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

by Peter Meredith

  Unnerved by the sight of the girl, the demon’s will had faltered and just like that, Jack had basically nailed its feet in place, allowing Cyn to slash it into pieces.

  “I risk my life everyday and I’m the jerk?” Jack asked incredulously, coming back to the matter at hand.

  Cyn only shrugged and Metzger sighed, saying: “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. Come on, let’s find out who this is.” He headed for Bob’s car. Jack didn’t follow.

  “Isn’t that the police’s job?” he asked. “They usually get pretty touchy about people messing around at their crime scenes.”

  Metzger paused in stride and glanced toward where the crowd of youths were edging closer. Many had swords belted on their hips; wearing swords, blessed or not, was a current fad and a dangerous one. “There’s not just a deficiency in the number of priests,” he said, his voice low. “Akron doesn’t have much of a police presence anymore.”

  “That bad?” Jack asked. He knew that the “Second Depression” they were in was really putting a squeeze on local governments, but it was a shock to suggest there wasn’t going to be an investigation of a demon possession. There were always quite a few corpses associated with them and large numbers of worried family members to break the bad news to.

  Jack was rarely a part of any of that. He was usually too exhausted and his soul too spent to care about the clean up and aftermath of these battles. Generally, he would go back to whatever hotel they were staying in and sleep an entire day away—but even he thought that someone should go check out Bob’s house.

  “Yeah, it’s that bad,” Metzger answered. “I was told that if we found our monster, to call it in and that they would get to it, eventually.”

  A tired sigh escaped Jack as he pulled the heavy vest back on and went to Bob Chapman’s car; it stank of death. In the glove compartment, there were three wallets; in the back seat, there were four purses; in the trunk was blood. A lot of blood.

  Chapter 2

  Akron, Ohio

  Cynthia Childs

  “You’re not a jerk,” Cyn assured. A car passed them going in the opposite direction and she tried not to flinch. A year and a half of living in America and she still got wigged out about their driving. It was bad enough they all sped and only used turn signals if the fit caught them just so, but worse was the fact they drove on the bloody wrong side of the road.

  “No, I am a jerk,” Jack said. He powered the rental forward. It was a brand new Lexus, and still had a new car smell, which he wasn’t going to have ruined by allowing Bob Chapman to ride in it. Bob smelled like rot and disease. His teeth were grey and his eyes yellow, and this was without the demon inside of him.

  Now that Bob was free of the demon, he and Captain Metzger, as well as the two priests, were driving in Bob’s old Chevy Camaro, which had too much incriminating evidence in it to simply be abandoned to the mob. Akron was filled with dismembered cars, resting on their rusting axles, their tires long since stolen. The mob, which had started with a single ruffian, sullen and rude, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lower lip, had gradually grown as a hundred more just like him had sauntered close, drawn by the commotion. They would have pieced-out the car, leaving little more than the frame behind.

  “I don’t think you’re a jerk at all, and you know that,” Cyn said. “Would a jerk risk his life every day for strangers? Would a jerk always watch over me?” Whenever she played the part of bait, which was every time they went out, he hovered close, always ready to throw himself at any creature, no matter how terrible, if it meant saving her.

  It was the only reason she kept going out night after night, putting her life on the line. She was always the one who hung around in the dark alleys or the empty parks or the lonely streets. She was always the one playing the “defenseless” damsel.

  The demons never suspected she was nobody’s damsel. They didn’t see beyond the intentionally streaked mascara to note the silver dagger in her boot or the vial filled with holy water tucked into the back of her skirt, or the triple blessed cross she wore under her shirt. More than any human, the demons saw what they wanted to see.

  Still, they were right nasty and entirely dangerous.

  But if her weapons didn’t work, she always had Jack close by, ready to bleed for her. She’d had men buy her roses and drinks and dinners; she even had one fellow offer her a car once, but she’d never had a man bleed for her. And she’d never had a man change on such a fundamental level for her as Jack had.

  They never talked about it much, mainly because it was an embarrassment for him, but Jack hadn’t started out as a sorcerer. No, he had been a necromancer like their cousin Robert…and like Cyn. She was one as well. She felt the pull. She felt the need to spill blood. She felt the hunger for power that only the King of Death could wield. But she hadn’t given in and she never would. Jack had taught her that lesson.

  He had been addicted to death. The power of necromancy had whisked him up and had taken him whole. It had owned what was left of his black soul, and it seemed that nothing on earth could have stopped him from calling forth an army of demons and usurping their cousin, Robert as the necromancer. And yet, Jack had given up a power so great he could have ruled the world. He had given it up for her. He had simply set it aside.

  Yes, he could be moody after draining his soul to fight evil, but that didn’t make him a jerk. Far from it in her eyes.

  “Does Akron even have a sushi place?” she asked, changing the subject. Judging by the dark streets and the many boarded over businesses, she guessed not. “You need sushi, Jack.” He needed to eat. His strength always came back faster after he ate. Sleeping was good for him, but food was better. He also liked sushi, something he’d always been too poor to try back when he had been a student.

  He ignored the talk of food and brooded, finally saying: “We’re getting close.”

  She could feel it as well. A hint of death hung in the air, setting her nerves on edge. Seconds later, Jack turned onto a side street and another turn later, they parked in front of a house. It was dark as could be and when she stepped out into the humid night, she knew right away that the damp in the air would make everything they found inside that much worse. One sniff confirmed her suspicions. A sick, wet smell of decay struck her.

  Jack paused as he stepped out of the car, his hand on his sword. Light splashed over him as Metzger pulled in behind them in the Camaro. When the captain cut the engine, the night was dead silent. Bob’s house sat on the edge of the suburbs, surrounded by a whole lot of nothing.

  It was too perfect as a murder house, almost as if it could be nothing else. Cyn couldn’t picture a family living there, at least not a happy one.

  “Can he speak yet?” Jack asked. He meant Bob who stood dully, blinking slowly, a line of drool hanging from his mouth. Sometimes the possessed remained vegetables for life, sometimes they snapped out of it quickly. “Hey, Bob!” Jack snapped his fingers under Bob’s nose. “What are we going to find in there?”

  The drool swung gently as Bob turned at the sound of Jack’s voice. His eyes; however, remained blank orbs. Cyn guessed he would recover in time, but for now he was hollow inside. Hollow and horrid; his mind that of an imbecile’s.

  “Forget it,” Jack said. “Anyone have an extra light?” Everyone including the two priests had their phones out, using the sharp light to illuminate the brown grass at their feet; the yard was unkempt and dying, littered with trash and feces, none of which was canine in origin. Cyn stepped with extreme care.

  Captain Metzger handed over a palm-sized flashlight as if he had been expecting Jack’s question. Jack hadn’t had a cell phone in all the time Cyn had known him—she was his only family and in truth, his only friend. He had no one to call and even if he did, Cyn wondered if he would bother.

  Jack didn’t thank Captain Metzger for the light—he also tended to forget his manners when his soul was drained. When he was like this, everything, simply was. If he asked for a light, you either had one o
r not, and he would have made do either way.

  “Here, eat these,” Cyn said, handing him a box of Junior Mints. He liked candy, especially Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, but, with all their wrappings, they were not easy to eat, and he would have tossed them away in frustration after the first. He palmed a handful of mints, shoved them into his mouth and started for the house.

  “Let the captain go first,” Cyn said, holding him back. Metzger moved ahead, shotgun in hand. The door was unlocked and the smell inside, mean.

  The priests were still so new to the team that they paled from the stink; Metzger, who had been tempered by six months of battle, only made swallowing noises in the back of his throat. Jack looked as though he were walking through a park. The smell was nothing to him and, sadly, the same was true with Cyn. She was sure the stench was horrible and yet she carried on, shining her light ahead of her, following Jack as he pressed into the house, pushing past Metzger.

  He could sense something just as she could. She hadn’t been to the edge of hell as he had, but she could still feel things that others couldn’t. It was part of her birth right. It was part of being a necromancer.

  Jack led them right through the house and down into the basement. In a back corner was a hole that went down into the earth; the smell here was three times as bad as it was in the rest of the house, and it would only get worse.

  “There’s a person down there,” Jack said. “I can feel him. He’s willing to deal.” A shiver crawled up his back, twisting his shoulders. After a second with her eyes closed and her mind focussed, Cyn understood what he was saying. She could feel him. There was a man in the pits beneath the house, though now he was only barely a man.

  His pain radiated up to them, but what was worse was his desperation. He was projecting the feeling out into the universe. He was letting everyone and everything know that he was so desperate that he was willing to make deals with his soul as currency.

  First, Timmons crossed himself and Jordan followed right behind. They could feel it as well.

  Jack opened his mouth and looked as if he were about to make some remark about them crossing themselves—when his soul was drained, he grew petulant and snappish with the priests. Once in a slurred drunken ramble, he admitted to Cyn that he thought their light exposed his darkness, throwing shadow where there shouldn’t be shadow.

  Cyn handed him more Junior Mints and he shoveled them into his mouth.

  As he ate, Captain Metzger went down an aluminum ladder that poked up out of the hole; it rattled as he went down. When he reached the bottom, Jack stuffed a double handful of mints into his mouth and followed after, the sword at his hip clanking against the ladder with every step. Father Timmons started to go next, but Cyn pulled him back by his black shirt. It wasn’t smart for anyone but her to get too close when Jack was in one of his moods—he could be dangerous.

  Drained or not, he had a reserve of power at his fingertips.

  She followed him down, her nerves rattling worse than the ladder. They had never been to the home of one of the possessed before; they had always left that particular horror to the police and the local priests. She was just beginning to think that was more of a blessing than she knew—it might have also been a mistake.

  Metzger and Jack stood in a cramped little hand-carved tunnel where the dirt trickled off the walls and the dark was absolute. There was no pause in Jack; he was pulled along by a calling he couldn’t ignore. He pushed past Metzger, and Cyn nudged past the captain as well and followed along after. She thought she was feeling the same pull as Jack, but she was wrong.

  They went down a stunted passage that ended at another hole and another ladder that went down to a third sub-level. There they walked hunched over, dirt cascading off the ceiling until they found yet another hole, going deeper still. At the very bottom was a black tunnel that went in two directions; Jack immediately turned left, while she was drawn to the right.

  “Hold on,” she hissed at Jack. “There’s something this way.” Yes, she could sense the poor man in his feces and urine stinking cell. He was a raw line of power. His soul was laid bare, open to the highest bidder, but what lay to the right was far more insidious and subtle...and dangerous.

  Ignoring her, he went left, while she, the unblooded necromancer, was drawn to the right. Metzger, wavered, not knowing which to follow. After a few seconds of looking back and forth, he chose to follow after Jack and the priests followed after him. Only Bob considered the right corridor. He stared, his filthy face open in a look of longing, but he was hustled after Jack by Father Timmons, leaving Cyn to face the insidious evil alone.

  It was an old evil. It had been the first evil perpetuated in that pit of despair, and it was an ancient evil. The dirt passage opened up into a hollowed square of a room where the ends of worms decorated the dirt walls and the floor was covered in a white sheet pulled as tight as a sail in hard gale.

  The decomposed body of a naked child lay in the middle of the sheet; it had been slit open from the throat down through its genitals. What was left of its organs was a black sludge that was rounded and bulged as swamp gasses built up inside. For all her toughness, Cyn was sure she would hurl if the bubble popped when she was in the room.

  As it was, the outrageous stench made even her stomach knot and twist.

  Around the body of the child were glyphs. For the most part they were ordinary hieroglyphs, though what they spelled out was hardly ordinary: it was a summoning spell. It was a crude spell written in a crude hand, and it shouldn’t have worked, but it had and for two reasons.

  Bob Chapman had sacrificed a child to bring forth a demon. He had offered the purest of innocent souls to bring forth his demon and it wasn’t just any demon that came into this world to possess Bob. The demon had been named Menet-rah.

  The glyph that bore his name was unlike the others. It was written in a curious poly-heiroglyphical script. The cuneiform wedges set it apart, making it not only different, it made it unique. It also made it terribly frightening.

  There was no way that glyph could have ended up in a crappy little suburb of Akron by accident and it was inconceivable that someone as insignificant as Bob Chapman would have his hands on it. He was a nobody from a nowhere town. He had likely never been to Egypt and if he had, he had gone as a tourist and these sorts of glyphs weren’t exactly lying around waiting for people to find them.

  “Jack!” she yelled, her voice flat and suppressed as if the tons of earth between her and the night sky was squeezing the air, taking the life out of it. “Jack! You have to see this.”

  There was no answer and a squirm of worry crawled into her belly. She suddenly felt very alone.

  With her hand on her sword and the wavering light leading her, she retraced her steps, hurrying down the rough-hewn passage. When she came to the bend, she finally heard something other than her own fearful breathing. It was the sound of a struggle.

  She ripped her sword out and raced almost blind in Bob’s dungeon of horrors, sprinting past short passages which ended in foul smelling pits that held the moldering bones of his victims. At the fifth of these passages was a sight that stopped her: Jack had Bob by the throat and was lifting him off the ground with just his left hand, while both priests clung to his sword arm trying to hold it from skewering the man. Captain Metzger had Jack from behind, one thick arm around Jack’s throat, the muscles bunching with all his strength.

  Jack looked as though he was just about to get really angry and that would have ended up in three more deaths.

  “Stop,” Cyn said and this time her voice was alive and it cut through the grunts of the two priests and the swearing of Captain Metzger and the odd garbled gobble that Bob was making as Jack choked the life out of him.

  All sound fell away as Jack and Cyn stared at each other. Ten seconds passed and then Jack, still hoisting the man in the air said: “You don’t know.”

  “I know enough,” she answered. “He deserves to die, but not yet. He has answers.”

&n
bsp; “But the demon is gone.”

  Cyn laughed a harsh, ugly sound that deflated Jack. He dropped Bob as if his arm was suddenly aware that there was no way on earth it could lift two-hundred pounds, and his sword was pulled out of his grip, Timmons grabbing it and backing away with it pointed at Jack.

  “One demon is gone, but the original is right there and when we get our answers I will show him the way to hell personally.” She held up the sword and it gleamed as if in anticipation.

  Chapter 3

  Akron, Ohio

  Jack Dreyden

  Jack blinked at Cyn and even that seemed to take more strength than he had left in him. “There were two demons?” he asked, feeling dull-witted. Even if it were possible, he would have sensed the second demon in Bob and surely the priests would have as well.

  “Bob’s human, but only barely,” Cyn said, advancing on the man. Jack knew her well enough to see that she was close to gutting him; he had been feeling the same thing only seconds before. “What I meant,” she said, “is that he’s a demon in training. There’s something back there that you have to...”

  She was cut off by a whimpering sound coming from the pit they had been tussling next to. When she looked in and saw the horror of a person who was down in the hole, her face went white. Jack had seen then skeletal man as well and the sight had sent him nearly mad.

  The scant figure was so pale that Jack’s first glimpse of him had made him jump. He had thought for a second he was looking at ghost or a wraith. And the man was so thin that when he turned sideways on he almost disappeared and yet that wasn’t what had sent Jack to the end of his rope. The man stood on broken ankles; the lower parts of his legs were bent at 90 degree angles and the same was true with his wrists. They were so warped that his fingernails touched his forearms.