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

by Peter Meredith

  The only thing that brought him around was when Admiral Owens waded into another lengthy pause. The pause was as wide as it was long and no one spoke or even moved much—except Jack, who stirred as if coming awake. He wanted to ask: Are we done? Can we go?

  Cyn nudged him with her arm and then told him with a down turn of her brows to remain quiet.

  Finally, the admiral stirred: a long sigh, a shake of his head and then a shrug was followed by: “This is quite a lot to take in. Really...really I’m not sure if I believe you and if I do, I’m not sure what I should do about it. One man started all of this? We thought it was the Muslim Brotherhood.”

  “No,” Cyn said. “It was just Robert.”

  One of the captains, a small man, neat and trim with almost no lips, spoke up: “I believe this information is fortuitously timed, especially concerning our new orders. It gives me hope at least.”

  “May I ask what orders you’re referring to?” Pastor John asked.

  “The orders are need to know only,” another of the captains said, dismissing the junior officer. He then faced the trim captain. “I think I have the exact opposite take, Blaine. You heard what became of their monsignor; he couldn’t take on a single one these demons.”

  Captain Blaine didn’t bat an eye. “This is different, Brewer. This is bigger! We’ve all heard the reports, but this is first-hand information. Yes, this monsignor couldn’t hold his own, but we don’t know him, we don’t know how Godly he really was. But I don’t think we can doubt...” He stopped before he could give away his secret, but he needn’t have worried, Pastor John’s eyes were widening.

  “You’re bringing in the Pope?” he asked, breathlessly.

  Jack knew they were, the second every officer clammed up and began shifting their eyes back from one to another. Finally, the admiral admitted: “We’re not bringing him in. He’s here already, at the White House, I mean. Since everything on the land side of the war has been one giant cock-up right from the start, we will be providing air coverage for the Holy Father. He’s going to attempt to put a stop to this.”

  “I need to see him!” Jack cried, stepping up to the desk. “He can’t face the creatures until I talk to him. He doesn’t know what he’s getting into.”

  The admiral leaned back, calmly folding his hands over his belly. “Settle down, son. You’re wrong on all accounts. The Pope knows the score. I’m not a rosary-rattler, but I got to hand it to him, he volunteered right off the bat. He flew in last night with a whole mess of cardinals. Our mission is to provide aerial reconnaissance and support as well as emergency evac if needed.”

  “He needs me,” Jack said.

  “I doubt it,” the admiral replied with narrowed eyes. “All that blood and body of Christ stuff, that’s metaphorical. It’s not real, so you can cool your jets. The Pope doesn’t need some sort of satanic advice.”

  “But he needs my advice,” Jack insisted, ignoring the word “satanic” as well as the somewhat snide way the admiral was looking at him. “I know why the monsignor lost. He was too righteous. He was too much a man of God. He wasn’t willing to get down in the dirt and really fight and if the Pope won’t get mean then he won’t stand a chance, either.”

  Chapter 38

  The Atlantic Ocean

  Jack pounded the admiral’s desk and demanded that a helicopter whisk him off to the White House so that he could confer with the Pope. When that was answered with a grunting laugh, he begged on his hands and knees and there were real tears in his eyes.

  The Pope was Jack’s last hope. If he failed, then who would the world turn to? Jack supposed that there were other holy men and women and guessed that other denominations had their leaders, but if the Pope was killed, would they step up? Would they rush forward, eager to take on millions of ghouls and demons, single-handedly?

  Unlikely.

  This made the Pope’s success all the more important. If he failed then it would be up to Jack to figure out a way to deal with his cousin—and that meant more death and murder and more guilt. It meant digging up grave after grave in an attempt to find someone with any answers. It meant the yoke sliding permanently to the wrong side.

  In truth, it meant the end of Jack Dreyden. He was already changing. What would another twenty murders do to him?

  “Save the crocodile tears,” the admiral snapped, “and get your hands off of me.”

  Surprisingly, Pastor John came to Jack’s aide. “I think you should listen to him. The monsignor was a good man and a valiant one. He had complete faith in the Lord and yet that wasn’t enough. Jack has fought these creatures. He knows them better than anyone. The Pope needs to hear what he has to say.”

  “I agree,” Cyn said, pulling Jack to his feet. “Feel that sword of his, Admiral. This has been going on for two days, have you heard of anyone fighting them with a sword? Have you heard of anyone fighting them and actually coming out alive? He’s done it time and again and if he has advice then it should be bloody-well listened to.”

  Admiral Owens glanced at his assembled officers; two were noncommittal, issuing only shrugs, two, Blaine and Brewer nodded, though reluctantly, and the final two shook their heads: The last saying: “This is the Pope. I don’t picture him riding a white charger into battle and brandishing a flaming sword.”

  “That’s immaterial,” Jack shot back. “He’s going into battle and whether he is armed with a sword or with some sort of spiritual power doesn’t make a difference. The concept of fighting is the same. He should know what the demons are capable of. He should know how they react. He should know their strengths and weaknesses.”

  “That actually makes sense,” Admiral Owens said. “Forewarned is forearmed. It’s what we preach in the military on a daily basis. Brewer, find out how much time we have. Blaine, prepare a chopper. The rest of you return to your stations; you have your orders.”

  In proper military fashion, there was a flurry of activity and then a long wait. Jack and Cyn ate and drank and then fell asleep leaning against each other on the admiral’s couch, and they were both too tired to care that they looked more like lovers than cousins.

  It took two hours for even a man as high-ranking as the admiral to get hold of someone on the Pope’s “protection detail.” The detail consisted of a battalion of marines, each of whom volunteered to be baptized and blessed.

  Once they reached the officer in charge, Colonel JT Abrams, there was another long wait as the situation was explained up the chain of command within the Pope’s entourage.

  At noon, the request was denied. “The word is that the Holy Father has the power of God on his side,” Colonel Abrams said over a radio that cracked and hissed. “I’m to tell you that it will be enough.”

  “Then we take the helicopter and go anyway,” Jack insisted, scratching the side of his face and looking around for his sword. He was a touch bleary from the long nap and it was a moment before he saw the sword leaning against the wall.

  Before he could get it, Owens stood up and walked the length of his office three times before he finally shook his head. “He’s the closest person to God that we have on our side. I won’t gainsay him.”

  “Maybe he’s right,” Cyn said. “Maybe we should have faith.” Her eyes were tired and twitchy; Jack could tell that she didn’t believe the words that came out of her mouth.

  The admiral left to oversee reconnaissance operations. Two unmanned Fire Scouts, which were dreadfully ugly little helicopters that were jammed with electronics, and a SH-60 Seahawk helicopter that could stay on station for three hours were sent over Philadelphia, which had been evacuated the night before, along with Delaware, eastern Maryland and half of Pennsylvania.

  The Pope, his squadron of cardinals and his battalion of US Marines were shuttled to the edge of the expanding Dead Zone: Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. It was eerily dead. Its streets strewn with empty cars, its buildings dark. It looked as though it had already been lost in battle.

  With rockets and bombs fl
ying overhead, a Mass was conducted by Cardinal Michael Tuccillo, Archbishop of Vienna, who, at sixty-eight, was the youngest of the clergy in attendance. He had a lilting Italian accent and an oratory style that was both fluid and enticing, and, by the end of the Mass, all eight-hundred marines that had packed into Saint John’s Evangelical Church, glowed with a heat that they had never felt before.

  Jack and Cyn watched the feed from the three recon birds on a tremendous television hanging from a wall in the admiral’s office. What they saw didn’t make sense: two companies of marines marched in formation straight across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, the last intact bridge over the Delaware River. Behind them came the Pope, carrying a tremendous wood cross high in the air, and leading a phalanx of cardinals. Behind them came the last two companies of marines.

  “Why aren’t they taking their tanks and stuff?” Jack asked. They had left behind millions of dollars in valuable military hardware: tanks, armored personnel carriers, and Humvees loaded down with fifty cals and machine guns. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he said and then picked up the phone that sat on the admiral’s desk.

  A woman answered: “This is the bridge, Commander Turner, speaking.”

  “Hey, my name is Jack Dreyden, is uh, the admiral there? We have a problem already with the Pope.”

  “The admiral is very aware of the situation, thank you,” Turner replied, coldly. “Please refrain from using this line. Out.”

  She hung up so quickly that Jack stared at the phone in confusion. “She was rude,” he said. “She basically hung...”

  “Forget that Jack,” Cyn said, jumping up and pointing at the screen. The marines in front of the papal procession had cleared the far side of the bridge.

  They were technically in Camden, New Jersey, though it looked more like the ruins of Beirut in the eighties. It was a tumbled land of bent steel, shattered glass and dust. Not a building had been left untouched by the constant bombing, while the streets were no longer streets; they were cratered and tortured. Everywhere there were mounds of rubble alive with stakes of rebar and spears of glass.

  The undead had been held back by firepower alone and even as they watched, bones began skittering across the ground as the bodies of the ghouls and demons were being reformed.

  The leading companies of marines advanced, spreading out, moving into this hell on earth and, as they did, the warm glow on their faces drained away to be replaced by grim lines of reality. They were few while their enemies were legion. The dead city of Camden slowly came alive as the shelling ended and the planes disappeared over the horizon. The fires burned low, consumed by the cold and the smoke mixed with the coming darkness.

  It was midday, yet a great bank of darkness hung over the city and it slowly came to engulf the marines and the priests. It surrounded them as deep as the sea. The men faltered, but the Pope led them to one of the greater mounds of debris and toiled up its slope. He stood, an old man in white, leaning on his cross and his breath came in gusts, like little clouds.

  The cardinals, struggling against age and the weight of their chin-to-toe vestments pushed up the mound to stand around their leader and the marines surrounded them with their all but useless weapons pointed out; so far, none had fired. So far the undead were content to gather round, growing their numbers.

  “This is wrong,” Jack said. “They shouldn’t be just standing there, they should be attacking. They should be driving their enemies away, before their numbers grow too great.”

  “Maybe it’s not about numbers,” Cyn suggested. “Maybe it’s about faith. Maybe you should have more faith in them.”

  The ugly in Jack wanted to lash out at Cyn in sudden violence. A part of him despised her just then. A part of him wanted to scream into her face and tell her that what she had just spilled out of her mouth was so profoundly stupid it was embarrassing.

  He hated this feeling and he hated himself for feeling it.

  “It’s not about numbers,” he said after taking a deep breath and forcing a smile onto his face, “and it’s not about faith. It’s about power and who has it and who doesn’t. And it’s about who knows how to use their power and I’m afraid that the Pope doesn’t know how yet.”

  Cyn flicked her eyes at Jack, but said nothing.

  For a full minute they were quiet and then Cyn gasped. The darkness surrounding the marines had surged forward as though a hole had appeared in the ocean of darkness and the water was rushing in to fill it. Their feed was silent, but they could imagine the screaming and the crash of automatic weapons.

  The darkness washed right over the marines and all that could be seen of them were hundreds of pricks of lights going off in a circle around the mound. The darkness ran right up to where the cardinals formed their uneven perimeter. The old men backed up as the Pope raised the heavy cross and looked up, past the circling helicopters, past the sky of blue and beyond any boundary of space.

  Jack could see his lips moving...right up until the darkness spilled over the grey cardinals in all of their flowing finery and surged up the Pope in white.

  “No,” Cyn said in a feeble whisper. She grabbed his hand and stared with wet eyes as the blackness swirled and pulsed.

  In those seconds, Jack felt the hate in him grow stronger. What he was watching was validation that hate was stronger than love. That evil was stronger than goodness. He was seeing that there wasn’t much power in God, after all.

  But then the screen lit up in a brilliant white light that exploded outward and they could see ghouls blasted back, some flying in pieces. Next to him, Cyn was jumping up and down, pumping her fist, screaming: “Yes! Yes! He did it! He did it!” She slammed into Jack and hugged him so hard that he thought his ribs would snap.

  Cyn was crying with joy and at first Jack was feeling the same and the evil, hate that had been eating him up was banished. The Pope was untouched, as were his cardinals. They had held firm and their power was undeniable.

  The same could not be said of the marines. Cyn sobered as the cameras swiveled away from the Pope and to the men that were supposed to be protecting him. Half were dead or missing and the other half was sheeted in ice and shivering, their fingers frozen to their assault rifles.

  Some were horribly injured, missing hands and arms, their bellies torn open. They rolled on the ground in mortal agony and Jack knew their pain, he knew the pain that hell inflicted. It was a pain that drew compassion from the hardest of hearts and it drew it at the worst possible time.

  “No,” Jack whispered. “Leave them.”

  The cardinals were coming down from the mound, some slipping on the demon-ice and some tripping on the unevenness of the ground and some just gimpy from their advanced age. Slowly they made their way among the marines and when they touched the injured, the men appeared to wilt in relief.

  “Leave them!” Jack yelled, thumping the desk. Cyn gave him a look of disbelief and he pointed at the television. “The battle’s not over! The demons aren’t dead. Look you can see the darkness creeping forward again. Now’s not the time for this, or they should have brought priests. It’s not a job for cardinals. All it’s doing is weakening them.”

  “But they...” Cyn began. Then her eyes caught the slow insidious motion of the demon-fed darkness—it was creeping back, little by little, and within it hid the countless ghouls. “You’re right,” Cyn said. “We should warn someone.”

  She had the phone up to her ear before Jack could stop her. “They’ll never hear. You can’t use radios or phones in the middle of a horde like that, remember? Besides...”

  Jack paused as the noise outside the carrier, what was a constant thrum and whoosh of planes taking off or landing, suddenly spiked as a dozen or more helicopters throttled up their engines. “Now’s not the time for that either! What is wrong with these people?” The anger and the hate, which had been swept away just like the darkness had been, were creeping back.

  “They’re just doing what they think is right,” Cyn told him.

 
“Listening to me would have been the right thing to do. Look.” The darkness was at the base of the mound once more, only this time it was the black of the abyss. Impenetrable. It was about to surge again and this time the good guys were in disarray.

  The marines no longer held a unified front. Their lines were in shambles. They were practically unarmed. Most had discovered that their M4s were useless against the bone creatures and while some had thrown their weapons away, the rest had turned the guns around to use them as clubs.

  It showed that they still had a fighting spirit and Jack thought it good that they would at least go down swinging. The same could not be said of the cardinals. These old men were arrayed all over the mound and most looked beyond their age as they healed the wounded and cured the diseased—noble as these actions were, it was a waste of time and energy. They were at war and what was needed at that moment was firepower.

  Just as Jack knew it would, the darkness came on again, engulfing the mound, running right up over the Pope and his great cross. There were flashes of light and explosions of flame in the darkness and the cameras picked up the valiant struggles of marines swinging their rifles and of cardinals in red and black shooting light from their hands.

  It also showed them being overwhelmed and brought down by sheer numbers. Then came another violent blast of white light and the cameras were able to center on the Pope...alone.

  There was no cheering this time. Cyn wobbled in place and Jack put out a hand to steady her. They could plainly see the hundreds of bodies. None had been left alive this time; there was no reason to have. The injured had been used to weaken the rest.

  Now there was only one.

  The Pope turned and saw the death all around him and what he was thinking Jack could not imagine. Should he retreat and live to fight another day? Should he make a stand and test the limits of his God-given power? Should he leap down among his enemies and scatter them to the wind or die trying?