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

by Peter Meredith

  The choices were taken out of the Pope’s hands.

  Out of the ringing darkness stepped a demon that Jack had seen before on a road in New Jersey. It was a tall bone-monster that was strung together by mildewed straw and in its eye sockets was graveyard dirt. The creature dragged a man behind it—one of the cardinals.

  The cardinal had a gaping wound in his chest and both hands had been either torn off or bitten down to the wrists. As they watched, the bone-demon stabbed a finger into the cardinal’s right eye and worked it around in circles.

  “Oh God,” Cyn whispered.

  The demon then beckoned for the Pope to come down. “Don’t do it!” Jack screamed at the television. The Holy Father stood his ground. They could see him talking, his eyes angry and his gestures threatening. The demon only grinned and pointed to his left where a second demon emerged; another one that Jack recognized.

  This one’s head was covered in a worm-eaten burlap sack—Jack never wanted to see what was beneath the sack; he was sure it would send him over the edge and he was very close to the precipice even then.

  The burlap sack covered demon dragged forth, not another cardinal and nor was it one of the marines; it was a child, a stunned and pale child. From the high angle, Jack couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, but it didn’t matter, the sight of the child staggered him.

  It was clear that when the Pope dropped his chin to his chest that he had the same reaction. Seconds later, he began to nod to an unheard request. He pointed a wrinkled hand at the child and the demon let it go. But the child didn’t run. It stood there in a fugue until the demon shoved it, and only then did it wander off. The child had been traded for the life of the Pope.

  “No,” Jack whispered. Inside he felt the yoke suddenly weighted down on the evil side by a thousand pounds of hate. It was a fire inside of him that grew hotter with each step the Pope took into the waiting darkness and when he finally disappeared, Jack exploded.

  “Son of a bitch!” he screamed and in one move, he picked up one of the heavy leather chairs and flung it at the television set. It broke with a crash and then came off the wall to hang, suspended by a black cable.

  Unfulfilled by this outburst, Jack picked up the phone. “This is your fault, Admiral! You did this! You killed...” he stopped and stared at the phone as the line went dead in his hands. He looked at it in confusion until he saw that it was Cyn who had disconnected him.

  He was about to scream into her face when she stopped him with a single word: “No.”

  “No what?”

  “It wasn’t the admiral’s fault, and it wasn’t the Pope’s either. And I’m sorry to say that even if you’d been allowed to go, the outcome wouldn’t have been any different. They have an army, Jack. We had a bunch of very brave but very ill-prepared men.”

  Jack was holding in his anger by the barest of margins. “That’s why they needed me. You even said so.”

  She shrugged. “It wouldn’t have mattered. We had eight hundred and they had eighty-thousand or two-hundred thousand or two million. The battle might have lasted longer, but it wouldn’t have ended any different, except you would be dead as well.”

  “So we need an army of our own,” Jack said.

  Cyn sat down and dug the heel of her palms into her weary eyes and without looking up, said: “Yes. We need every priest, rabbi and witch doctor in the world. If they can stop the darkness and the fear, we have a chance.”

  “No,” Jack said.

  She ignored him and went on planning: “And on top of that, we’ll need an army of soldiers who are armed with shotguns and swords and battle axes.” She sighed heavily and added: “We’ll lose millions, but we can beat Robert. That’s the lesson we should learn from today.”

  She was wrong. “And what happens when he raises another army. I hate to break it to you but there are now tens of millions of bodies out there just waiting for a demon to take up residence. And do I need to remind you that we don’t even know how to kill the ones we have already?”

  Cyn jumped up and stared angrily into Jack’s face: “Then what do we do? Huh? You can throw a tantrum and blame everything on the admiral, but you just admitted that we don’t know how to kill them. So what do we do? Give up? I don’t care if they have an unstoppable army, giving up is a coward’s way out and I never pegged you for a coward, Jack. You may be a second-rate necromancer and a hack with the sword, but you’re not a coward.”

  Before he knew it, his hand shot out and grabbed the collar of the white shirt she wore beneath her tactical vest and for a moment the yoke was so far over that he was tempted to punch her in the face. He held back, but couldn’t hold back the sneer.

  “Second-rate necromancer?” he asked in a soft, evil voice. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’ll show you what a real necromancer can do.”

  Chapter 39

  The Atlantic Ocean

  The mood on the carrier, from the greenest sailor right on up to the fleet admiral, was one of total defeat. When the Pope went under the darkness, there was a full two minutes of stunned silence before Admiral Owens sent in the fourteen SH-60 Seahawks he had hovering nearby in order to execute whatever evacuation could be accomplished under the conditions.

  To the pilots, it was as if they were hovering over an alien world. The darkness could not be swept away by the powerful downwash of the blades. From the air, nothing could be seen of the ground except for the tips of a few buildings and three of the birds crashed with all hands while trying to find the point where the darkness ended and the land began.

  One had a rotor clip the side of a building and in a second the machine was on its side and falling like only 17,000 pounds of metal could. There was a single alarmed cry of “Mayday!” a flash of orange light within the darkness, and then nothing.

  The other birds carried on with their mission, but were called off when first one Seahawk and then another dipped slowly beneath the roiling darkness and never came back up.

  Twenty minutes later, the Admiral was given the order to begin bombing and missile attacks once more. To Jack it was a declaration of defeat. The bombing announced to the world that the military, the White House, and even organized religion were all out of ideas; all they could do was slow the attack, but they couldn’t stop it.

  The Navy’s targets were now the west bank of the Delaware River and a line along highway 76 cutting across Pennsylvania, though this was gradually moved south again and again as somehow the creatures kept advancing.

  Jack and Cyn were alone together for over an hour and in that time they didn’t speak or sit near each other. Cyn leaned back on the couch, staring at the ceiling, while Jack sat on one of the comfortable chairs; though he didn’t do much sitting. The idea brewing in his head had him pacing half the time.

  He couldn’t sit still. Now that he had decided to use his power, it ate at him. The spell demanded to be used. Something inside of him demanded blood. It was the ugliest feeling in the world. Thoughts of murder continually lit upon his mind like blowflies on a dead coon lying in a ditch.

  The spell drove him to distraction. He paced and he balled his fists and he pulled at his hair until Owens finally came back into his office; he was more alarmed at Jack’s appearance than he was angry over his destroyed television set. He was accompanied by only two captains this time, Blaine and Brewer. Both were too stunned by the loss of the Pope to dwell on a broken television, either.

  “You were right,” Owens said to Jack, taking a seat behind his desk, seeming to use it as a barrier between him and Jack.

  “I wasn’t, actually. I know that now. If I had gone, nothing would have changed, but...but we have a new plan.” He tried on a disarming smile, but it sat as crooked on his face as the television sat on the wall.

  Cyn waved a finger at Jack. “Don’t say we. I’m not a part of any plan of yours. I can tell what you’re thinking, Jack and it’s bloody awful. I don’t want any part of it.”

  The blowflies were back in an instant and t
he growing evil in Jack wanted to teach her a lesson in manners. It wanted to break her. It wanted to hurt her and he was half turned around in his chair when the phone buzzed and a male voice said: “Sorry, Sir, but Captain Corley and Commander Price would like to see you and your guests.”

  “Send them in,” Owens replied, with a voice as dry and old as sand.

  Price was obviously a preacher of some sort. To Jack, he had the look: white hair, soft hands, a bible clutched in them of course, and a sad, kindly smile.

  It was a look that Pastor John had never mastered and now he was even further from it. He had changed in the last few hours: his eyes were red from crying, yet they were also hard and mean. His mouth was small and set grim. His lips were so drawn in that they no longer looked as though they were capable of speech; however, after a very quick salute to the admiral, he asked Jack: “What do you know? You were going to share ideas concerning fighting these monsters with the Pope, what were they?”

  “Excuse me, Captain,” the admiral growled. “Since when does an Army captain barge into an admiral’s office and start making demands? Jack was actually about to discuss a new plan. We can deal with you in a second.”

  Pastor John turned his newly hardened eyes to the admiral. “Sorry to say this, sir, but today, I outrank you.”

  The two men glared at one another and into the silence that dragged on, Jack wanted to say: I outrank you both. It was no exaggeration. Cyn had called him a second rate necromancer and even if that were true, it still gave him strength beyond any of the men in the room.

  “I will answer Pastor John, first,” declared Jack, taking the power of leadership away from both men and claiming it as his own. “The Pope made the same mistakes as the monsignor. He did not treat the battle as a battle. He marched into the middle of tens of thousands of ghouls and basically figured that God would do his fighting for him. I’m sorry, but God stopped doing personal appearances eons ago and even then, when did he ever fight man’s battles for him?”

  “Never,” Pastor John replied in a heartbeat. “The closest I can recall is in the book of Joshua in the battle against the Amorites, the Lord ‘rained down hailstones’ on the enemies of Israel.”

  The evil part of Jack reared up and put a smirk on his face. “Hailstones,” he said with a little grunt of laughter and then immediately regretted it. How on earth, after everything he’d gone through and had seen, could he mock God? He closed his eyes and again balled his fists, fighting the evil down into the pit of his stomach where it burned and frothed the acid, unpleasantly.

  After a breath, he went on: “The point is God helps man, he doesn’t live his life for him or step in every time things get hairy. The Pope didn’t fight. He didn’t wage war. His cardinals healed and blessed, both good things of course, but neither can win war.”

  “So what would you have us do?” Commander Price asked and then gestured to where Jack’s rapier sat leaning against the desk. “Do you want a bunch of priests to beat our plows into swords and fight these monsters toe-to-toe?” He seemed outraged at the idea.

  “Yes,” Jack answered, staring the man right in the face. “Some of you, like the good pastor here, are fully capable of fighting. If you can’t, then you can fill an auxiliary role. Did you see the marines yesterday? None of them seemed to have been affected by the fear. I’ve seen firsthand a priest counteract both the fear and the darkness. Just think if the priests were trained to hold back the darkness.”

  The admiral nodded with bright eyes. “And what if the marines had better weapons? M4s won’t cut it, but 242s might and shotguns and grenades would definitely slow them down and ruin their day.”

  “And better tactics,” Captain Blaine put in. “From what I saw, it was every man for himself. They need to work in teams.”

  “And they need to meet force with overwhelming force,” Captain Brewer said. “They were ridiculously overwhelmed…and what about the stronger ones, the demons? How do we fight them?”

  This brought on a silence, one that Jack could appreciate. They were finally thinking, properly. They were analyzing their enemies, looking for weaknesses and strengths. They were planning—all so much better than walking in to hell with only a faith in God as armor. Faith only went so far. It had to be backed up by good works and hard blows.

  The admiral broke the silence. “The question is, how do you kill them? That’s what really needs to be answered here, Jack.”

  “Yeah, Jack,” Cyn said. “How do you kill them?” Her look was crystal over granite; beauty with a deadly ice to it. “You’ve got all these military men plowing through stratagems, but there’s something you aren’t telling them. These monsters are unkillable. They are souls or the perverted twisted shadows of them, and how do you kill shadows?”

  “Only light destroys shadows,” Pastor John said with confidence.

  Cyn looked to Jack. “Is that your idea as well? Using light?” The naval officers and the one army chaplain leaned it towards Jack, expectantly, but it was Cyn who answered her own question. “No, he is looking to destroy the shadows by drowning them in darkness. I know it Jack. I know what you’re thinking.”

  He shrugged because what could he say? “She’s right, I don’t know how to kill them, at least not yet. Has anyone tried silver bullets?” He meant it to be an offhand joke, more to deflate Cyn than to garner an answer.

  “Yes,” the admiral said. “Silver, platinum, palladium, every metal that could be grabbed on short notice. We’ve had teams of Delta operators try them all. They even had some of the bullets blessed to see if that would work. They tried everything. They dipped bullets in Holy Water and in Holy Oil. They even tried different kinds of wooden projectiles thinking that stakes would do the trick. Nothing worked, none of the teams returned.”

  Jack glanced at Cyn; she was blinking slowly, her eyes on the floor. The rest of the room was looking to Jack. They knew he had a plan, but it was such an awful plan that he was slow to give it up. “If we want to win...if we want to defeat the creatures, I’m going to need a man…someone dispensable,” he said in a whisper.

  The admiral’s face lost color as he asked: “Why?”

  “I think you know why,” Jack answered, not looking up. There was a quiver of excitement inside him. He knew they would hem and haw over his idea but they would agree in the end. And they wouldn’t just agree to let him sacrifice a man to the Gods of the Undead, they would help him. The idea sent a queer shiver up his back.

  He loved the feeling and hated it. It made his nerves crawl and his stomach wanted to puke up his very spleen—and at the same time, he started to get an erection. He swallowed back the bile and the nasty feeling growing in his loins and threw out a last life line. “I guess there may be other ways…exorcism. It’ll be a one at a time thing but, you never know.”

  Admiral Owens seemed put off by the idea. “Exorcisms? That would take years.”

  In truth it would take forever, Jack knew. There were always more undead for Robert to create, an entire plane of un-existence filled with the damned. “You can also lock up the pieces,” he said in a desperate gamble to save his own soul. “If you hacked off the limbs and encased them in iron boxes…”

  “Oh stop it, Jack!” Cyn seethed. “These ideas might work against a stray demon or two, but against an army of them, never. So why don’t you spit out what you really want to do? You want to create your own army, don’t you? You want to replace Robert!”

  Yes! he wanted to cry. In fact, he wanted to scream it at the top of his lungs. It was his birthright. The power of the three spells was his to command and had been since before his father’s father was born. He knew it deep in the rotten part of his soul which ached and seethed. He didn’t know if that part of him had remained hidden or unknown or unexplored all his life, or if it had only just grown like a weedy, unkillable form of hemlock or arsenic in the last few days.

  He didn’t know and it was hard for him to care.

  “I don’t know about replacing
Robert,” he said at last. “I just know that death begets death. Does it not? I know that only a stronger demon can kill a weaker one. I know this may be our only chance.”

  Cyn wouldn’t back down; in fact, she stepped forward, challenging him. “You should see yourself, Jack. You’ve changed. You’re asking us to agree to replace Satan with Lucifer.”

  Jack was glad that he couldn’t see himself. He hated what the power of the spells was doing to him and yet he didn’t think he could stop it even if he wanted to, and really, he didn’t know if he wanted to.

  All he knew was that it was eating him up from the roots of the soul out and before he knew it, he was on his feet and the rapier that had been leaning against the desk, just another piece of metal, was suddenly in his hand and he was lunging at Cyn, that ugly part of him in full control, the sword raised.

  He was fast, but Pastor John was closer; he stepped between Jack and his cousin. “Stop,” the pastor said, just a soft word. Jack didn’t just stop, he bounced back as though the pastor’s outstretched hand was the wrong end to Jack’s magnet.

  The little scene spanned all of two seconds and yet it cast a pall in the room. Eyes flicked around: the admiral to the commander, the pastor to the captain. Eyes flicked and yet no one looked into Jack’s face, perhaps afraid of what they would see there.

  The silence was like a murderer’s wake, it went on and on so very uncomfortably until Commander Price spoke. “The analogy is not without merit,” he said, slowly as if dipping his toe in the water, as if the sword wasn’t still in Jack’s hand. “Lucifer was an angel.”

  “Ha!” Cyn laughed, cruelly, seeming to want to hurt Jack. “An angel!” She was either on the verge of tears or a volcanic explosion. It was hard to tell which.

  Jack was in his own volcanic state and could barely contain himself. Through gritted teeth, he said: “You shouldn’t mock.” It was a warning and she was lucky to get it. Had she been anyone else...he bit back the black thought and turned to the admiral. “If you want to stop the creatures, you’ll do as I say. I need a man or a woman. I don’t care which. It’s not going to be pretty, so the more despicable the better. If you have a killer locked away in the ship that would work.”