The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic

by Peter Meredith

  The Edge of Temptation

  Gods of the Undead 2

  A Post-Apocalyptic Epic

  By Peter Meredith

  Copyright 2016

  Kindle Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  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 Book 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 1

  The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2

  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

  Prologue

  Akron, Ohio

  Bob’s wife left him, screaming at the top of her lungs, which was a point of pride with him. If he’d had his way, he would have stuffed her mouth with a toilet brush and eaten her alive as she choked on its yellowed bristles.

  But he had kept the urge in check. The urge was always on him, and yet he went to work every day so that the faceless masses could have their cable television. Bob didn’t understand the TV. To him it was simply a box of colored lights. Thousands and thousands of pinpricks of light.

  They formed no images in his mind and the words that came from it were bodiless, and worse, soulless. The laugh track that went along with most of the shows made more sense to him. The radio, too was conceptually beyond him. Every channel was static that pulsed. Easy to ignore.

  What he liked were people and being around people, and yet there was nothing more than he hated than people. He hated them with the greatest passion and was jealous of them with a passion greater than that. They were diamonds and didn’t know it. They were loved and didn’t care.

  They were gifts that were left half-unwrapped and they were toys that rusted from not being used properly, and the only time that anyone truly cared about them was when one went missing.

  Bob had made quite a few disappear…but not his wife. That had been a great win. The ones he had taken and eaten were never as close as his wife. Little Jimmy with the gap in his teeth right in front…little Jimmy from next door who smelled of skid marks and macaroni and who kept coming into Bob’s yard to look in his dirty basement windows because he could swear he had heard a child crying; he was also still around. Another win. Another victory over those who hunted him.

  He could feel the priests when they came sniffing around. He could feel them from blocks away and even though he knew he should run, he never did. Instead, he would freeze. Running was bad. Running meant giving up this sham of a life. He was like a child in a toy box who, when threatened by the coming of other children, tried to cover his toys with his arms splayed and his chest hunched over his prizes.

  Bob had many prizes.

  He had been collecting them even before his wife had left him. When she was away at work he would dig, and when she slept, he crept away and dug some more. He had gone deep into the dark earth. Surprisingly deep. It was a wonder how deep one could delve when sleep meant nothing and blisters were to be marveled at.

  When his shredded hands were remarked on at work, Bob wore gloves everywhere.

  “Cold, are you?” was what people asked next. They seemed satisfied when he answered: “Yes,” and then smiled. People seemed to like it when he smiled and so he smiled often.

  He smiled as he went down into the earth where the hated priests couldn’t find him. Every night he dug deeper and deeper. When he was a hundred feet down, and the heat had ticked up noticeably, and his body felt “misty” from lack of oxygen, Bob began forming his cells. He burrowed pits twenty feet deep and ten feet wide.

  By the time his screeching wife had left him, he had six built, but only four had been filled. He had room for her, but in a tremendous display of self-control, he had let her scream into his face about how much he had changed and what a jerk he was and other things that were entirely meaningless to a demon.

  He had even smiled at her, but this time the smile had not had its previous effect. She left and that night Bob went to find another soul, because he loved people and hated them in equal measure.

  That night he found one that screamed and cried and begged. She even tried to joke, and laughed a crazy laugh as tears coursed down her face.

  She begged for mercy and he gave it to her.

  Her name was Bernice and she had been wasting her life cataloguing insurance forms at a white-bricked hospital. But he had saved her from that hell and now she felt life like she had never before. Life was suddenly more precious to her than she had ever known, and boy he knew that better than any.

  Bob didn’t have a life and didn’t have a soul. He craved both, holding them close, hugging their bloody, screaming bodies to his. He wasn’t a sexual creature and yet he never felt more connected than when he was stabbing his piece as deep as he could into them, male or female.

  Sometimes they died and that was ok. What was left over was just as precious; not their rotting carcasses, no, these were buried where they died. It was the souls Bob craved. Each of the pits were lined with his symbols, anchoring the souls in place. In death they were pure light both to be hated and loved. He could only stand to be around them for so long and then he would go to the next, hoping to capture it for his own.

  Bob’s soul was long gone, corrupted into nothing. In life he had denied his soul and in death he had denied the maker and now he was undone and desperate.

  Desperate, he went on and on, going through the motions. When next Bob looked at the calendar that sat magnetized to the fridge, he realized it had been three months since his wife had left him and two since he had been to work where he helped the people get their cable.

  In his pits he had only one being left. It was a man, scabbed and skinny as a wraith. He had asked for a ride on a rainy night and when Bob had tried to take him, he had fought.

  It had been a lovely fight. So much blood and fear. The man had been so strong, but now he was frail and his breath came in a rattle that made it seem as though his lungs were curtained in phlegm. He would be dead soon, which bothered Bob. He loved the souls, but he also liked the screams and the actual bleeding body—in hell, souls were utterly fantastic, but on earth the bodies were good, too.

  They were always so warm.

&n
bsp; Bob spent the day making the man eat things. A handful of dimes. His own hair. The urine-smelling mud at the bottom of the pit. It should have been the end of him, but the man kept breathing, much to Bob’s delight.

  And yet, he knew that it wouldn’t last. So sad.

  And also, not sad.

  Finding the next one was always so sweet. It was like falling in love. Hearing the screams and feeling the raking claws. Bob wasn’t much to look at anymore. His smile was no longer so sweet. It was now repulsive, and his beard was a wild thicket and his balding head was a patchwork of lesions, and his eyes were so insane that they caused people to blanch and turn away.

  He knew something had changed but not what. The mirror was another thing he didn’t understand. It took concentration to connect the image in it to his present form; frequently, he assumed it was just a picture.

  But he had his sunglasses and his gloves and his turned-up collar and the hat that read: World’s Greatest Husband. These had always been enough to allow him to blend in with the others, only now he was too hungry to care what he looked like.

  He went out that night looking like a nightmare and even if he had known it, it might not have bothered him all that much. He was very hungry for everything…so much of everything, and so far he had been lucky. The priests came and went, always searching in the wrong places.

  “They’ll never get me,” he growled. “Not in a million years.”

  This wasn’t just a cliche to Bob. Time to a demon was a lot like the picture in the mirror, it was flat and wide, and hard to connect with the rising of the sun. He was immortal, just as everyone was, but unlike them he knew it, and wasn’t that the problem? It was supply and demand. He had an endless supply of time and that made every second a valueless spec, and of course a minute was only that much worse and an entire year was a torture.

  What he needed was something to fill in those seconds, what he needed was to be near someone who really appreciated time. A woman wasting away on a couch watching gameshows could not appreciate time, but a man a second from death loved time and always begged for more with such wonderful urgency.

  That thought, as aways, made him grin and he drove, enjoying the feel of the road beneath the tires: so smooth, so accommodating. He drove to where the feast of humanity was the hottest and the smell was greatest. He loved the smell and sights and the little things that no one noticed. He loved the fact that they gestured with their fries or smiled with spinach in their teeth or stewed through their bowls with forks looking for that one last piece of meat.

  And really, wasn’t that exactly what he was doing?

  He stewed Akron and found a street where the ladies hung out on the corners and stoops. When he stopped, they would jerk their thumbs up at the brick buildings behind them, inviting him up. He would shake his head in spite of the fact that he was so hungry. It wasn’t safe for him to be out in the open. What he needed were the ones who lingered in the alleys where there was nothing but the dark and the drip of rain and the distant glow of the street lamps.

  These were the lonely ones who were the most desperate to feel life and he was desperate to help them feel it in all its hideous glory. On that night, most of these little alleyways were frustratingly crowded, and he drove for miles back and forth until he found an alley that held only a girl, so small and slim. He saw that she was denying herself, not eating her fill. She could have been a round-bottomed thing, but she was holding back, not drinking life to its deepest.

  Bob would fix that.

  Letting the car prowl up, he rolled down the window, hoping that his old smile would do the trick, but ready with his gloved-hand on the door handle just in case she wanted to breathe deep and stretch her muscles one last time in a mad sprint. He loved that. They were always so alive when death was right on their heels—they didn’t know how precious those few seconds were to both of them.

  He beckoned her to the car. She shook her head and patted the dank, urine-smelling wall she leaned against. Her clothes were black; her hair was blonde and plaited in a tense braid that hugged her skull. She was grinning but it was tight.

  And that was so good. She was scared and excited, but as he stepped out of the car, he smelled that she was wasn’t nearly as afraid as he had first thought. She would be a tough one and that was even better.

  “Hi,” Bob said, showing teeth that were rotting out of his head. He knew he should take better care of the body, but he always got so caught up in the minutia and the fun and the simple things of this world that so often went unnoticed.

  “Why, you-all don’t look so good,” the woman said. Her odd accent didn’t register, nor did the fact that she kept one hand tucked behind her back. He was too busy breathing her in and enjoying the smell of sweat and anxiety hidden under the chemical mixture of perfume.

  “You look good. You look healthy.” To Bob that was a compliment.

  “Thanks,” she said, a little smirk playing on her lips. Louder, she said again: “Why, you-all don’t look so good.”

  Bob showed his teeth wider. “You just said that. Maybe you…” He stopped. There was a sudden tone in the ether around him. It was like a tin bell being rung. Right along with it came the heady smell of blood. Bob was drawn to the smell. Four steps to the right of the woman, there was a man kneeling behind a dumpster; his forearm was slit open and a steady drip, drip, drip of that wonderful, rich blood came from the wound.

  Mesmerized, Bob watched. When each drop of blood stuck the filthy alley floor, they didn’t splat as they should have, instead each formed a glyph and with each drop the man spoke a single word.

  In a flash, Bob knew this was a spell, an anchoring spell to be precise.

  “Stop,” Bob said. It was a word of command. The man faltered and the next drop splattered instead of forming a glyph, as did the next. Bob and the man stared into each other’s eyes as the next three drops were also wasted, useless for any spell and ruined in their purity by landing on the reeking alley floor.

  A drop of sweat joined the blood as the man grew grim. He was straining, where Bob was barely using a tenth of his strength—then again, he couldn’t use much more, not in this body. To use more would mean burning it out and using it up.

  The next drop of blood formed the word: Hrsta, and the man spoke it through gritted teeth.

  “No!” Bob cried in fury. He redoubled his efforts to break the man, but they both knew it was useless. This was Visha Ra-aye—the Demon Slayer. It could be none other. Only one human breathed the tongue of the First in such a way. “I could break you,” Bob said. “If I was not in this warm flesh.”

  The Demon Slayer ignored him and when the next drop struck, he said: “Ast-ri-mhra.”

  Bob turned from the man, only he couldn’t move precisely; his feet were planted in place and his legs were like stone and his hips were locked. He could only torque his shoulders and his neck. He was seconds from being held, and he was very close to throwing off all pretense and giving up the body of “Bob.”

  He had not started off as “Bob.” He had begun life eons before and his name was hidden and a secret. He had been spawned in the lower pits where the blood was old and congealed and constantly in need of being stirred. But even from the depths of hell he had heard Old Bob’s call and, more importantly, he had smelled the virgin sacrifice that Old Bob was offering. Old Bob had hated his life. Old Bob was a damned fool. Bob hated the woman who loved him. He thought she was a nag when she only wanted the best for him, even if it meant changing him.

  Old Bob had seen the news clips and read with greedy eyes all about the ghouls and demons that had turned New York into a ghost town of littered bones and burned-out buildings. He had begun to plan, thinking that he could have a better life when in truth, his life was already wonderful and so full of a thousand possibilities every day.

  Old Bob had thrown all that away. He had opened the gate between worlds by drawing glyphs in stolen blood. They had been childish, simple.

  And they had wo
rked! A very hungry demon had come through and had taken up residence in Old Bob.

  Now, a demon can’t simply step into any body it chooses. For the most part it has to be invited, although sometimes a “careening” demon can manage to slip into the weak: the nearly dead, or the child with “eyes” who was in that precious state where control was problematic. But how frequent did that happen? Almost never.

  In the worst of circumstances, a demon sprung from hell could climb into a cold body. However, possessing a corpse was terrible. No breath, no heartbeat. It was a tease. It was the ultimate broken promise, and yet no demon would ever pass it up. You were just SO close to being free on earth.

  But Old Bob, like a fool, had offered his body freely.

  It was such a fantastic prize and was the reason why the demon in him ground his teeth, making a whining noise in his throat as he was trapped. He could have broken out, but that would have meant an end to the body and it was just too precious to give up, even so close to being sent back to hell.

  It was a horrible feeling and a delicious one as well to know that he had only a few more seconds of real life. They were precious seconds, seconds that he would never in a million years get to experience in hell.

  Visha Ra-aye finished his spell and Bob was good and stuck. He fought back as best as he could, but to no avail; the spell had anchored him in place. Bob couldn’t move as long as Visha held his concentration.

  The woman walked closer and stared long at Bob, her blue eyes running up and down the ruin of his face. Even held as he was, those seconds were fantastic. From behind her back, she pulled out a radio. “It’s him. We got him.”

  His body might have been frozen in place, but his mind was still sharp. He could feel the priests coming. Their ugly glaring white heat had been on his periphery before he had even seen the woman but, foolishly, he had let his hunger for her scent distract him. They closed quickly from either end of the alley. He was glad that he couldn’t turn his head to see their self-righteous faces.