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

by Peter Meredith

  Jack was the first out from behind the counter. He could feel five creatures coming and he wanted to get in the first shot before they saw that he was there—for some reason, he was sure they would recognize him. He didn’t recognize them; no Incan mummy, no Amanra, and, thankfully, no Hor. They were just five bone-monsters with rags of forgotten flesh hanging off of them and empty but eternally deep eye-sockets that could drive a person mad and yet, Jack ignored the feeling which had his mind tipping over to a point where sanity was the underside of the boat.

  He stepped out, aimed his shotgun and accepted the mule-kick in the shoulder and watched the first of them tumble back, missing its head and one arm. A second later, Jack exploded another, much smaller creature—it seemed to just turn to white powder in a flash of orange. A third one opened its mouth and blasted out a smog of stench that wobbled Jack, but then Cyn was suddenly right next to him, her face hard and sharp. She pulled her trigger and staggered from the force of the gun shot.

  The creature she hit had its vertebrae and most of its ribs shot away and it collapsed in on itself like a house of cards.

  The fourth and fifth creature were feet away. Cyn, who was staggering under the twin clouds of fear and stink, fired once sending a skull flying in a thousand pieces just as Jack hit the last dead center.

  “Let’s go!” Cyn yelled to the others. She started to charge through the litter of bone fragments, ignoring, for some reason the fact that one of the corpses was still standing. It was headless and by all natural logic, it should have been harmless; it should have pitched right over and died, except it was already dead.

  Cyn sort of shied away from it, but it was a long fiend with arms that stretched out and grabbed her, snagging the back of her armored collar. For something that was made of so little, the creature had the strength of the largest of men; it picked Cyn up and dangled her a foot off the ground.

  She tried to bring her gun around but it could see without eyes and grabbed the gun with its free hand and Jack was shocked to see frost run up the barrel. He was shocked, but for only one second and then he fired his shotgun straight across the axis of the thing’s shoulders, tearing both arms off by the blast.

  He followed the shot up with a kick to what remained of the thing’s sternum. Cyn dropped, landing on her feet like a cat. Now, she smirked and charged off through the south end of the lobby and, seconds later they were out in the morning and breathing fresh air.

  Cyn smiled at him. It was part relief, part joy at being alive and part…it seemed to Jack, that it was part happiness that he was there with her. He didn’t have time to figure out what he thought of that; there was a cry from behind them.

  It was Father Paul who was being dragged down, not by one of the undead creatures, but rather by Richards who had either died or had fallen unconscious. Rebecca tried to prop the detective up, but he was too much dead weight and she was too weak to help.

  Jack ran back and handed over his shotgun to her. “Cover us!” he ordered, and then took the police officer’s shoulders as Father Paul took his feet. Richards was a big man and they moved awkwardly along under his weight, going far too slowly.

  They were so slow that the lobby emptied behind them and the demon…the dreadful, little demon girl was able to catch up, having passed through a thinning crowd of screaming hotel guests to come after them.

  When he saw the demon he said to Father Paul: “Go faster!” They had a sixty-yard head start and were actually in the ambulance when it caught up. Cyn was just climbing into the ambulance assuming the “shotgun” seat as she had been, and Jack was in the back, pulling the unconscious Richards inside with Father Paul’s help.

  The only person outside and vulnerable was Cyn’s mother, Rebecca.

  She saw the monster coming and had to have felt the evil radiating from it. She had seen what it could do first hand, and yet she didn’t quail in the face of it. Rebecca shouldered the shotgun, aimed, grimaced in anticipation of the kick that she assumed to be coming, and pulled the trigger.

  There was nothing, not even a click.

  In a sudden rush of memory, Jack counted every shot he had taken with the gun. It wasn’t difficult to count to four—she was out of ammo.

  Things took on that hated slow motion nightmare feel: unaware of her mother’s situation, Cyn pulled her door closed. Father Paul climbed into the back of the ambulance, and was just reaching out to close the door when he saw Rebecca thirty feet away, staring at the shotgun in confusion.

  The little girl demon with the big, gleaming pennies for eyes was much closer to her, just a few feet away. There was no way Jack, or anyone could save her. It was a fact, except in his mind it was a DAMNED fact. She was going to die; there was no getting around that, there was only acting like a crass unfeeling bastard and using her death to get away.

  He scrambled for the front seat, digging for the keys, just as the monster, the little bundle of bones and dried flesh, leapt at Rebecca and latched its toothless mouth onto her neck. If she could have screamed, she would have, however she was feeling something beyond both pain and terror. Her mouth came open wide and her eyes were huge and filled with a misery that would forever haunt Jack’s soul.

  The demon fed on her as Jack tried to get the key seated in the ignition. It drank from her. It sucked her dry, pulling from her everything that made her human and that included her past and future. It was horrible to see. Jack and Cyn saw out of the side view mirrors, while Father Paul had a front row seat and was right there as Rebecca had her entire life pulled from her.

  The skin of her cheeks sunk in and pulled tight, her eyes deflated and shrunk in on themselves, becoming strange pale raisins, her lips drew far back, stretching across her teeth until they split apart, her hair grayed in seconds and then began falling out, whispering down her back to land in an obscene little haystack and her nails grew three inches, curling at the ends into ugly looking bird claws.

  She was sucked dry, but she didn’t die. It would have been better for everyone if she had. Rebecca became one of the living dead.

  “Jack!” Father Paul cried, pointing.

  “We have to save her,” Cyn said, hammering on Jack’s arm.

  “No,” he answered in a soft voice. His eyes never left the terrible sight. But somehow his hands did what had to be done. They started the ambulance, put it in drive and sped away.

  Chapter 24

  Manhattan, New York City

  They were blazing through red lights with the back doors swinging wildly, banging against the side of the ambulance, and there were undead corpses everywhere, and there were screams and sirens...and Cyn pointed her shotgun at Jack.

  “Turn around.” Her voice, quiet as it was, cut through the roar of the engine and the gun blasts that seemed to be coming from every direction and an explosion that sounded like it was just around the corner.

  “I can’t,” Jack told her. “Your mom’s dead, Cyn. I’m sor...”

  She jabbed the barrel of the gun into the side of his head. “Turn around or I shoot.” The barrel was as cold as her words.

  He shrugged, but didn’t slow the ambulance. He would deserve it if she killed him. He had given her mom an empty gun and told her to protect them; that was a straight up fact. It was his fault she was dead. The guilt was a brick in his gut.

  “No,” he answered. For a few seconds, she pressed harder, leaving a red circle imprint, preparing herself to kill him, he supposed with calm circumspection. He could afford to be calm since he really didn’t care if she shot him or not. The guilt mixed with his exhaustion, made him apathetic to his fate, or rather this fate. Getting his brains blown out was an easy death compared to what was happening around them.

  The streets were filled men and monsters and it was all Jack could do to weave in and out of the screaming people; it didn’t help that Father Paul was yelling from the back for them to stop. Richards was laid out on the floor, either dead or unconscious with the priest draped over him to keep him from rolling
out of the back.

  Unbelievably, Cyn said: “This is my fault.” He felt the metal bore wavering against his temple. A second later she withdrew the gun and he chanced a look at her. She was glass-eyed and staring out at the chaos without seeing a thing. Even when they hit something that had been long dead and a wet slop of decomposing flesh struck the windshield, she didn’t blink or seemed to notice.

  She went on: “I gave away the spell. I just gave it away like an idiot. My mum is dead because I was an irresponsible git. I wanted to be famous. That’s why she’s dead because I wanted to be someone, but what I was...what I am, is a damned child!”

  “Stop it!” Jack snarled. “This is Robert’s fault...or mine, really, but it’s definitely not yours, so shut up.” She glared and he deserved that, too. “I-I’m sorry, that came out awful, I know. The only thing you did wrong was to place your faith in your cousin. You believed Robert and so did I. That’s not a crime, Cyn, so please, just stop blaming yourself and get that look out of your eyes. You can’t give up. Your mom wouldn’t want you to give up, would she?”

  “No, she wouldn’t,” Cyn said after a moment’s hesitation. “She would want me to get back home where it’s safe. She would want me to get as far away from all of this as possible. And as far away from you as possible.”

  “Yeah, that sounds good, I suppose. I mean, I can see her point.” He could see her point right in front of him where a platoon of uniformed policemen were running away from a single walking corpse. Jack could sense that it wasn’t one of the powerful demons, so he aimed the ambulance right for it.

  There was a satisfying crunch under the wheels.

  He didn’t slow to pick up any of the officers. As hard as it was, it was the right thing to do to leave them. They were crazed with fear and would more than likely mistake Jack for a demon and shoot him.

  “Wrong, Jack!” Cyn snapped. She was no longer on the verge of being catatonic; her face was sheathed in anger and yet her blue eyes were misty. “You’re wrong and so is my mother...or so was my mother or...you know what I mean. I can’t run away, just like you can’t. We can stop this. We’re the only ones who can, I think. We just have to find the right spell.”

  “What you have to do is stop, please,” begged Father Paul from the back. “I think Richards is dying.”

  Jack aimed the ambulance for an intersection that looked empty and skidded to a halt almost in the middle. There was a blare of a horn to his right and then a white Lexus flew past within an inch of their bumper, the driver waving a fist in true New York fashion.

  “Take the wheel,” Jack yelled to Cyn and then jumped out. He ran around to the back, climbed in and slammed the doors behind him. Immediately, the ambulance took off, taking a hard left, heading west, trailing after the speeding Lexus and causing Jack to stumble over Father Paul. “Sorry,” he said to the priest and then he yelled to Cyn. “Be careful!”

  Father Paul barked a short laugh. “Compared to you, Mister Jack, she is being careful. Now, help me get him on the gurney.”

  Richards, though still alive with a thready pulse, was dead weight. It took all of their strength to heave him onto the gurney and strap him in. Jack saw the O2 mask, stuck it over the detective’s face, and then followed the plastic line to a valve. One twist got the gas flowing.

  In the meantime, Father Paul poked another nitroglycerine pill under Richards’ tongue. “We must please get to a hospital or he will die. Go. Go make sure she gets us to a hospital.”

  Jack gave him a nod and then squeezed through the narrow opening to the cab of the ambulance. When he climbed into the passenger seat, he didn’t hesitate to buckle up—there wasn’t a law that Cyn wasn’t breaking.

  With tears still on her face, she drove down sidewalks, zipped through red lights, took a left on a one-way street and played chicken with thirty cars heading right at her. “Is this the way to the hospital?” he asked, his hands stiff on the dashboard.

  “How should I bloody know?” she shot back as she shared paint with a plumber’s van that was filled with people, all of whom were yelling curses at her. I was trying to get off this island. I’m sorry about the bobby back there, but if we don’t get out of Manhattan soon, we may not ever get out.”

  They had left the first wave of undead behind them, but in front the traffic was beginning to snarl worse than anything Jack had ever seen. They had made it to Seventh Avenue only because of Cyn’s crazy driving; the roads west were starting to freeze solid with the numbers of cars trying to get to one of the three exit points on the west side of the island.

  Jack knew she was right. Once the creatures caught up, there would be pandemonium and then massacre.

  “What about that ferry?” she asked.

  “Cars aren’t allowed on.”

  “Well, we aren’t a car now are we?” she demanded and took a hand off the wheel to swipe away the tears on her cheeks. “As far as anyone knows, we’re constables. Ok, maybe you could pass as one; you have a badge and a bloody big gun. They’ll listen to you, I’d wager. You could get us on.”

  The mention of the gun reminded him of how badly he had messed up with regard to her mother. He glanced down at the shotgun Cyn had been carrying and then shook his head in wonder at what a fool he was. How many rounds were left in the thing? He grabbed the shotgun and started feeding shells into the port—it had been empty as well.

  He was just about to mention how the ferries had been converted and there was no place for an ambulance to even park on one, when there was a roar from overhead. Fourteen army helicopters, each so full that they were practically spilling soldiers, flew west in two wedge formations, causing a smaller, red and white helicopter to swerve.

  The lone helicopter played on his mind, giving him an awful idea, one that he refused to even contemplate until they hit 45th Street and the traffic fused into one great mass of metal and the air was filled with the blare of horns and screams of rage.

  “Turn around,” Jack ordered. “There’s a hospital ten blocks north...” Cyn started to argue and he put a hand on her shoulder. “Trust me, ok? This may be the only way off the island.”

  She nodded, her exhaustion and grief taking over. Without caring how many cars she hit, she turned the boxy vehicle around and broke a great number of new laws in traveling the mile to Saint Luke’s, where every entrance was taken up by ambulances; she parked dead set in the middle of the sidewalk.

  Jack slung the shotgun over his back and pinned Richards badge to his chest. Cyn carried his 9 mm. “We have to get to the roof as quietly as possible and without arousing any suspicion.”

  This turned out to be relatively easy. The hospital was pure chaos; its fifty bed emergency room had eight hundred people waiting to be seen. Nearly all of them had been scratched or bitten by the undead and were in the throes of misery. Jack and Cyn knew the pain and they glanced guiltily at each other as they pushed Richards’ gurney through the choked halls.

  “I have to help them,” Father Paul stated suddenly. He stopped pushing the gurney and stepped to the side to let Jack continue to push it. “I have it in my power to ease their suffering.”

  “No,” Jack hissed in a whisper, his eyes flicking around. “You need to stay with us. We’re going to need you, Father. You know that. This...this isn’t about you healing people, this is you ducking your responsibility.” The brick of guilt in his stomach had been shrinking, but now it was back and heavier than ever.

  For the first time since they had met, Father Paul grew angry, his jowls shook and he waved a pudgy finger in Jack’s face. “How dare you, Mister Jack? How dare you question my courage? Staying here is infinitely more dangerous and you know that. I think that you’re using poor Detective Richards as an excuse to run away.”

  Jack began to puff up in real anger as well; however, the priest popped that bubble by adding: “Where is your cousin Robert? The simple answer is that you don’t know. He’s likely here in the city and yet you are doing your level best to run away. Don�
��t tell me about responsibility until you learn to do yours.”

  The priest turned on the spot and went to the nearest person, a woman in the blue uniform of a fireman. He began to pray over her and in seconds the misery that had been lining her face disappeared and she passed out.

  “Come on, Jack,” Cyn said, pulling the gurney. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We don’t have the tools to fight Robert yet and until we do it’ll be suicide to try to face him.”

  That was perfectly reasonable and Jack found himself nodding...but was it the truth? Were there spells somewhere in the world that could help him? And if so where? And why did it have to be him? Was he fooling himself into thinking that he was going to be some sort of savior, just so that he could run away, just so he could save his own life?

  Indecision held him in place until Father Paul ran through his prayers. He took out the little bottle of Holy Oil, anointed the woman and then turned to Jack. “May the Lord bless and protect you, Mister Jack.” He drew a cross on Jack’s forehead with the oil and then stepped over to Cyn and repeated the same thing.

  “Do Detective Richards, too,” Jack asked, remembering a little too late, “Please...and, uh thanks for everything.”

  “It is nothing. It is my duty,” Father Paul said. He seemed unsure of himself for a moment. “And...and I might have been too harsh with you just now. Maybe your job is to save the world. I hope it is. But you must know that my job is to save souls and I intend to save as many as I can before they come for me. Now go with God’s blessing.”

  Slowly, feeling the guilt build to the size of anchors, Jack pushed the gurney away, knowing that the soft, chubby priest was a braver man that he would ever be.

  Cyn was crying as she shoved ahead of people waiting on the elevators. “Police business,” she mumbled a few times and then they were on the car and zooming upwards. “The top floor, please,” she said to a man in white, a doctor, Jack supposed, who was standing closest to the glowing buttons.