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

by Peter Meredith

  Cyn hugged him, reading his mood with precision. “You tried, Jack. No one can say that you didn’t. I was getting pretty scared there for a while. I thought for sure we’d find the road wide open all the way into Queens, which is crazy. We saw how bad it was this morning...or was it yesterday morning?”

  The eastern sky was dark, but not nearly as dark as it had been. “It was yesterday morning,” Jack said, wiping his eyes. “And I was thinking the same thing.”

  “I find it strange that I was as well,” Pastor John said. “I was simply sure that we would just zip along so fast that there would be no time to change your mind, Jack. But the Lord has again provided and we are balked.” He pointed at the river. The Hudson was a dark strip, almost a mile wide between them and the city. The three of them turned to stare at it and just then there came an odd, echoey thump.

  Jack’s head dropped and his heart sank. He knew the sound—it was a boat thumping on rocks. Cyn rolled down her window, listened until the sound repeated and then asked: “Is God doing this? Is he trying to help us get to Queens?”

  “I don’t know,” the pastor answered, looking shaken to the core. “And I really don’t know what to do about you, Jack. I can’t let you murder this man. It’s one of the reasons why I came.”

  “I wish you would stop me,” Jack said, and then got out of the Humvee. He stood for a moment; there were ghouls nearby, he could feel them further up the road. There were six of them feeding on the remains of a woman. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said, shouldering his M4 and retrieving the rapier. He then went around to the back door and hauled Connor out of the Humvee.

  The man began to blink. “What happened?”

  Jack hauled him to his feet; he wasn’t gentle. He was getting the same feeling he had with Carl. Jack didn’t want touch Connor or even look at him and even the thought of him began to feed a brewing fury within Jack.

  Cyn saw what was happening. “Here, I’ll take him.” She began pulling Connor down to the river’s edge.

  He was groggy and easily moved. “Like a sheep to slaughter,” Pastor John said. It was an accusation, one that Jack ignored. “I will stop you if it comes down to it,” the pastor said. He held up a 9MM pistol. Where he had gotten it from, Jack didn’t know and he really didn’t care.

  “Then maybe it would be best if you shoot me now,” Jack said and then turned his back on the pastor. Just like with their journey to Queens, Jack knew he wasn’t going to die by being shot in the back. He led them down to the water and what he saw there had him turning to Pastor John.

  “If you stop me, this will keep happening.”

  In the dark, Jack had first thought that the river was filled with ice flows, but it wasn’t ice covering the river from bank to bank. The river was filled with bloated corpses.

  Pastor John made a noise in his throat and began crying. And then he began blubbering. And then he fell down on his knees. Jack looked on the priest with cold eyes and saw himself in the display. He’d been a pathetic, mewling bitch after he had killed Carl. He vowed that he wouldn’t be this time. What would be the point to sorrow and sadness and begging forgiveness? He was going into this with his eyes wide open this time. How could he kill someone in cold blood and then turn around and say: woops, my bad, now forgive me.

  He left the pastor and made his way to the water where a boat was kicking up next to the shore. It was little more than an aluminum dingy, the kind a middle-aged man would take out on the weekends to get away from his nagging wife. There were dozens of bottle tops rusting little rings on the bottom of the boat.

  Jack sent one skittering as he climbed in.

  Cyn came next pulling Connor. He stopped at the water’s edge and stared at the river of dead with his mouth hanging slack. “I’m not going in there,” he said, pulling back.

  “Then you’ll die,” Jack told him, matter-of-factly. “There are a whole mess of ghouls coming for us right now. It’s either get in the boat or take your chances out there with them.”

  Connor, who had no idea the fate that Jack had in store for him, hurried for the boat. Like a sheep to slaughter...the words echoed in Jack’s mind. Angrily he turned from the man and took a look at the outboard engine. It had plenty of gas and a new plug, but the props were clogged.

  The propeller blades were imbedded in a person...a child, actually.

  “Can you start it?” Cyn asked, nervously. The ghouls were coming closer.

  “P-Probably,” he answered, his stomach felt like it was coming up his throat. He looked away from the propeller and saw Pastor John standing just at the water’s edge. “Push us out,” Jack ordered, “and either get in or don’t, but if you get in, get in with a purpose. Help or hurt us, just make up your mind.”

  The pastor shoved them out and hesitated before jumping in after them. No one asked him whether he was going to help or not, but he was no longer carrying the gun. He had the crucifix.

  They only went twenty feet out into the river where the current, a sluggish underwater hand, grabbed them and slowly started pushing them down stream. The ghouls came up and eyed them from the bank; they were all dressed in black suits save for a single woman in a dingy grey dress. Only the woman had any flesh on her bones and that was stretched tight as a drum. The others were bone and gristle and grinning teeth. They looked like a wedding party of the damned.

  They only paused for a few seconds before they waded in after the boat.

  It was a bit of a shock to everyone that the ghouls turned out to be such good swimmers. They splashed straight for the boat. Cyn tried her shotgun on the lead ghoul and nearly toppled into the water herself when she blew the thing’s head off. Pastor John barely caught her as she pinwheeled her arms to keep from falling in. They toppled into the bottom of the boat, disturbing the bottle caps.

  “Give Connor your sword!” Cyn demanded. Jack had pulled it out and was using it to clear the body off the prop.

  Not only was Connor looking as though he had just wet his pants, Jack wasn’t about to do to clear the props by hand. “No. Use the priest.”

  Cyn turned to the pastor, who was trying to find a place in the boat that had any stability. “Come on, Pastor do something!”

  “Of course, right,” he said. “Just give me a second to get up.” A bony hand clamped on the side of the boat, and then a second. Before the pastor could even right himself, let alone lift the crucifix, the grinning skull was hoisted up next.

  Jack took it off its shoulders with one swing of the rapier. The extra seconds this afforded allowed the pastor to get to a secure squatting position. From there he recited Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and as long as he spoke, the ghouls were kept at bay, splashing in the river fifteen feet away.

  Finally, Jack got the last of the child—a little boy in onesie pajamas—off the propellers. To get the engine going was nothing more than a pull of the starter cord and then they were chugging away. They went slowly with Pastor John and Jack fending the bodies away from the prow of the boat with the butts of their guns. Connor sat in the middle of the boat and clung to the sides, while Cyn drove.

  It was a slow trip around the southern end of Manhattan and when they turned north into the East River, the number of bodies only multiplied. They pushed through the dead, stopping twice to remove yards of spun skin from the props, and the sun was pinking the sky before they turned straight east onto a canal that ran deep into Queens like a dagger wound.

  The southern edge of Calvary Cemetery sat thirty yards from the canal. Cyn pushed them up close and first Jack and then Pastor John climbed up onto a cement retaining wall. Connor came next, eager and grasping, afraid of everything: the water, the boat, the shadowed tombstones and the hundreds of thousands of upturned graves.

  The one thing he was not afraid of was Jack, and that was a tremendous mistake. “What the hell are we doing here?” he asked.

  Cyn turned away and Pastor John looked sick. Jack’s ugly fury ramped up. It was the coming spell that made him feel such
alien hatred, there was no other explanation. And that meant fate had a driving hand in all of this—the idea made it easier to answer: “I’m hoping to figure things out and you’re going to help. Come on, it’s this way.”

  Jack went first, feeling with that strange part of himself for ghouls and the demons. The only demon around was the one with the terrible half-penny eyes and it was away west, still in Jersey but hurrying their way. There were ghouls closer, not many and none seemed to be oriented on the little group. For the most part these close in ones were trapped in caskets of marble and would never break free.

  The four crossed through the graveyard, the morning light guiding them around the countless holes in the earth until they found the one actually dead corpse in the entire cemetery. They all stared at Loret’s mutilated body. Jack studied it for clues on how to cast the missing spell, the others simply looked disgusted.

  “Who is this guy?” Connor asked.

  Casually, as if he was secretly hoping that Connor would run away or fight him or even just scream, Jack unslung the M4 from his back. The welder did nothing but look at Jack with an infuriatingly dim expression. “He’s you,” Jack told him and then thumped Connor right between the eyes with the heavy butt end of the gun.

  Chapter 35

  Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York

  “How can Satan drive out Satan?” Pastor John said. It was a statement, not a question, and one filled with misery. He looked stricken as though the blow had struck him instead of Connor.

  “What are you talking about?” Jack asked, his tone sharp and his eyes sharper. The fury and the hate were building.

  Pastor John shrugged. “Just scripture. Just the Lord’s word: If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. It’s the Gospel of Mark, 3:23.”

  “Ok, and what’s it supposed to mean? Are you calling me Satan?” Jack certainly felt like Satan, he just didn’t like the idea of someone pointing it out. As well, he felt as divided as was humanly possible. A part of him...a growing part of him had actually enjoyed the heavy thunk the rifle made when it had smashed Connor’s face. The rest of him was appalled and on the verge of being sick.

  The pastor shrugged again, an infuriating gesture of weakness in Jack’s eyes, and answered: “No, you are not Satan. You’re not even close, not yet at least. The scripture is Christ’s warning against...”

  With just a touch, Cyn stopped the pastor before he could get going. “Now’s not the time, Father. The demon is coming and people are still dying by the thousands. Maybe we should wait over here.”

  She pulled the pastor away, hauling on the hem of his camouflaged shirt. Jack watched them go, divided once more by anger and jealousy, each eating into his mind until he balled a fist so hard that his nails bit into his palm. Only then could he concentrate.

  “Why couldn’t this be someone else’s birthright?” he mumbled and then looked down on the two bodies: Loret and Connor. They couldn’t stay where they were.

  Loret was surrounded by the twin circles—Robert’s used-up magic, and Connor was crumpled in a heap, too far from the cement. Jack dragged them both further up the wide sidewalk and then cuffed Connor’s hands behind his back and tied his shoelaces together, just in case he woke during the ritual. It was an ugly thing to do and it was only just the start.

  Jack pulled the knife he had used to kill Carl from his back pocket; the blade was black with dried blood. The paintbrush that he had used to create the glyphs was missing, lost somewhere in the last ten hours of fighting and running for his life. But it was no matter.

  Fate kept him on course. The brush that Robert had used was lying just beside the sidewalk. It was revolting, the blood on it looked like tar and it smelled like a charnel house in summer. Jack grabbed it, smacked it against the cement to clear off most of the blood and then advanced on Connor.

  “Be tough,” he whispered as he slit open Connor’s shirt, exposing his soft belly. But Jack was not tough. He winced and his eyes teared as he drew the knife along Connor’s skin. The first cut was straight across his belly going deep enough to slice the muscles of his abdomen;

  To keep him from running, a voice whispered in his mind. But there’s a better way, as you know.

  Jack knew. He had seen too many depictions of ancient sacrifices not to know that it would be best if he impaled Connor, “nailing” him to the earth, so to speak. A shiver went up his back and a second later a snarl appeared on his lips. He was torn in two, hating as well as loving what he was doing.

  He wished he could feel nothing only that wasn’t an option, sacrificing a man to one of the Gods of the Undead was too personal. He cried and he hated and he grinned and leered greedily and he felt the power swirling around him as again and again he dipped the brush into Connor’s split belly.

  Sometimes he stabbed the brush in, knife-like, with the strange hatred that he couldn’t explain and sometimes he felt just the edges with the brush, afraid that he was hurting the unconscious man.

  Gradually he went around the circle and with each glyph drawn; he felt something taken from him. His muscles began trembling and his breath came ragged in his chest. He was being drained. It was part of his soul that was being taken. After Carl, it was expected and so was the feeling of suffocation that clamped itself on Jack’s throat the moment the circles were complete.

  It was time to sacrifice Connor to complete the spell.

  Jack was afraid to look straight at the man, fearing that when he did, Connor would be staring at him with wide eyes, and he was afraid to look over at Cyn, knowing he would see disappointment etched onto her face. Jack kept his chin down and approached Connor, making sure to focus squarely on the man’s chest.

  Hesitation was no longer an option; his head was beginning to go light and his hunger for the spell’s completion was too great. At this point there was no turning back; either he would die or Connor would. Jack stabbed the blade deep and there was a tin sound ringing in the air and a surge of unholy power that ran up his arms, into his chest, up his throat and then out of his mouth as he spoke the ancient words that opened the portal to the world of the dead.

  This time, Jack felt only a deep pang of remorse. He didn’t cry or weep; there was simply a hole somewhere inside him where his soul hid and there was a pain that he tried not to think about.

  With a sad shake of his head, Jack watched as beneath Loret’s corpse a black hole, liquid and glassy, formed so that it appeared that Loret floated on a table of pure nothingness. Then came the motes of gauzy light; they were spirits coming to inspect the opening, looking to take advantage of any mistake Jack might have made.

  When they saw that there were none, they hovered below, waiting again, hoping for an opportunity to escape hell. After a moment, when one didn’t surface, Jack asked: “Dr. Byron Loret?” This didn’t seem to help.

  A full three minutes passed, and as the seconds drew out and Jack stood on the edge of the black circle, there came a sudden terrific screech ripping up the sky that made him jump. He squinted up and could just make out a tremendous metal dart cruising at mach 2 a thousand feet off the ground. When it disappeared, there came an ever greater cacophony as a ripple of explosions on the Jersey side of the Hudson River shook the air.

  It was the Navy firing from out to sea, Jack figured. The explosions went on for a good five minutes, crash after crash, and then silence.

  Cyn and Pastor John had eased closer to the circles and Jack was still staring westward at New Jersey, which looked to be one tremendous bonfire, when he was suddenly jerked back to his sad reality: Dr. Loret finally made his appearance. There was a blast of cold from the black circle and then Loret sat up, suddenly, spilling his insides into his lap. He touched the knot of intestines and began trying to shove them back in place, hauling the loose flaps of his skin around him like an ill-fitting kimono.

  Loret was hideous in death. For some reason, Robert had slit his eyes wide open and now they looked like two squished grapes; his tongue
had been split down the middle and when it came out, which it did with unsettling frequency to lick his lips, it looked like a snake’s tongues, except it was loose and flappy. Lastly, Loret was dual colored: the front of him was cadaver-white, while the back was a sick purple where the remains of his blood had pooled and coagulated.

  “What a shame,” he said, looking down at his open chest, the words sounding strange and wheezy as though his lungs were bagpipes.

  “Dr. Loret?” Jack asked again. “I have some questions.”

  For the first time, Loret looked around himself. He seemed especially interested in the glyphs. He turned three small circles, like a dog readying itself for bed, and all the while his lips moved as he read and reread the glyphs holding him within the circle.

  “You ass! Let me go!” Loret cried, stamping his foot and accidentally letting a cascade of intestines out to splatter on the ground. He scooped them up and then charged at Jack, but was stopped short by the invisible barrier that Jack’s spell had created. “Let me out and I’ll kill you!”

  “And?” Jack asked. “Don’t you mean, or I’ll kill you?”

  Loret tried to grin with his dead face and it came out as all teeth. “Yes, of course, sorry. What’s wrong with her?” Cyn and the pastor had joined them; she was looking back and forth from the corpse of Connor Randall and the talking corpse of Dr. Loret. Her look was one of profound queasiness.

  “I’m just feeling a little sick is all,” she said, gasping and swallowing repeatedly. “There’s so much ugliness everywhere I turn. No offense Dr. Loret.”

  Even in death, he could manage to raise a haughty eyebrow. “And how am I not supposed to take offense?”

  No one had an answer to that and Cyn only shrugged. Jack, who was still feeling reverberating evil bouncing around his insides, and who was tired, both physically and spiritually, rubbed his forehead and said to Loret: “I don’t want to be a jerk, but no one wants to hear your whining. We brought you back because we want answers. Where’s Robert Montgomery? And what’s his deal? What’s he looking to accomplish with all of this?”