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

by Peter Meredith

“It’ll be ok,” a soft voice said—and suddenly it was ok. Pastor John had touched him and the fear was gone. “God loves you, Jack.”

  For Jack it was an odd thing to hear and impossible to answer if an answer was even needed. “I need time,” Jack whispered. The circle of glyphs was only half-completed. He needed the pastor to hold out against the creature for two more minutes; the only problem was that John looked tired and worn. His spiritual labors in the running fight had taken their toll. “Remember, your God is strong,” Jack said.

  “The Lord is all-powerful but his vessel is weak,” the pastor answered and then walked through the echoing warehouse towards where the fiend stood with a wall of metal and glass between them.

  Pastor John crossed himself and then said in a carrying voice: “Leave this place, fiend. The Lord is here. The Father of all resides in me and his power is absolute. Be gone!” A blast of white light shot from the pastor’s upraised hand outlining the shadow of the bone-monster.

  It screamed in a rage, shattering glass and causing the humans to cringe. Jack’s hand slipped as he drew, causing a glyph to smear. Quickly, he wiped away the blood, so that it was a dull brown stain. He spat on the ground and swiped at it with his left hand until the spot was clear enough to begin again.

  Jack dipped the brush just as the fiend reached out with its clawed “hands” and tore down the wall. The brush wavered over the unconscious man, blood dripping onto the leg of his jeans. Jack should have been writing, but the fiend drew his eye. It was an alien horror, built of bone—built of thousands of bones that were tied together with a deeper darkness than was physically possible.

  The beast was formed in the likeness of a man; legs of bound bone, a chest like a cage, shoulders that stretched wide and arms fifteen feet in length ending with fingers that seemed extraordinarily long even for a thing as massive as it was.

  From there it degenerated into something more alien in design. Its head, again a cage in form sat atop a short neck. Around the head were three mouths shaped from human bones and seven eyes that glistened wetly. Jutting from its back were two wings that were hideous, more vulture-like than bat-like. They were “feathered” in the flesh from a thousand corpses. The skins were fresh and there was a rain of blood when it shook out its wings.

  It was an absolute horror to behold and it shook Pastor John so badly that the hand holding the crucifix faltered.

  From the three mouths laughter boomed that grated on the nerves and hurt the ears. Jack had to force his hand back to the task of painting the glyphs while twelve feet away Pastor John gathered his courage.

  “Go back to your pit, servant of Satan!” John cried in a high voice. “The Lord commands you.” Again, a white light rolled outward from the pastor; it was a diffuse wave and though it crumbled the ghouls, leaving them little more than piles of bleached bone, it only caused the fiend to shake and roar.

  But the light did not last and Pastor John staggered and went to one knee from the effort. His strength was failing and wouldn’t be enough; he would be killed, torn into pieces so that each of the mouths would get their bite. Jack saw it in a blink that there would be no saving the man unless he grabbed him right then and ran.

  That would mean leaving his sacrifice lying there; a wonderful treat for the fiend. As well, it would mean the end of their mission. With his teeth grit, Jack turned from Pastor John, a brave and true man. “Get this guy out of here,” Jack said to the Seals through his clenched jaw. He pointed at the unconscious young man, the bloody thing whose only purpose left was to die.

  The Seals hesitated until Jack picked up his saber and started smacking them with the flat of it. “Go! Now, before it’s too late.”

  Pastor John had his crucifix raised and from it came a weak glow. The fiend stepped into the warehouse, its long arms thrusting aside the stacks of boxes and the industrial shelving as if they were made of toothpicks, and yet it moved in slow motion as if it was wading against an invisible river. It came at the pastor and with each step John’s face grew more and more strained.

  It was good verse evil. It was man against the unkillable embodiment of evil. It was mortal against immortal. It was an unseen battle that everyone felt pulse around them. The ebb and flow caused a wind to surge back and forth around the vast space.

  It was a battle of actual dark versus light with the shadows growing, filling in every corner, blotting out the sun. It was a battle that ended with the fiend standing high above the man of God in triumph. Pastor John was beaten down. He was sprawled with only the crucifix raised, the glow from it no more powerful than a candle.

  The fiend loomed over the pastor, its ugly wings stretched wide, its head spinning like a carousel, each mouth opening greedily but before it could bite down it would spin again to the next mouth. Jack couldn’t take his eyes from the spectacle and he hesitated, just steps away from the stairwell door.

  “Don’t watch,” a soft voice said into his ear. It was Cyn, pulling him to the stairwell where the Seals had retreated.

  Jack tried to resist her small hand and the light pull she affected. He felt it was his duty to watch. He had chosen Pastor John for this assignment and he had allowed the man, weakened as he was, to go up against this prince of demons.

  But he also had an obligation to make his own kill, to fight his own fight. He wasn’t God’s warrior; he was just a man trying to do the best with what he had to work with.

  He turned away just as Pastor John’s light failed him.

  Chapter 42

  Manhattan, New York

  Jack slammed the heavy fire door closed and turned to see the staircase filled with the platoon of Seals looking at him expectantly as if he had the answers to everything.

  As if on cue, Neilson asked: “What do we do?” His God-inspired courage apparently slipping, now that their spiritual leader was even then being ground into bloody chuck by the bone-teeth of the fiend—the door was heavy, but not so heavy to block the screams of the pastor. Nothing could.

  “Get up to the roof and prepare to go,” Jack ordered. “That thing might be too big to fit into the staircase and I can do the spell on the landing.” He didn’t add: I hope. He was afraid that raising the angle of this circle would change the parameters of the spell, lifting it too high so that he wouldn’t be able to reanimate as many of the monsters as he needed.

  And he would need a lot.

  All the Seals except for Lieutenant Neilson hurried back up the stairs. The lieutenant stood next to Cyn with a look that was bordering on panic. “You two should go. I got this,” Jack said. They didn’t budge, though Neilson kept glancing upward as sweat rolled down from beneath his helmet.

  Jack had a sense of déjà vu as he laid the sword to the side and brought out the knife. It now had an evil, hungry feel to it, but Jack was able to control it this time and sliced only deep enough to bring the blood running. He began painting the glyphs as fast as he could.

  The fiend played with its food, giving Jack time to get three-quarters of the way around the circle. Then there was a roar that shivered the warehouse and turned the air to ice. Jack gasped and threw an arm across his face. Cyn did the same thing; however Lieutenant Neilson, maybe the toughest of the Seals began to back away, his fear becoming too great for even him to control.

  Now that he was dead, all of Pastor John’s blessings were coming undone and the Seals were being subject to a fear that was simply beyond them. It was sad to say that Jack was getting used to the feeling; it was like getting used to cancer. It made him sick and nauseated, but he kept going right up until the fiend tore down the fire door.

  It would have taken Jack a sledgehammer and an hour’s worth of swings to get through the door but the fiend tore it apart in twenty seconds, bringing down part of the wall with it.

  It then brought its huge head down and stared at Jack through the opening with one of its tremendous eyes. The eye itself was a horror. It was made from hundreds of individual human eyes smushed into a ball the size of an
oven. Jack found himself staring instead of finishing the circle. Seconds past and yet he couldn’t force his eyes away; it felt as though he was being held against his will.

  A high girlish scream broke the moment, jarring Jack to his senses. He thought it was Cyn, but it was Neilson; he had reached his limit and with his mind snapped, he went racing up the stairs, screaming his throat to ribbons.

  The fiend laughed at this, a booming, echoing noise that caused Cyn to retreat up another stair; she was on the verge of coming apart as well.

  Jack wasn’t even close. In fact, he was furious. When the fiend had laughed it showed its long, sharp bone teeth and hanging on them were the bloody remains of Pastor John. In an unrestrained fury, Jack snatched up the saber and flew down the dozen stairs separating him from the creature. He meant to stab that awful mouth, but at the last second the fiend felt him coming and stuck a hellacious eye in the doorway instead.

  That’ll work, too, Jack thought, as he drove the sword up to the hilt into the orb with all the strength in his arm and shoulder. The sword must have been blessed by Commander Price; it still held its power. If it hadn’t, Jack would have died right there.

  There was a crack like a whip snapping, a flash of light, and then there was the hateful, dark power racing up the blade and into Jack. The fiend roared in pain, while Jack staggered back and fell onto the staircase. His right arm so completely numb that he was sure that if he looked down on it he would see that it was dead and rotting, hanging by just a few tendons.

  He forced himself to look: the arm was intact. It looked the same as it always had except there was dirt and ash upon his palm and the fingers were curled in what looked like a claw. He didn’t have time to marvel; Cyn was suddenly there, next to him, pulling him up the stairs. He stopped her at the landing.

  The boy was laid out there, seemingly at peace, seemingly just waiting on Jack to finish this third set of spells. The cold had closed his wound—Jack would have to cut him again. Each spell needed its own cut, its own opening in the body, its own channel to the soul.

  Jack knelt, his dead arm forgotten. He was overcome by the hunger to kill. It was such a huge need in him that he could block out the noise of the fiend’s anger as it roared loud enough to be heard for miles. The world echoed with its sound and yet Jack couldn’t care less.

  But he couldn’t block out Cyn. “We have to go. Come on, Jack!” She was trying to haul him out of there—the stairwell was filling with clouds of darkness and quickly the air had turned black as sackcloth and cold as the deepest winter night. The fear was heavy as well; it was as strong as Jack had ever felt it. It gripped his heart and threatened to explode it.

  In spite of all of this, he wouldn’t move.

  The craving was too great. He had to get to the blood. He had to dip the brush into the body where the meat hit the metal and above all, he had to paint the glyphs. It was a need too strong for Jack to resist—he would give his life for it.

  Taking the knife in his left hand, he made a cut across the man’s throat. In his unholy eagerness he very nearly slit too deeply which would have ended things right there. The blood ran quickly, running onto the landing; wasted in Jack’s opinion. “My fault,” he said, and then felt around in the growing dark for the brush.

  “Jack!” Cyn screamed. “Forget it! We have to go.”

  He grabbed her, left-handed and pulled her close, snarling: “Give me light. I have to do this.” It was a lie. If every demon in the city suddenly turned to dust, he wouldn’t have stopped.

  Cyn brought out her phone and shone the harsh light. Normally, it was annoyingly bright. Just then it barely cut the murk and though she was inches away, all he could see of her were soft lips. They were blue and every time she breathed, she puffed out a little plume of steam.

  “Hurry,” she begged through chattering teeth. He was so consumed that he didn’t feel the cold. It was nothing to him.

  It wasn’t exactly by memory that he painted, now. His hand was directed by something greater than the patchwork of neurons and micro-synapses that constituted memory. His hand felt guided by fate. It was an altogether heady feeling and when he was done, he bellowed the words of the spell in a direct challenge to the fiend.

  The tolling bell that could only be heard on a level by the dead and their masters rang out stronger than ever. It sent a vibration through Jack, one that he knew wouldn’t stop until the final spell was cast or until he died. It made him feel unstoppable and he cried out: “You cannot defy me! Go tell my cousin that you failed.”

  “You are not done yet,” the fiend replied in a triple voice from its three mouths, the words harmonizing strangely as if three separate creatures were speaking. “You have to come out. You can do little in there. You cannot finish what you’ve started in there. You must come out to where I await. You must come out to die.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” Cyn said as Jack stood. She was only a vague outline; the electronics in her phone were failing and the dark was becoming absolute. He felt closed in, trapped.

  He had to run his hand over her in order to find her arm to help her up. “Weren’t you just begging to go?” he asked her, his hand gripping her sharply—he couldn’t seem to help it; there didn’t feel as though there was anything gentle in him just then. Everything was splintered and hard. “Besides, we have a destiny.”

  She pulled her hand out of his grip and then punched him in the chest. With the dark, it was completely unexpected. And, as usual with her, it was such a strong blow that it caused him to step back, where he almost tripped on the unconscious, bloody sailor.

  “Hey,” he said, rubbing his chest. “Why’d you do that?”

  “You don’t have a destiny, Jack. You have a job to do and nothing more. You’ll do the spell. We’ll figure out how to get rid of all these bleeding monsters and then you’ll be done. Do you hear me? This ends tonight.”

  The yoke was so far over and the spell had its hooks so deep into him that he felt as though he was going to crack in two. He nodded, agreeing with her and yet at the same time the other part of himself hissed into his own ear: That’s all very easy for her to say. She’s rich and beautiful. She isn’t the one who’s a mass murderer. Her hands are barely dirty and her soul is clean as new ice. It must be wonderful to be able to be so condescending.

  And what do you have to look forward to if you can even find a way to live through all of this? At best you can go back to being an absolute nobody. Your career is over before it ever started; your doctorate is finished. You are facing a possible prison sentence and she wants you to give up the one reward for putting your life and soul on the line?

  I don’t think so.

  Jack touched his head, feeling it as if it belonged to someone else. Where had that voice come from? It seemed very much like a harsh voice and not his at all, but he couldn’t be sure. The truth was that just then, Jack really couldn’t remember who he had been. He’d been a student, yes, but who was he beyond his books and his classes. What sort of person had he been? Just a regular one? He really couldn’t remember. He wanted to think he had been a nice guy and wanted to blame this hate in him on the spells but just then he didn’t know. It made him feel crazy

  A strangled, frightened laugh escaped him which he quickly turned into a cough before Cyn could ask what he was laughing about. “Let’s…let’s get this guy out of here,” he said, breathlessly. “Grab a hand.” He went to reach out with his right hand, but the arm didn’t move and so he switched to his left, wondering what he was going to do about his arm. It wasn’t like a hospital was going to be able to fix it. The newly high-powered priests might, but the question was would they after he was in command of his own undead army.

  And if they would, there was the question of whether their fixes would work on someone like him? He was so far down the rabbit hole that he had to think that if a priest touched him there would be a flash of light and the smell of brimstone.

  He forced his imbalanced mind away from the
thought and concentrated on dragging the young man up the next few flights of stairs. They went as fast as they could and near the top they cleared the darkness and stood under the yellow glow of a naked bulb.

  Cyn was afraid of what they would find out there, Jack could read the fear easily. It was oddly quiet beyond the door. There should have been machine gun fire and the blast of grenades and the roar of the helicopters. Instead there was only a single muffled engine going.

  The fiend was out there as well.

  They could both feel it against a closing ring of darkness. “They’re all coming aren’t they?” Cyn asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Robert had reversed his armies. They were racing back to New York because it was now obvious that this was where the real fight was going to take place. To Jack it felt like he was standing in the middle of a ring of dark flames that was closing in on him.

  He was hating and cocky and there was a snarl twisting his lip; he didn’t want to go out unarmed—that seemed pathetic. “Hey, Cyn? Do me a favor and put my sword in my hand. My—my hand doesn’t seem to work, not after…you know. I just don’t want to go out there unarmed.”

  She drew the rapier that he had taken from Dr. Loret’s wall and shoved it into the claw of his hand. Jack knew a blade in his hand would give the fiend pause. Its pain had been very real, perhaps greater than any mortal could have endured and Jack wanted every advantage, real or illusionary, that he could get.

  But the rapier was more than a prop. The moment Cyn had fitted the pommel into his dead claw, there was a glow and a shock ran up the arm. It was warm and beautiful…and disappointing. Jack could suddenly use his hand again. The sword had been blessed by Pastor John; his last blessing. It was a weak, fading charge and once it had slipped into Jack, healing him, it was forever gone.

  The rapier was now just a chunk of metal. Against the fiend, it was useless.

  Although his arm now worked as well as it ever had and he was just as deadly with the sword, he let the blade clatter to the ground. The fiend wouldn’t be fooled by it.