victoria. Ugh! Right in front of me the entire time. Not that I would ever use the spells. I never used to believe in that sort of thing. It was all such poppycock. But now...”

  The room went quiet and they could hear a new crackling of gunfire outside their windows—it was closer than it had been. The suite had an entire bank of glass overlooking Park Avenue and they each went to a window and stared down. The streets were beginning to flood with people.

  “They’re starting to panic,” Cyn said. They had a bird’s eye view and could see four different intersecting streets and for the most part people were running in four different directions. Cyn was the first to turn from the window. “So, what do we do? We can’t just sit here; the hotel is no sort of protection.”

  Jack thought it interesting that Cyn’s accent had changed in her
mother’s presence; she was much cooler and refined, even when they were witnessing the breakdown of society occurring right below them.

  “We alert the authorities,” Jack answered. “We should get out of New York first. Right now, as soon as we can and then alert the FBI or the CIA about Robert.”

  “As if they would believe us,” Cyn said over her shoulder.

  Rebecca tapped the glass with a manicured nail and then said: “Whether they believe us is immaterial. We have no choice but to present our findings. Now, Cynthia, gather up what you need and let’s leave as soon as possible.”

  Cyn ran into her bedroom, threw a few things in a small piece of carryon luggage and then rushed out again in under a minute. They then went to Rebecca’s room, gathered a handful of her things and then rode a crowded elevator down to the first floor.

  They seemed to stop at every floor and as they did, Jack’s fear mounted. The creatures were getting closer, swarming from the north and the east. They were a black cloud in his mind, but there was one blacker than the rest coming closer.

  Next to him, Cyn clicked the safety off her gun. He did the same and then they were in the lobby with close to three hundred other people—something had happened.

  Jack heard people all around him:

  Did you hear?

  Did you see?

  It can’t be true, can it?

  This is all a hoax, right?

  A thousand questions and no answers...at least no answer that they wanted to hear. Although TV stations had been blacked out, the internet was alive and well and full of fantastic pictures and horrible videos of skeletons and corpses walking through the city streets killing and feasting.

  And if they didn’t believe the internet, all they had to do was look outside; there were skeletons and mangled creatures trailing graveyard dirt and entrails.

  They found Detective Richards and Father Paul where they had left them. If a doctor had come see the police officer, he wasn’t around and neither was the girl they had picked up with the ambulance.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Cyn said in a rush. She pointed north. “One of the big ones is coming. A demon. I can feel it and so can Jack.”

  “If we leave, we’re going to start a riot,” Father Paul said, in a low tone. “The people are very much on edge and I don’t trust their temper.”

  Jack glanced around and couldn’t feel what the priest was feeling. With the demon so close, his ability to empathize went right out the window. Not to mention, he thought it was the perfect time to panic. There was a demon coming! He wanted to scream it.

  “They’re going to have to fend for themselves,” he said, buckling up his riot helmet. “And get your cross ready, Father, we’re going out the front door right now before it’s too late. Mrs. Childs, if you can help Detective Richards, please. We’ll go straight for the ambulance.”

  Looking neither left nor right, Jack headed for the stairs leading down out of the lobby. Around them people began to babble more questions, but he paid them no mind, the demon was very close now, almost racing them to the doors, but that didn’t make sense unless the demon could feel them as well.

  “Hurry!” Cyn cried. She started to pull ahead of them, only just then Jack grabbed her by the collar of her bullet proof vest and yanked her back. They were too late. The demon was crossing the street now.

  Jack could see it just fine: Small, not even hip-height, wearing silk and lace, a few limp strands of hair plastered to its grey skull, its mouth, toothless and gaping wide—and two big halfpennies where her eyes should have been. It was the same demon that had nearly killed them in the graveyard. It had healed its body so that it appeared just as it had before, except it had shined up the big pennies covering its eye sockets. The copper gleamed like fire.

  “Go back!” Jack cried, his heart beginning to thunder.

  Richards saw the creature and nearly collapsed. Father Paul kept him from falling and propelled him back up the stairs, but he did so with his head spun around, looking over his shoulder with fear dancing in his dark eyes.

  They had to fight the sudden surge that their rush to the exit had sparked. As though a damn had suddenly let go, people were trampling each other to get out of the hotel; however they stopped when they caught sight of the little girl demon. Jack was virtually stuck two steps from the top, while Father Paul was easing through the crowd, moving like water through the creases when the demon reached out to touch the glass of the door.

  It exploded into the crowd with the force of a bomb. Through the remains of the door came a wave of terror that was so mentally shocking that it took a moment for the crowd to react.

  They stood dumb with wide eyes as their blood flowed from the many cuts the glass had given them and then, as one, the people began screaming, fighting each other to get back up the stairs. Jack had felt the green, sick fear, but was able to shake it off.

  He grabbed Cyn and thrust her in front of him, pushing her up the stairs until a large, powerful hand found a grip on his shoulder and he was shoved down.

  Panic had a hold of the crowd. The demon had stepped through the remains of the door sending the people mad, and they swam up the stairs as though they were part of a mass drowning. Mindlessly, they used anything they could to get up the stairs and they crawled over and crushed the bodies of anyone smaller than themselves, and Jack was smaller than the man who had grabbed him from behind.

  He felt a foot stomp down on the back of his calf and another was planted on his left kidney; he was being trod upon as though part of the stairs.

  The man trampling him was obese, and clumsy; he tripped, falling on Jack and would have crushed him had Jack not been wearing the heavy vest. The man started to fight his way to his feet, but he never made it. He died as the demon opened its dank, black hole and breathed out a frozen cloud of white.

  The cloud filled the stairwell top to bottom, ending the screams of the panicked people forever. A hundred men and women died in seconds. The obese man atop Jack took a few moments longer than most. For the most part his bulk insulated him from the intense cold; however, his lungs had frozen solid and his eyes were frosted marbles and unmoving.

  He rolled off Jack and began clawing at his throat with fingers that snapped off knuckle by knuckle.

  Jack wasn’t unscathed by the cold. He had been buried under a three-hundred pound man and still his sweat had beaded into ice and his lungs had contracted—it felt as though he was trying to breathe through a straw. He pushed out from beneath the heavy man and grabbed the frosted over shotgun; even through the tactical gloves he wore, the cold stock of the gun stung his hands as he picked it up.

  It felt as though he was moving in slow motion; his muscles were tight and his joints ground together. The demon, on the other hand, came up the stairs an eager black smile on its face. It wanted Jack.

  “Jack!” Cyn yelled from above. “Get down!”

  Down was much easier than up. Down was as simple as allowing himself to fall, which he did, landing on a woman who had the consistency of formed plastic. There was a loud bang and then people began shouting his name. Jack should have run, but he looked back to see that the child-demon had been blown through the doors by the shotgun blast, but it wasn’t in pieces and was already picking itself up.

  Jack had to do the same if he was going to live. He crawled to the top of the stairs and then was hoisted to his feet by Rebecca and Cyn. It was still a chore to breathe and his head spun as he was propelled along after the crowd.

  There had been over three-hundred people in the spacious lobby; they were racing like a stampeding herd for the south side exit onto 49th Street. If Jack could have spoken, he would have told them the way was blocked. There were more of the undead waiting for them.

  A sudden rippling scream stopped the forward momentum of the crowd. “This way,” Jack said in a feeble voice. He pointed to the long counter where people checked into and out of the hotel. “Cyn, get Father Paul.”

  She darte
d through the crowd to fetch the priest, who was still trying to help Richards along.

  “Get down.” Jack pulled Rebecca to her knees as the crowd surged back into the lobby, this time heading for the 50th Street exit. He was breathing easier and with every passing second, his head had begun to clear. With unexpected understanding, he thought he knew what the creatures were up to. There were undead at every exit moving inwards; they were going to drive the people into one bleating herd stuck in the middle of the lobby and then they were going to feast.

  Cyn was back in seconds; Richards was a mess. He was dying right in front of Jack, of a heart attack of all things!

  “We’ll get you back into the ambulance as fast as we can,” Cyn told him, caressing his shoulder and trying not to look as though she wasn’t scared that he was going to die any second. “Jack has a plan...right Jack?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He gave Richards a lying smile and felt weird that it had come so easily. It was an ugly feeling. “All we have to do is…” There was no time for intricate plans and really no time beyond anything more complicated than a role of the dice.

  “We’ll blast our way out,” Jack said, lifting the shotgun and giving it a little shake. When the crowd thins it’ll be just the corpse things, you know, the monsters. If we hit them quick, they won’t have time to try any of their tricks.”

  Rebecca narrowed her eyes at Jack. “That’s your plan? I’m sorry, but I was expecting, I don’t know a little more.”

  “It is what it is,” Jack answered, shortly. “And it’ll work as long as we move as fast as we can. We get to the ambulance and we don’t look back, and we don’t pick up stragglers.” It was a cold thing to say, yet no one disagreed.

  They didn’t have long to wait before the last of the crowd rushed past, tripping over themselves in their fear.