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

by Peter Meredith

It was sick. And still the man tried to scramble up to them, tears in his blind eyes—there were golf tees in both eyes, jabbed just as deep as they could go.

  It was seeing that which had sent Jack off the deep end. He didn’t know the full extent of his power, nor how to control it, or what it’s limitations were, but there were times like this that he didn’t need to know, he just needed to unleash it.

  “I...I can’t understand this,” Cyn said, her eyes filling with tears. Upon seeing them, Jack felt the surge of power in him again, but it was weaker and easier to control, and besides, Captain Metzger still had his arm across Jack’s throat and it was like a bar of iron.

  “Let’s deal with what you saw,” Jack said, softly, thinking he would steer her away, but she would not be moved. She had compassion enough for both of them—exactly what Jack loved and needed from her.

  She disentangled Metzger from around Jack and pointed to the pit. “Get him out of there. All of you. I’ll watch Bob. I promise I won’t kill him…yet,” she added when Father Timmons raised an eyebrow.

  Another ladder was found; Jack led the way, followed by Metzger and then the priests. They weren’t all needed; certainly Jack wasn’t. The man in the pit, naked, stinking, his body running with pus from the half-healed remains of hundreds of cuts, hugged Jack as soon as he stepped into the pit.

  It took all of Jack’s remaining strength not to thrust the horrible being off of him. He stood perfectly still, his face set in a grimace of disgust. Finally, Father Timmons came down. “There you go my child. You are safe now. Let’s bring you up where the light of the stars will fall upon you.”

  Metzger bent the broken man over his broad shoulder and carried him up the ladder as if there were nothing to him...and really there wasn’t much to him. He had almost translucent skin, weak bird-like bones, and hair that consisted of only a few wisps. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him and his muscles were strings, barely able to pull him around.

  When they had left, Jack could feel what had drawn Cyn away to the right hand tunnel. “There are more glyphs?”

  “Yes,” she answered and then led him to where Bob had sacrificed a child to the infernal gods of the undead.

  “Give me your light!” he demanded. The one Metzger had given him was gone, lost in the scuffle.

  Without question, Cyn handed over her phone and he knelt down next to the remains of the child as if it wasn’t even there. He had seen it of course; however, his focus remained on the hieroglyphs; this particular spell wasn’t new to him. It was an internet spell. It was a downloaded copy of part of a funerary text, making it pure crap. Alone, there was no way the spell could have brought forth a demon, but there was also a dead child, properly sacrificed and one glyph that didn’t belong.

  “Menet-rah,” he whispered, reading the glyph and feeling not just the name but also the memory of the demon. For him, speaking a demon’s name elicited more than just the sensation of sound. There was always a strange uptick in the aura around him as if someone or something had pricked an ear. He could feel it even though it wasn’t the demon’s true name. Menet-rah was more of a nickname.

  Next to him, Cyn shivered. The sensation which came with speaking the demon’s name was probably worse for her. It was the sort of name and glyph that a necromancer would drool over. It was power and compulsion and an ugly greed. Their strength came from the netherworld. Their strength was in their knowledge of it and their connection to it.

  Cyn was a weak necromancer. She cared more for the child than she did for the glyph. “That poor thing,” she said, her hand out, almost, but not quite touching the corpse.

  At first Jack didn’t know what she was talking about, and then he truly saw the child for the first time. “Emily,” he said. Around the child and the glyphs was an echo of the spell that had been used in her death and a sad memory. “Her name is Emily Druggins.” He knew much more but the rest was only pain and tears and a fright that still set his nerves on edge.

  “Was,” Cyn corrected, though in this she was wrong. Emily was still Emily only now she was owned by the demon.

  Jack didn’t argue. “There’s a lot to be done. First we need pictures.” He stood back as Cyn started storing images in her phone. When she finished, Jack unpegged the sheet and rolled up Emily’s body in it—the room felt utterly empty when he did.

  He then went to the other pits and felt the binding spells in each and the trapped souls and heard their screams in his head. It was strange to shine the phone’s light down and not see people staring up at him. He was flicking the light quickly side to side just to see if he could catch the image of one of the ghosts when Cyn asked, “Can we go now?”

  She stood white and trembling; again, this was more of a trial for her than it was for him. Souls were the source of power to the necromancer, they were currency. Jack’s power went no further than his own soul. He had no desire over any of these.

  “You can go, if you wish,” he answered, handing her the phone. “I’ll be all right.” She didn’t leave, but only stood at the top of the pit, shining the light on him as he went down to analyze the spells holding the souls in place. They had been carved into the wall with a knife and then dabbed in blood, creating an ethereal connection between the blood used and the souls held. “Interesting,” he said in a whisper as he lightly ran a finger over the symbols.

  They were very similar to the one he had used earlier to hold Bob in place, only there was a short arc of glyphs curving along the inner ring. These were even more interesting and fantastically more ugly. His hand stung when he touched them.

  “Phone, please,” he said, snapping his fingers and essentially nullifying the word “please.”

  Cyn dropped her phone down to him and then she was up there in complete darkness—he could feel her, but not see her. He stared up into the empty darkness, searching for her and it was as though she was just a spirit like the others in the foul dungeon. That cut through the emptiness inside of him.

  He shot the light in her direction; she was pale almost to the point of being chalk-white and because the darkness behind her was so absolute, she threw no shadow and again the idea that she was only spirit hit him. “Talk to me, will you?” he asked, finally feeling something in his chest beside the dull beat of his heart.

  There was a long disquieting silence before she asked, “Talk about what?”

  “I don’t know, maybe your goose farm?”

  It was what made her happy, and she began to prattle on about the geese and what sort of enclosure she would make for them, though she never used the word “enclosure.” For her, it was always a “goose house.” When she started, her breath came out in shaky sort of manner, but gradually her words firmed up as she described the “house” and its seven bedrooms and twelve baths.

  “Geese need plenty of water,” she explained. It was all mindless blather in his opinion, and yet the words centered him and held him in place. She was his anchor; she kept him human when he felt altogether alien. And the words made her real and gave her form.

  He took pictures, concentrating on the glyphs along the arc. “They are for pain,” he whispered. It was a form of torture—a soul-wrack. They made him uncomfortable being so close but he had nothing to fear. The glyphs had been personalized; each soul had their own glyph. It was a sign of love—the love of pain. He hurried through the inspection of the pits; there wasn’t much else to be discovered unless he wanted a primer in the art of torture, which he did not.

  After a long climb to the surface where the air was clean and cool and the stars inviting, he swept past the poor man with the twisted limbs and the eyes that sported golf tees, as if he weren’t there. He went right for a garden hose and washed his hands and then his boots with the rust-smelling water.

  “You need to eat more,” Cyn said, handing him the box of Junior Mints. He ate them mindlessly as he watched the priests on their hands and knees, praying over the man they had hauled up from the pits. There was a soft glow around him an
d in the strange light he looked unconscious, something that was hard to tell what with the golf tees.

  The two priests were healing the man. It was skill that not all clergy possessed, but was mandatory in the Raider Squads.

  “I wouldn’t waste all your energy on him,” Jack suggested. “We have a lot more work tonight. And you’ll need to get someone over here to break the holding spells down in the pits. Those are real nasty.”

  Father Jordan looked up, sweat coursing off his brow. “Waste our energy? I don’t believe you, Jack. This man is suffering and we are going to do everything in our power to ease his pain. That is our calling, just like being a callous ass is yours.”

  Too tired to care, Jack only shrugged at the rebuke and munched down more Junior Mints until he was thirsty and then he glanced down at the hose. “No, drink this,” Cyn said as he reached for it. In her hand was a bottle of water; he drank, forgetting to say thank you.

  After he chugged the entire thing, he tossed the plastic aside and said to Metzger: “Torture Bob. Cut off his parts or whatever, I don’t care; just find out where he got the glyph.” A question rose on the captain’s face, but Jack waved it away. “Ask Cyn, she’ll tell you what glyph I mean. Now, I need some sleep.”

  He was close to falling unconscious right there on Bob’s scrubby lawn. By a force of will, he made it to the back seat of the Lexus, crawled in and was snoring in seconds. When they woke him a little after midnight, he was almost his old self.

  “Did we get the info out of Bob?” he asked Cyn the moment his eyes popped open.

  “With the help of Father Jordan, we did. That bloke is bloody useful when questioning a suspect. You have to give him that.”

  Every priest seemed to have the innate ability to tell when a lie was being told in their presence, but Jordan’s was a little more advanced than others. He could “glean” things. It took a lot of getting used to, having human lie detectors around all the time; not that Jack was much of a liar. But even white lies caused eyebrows to rise around Jordan.

  “The man who Bob got the glyph from is back downtown,” she said, going on. “We were only two blocks from his store when we picked up him up and judging by what that jerk said, the man we’re after is probably a necromancer.”

  The idea of facing a necromancer didn’t faze Jack just then. He was too hungry to worry about that. “Back downtown? That’s good. We passed a Mexican restaurant on the way here. I could use some fajitas. Does that sound good to you?”

  She shook her head, giving him a tired chuckle. “It’s almost one in the bloody morning. Nothing is going to be open.”

  A glance at the dashboard clock showed she wasn’t lying; his stomach rumbled. “I hope we can find a twenty-four hour Taco Bell. Say, how’s...uh, how’s that guy, the one from the pit?”

  “Better. All of his limbs are straight now and he can almost walk, but they’re going to have to bring in someone with a bit more mojo than our two priests to heal his eyes.”

  This wasn’t exactly great news to Jack. He still had to deal with the man who had given Bob the glyph and, necromancer or not, it was almost a guarantee that he would be trouble. Jack would’ve liked to have gone after him with his team at full strength.

  Cyn could practically read his mind. “We could get him in the morning. He might not be going anywhere.” Jack couldn’t take the chance. If there was one thing that could be counted on with the scum who peddled demon paraphernalia, it was that they had a sixth sense when trouble was coming.

  A knock on his window; it was Captain Metzger. He was the only one of the five who looked ready for business. “Are you good to go?”

  “Five by five,” Jack replied. “Hey, sorry if I was too big of a jerk before.”

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” Metzger said. “Are you up for taking out a necromancer?”

  “Sure, piece of cake.” That was true. Jack could swat necromancers all day—it was the undead and the unkillable things that they brought into the world that were the problem.

  After dropping off Bob’s victim at the local cathedral and swinging by the nearest Taco Bell, the team, with Bob in tow, hurried to “the shop” as Bob called it. The place was, ironically enough, another of the many Chinese herb shops specializing in items of dubious origin and quality that were “guaranteed” to repel demons.

  Captain Metzger pulled up just down the block with Jack and Cyn in the Lexus right behind. Jack sat in the driver’s seat for a moment, munching a gordita and feeling the aura in the air— it was dead. No spells had been cast recently. Disappointed, he grunted and took another bite.

  “Maybe the lack of spells means he doesn’t know we’re coming,” Cyn suggested.

  Jack didn’t believe it. A necromancer left traces and the only undead presence was the lingering taint around Bob; more than likely their bird had flown the coop. With a nasty Taco Bell burp, he zipped his jacket over his Kevlar armor, grabbed his to-go bag and his sword and strolled toward the darkened store. Cyn, toting a shotgun, joined him on his right while Captain Metzger had his left.

  “Chalupa?” Jack asked, offering the bag to the soldier. “I was saving the gordita but you can have the chalupa.”

  Metzger shook his head, his eyes at squints; he wasn’t scared. Jack had never seen him scared. Instead, he got hyped up, his blood running fast, his eyes twitching at any shadow that didn’t look entirely kosher.

  Cyn was more relaxed. Demons were her big fear and there weren’t any around and it wasn’t likely that one could be called by the time they kicked in the front door of the shady store.

  Both priests were drooping from exhaustion, so Jack counted it a lucky thing that they wouldn’t find a demon inside. The only one who looked truly scared was Bob. He was no longer the empty shell that he had been; he had come alive and now his haunted eyes stared into the store.

  Jack should have taken that as a cue, that and the fact the place was devoid of graffiti. It was the only establishment on the street that could make that claim, which suggested that the local scum were too afraid to tag the building.

  They strode to the door. It was glass and steel…and it was unlocked. It pointed to a quick exit by the owner, but in fact it was an invitation.

  Confident that he would find the place empty, Jack walked in and paused, scanning the eclectic and sometimes obscene goods for sale. It was a haphazard and unruly store that was part Chinese herb shop, part voodoo parlor and part tourist trap. From the walls hung antelope horns and silver swords. On the shelves were glazed ocelot eyes, and crosses made from jet and ivory and cedar. In a glass case behind the register was a burnt piece of wood that was supposedly part of the True Cross.

  Deeper in the store were darkened alcoves where tarot or palm readings occurred, and in one of them was a figure that sat so unbelievably still that Jack missed him at first. It was Metzger who nudged Jack and pointed with his shotgun.

  “So far you are disappointment, Mister Dreyden,” the man said. His voice, made sinister by the dark, was marred by a Chinese accent which was thick, mangling his words.

  “Wait until you get to know me,” Jack replied. “I’m pretty sure that I’m more of an embarrassment than a disappointment.”

  “Yes.”

  Jack glanced at Cyn with a raised eyebrow and said to her: “Yes? That’s all he has to say? He’s a pretty cool customer seeing as he’s outnumbered five to one. What do you think? Is he tougher than he looks?” Cyn only shrugged. He could see the fear building in her eyes and he wanted to reassure her; however the man took that moment to stand.

  It was like watching a shadow of a kite unfolding and growing. Only his face was fully visible, looming larger, threatening…and yet, in the last, the person who came to stand across a low, knee-high table from them was a head shorter than Jack and thin as a reed.

  The danger that surrounded him was not in proportion to his size, however. It was a magnitude greater. This was no necromancer, this was something more. Jack pushed Cyn behind him. �
��Wait outside and take the priests with you. I got this.”

  The man chuckled, low and evil. “Leave them to stay, Mister Dreyden, my glory will only be greater.”

  At that exact second, Captain Metzger clicked the safety off of his shotgun. The metallic snick was a trigger in itself and things took on a slow motion quality. Jack saw blood and more importantly, he felt blood. He knew the blood and what it meant.

  The man clenched a fist, the source of the blood and very quickly the source of the spell. Jack had misjudged the man in a huge way. This was no shopkeeper looking to make a buck, and this was no necromancer letting a demon fight his battles for him.

  This was a sorcerer.

  His hand clenched and drops of blood fell, forming, not a hieroglyph, but a Chinese character. It was tinged silver—the soul of the man; the power of the spell.

  The fist with the blood glowed. He raised it and brought it down. Metzger bellowed an order that was ignored. Cyn flinched. There was no other way to put it. She saw the glow in the man’s hand and her muscles bunched uselessly in anticipation of what was coming. The priests started to trace the sign of the cross in the air but they were too slow.

  Only Jack did anything constructive and his moves were dictated by the erratic nature of fate and his own instinct. There was a low table separating him and his opponent. He leapt over it, just as the man brought his glowing fist down on the floor, yelling: “Shishin Ighn!”

  Blinding light flared and there was an explosion of thunder as silvered electricity blasted outward from the man’s fist. The bolt separated into six blazing streaks of light, each one crackling across the floor and then up the legs of Jack’s team. They convulsed as the power ran up their bodies and then they fell, twitching.

  Jack couldn’t spare them a glance. He had been in the air as the lightening passed beneath him and he watched it in amazement and fear. The power it took for that spell would have left him useless for a day and yet the man wasn’t through.

  By some secret means, he opened up another cut on his left wrist; another avenue to his soul. It was access to more power and a second spell. Jack knew he couldn’t count on getting lucky again and so he threw himself into the attack, desperate to keep his opponent dodging his sword thrusts instead of casting spells.