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

by Peter Meredith

  Strangely, Jack wasn’t exactly happy that his arm was alive again. What he felt was bitter disappointment, because he knew that’s how Pastor John would feel if he was there and knew what Jack was thinking. And that’s how the Monsignor would feel if he knew what his sacrifice had been for. And Father Paul as well. And Detective Richards…and even Carl and Connor Randall.

  And his father.

  They had all died in one way or another, simply to get Jack to this point and it was a hard fact that they would all be disappointed that he was bending under the power of the spells…that he was wasting the gift of their sacrifices to him, that he was hungering for a chance to usurp his cousin as King of the Dead.

  That was the title that whispered in the back of his mind…and now the title was stained, discolored by the taint of disappointment.

  “They don’t know how it is,” Jack said, not quite as under his breath as he wished. Cyn glanced at him and he was damned sure that he saw the same disappointment in her eyes. It wasn’t right on top. No, it was buried deep where she thought it was hidden. It wasn’t hidden from him; he saw it just fine and it hurt…which only made him angrier, hateful and broken.

  The yoke in his mind had broken—it had snapped in two. He was both good and evil. He wanted to destroy the world as well as save it. He wanted to rule the remains like a king and he wanted to go hide away on some island. His right arm was strong and righteous but his hand was tacky with drying blood. He wanted to scream in frustration, but all he did was whimper.

  Shaking in confusion, he reached down and took the young man by the hand and burst through the door and out into the horrible world beyond. What he saw made him disappointed. The Seals, those badasses, were, for the most part, cowering in the shade of their leader. Lieutenant Neilson had rallied his courage and was screaming into a radio. Around him were the bravest of the Seals, guns pointed out, their faces stamped in fear.

  These were the eight bravest.

  The rest had broken, succumbing to the hell-fear that turned ordinary men to jelly. They were clawing their way onto one of the helicopters, overflowing it, weighing it down; they were beyond rational thought, as was the pilot who took off with men still clinging to any hold they could get.

  Jack tore his eyes from the scene. What was happening as a backdrop to the helicopter was far more eye-grabbing and terrifying. The entire city was blanketed in the unnatural darkness; it stood three stories high from river to river impenetrable to the naked eye.

  Standing a head above it all was the fiend. It was blowing great clouds of the darkness from its three mouths in huge jets, filling the city streets.

  The head and its seven eyes turned as the SH-60 slowly lifted off. The chopper seemed to move in slow motion, straining to get lift, straining to get the hell out of there. It was far too slow. The beast’s seven eyes were filled with ten thousand human ones and they were all looking at the chopper with an aching hunger.

  With a grunt, the fiend leapt into the sky, its flesh wings slapping the air, creating a wave of stench that sickened anything left alive for miles. Jack cringed and Cyn fell against him. She didn’t see what came next.

  The beast could fly.

  It launched itself directly into the path of the helicopter, catching the machine and pulling it down into the darkness. The engines revved and whined and the men screamed. The pilot did everything it could but the fiend was too strong and gradually the chopper was taken and all that was left were those screams which went on and on.

  Chapter 43

  Manhattan, New York

  The crash of the Seahawk was surprisingly low-key. There was a metallic thud, a few strange whoo-whoo-whoo noises as the blades whickered away and then came the sound of glass crashing down. There was no fireball or earth shattering explosion.

  Muffled as the crash was, the screams rising up from the sea of darkness were just the opposite. They were magnified in the dead city. There were no traffic sounds, no honking of horns, no babble of people on cell phones, no pitiful group of survivors making a desperate last stand; the city of the dead was dead quiet—all except the screams.

  They echoed for miles.

  And they went on for an oddly long time. The screams were doing a number on the eight Seals. Already drenched in the terror of the fiend they shrank even further back from the building’s edge. Some begged for the lieutenant to call in the second helicopter which was circling a half a mile away.

  “Don’t do it,” Jack ordered. “That thing is down there waiting for you to do just that. I can feel it.” The fiend was watching, waiting, lurking beneath the darkness, ready to spring on the chopper once it was loaded and slow. To Jack it was a sign of weakness.

  It had been stung by the blessed sword and wanted no more of those sorts of wounds.

  Jack glanced down and saw a discarded pack. One of the Seals, in his panic, had thrown away his best weapon against the bone creatures: there was a saber slid down along one of the buckles. He drew it, feeling the warmth and goodness emanating from the steel.

  “I say we fight it,” Jack said.

  “I say: no way!” one of the Seals blurted out. “That thing is...is too much. It’s too big. Our only chance is to get the hell out of here.”

  “Coward,” Jack seethed, conveniently forgetting that he had fled, screaming in his first encounter with a far less terrifying demon. “You’ll die if we just sit here. The fiend is afraid of us. Think about it. It’s down there, hiding.”

  “It’s n-not hiding,” the Seal replied. “It’s eating.”

  Jack grabbed the much bigger man by his chest rig and started pulling him along, saying: “And we’ll be eaten next if we don’t do something besides cowering. Come on, Neilson. Have you forgotten our mission?” As his only answer, Neilson shook his head. “Ok, then let’s get moving,” Jack said. “Swords out.”

  Cyn stopped him, whispering urgently: “You can’t do this. It’ll be a suicide mission.”

  She was right of course, however, in Jack’s broken mind it was the only way to escape. He would send the Seals down to be killed and then he, Cyn, and the boy would call down the helicopter and slip away in all the confusion. It was a cold plan, he would admit, but it was also the only plan.

  “It is what it is,” Jack told her. “And it’s our best play.” He turned to Neilson. “Come on, Lieutenant. It’s time to earn your pay. Let’s see if the military can come through this time.”

  “This time?” Neilson demanded, outraged. He grabbed Jack by the shirt and unexpectedly started pulling him back to where the others were. “Everyone, get your asses down!” he barked, dropping to his knees and pulling Jack along with him. “You too, ma’am,” he said to Cyn.

  Not three seconds after she knelt there came a roar and suddenly a grey jet appeared flashing down 50th Street just above roof top level. A quarter mile away, it dropped two CBU-87 cluster bombs which appeared to come apart in midair and four-hundred grapefruit sized bomblets rained down all along the street in front of the warehouse.

  The explosions took out the entire street, and shook the building. Flames, orange in a roiling black plume stretched high overhead and the heat made everyone cringe. Jack’s ears were ringing from the noise and he still had his head down when the last helicopter came to hover a few feet above the warehouse.

  “Come on!” Neilson ordered, hauling Jack to his feet. The sacrifice, still limp, was literally tossed in like a bag of potatoes; Cyn was helped in next and then Jack climbed up. Only then did the Seals jump in and the helicopter beat the air with its four rotors and climbed away.

  Both door gunners had their M242s yanked as far to the rear as they would go—they had seen what the fiend could do. But the fiend did not suddenly piece its ten-thousand bones together and jump at them; the surface of the dark below them remained still.

  “Yes!” Jack cried. “That’s what I’m talking about! Neilson, that was great and you Seals did a great job, too.” He was feeling huge, as if nothing could stop
him from drawing the last symbol. “We have one more, just one and then it’ll be our turn.” By that, he meant that it would be his turn and his alone. The Seals could all go jump off a bridge for all he cared.

  “It won’t be easy without a priest,” Cyn cautioned.

  “We should go back and get Commander Price,” one of the Seals advised.

  Everyone thought this was an excellent idea, all save Jack, who thought it was not only stupid but a sign of cowardice. “We don’t have time. My cousin is bringing everything he has to bear on the southern tip of Manhattan; I can feel them coming by the millions. We can’t spare even a minute.”

  “But without a priest...” Neilson said, leaving the end of his sentence hanging.

  “You have Holy Oil,” Jack said. “Say a prayer and anoint yourselves. And use the swords when they get close. There’s magic to them.” The men followed his instructions and for the next ten minutes as they flew south, the chopper was filled with mumbled prayers.

  Cyn broke the near silence. She started pointing out the door of the helicopter. “Are...Are we sinking?” she asked, her eyes wide.

  Robert was pulling out all the stops. They weren’t sinking, the darkness was rising. The Seahawk was cruising at a thousand feet and now the darkness was at five hundred feet.

  “How are we going to land?” Cyn asked.

  Lieutenant Neilson unbuckled and made his way to the cockpit to confer with the pilots who both agreed they couldn’t land in the darkness. They would crash for certain.

  “What about that building?” Jack asked. He had pushed in next to the lieutenant and was pointing at a fifty story building, the last floor of which was an island in the dark.

  “You’ll be way up, but sure,” the pilot answered.

  “We’ll be fine,” Jack said. “Just tell me which way Battery Park is.”

  The pilot pointed west and said: “It’s about four hundred yards that way...somewhere. If you want, I can drop some flares in a line from this building to approximately where it is. I can’t guarantee they will land where I want them to but it’ll be better than nothing.”

  “Yeah, do that.”

  Again, the helicopter couldn’t risk landing on the roof and so they hovered just above it and by the time they were all out and on the roof, the darkness was at their knees and the cold was shriveling their testicles, all except for Cyn, who was shivering so badly that Jack worried that she would accidentally fire her shotgun.

  “Let’s do this,” Neilson said. “Kendrick and Stern lead the way. Skelly, hoist that boy on your shoulder. Adams will take over when we hit the street level.”

  The fear was heavy on them and the cold made their joints ache and the darkness was simply impenetrable. Cyn’s phone lasted three floors; after that they walked in the dark, each keeping hold of the person in front of them. Down and down they went and even though they knew they were progressing through the inside of a building, it felt as if they were heading deep into the bowels of the earth—as if they were going down into hell.

  In the dark, Cyn found Jack’s hand. Hers was like ice. He gave it a squeeze to make sure that he was holding the hand of a person and not one of the dead. “I’m here,” she said in a whisper that set off an echo of whispering.

  “What the hell?” one of the Seals in front of them almost screeched. “What was that?”

  “It was me, sorry,” Cyn said, louder now.

  “Keep it together,” Neilson said. “We have to be close to the bottom. When we get out we go left. That’ll be west. Use the swords like Jack said. They’ll kill quietly and hopefully will keep us from being found.”

  There were grunts of agreement from everyone but Cyn, who didn’t have a sword. She had her shotgun and a few bottles of Holy Water. “Stay near me and you’ll be fine,” Jack said.

  It took twelve minutes to get to the lobby of the building where everything crunched and crackled underfoot. It was glass. “Why don’t we just do the spell here?” someone asked.

  “Because I can’t see a damned thing,” Jack said, giving the obvious answer. “Not only that, who knows if this place has even a single actual wall left intact. The second I start the spell, all hell is going to break out and we’re going to need some protection. In Battery Park there is a place called Castle Clinton. It’s not really a castle like they have in Europe. It’s more of a heavy brick fort laid out in a circle and there’s only one door we have to guard.”

  He didn’t add that it was completely open, without any sort of roof, and if the fiend got there before he was finished with the spell, they would all die very quickly.

  Although it took them twelve minutes to slip down fifty stories, it took fifteen to find their way outside. They had to go by feel alone; not an easy task when every wall felt the same. Eventually, they made it out onto a sidewalk where things slowed down even more.

  The city streets this close to the Staten Island Ferry station were piled with dead. Not just one or two here and there or a few stacked in neat little bundles. No, they were three or four deep and they seemed to go on forever in every direction.

  This was Jack’s army, really just a tiny fraction of it; that is if he could bring them back from the dead. He guessed that there had to be between five and ten million corpses within the boundaries of his spell. It was why he had insisted on heading all the way down to Battery Park.

  But it was turning into a nightmare. In no time they were exhausted from going up and down the mounds of bodies, feeling each, deathly afraid that one would be “alive”, one of Robert’s bone-creatures. They were quickly covered head to toe in blood.

  Nothing could have been so horrific than crawling over the dead. They kept as close as they could to each other. Cyn and Jack called to one another in whispers and touched each other when they could, absolutely uncaring what part of the other’s anatomy that they were touching; they simply needed each other.

  The lack of ghouls was a mystery that was solved a few minutes later when they saw the first flare. Its parachute had been caught up by the second story of a building. The light it gave off should have turned night into day. Instead it was dim and showed more shadow than light; however it did illuminate the area well enough for them to see that more than a hundred ghouls were gathered beneath it.

  It also showed them an easier way to travel. The sidewalks were heaped with bodies, while the streets were clogged bumper to bumper with cars. They saw that it would be far easier to scootch over the cars than the bodies. And two of the cars were police cars. Jack went right for them; in the trunks of both were boxes of hand flares; they each took three.

  There was no whispering now. No one dared. The group of eleven slipped and slid over the cars, moving as silently as possible, but it didn’t seem to matter that they frequently thumped hoods of cars with their boots, or scraped their swords on windshields. The creatures were too absorbed in the light.

  They found the same scene a hundred yards on and a third in Battery Park where the light was enough to display the grim outline of Castle Clinton itself.

  On the grounds of the Castle, the bodies began to grow in number and at the tall wooden door itself they were piled seven high, the ones at the bottom, having died of asphyxiation. They had been trying to find a last refuge in the castle, but the stout doors had been locked against them.

  After pulling back the bodies, Jack’s team began a whispered conversation about different methods of blowing the door quietly. “We could use these bodies to dampen the sound and then...” began Lieutenant Neilson.

  Jack interrupted: “Just blow the lock! They are coming. I can feel them.” The noose was closing in on his guilty neck. He tried to block them out and failed. They knew he was trying to send them back to hell; they would fight that with everything they had.

  With the flares dying, the dark became all-consuming once again so that they couldn’t see their hands flap in front of their faces—in order to prepare the charge they would need light. The Seals formed a wall around
Neilson, who lit off a flare and in the red light, he assembled an explosive charge in eighteen seconds. Four more seconds were spent as everyone dove into the piles of dead for cover and then one more was spent waiting for the blast.

  The door bounded inwards with a flash and a crash. There was no use being subtle now and everyone popped flares. Jack raced through the door first, a flare in his outstretched left hand, his sword cocked in his right. The interior of the castle, a wide round space, was completely empty. Jack dropped the flare, uncorked another and dropped that too.

  “Right here!” he said, snapping his fingers at the Seal who had been lugging about Jack’s sacrifice. The Seal laid the man down with what Jack thought was excessive kindness.

  It was time for the final act; the final spell, or rather the final portion of the final spell. That part would entail Jack marking his own body. He would paint his own flesh with his victim’s blood. It was why there was never any sign of Robert’s spell. He carried it around on his body, possibly forever.

  Jack laid aside the sword and then, strangely, made the shallowest cut yet. Something within him, a last cry for help perhaps, had staid his hand. The boy bled well enough that Jack didn’t waste even a moment for a second cut. He went right in, starting with arch-glyph, the one that described the spell as having fout parts.

  From there he sped through the first circle of glyphs, going faster than possible. The undead army was at the gate. For now, only a thousand or so, but more were coming. The Seals fought with all the bravery, skill, and honor that they were known for. And yet they were over-matched, not only by sheer numbers, but also in power.

  The ghouls were strong and unflinching. They charged regardless of the holy swords and quickly forced their way into the castle. Cyn grabbed Jack’s saber and rushed into the battle screaming at the top of her lungs. In one hand, she held the sword and in the other she held a bottle of Holy Water, which she splashed about.