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

by Peter Meredith

  With just his mind he could control his army. He could control them easier than he could control his own fingers. With just a thought he had a thousand ghouls attacking the fiend. When a thousand only angered it, he sent ten-thousand after it.

  They tore it apart, bone by bone. It roared and cursed and blasted the air with its darkness and ice, but these did not hurt fellow ghouls and, what was more, the fiend was earth-bound. It could not fight without a physical body and eventually it was nothing but a pile of bones and then the cement beneath the fiend turned smokey. There was a loud crack and the bones of the fiend collapsed.

  “Destroy the rest of them,” Jack ordered

  With Jack’s army spreading out, everywhere victorious, the veil of darkness around the city drew back. “It’s still light out?” Cyn asked. She smiled and laughed and then cried. It was nearly impossible not to cry when so many corpses were battling still more corpses. The fresher ones—Jack’s army—were stronger, but they were also tremendously sad.

  It was one thing to be repulsed by a “living” pile of bones, but to see a child in her bloody pajamas, her eyes popped right out of her head and her lips chewed off, fighting with a fiendish grin on the hideous remains of her face, was too much.

  Jack pulled Cyn close to his chest and breathed her in. The world stank of decay but Cyn was a flower in a desert and her heart beat added to his weak one, feeding it. He grew stronger, slowly recovering his strength, though his hands still shook and his legs wobbled.

  She closed her eyes as the battle raged and only Jack saw the unspeakable things that occurred: demons tearing apart demons, packs of ghouls setting on one another, eating each other. The carnage was nightmarish. The blood that ran, maddening. The sound of molars on bone was the sound of reality warping into a cartoon world where Jack wanted to stuff his fingers in his ears and scream to drown out the sound.

  Jack forced himself to watch. It was a reminder of what he had caused and what he had almost become. It was a hard penance to watch the horror.

  Gradually, the battle around them ended as Jack’s army swept forward in victory and from then on the fight consisted of only psychic echoes in his mind and the horrible mounds of flesh and the scatter of bones. Death was ugly. Jack wanted to flee from it as fast as he could, but he wasn’t done, not yet.

  Slowly, stumbling and weak, Jack and Cyn made their way up town.

  It was a long walk, kicking through millions of bones and stepping around the occasional remains of one of Jack’s undead soldiers. Everywhere there was broken glass and burned out buildings and over-turned cars. And there was blood in pools and puddles and splotches and sprays. The blood was dry as paint and ugly as rust, and in the fading afternoon light it looked like a disease attacking the city.

  They refused to look at it. Both Jack and Cyn, arm in arm, stared up at the sky as they walked. It was golden and there was a new touch of warmth to the air.

  They were heading to the Waldorf; in the direction they could feel Robert…well, truly, it was Hor that Jack had honed in on.

  Hor was a blight on his mind. Jack sent four of his nastiest demons ahead to hunt down Hor and, of course, Robert. Even before they got to the hotel, footsore and exhausted, Jack knew that his beasts had failed. Hor was strong, but not strong enough to take on four demons, not even with Amanra’s help. It made Jack wonder what sort of nasty surprise was waiting for them.

  Regardless, they mounted 42 stories to the top floor. Winded, they stepped out into what used to be an outrageously beautiful and opulent hallway. It wasn’t the same.

  Blood sprayed the walls; scattered bones were like autumn leaves and tatters of flesh were the tell-tale signs of a demon battle. In a pile of bone and dust next to the elevator, Jack noted the ancient remains of one of the Egyptian mummies, while strewn down the hall were the blackened bones of the Incan.

  The rest of the bodies in the hall were what was left of Jack’s four demons. It wasn’t pretty and yet Cyn and Jack only glanced at the mayhem. What held their attention was the dead cleaning lady splayed out in a circle of glyphs just before Robert’s door.

  She had been sacrificed. And she was only the first.

  Inside the suite of rooms were more. In the living room were three tiny bodies. They were children, sacrificed to the Mother of Demons. One had been butchered to bring forth the fiend that had killed Pastor John and the squad of Navy Seals.

  They had no idea what the others had died for. Jack stared down at a circle of strange glyphs, committing them to memory. Then he knelt and touched the child who lay in the middle of it. She was dead and hollow—he understood the feeling. She wasn’t like a normal corpse where there was a lingering warmth, a touch of memory. She was gone inside.

  “I wish God had answered our prayers,” Jack said to Cyn.

  “How do you know he didn’t,” Cyn asked. She kept her arms folded across her chest, hiding her hands. She wasn’t going to touch anything. “I prayed for us to be saved and we were. I prayed for Robert to be defeated and he was. That was pretty spot on if you ask me.”

  “I meant I wish he had sent angels...and don’t even suggest that I’m angelic in any way.” Jack rubbed his chest where there was only the tiniest whisper of his soul left. It was like a flickering match trying to catch a log on fire. Given enough time, he knew that it would and, unlike the girl, he wouldn’t feel so hollow. “I’m not an angel. Right now, I’m barely a man.”

  “Just be thankful that we’ve won.”

  Going to the window, Jack looked down at the destroyed city and thought that nobody had won. There were the dead and there were the survivors, but no winners.

  He turned his mind to his army, knowing that he had let his concentration wander and that he was losing control at the edges. Some of Robert’s demons and the craftier spirits were escaping, throwing off their corpses and hiding among the people, among the living, where Jack couldn’t see...at least from this distance.

  In spite of his exhaustion, he concentrated on encircling and hunting down the last of Robert’s army. It took two days to destroy them all and in that time Jack did not sleep, and hardly ate. When at last it was done, he gathered his army on a farm in western New Jersey and then forced the demons and spirits under his control back to hell.

  For an hour, Jack walked among the dead, among the millions of unstirring corpses until he passed out.

  He woke to the smell of honeysuckle and was dimly aware that Cyn knelt over him; he was being washed in a river and she was kissing his lips. Unashamed, he cried as he felt his soul once more. It was a warm spot in his chest

  Cyn, clean and beautiful, cried as well—tears of joy at first but when Jack said: “It’s not over,” her tears were of sadness. Hundreds of demons had escaped and would have to slain one by one, but worse was that Robert had pulled a Houdini and disappeared.

  “It’s a big world,” Cyn said. “He could be anywhere.”

  “Egypt,” Jack said, his mind on the strange glyphs that had been written in blood in Robert’s suite. What were they and what did they do? There was no way to know, but he knew where to look for answers. Five-thousand year old riddles could only be solved in the ancient sands of Egypt. He had to go where all of this had begun. And he knew that Robert would go to Egypt as well. Robert was more than half demon now and he craved the power of the eldest beings. He would go to Egypt and Jack had no choice but to follow.

  The End

  *******

  Author’s note:

  As always, I hoped you enjoyed the book and as always I humbly beg for an Amazon review and a quick mention on Facebook so that I can continue to write what I think are pretty good stories(Most people agree, except for those whose chests seize up over the occasional errant comma.)

  The second book in The Gods of the Undead series is being written right this moment(Yes, even if you are reading this note and two in the morning, chances are that I am up and writing!) If you would like your name to appear in it please contact me at peterme
redith07@gmail.com. I try to use as many fan names as possible, but if your name is Willy Willoughby maybe just write to say hello.

  Now as you desperately wait on book 2, how about you take a look at some of my other works. I would suggest my seven book series: The Undead World. Here is chapter 1 of The Apocalypse to wet your whistle:

  The Apocalypse

  Chapter 1

  June 27th

  Rostov-on-Don, Southern Military District, Russian Federation

  Under the neon lights, Yuri Petrovich seemed a sick, pasty white, however since this was normal for almost everyone at the facility, it went unremarked if it was noticed at all. From his office, he passed through the agriculture research section—what once was the façade of the operation, and took the secure elevator to the lowest sub-basement.

  There he grunted a 'hello' to the aged guard, Beria, and signed his name on the log board. "Time for my monthly checks," Yuri said affecting a bored voice despite the tremor in his hands.

  The guard didn't look up from his magazine, a German rag that was two months out of date. "Better you than me," Beria replied, as he always did. Though the man wore a gun at his hip, he was extremely disinterested in anything concerning the facility and no one knew who or what he actually guarded.

  "Key me?" Yuri asked.

  Once upon a time it would have been a sharp-eyed and sharply dressed political officer who had to match keys to get into the White Room. Now it was only fat, put-upon Beria. He sighed heavily as he heaved himself out of his creaking chair.

  "On three," he said, taking up his position on one side of the door. "One, two, three." They both turned their keys and the door opened with a hiss. Beria beat a hasty retreat to his beloved chair, where his fat rear had only wiggle room left.

  Yuri went into the next room and donned his bio-suit, ran down his checklist, inspected his filters twice, and then went first through one air-lock and then a second. Despite his years on the job, the White Room always gave him a shiver down the spine when he entered however today the shiver went to his guts and wouldn't leave.

  "Five hundred million rubles," he whispered to himself. "Five hundred million fucking rubles…"

  This helped. And so did the fact that he knew Beria was completely ignoring the cameras. To be on the safe side however, Yuri went through the dull routine of cataloging the various strains of bio-weapons stored there and he did so as slowly and methodically as he could.

  Though it was called the White Room by the sad few who knew of its existence, it was officially unnamed and not at all associated with the Department of Agriculture housed in the building above. Instead it had grown as an offshoot of the Stepnagorsk Scientific and Technical Institute for Microbiology. It was what the Soviets had called a Biopreparat facility and thus very illegal in the eyes of the world–for good reason.

  Yuri glanced down the rows of steel and glass cabinets that were clearly marked: Anthrax, Ebola, Marburg Virus, Plague, Q fever, Junin Virus, Glanders, and Smallpox; each had to be numbered and their dates checked. He worked, with clipboard in hand, in the tedious manner he had cultivated ever since he had become chief of scientific research at the facility.

  The term ‘research’ made him want to gag. There hadn't been a kopek of new research money in a decade, and every year his budget shrank. There was even talk of ending the bio-weapons program altogether.

  And then what would Yuri do?

  The struggling Russian government wasn't hiring many scientists, and the private sector wasn't eager to be associated with a man who had made his living producing and maintaining weapons of mass destruction. His legal options were few, and his illegal options were even fewer, but they were oh, so lucrative– Five hundred million rubles worth of lucrative. The promise of the money was the single reason he had taken to going to the one locked drawer in the room on every visit.

  With a quivering in his chest that wouldn't stop, Yuri undid the stout combination lock, opened the door to the locker, pulled back on the stainless steel slab, and then forced himself to breathe in a normal manner: in and out, in and out. The body lay beneath a sheet and as always, Yuri uncovered it with gritted teeth, while his gorge rose in the back of his throat.

  The body was that of a man, or rather it used to be a man, now it was something else.

  He took the right arm of the thing, it was grey and stiff, and set it to hang as far as the handcuffs would allow, letting the black blood pool in the extremity. Yuri then went through what had become a routine and completely unnecessary check up. The thing on the slab should have been dead. It was quite literally ice cold since the refrigeration unit was kept at a constant zero degrees centigrade. And yet it was already moving.

  The hands spread and the muscles around its mouth began to work, opening and closing. It was in the eyes where it was most "alive". Somehow they were hungry and furious, but also glassy and empty of any intellect. Lately, Yuri had begun to dream about those eyes, and lately Yuri had become an insomniac. He couldn't sleep, knowing that those nightmare eyes would be worn by everyone he knew—if things went wrong.

  Still he had a job to do and after a deep breath of stale bio-suit air, he began his check-up, starting with the hated eyes. He then peered into its ears, and nose, and its horrid, dank mouth. Then, making sure his body was completely blocking the camera, Yuri pulled a syringe from one of the zippered cargo pockets that adorned his suit and jabbed the needle into the crook of the thing’s arm where a fat vein had begun to bulge.

  The thing didn't flinch. According to every report the creature that once had been a man, couldn't feel the slightest pain.

  Yuri filled the syringe with black blood, and then very carefully pocketed it. The virus was blood born and though he could bath in it if he wished, a single prick from the infected needle would kill him in hours.

  With sweat running down his back, he covered the body, slid it back into the freezer where it belonged and then went on to his next chore which was to switch out the attenuated viruses in their little plastic pipettes. There were a total of twenty doses of the vaccine—he took six, leaving normal saline in their place. No one would notice, not until it was too late for them.

  Of the six doses, he would inject himself with one of them that night, just in case; three were part of the bargain that would make him rich, and the final two he would keep for himself.

  These last would guarantee him a position of power if his clients, the North Koreans, were ever foolish enough to release the virus. Given the right conditions he could churn out vaccines in as little as four months, while he had to wonder if the Koreans would ever figure it out. They were pathetically behind in all aspects of technology, as everyone knew.

  Yuri closed the last glass case and breathed a sigh of relief. He was done and not a single alarm had gone off, which meant that one wouldn't. Beria had been as poor at his job as ever. Moving quickly, now that the toughest part of his job was past, Yuri breezed through both air-locks, and with the utmost care he transferred the syringe from his bio-suit to his jacket pocket. It felt like he was carrying a bomb with a hair trigger as he made his way up to his office, however nothing untoward happened and he was able to take the needle off the syringe without mishap.

  The now capped syringe and the clear pipettes he bagged and then placed inside his thermos, while the needle he dropped onto the open face of the sandwich his wife had made him for lunch; it would go to waste anyway, he could never eat after a visit to the White Room. Very carefully he wrapped it back in the brown bag it had come from and this he gently put in a medical waste container.

  One last item: Yuri took the container, which was nothing more than a plastic bag, and walked it personally to the incendiary chute and tossed it in. Now he was done. He went to his desk and sat there picturing everything five hundred million rubles would buy, sighing happily.

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect America

  The Sacrificial Daughter

  The Apocalypse
Crusade War of the Undead: Day One

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two

  The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1

  An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2

  Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3

  The Punished

  Sprite

  The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1

  The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2

  To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3

  The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

  The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

  The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

  The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

  The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

  The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6

  The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

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

  Pen(Novella)

  A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)

  The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)

  The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)

  The Drawer(Short Story)

  The Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)

  The Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World