Jack put his hand out to her. She stared at it until he said: “I’ll think of something, ok? I won’t let it get you.” Only then did she release the gun and hold his hand.
He had no idea what he could do to save her. The demon was relentless. They could drive to the ends of the earth and it would still come for them and would find them when they least expected it.
But I won’t kill to save our lives, he vowed to himself. I won’t open the portal ever again.
That seemed as though it would be the easiest vow to maintain. He had changed when he opened the portal; he had become everything he had ever despised. He had felt the evil in his soul well up and explode, taking over his mind and his body. It had been the sickest feeling imaginable and he knew he wouldn’t go through it again just to save his miserable flesh.
And he wouldn’t do it to save Cyn’s either. As much as he cared for her, and it surprised him that he did indeed care for her as much as he did, he wouldn’t murder for her.
Two people weren’t worth it.
The question was, would two million people be worth it? He took the Humvee down a path and found himself heading northeast going straight through the city of Princeton, New Jersey, population: 2.
The streets were covered in bodies and blood ran in the gutters. Jack had to drive slowly along lawns and sidewalks to avoid running over the tens of thousands of bodies.
Many of the corpses were dressed in camouflage, but most of the dead had been civilians. They had packs on their backs and their faces were eternally stretched into insane grimaces. They had gone mad with fear before they had been pulled down and had their throats torn out.
It was heartbreakingly sad and then they passed the hospital they had landed at that morning; it was a blackened husk. There was no way Richards was alive in that building.
Chapter 30
Princeton, New Jersey
Had the hospital staff evacuated him before the creatures arrived? Or had he crawled out on his own when the screams and the darkness swept over the building? Or was he still up there, a charred corpse. Jack dearly wanted to go check, only the shadows were moving. The undead were near. He could feel the creatures plain as can be; dozens of them lurking, hoping that he would come closer. The ugly eagerness that Cyn and Jack could feel added to their discomfort and it was with a heavy feeling that Jack accelerated away.
“This is just wrong,” Cyn whispered, squinting and swallowing loud and often. The all-pervasive smell of death was creeping in through the cracks of the doors and what they could see around them made Cyn hold herself. People ran here and there, chased by gangs of the dead, others screamed in the darkness as though they were being eaten alive—and they probably were.
They had left the demon with pennies for eyes far behind, but there were others like it, their evil standing out even among the sea of evil that Jack and Cyn found themselves in. They had somehow driven straight into the maelstrom and now that they were neck deep, there was nothing they could do but push through and hope some remnant of the army was making a stand somewhere ahead.
“Careful there.” She held out a shaking hand to point at a child...a little girl in footy pajamas, dead as could be. She was whole and intact except for her head which was missing.
Jack was having trouble seeing because one of his headlights had a two-by-four sticking straight out of it as though it was a lance and he was a modern knight. To make matters worse, his windshield was shattered in a thousand places so that his vision was that of an insect’s. In truth, he thought the world looked better peering through the cracks. The death was blurred, the flowing blood was cut up in angles which looked less like the rivers that they were.
The real world was too hard to take in through clear eyes. It made him feel lightheaded and numb and he kept running a sleeve across his cheeks—he was sure he was crying and if he wasn’t it meant that he was broken and he didn’t want to know that, either. He feared that he was broken on the inside in a way that couldn’t be fixed.
Slowly, carefully, he guided them through the ruined city and on the outskirts, where the bodies were fewer, there was an odd scene: a line of holes in the ground, carefully dug. He knew that they were foxholes…or that they had been intended to be foxholes, but they weren’t foxholes anymore, they were graves.
Soldiers had painstakingly dug their own graves with two-foot long entrenching tools. They had sat in them with their bladders filling, uncomfortably and their hearts racing and their stomachs going silly until the darkness descended. There was enough gleaming brass around the holes to show that they had fought; they hadn’t run off.
And there was enough blood wetting the ground to show that they had fought in vain. Jack kept his eyes straight ahead and refused to look down into the holes as they passed. What he saw in his periphery, the body parts and the heads spiked on rifles and the soup of blood and other unknown fluids filling the bottom of the holes was enough to make him grind his teeth to keep from whimpering.
Cyn had her hand in her mouth until they passed, but the ordeal wasn’t over. There was a second line three miles further on and another after that just before a small river. It was here that Jack found a replacement for the battered Humvee they were driving in.
The replacement was, in fact, another Humvee. This new one was better in every way. Not only was it perfectly preserved it also sported a massive machine gun on top and, to make it even more perfect, it had extra fuel cans strapped to its side and in the back there was food, water and ammo.
Perhaps best of all there wasn’t a dead soldier sitting in the front seat in a pool of his own blood with his throat torn out as Jack had feared there would be. Both doors were flung wide open and on the ground next to the Humvee was a fully loaded M4. Jack picked it up and stowed it in the back next to a case of bottled water. He grabbed two of the bottles.
“Here you go.” He held out a bottle to his cousin. Nothing needed to be said or guessed about concerning the previous owners of the Humvee. The fear and madness had been too much for them. Jack had given in to it that first night he had fought Hor. It had been horrible and yet, ever since then it had become easier to overcome every time he’d been confronted by it. It was one of the few instances when the saying: What doesn’t kills, you makes you stronger actually applied.
In silence, Cyn sipped her water as Jack drove the new Humvee on a northeast course. It was a marvelous machine that seemed unstoppable no matter what sort of ditch or hill or downed tree was in their way. When there was a blockage of cars, they went up embankments or plowed down fences or forded streams that ran nearly as high as their doors.
The land was an odd mixture of suburbia, nature and hell. They drove somewhat thoughtlessly, and it was twenty minutes before either of them even questioned where they were going. All they knew was that they wanted to “get away.”
With the main axis of the undead attack heading southwest, Jack drove northeast, climbing into the hills until he had mounted a ridge that had a plaque situated nearby that read City Overlook. From the top of the ridge, they should have been able to see the glittering skyline of New York, instead the night had swallowed the lights and there was nothing but a deep, formless darkness engulfing the entire city.
The sight stopped them.
“This really isn’t our fault,” Cyn said, carefully screwing the lid back on one of the bottles. It wasn’t easy to do since her hands were shaking so badly that the cap kept popping off and falling into her lap. “Right? We didn’t know, is all. We’re being too hard on ourselves.”
Jack had no reply. Whatever Robert was doing was building to a crescendo and he could feel an unpleasant metallic zing in his teeth that went down his nerves. They waited, sipping water that sloshed in their twirling bellies and then it happened.
Robert must have finished his fourth set of spells and the darkness that held New York, exploded outward in a storm engulfing everything, damping out lights and erasing the world. The darkness swept along faster than they
could have driven away and there was nothing either of them could do.
Cyn reached over and grabbed Jack’s hand just before the darkness swept over the Humvee, rocking it on its springs. To Jack, Cyn, with her porcelain skin and blonde hair glowed faintly in the dark like a spirit or a ghost. She seemed so insubstantial that Jack felt as if he could blow her out of the Humvee with only a whistle.
Her cool hand in his, gripping him in terror was real enough. He pulled her close and, since they were both still in their tactical armor, he rubbed his cheek against hers. They sat like that, tense and afraid for some minutes and then the darkness settled like fog in the low places and gradually dissipated.
“How many did he raise that time?” Cyn asked, prying her hand from his grip and straightening up. She touched her hair and looked embarrassed, perhaps over her fear or perhaps over the fact that she had been clinging to her cousin; Jack didn’t know.
Just then he wasn’t sure of anything. “With no one to stop him?” he asked, rhetorically. “He raised as many as he could…as many as he dared to. There were other cemeteries right around Calvary, right?”
Cyn nodded miserably. “All told there are a few million people buried in Queens.”
“Were you mean,” Jack said. Again she nodded, but this time she remained mute. There really wasn’t much to say.
The unnatural darkness that had hid New York faded and now the lights of the city, once so bright and gay, could be seen. It was no longer a pretty view from the ridge—parts of the city were without power and the buildings looked grey and forbidding, like tremendous tombstones, standing over a city of the dead. In contrast, other parts of the city were on fire. Flames ate up entire blocks, dancing merrily, destroying what the walking dead had not.
“It’s not our fault,” Cyn repeated, trying to convince herself. “We did everything we could have to stop this. Isn’t that right, Jack? Say it. Say we did everything we could have.”
Seeing as he had committed murder, Jack felt that he had. “This isn’t our fault,” he agreed.
Cyn had been on the verge of tears, in a snap, her demeanor changed. She glared at Jack. “What do you mean by this? Are you saying we did something else wrong? Because I told you not to kill Carl. Do you remember? I told you that it was wrong and evil, so don’t try to drag me down with you. None of this, none of any of this is my fault. I was tricked and lied to. The glyphs I had could have said anything. I had no idea that it was a spell or...”
“Hey!” Jack snapped, cutting her off. “I’m not blaming you for anything. Yes, you were lied to and you were tricked, and you were entrusted with a warning and a puzzle that was so vague that it was too much for a curious mind. I don’t blame you, I blame our great-great grandfather. If he thought the spells were so dangerous, why didn’t he burn them?”
“Right,” she said, confused. “That’s right, he should have. So…so why did you empathize the word ‘this’ like you did?”
It was a moment before he could bring himself to speak. “Because we might still be able to stop Robert. If we can figure out what he’s doing and where he is and what his game plan is, and, most importantly, the spell that he commands, we might be able to stop him.”
Cyn’s eyes narrowed. Cautiously, she asked: “How on earth are we supposed to find any of that out? Not even Robert’s own father knew what he was up to and even if he knows now, how do we go about finding him in all of this?” She pointed at a world that had been turned on its head.
“I agree, we could never find Robert’s father,” Jack said, “and even if we did, I doubt he would have much to say. The power of the spells is so great that I wonder whether Robert would even tell his own dad his secrets.”
Cyn lifted an eyebrow. “If he wouldn’t tell his own father, then who would he tell? He wouldn’t tell some chum he met in some pub, and he wasn’t a bloke with a gob of mates,” she pointed out. “So who does that leave? You heard your own father say that no one knows about any of this magic business.”
“That’s not what he said,” Jack corrected her. “He said: There’s none among the living who knows.”
Cyn leaned so far back from him that she was pressed fully against the door as the implications of what he had just said sunk in. “You would do that again? Really? Do you know what you looked like when you killed that poor man? You looked insane, Jack. You looked evil and it was disgusting. It made me question everything I know about you and everything I...” She bit off the last of her words, and shifted her eyes away.
“I know what I looked like, or I guess I know, because I felt exactly what you were saying. I felt like a killer, Cyn. It was like I was born to murder and...and I enjoyed it on some level that I never knew existed. But I don’t think that was really me. I think it was the spell because right now I’m like you, disgusted by the very idea.”
“Then why even contemplate it, Jack? I know it’s not you, but it might become you if you keep this up. This is black magic. It’s evil and it will turn you evil, eventually, I know it. And you know it, too.” She glanced at her watch. “Two hours ago you were crying like a baby. Do you remember that? You were so ashamed of yourself that you were practically blubbering.”
Jack remembered and the memory sent a rash of heat into his cheeks. “Yeah, it’s not something I’m going to forget so soon. But what we saw back there, the…the butchery and the blood and the bodies, I’ll never forget that, not for a thousand years. And we both know that was just the beginning. Robert has unleashed hell on earth and, yes, it’s not our fault, but if we can do something, anything to stop it, then what happens next IS our fault.”
Cyn was quiet for a long time as the truth of their situation slowly burned through the wall of denial she had built around her. “It’s going to get worse, isn’t it?”
“A whole lot worse,” he said. It would be unimaginable.
She knew it. Her lips sucked in and her eyes glinted as tears built up. “So who is it going to be? You want to…I know you don’t want to, but you’re going to bring someone back. I just don’t have any idea who could help us. It would have to be someone who knew Robert; someone who knew his plans…”
“Someone who helped him?” Jack suggested. “Someone who was in the know only because Robert knew that he was expendable.”
Her eyes shot wide. “Dr. Loret? But…”
Jack shook his head. “But he’s on Robert’s side? I really doubt it, not after Robert slit him open and tortured him.”
Chapter 31
Central New Jersey
“Dr. Loret,” Cyn said for the third time, shaking her head. Each time she said his name she sounded more and more confused.
“Yeah, he’s the only one who’s seen all three spells performed,” Jack said as he climbed into the back seat of the hummer and worked a lock on the ceiling of the vehicle that popped up the hatch, giving him access to the gun mounted on top. It was one of hell of a big gun. “Do you know anything about fifty caliber machine guns?” he asked Cyn. The only reason he knew it was a fifty caliber was that it was written on a box of fat bullets that was hooked to the gun.
“No...no but, Dr. Loret? You actually think he knows Robert’s spell?”
Jack looked over the gun—it was a puzzle. In the dark, not even the trigger was obvious and nor was it clear what the function of the little rod sticking out the side was for or the round knob protruding from the back or all the little metal gizmos on top. He knew what the handles in the back were for and so he settled in behind it and thumbed a button.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“What the bloody hell!” Cyn shrieked.
“I found the trigger,” Jack answered, pulling his hands off the handles. Not knowing that the weapon was “live,” he had jumped higher than Cyn had. He tried to laugh off the shakes that struck him. “This thing is awesome.” It wasn’t awesome, at least not to Jack and not at that moment. It had been so loud that he was sure every ghoul within a mile was heading toward them.
Cyn pu
lled him down by the leg of his jeans. “Loret doesn’t know the spell. You’d be killing someone for nothing, just like you did with Carl.”
His gut turned where she had knifed the guilt into him. “Loret knows. I’m sure of it. Loret was there for at least three of the castings and sure, he was being killed for the third one, but he wasn’t for the others. He was probably taking notes.”
Jack started to clamber back up into the turret when she grabbed him again, asking: “How do you plan on controlling him? He’s not going to tell you anything if you keep him penned up in a magic circle. That’s what you were going to do, right? A circle outside the two conjuring circles to keep him caged?”
Actually he had been going to draw a protective circle around Cyn and himself, but her idea was far better. “Yeah, of course. And he will talk, I’m sure of it. He’s going to want revenge. I bet he’ll do anything to get it, too. Now, hold on, I’m trying to figure this thing...”
She pulled on his pants a final time and asked the question he didn’t want to hear: “Who are you going to kill?”
Jack leaned on the gun. Who was he going to kill? That was the ultimate question before him. If Robert was standing there, he’d turn the machine gun on him and blast him to hell where he belonged. But that was his entire list of people he wanted dead. Even Robert’s creepy father didn’t make the list. As far as Jack knew, his father hadn’t committed any crime, beyond being disgustingly proud of his son, that is.
“I don’t know, Cyn. It won’t be you, so don’t worry about that.”
He felt something below him and then, suddenly she pushed her way through the hole in the roof of the Humvee. There was so little room that they were pressed together, chest to chest.
“You’d let the entire world go up in flames rather than sacrifice me?” she asked. He was suddenly very aware of her lips and her breasts pressing into his chest. And she was suddenly aware of his manhood perking up.
The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead A Post-Apocalyptic Epic Page 28