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

by Peter Meredith

  Before the “Event” the city had been losing a thousand people a year to sunnier climates; since then, the number was closer to a thousand a month. There were entire neighborhoods that sat empty and brooding, where it seemed every window was broken and every door hung like a crooked picture.

  Downtown was still alive enough to justify streetlights, however what they illuminated was the essence of sadness: dealers on the stoops, drunks in the gutters, and hookers on the corners. Anyone with any sense of decency was inside their homes behind locked doors and barred windows.

  All save Cyn and Jack that is, and she didn’t know if they constituted decent people. She didn’t think she did especially as they pulled up to the herb shop and there came over her a sudden lust. It crept into her chest and set up a thrumming. Someone was summoning a demon; she knew the flavor of “her” spell. Her birthright had been the protection spell that dictated who or what or how many demons came through the portal from hell.

  The spell had either been used recently or was being used even then.

  “Do you feel that?” she asked.

  “I do. I think it drew me here.”

  After stepping out into the warm night, Jack took his sword in hand. Cyn had her shotgun and, as much as she wanted to rush forward, she let Jack go first. Yes, he was the stronger, and he was tougher, but what held her back was the fact that she was still strong enough to resist.

  She followed just behind him, the gun at the ready. She wasn’t afraid. The spell wasn’t complete and the caster wasn’t strong. It was likely Bob Chapman or another loser just like him. If he was dangerous, it would be because he had a gun, meaning she should take center stage for once.

  Jack went to the door, naked steel in hand. It was locked and so Cyn stepped forward with the key.

  “Wait,” Jack said, his eyes slightly unfocussed. The shop was dark. She could see the body of Truong through the window; the blood around him was blacker than the shadows. “There’s someone here,” Jack said.

  He seemed confused. Of course there was someone there. Spells couldn’t be cast from thin air; there had to be blood, there had to be sacrifice, there had to be innocence, not lost—it had to be taken.

  For some reason Jack hesitated as if he couldn’t sense the clear danger in the air. Her mind felt there was someone in terrible danger. Not a child but also not an adult. It was someone in between. Someone who had been lost and had been found by the wrong person.

  Cyn stepped forward into the shop, the shotgun, a veritable cannon in her hands. It would drop any man and make a demon think twice.

  “Wait,” Jack said, his eyes still unfocussed. He was confused. There was a lot riding in the air, but what she felt were the spells: the spell to open the gate, the protection spell, but where was the control spell? Only a fool would twice bring a demon into the world without one. Bob should have learned his lesson and yet, amazingly he was trying to bring Menet-rah back.

  Its vile name was on the air, roiling it, but there was also a confusing aroma of blood. Too late Cyn smelled and felt the blood. There was Truong’s blood, old and useless, and there was the sacrifice’s blood, young and tasty, but there was also a third blood fountain. A third source.

  There shouldn’t have been. It meant that another spell had been used.

  Too late, Cyn paused to sniff and feel. Someone spoke a single word in an ancient language and then she screamed. The sound ran along the tourist trap buddhas and the incense sticks. It shook the bottles of lizard spleens and the snake whiskey. The scream went on and on. She was becoming unglued. Her very essence was being ripped apart.

  Her soul was being stripped from her body. It was peeling off the inside of her self. It hurt. It hurt more than any physical body could tolerate. Her soul was being torn apart. No one but the dead knew that feeling.

  Chapter 6

  Akron, Ohio

  Jack Dreyden

  Jack was slow to see, and he was slow to feel, which meant he was slow to understand. Too many things were happening at once for him to process. Within the store there were spells and there was hot blood and there were bodies, living and dead. There was also danger; it was all around him, ringing alarm bells in his mind. But there was also such pain in the air! It was pain that few could endure for very long.

  He didn’t know which way to turn first. With so many feelings and fears assaulting his senses, he had stopped just outside the door of the shop; however Cyn had pushed through and now she was screaming fit to wake the dead.

  That was his first thought. Somebody was killing her in order to bring a demon across. Menet-rah. Its name popped into his head and that meant: “Bob!” Jack yelled, striding into the shop, his sword in hand. There were a thousand things to process, but killing Bob took precedence.

  The herb shop was mostly dark. There were three spluttering candles giving Jack just enough light to see the glyphs painted in blood on the floor, though in truth, he hadn’t needed to see them to know what they were.

  These were the same glyphs found in the pits beneath Bob’s house. Cyn was being held in place by them. She writhed and screamed and wept as her soul was being tortured and there was nothing Jack could do. Although the glyphs hadn’t been drawn by a demon, he still needed Holy Water to destroy them and he had always relied on the Priests to carry some.

  Cyn’s screams cut right through him, igniting his fury and he stepped around the woman he loved, knowing he would have to kill Bob quickly in order to save her. “Bob! Show yourself, you coward!”

  There was a harsh laugh and then Bob Chapman showed himself: naked, covered in blood—someone else’s blood—holding a shotgun and laughing through a sneer. “You call me a coward and yet you hide behind a girl... and this isn’t the first time is it? She’s always watching out for you and making excuses for you and fighting your battles for you. I shoulda known this time would be no different.”

  Bob edged closer, the gun pointed square into Jack’s chest. He was so close that Jack could smell the snake whiskey on his breath. If he pulled the trigger, there’d be no dodging the blast; no one was that fast, except for maybe Truong. Jack didn’t know Truong’s speed spell, meaning he didn’t have any way out of this jam, unless Captain Metzger would suddenly appear to save the day.

  “And now you’re hiding behind a gun,” Jack said, glancing back in the vain hope that the rest of his team would suddenly show up and save the day. The street was empty.

  “At least I fight my battles. I don’t rely on four other people to fight them for me. And what I do isn’t for the weak or the cowardly. I put my very soul on the line.”

  Keep talking, you moron, Jack thought, stealing a look around the shop. There were three bodies sprawled out: Truong, whose head was nowhere in sight, a naked teenaged girl whose throat was cut and whose panties were caught up on one ankle, and, finally what looked like a fourth grader. This last person was still alive and staring at Jack with wide, teary eyes. She was bound, naked from the waist down, tied spread eagle and there was blood coming from her.

  Cyn’s screaming and the awful sight of the girl and the corpses and Bob’s smug look had Jack on the edge of a volcanic reaction, one that was going to get him killed. He almost didn’t care, but what pulled him back was the leather-bound book sitting in the dancing light of the candles.

  It was Truong’s spell book.

  The yearning in Jack was immediate, almost overshadowing the screams of Cyn and the desperation in the eyes of the little girl. Bob saw Jack’s hunger and his smug-ugly face broke into a grin. He knew what Jack was feeling. He knew the lust for power, and just then, Bob had all the power he needed. Bob had power over everyone in the room. He had the spell book and soon he would be gloating over Jack’s corpse.

  It was infuriating, and all Jack wanted to do just then was light that spell book on fire and shove it up Bob’s ass. He could picture this desire in vivid detail. He had everything he needed: lit candles, snake whiskey to get the flames going, the book and finally
Bob.

  It clicked suddenly that the fantasy could be at least half-real.

  “You think you’re tough and brave?” Jack said. “Prove it. I’ll toss aside my sword, you drop the gun and we settle this man to man, sorcerer to sorcerer. It’s the only way to steal my power the proper way, and isn’t that what you want? My power?”

  Bob smirked. “Nice try. We both know you’d wipe the floor with me. It would hardly be a fair fight, but you had one part right. Drop the sword.”

  “Coward!” Jack pretended to seethe, while in truth he was calculating distances. “You battle only defenseless girls.” He pointed the sword at the fourth grader. The second Bob’s eyes slid off of him, Jack tossed the sword. Not at Bob. There was no way he could hope to spear Bob on the end of it; it simply wasn’t weighted properly. And hitting him square in the head with the pommel hard enough to knock him out was a one in a thousand chance.

  He tossed the blade side-on so that it struck the whiskey bottle, knocking it over. As he hoped the whiskey poured and the adder slid out as if alive. The blade then spun in a short arc, knocking down two of the candles and then:

  “No!” Bob screamed in such a high tone that he seemed almost to be joking. The last candle lit up the whiskey, just as the amber puddle reached the spell book. Bob made a break to save the book just as Jack made a break for him empty handed.

  Jack had no choice. He was uncut, which meant he had no portal to his soul. And even if did, there was a waist-high counter between him and Bob, and he didn’t think that his electricity spell would go through it. Not only that, Cyn’s shotgun was frozen in what Jack feared was a death grip and worse, both she and the gun were still within the circle of glyphs. He couldn’t reach across the blood words to get it without suffering the same fate as her.

  Jack leapt the counter, took two steps and that was when Bob spun and shot him.

  There was no pain. His senses were overwhelmed. The harsh orange and white light blinded, the explosion deafened, and the impact stunned. He was thrown back, his muscles losing their tension so that he became a discarded rag doll hidden in a mist of red.

  Even when he landed in a crumpled heap, there wasn’t any pain. He was in too much shock for pain. He was stunned and couldn’t breathe. His lungs failed him. No matter how hard he tried to suck in the tiniest sip of air, his lungs were closed for business.

  His only consolation was that Bob had lost the spell book, or so he thought. Seconds after the blast, his head was yanked up and he found himself staring into Bob’s face. Behind him was a glow as the shelves of dried herbs went up in a whoosh of flames.

  “Nice try,” Bob said. In his hand was the spell book; a single edge of it seared black. He shook it in Jack’s red face. “Say, does that hurt? It sure looks like it hurts.” Bob smiled as he watched Jack tried to breathe. Jack looked like a landed fish, his jaw opening and closing uselessly. Bob smiled right up until he saw the Kevlar vest. In the dark he had missed it, but now that the fire was licking the ceiling, it was obvious.

  The vest was shredded and there was blood seeping from the remains. Bob poked a finger into Jack’s chest and held it up so the red glinted. “Still gotta hurt,” Bob said, but he looked less certain. He stood and pumped the gun once, kicking out a shell that clinked on the ground. “Maybe I should give you one more to make certain. You see, Jack, you don’t bring a godforsaken sword to a gunfight. That’s just dumb.”

  Bob’s smile was back in place, wide and insane. The fourth grader was screaming; the fire was eating up one of the shelves next to her bound hands and they were beginning to blister. Cyn had never stopped screaming, her mind tearing itself apart. It should have been tearing Jack apart as well, but he was too filled with hate to find love.

  The hate cut through all of the noise and the chaos with one overriding demand: Kill Bob!

  Had he been able to take even one breath, it would have been easy. He had his blood and his portal to his soul—in fact, he had fourteen portals. The bullet resistant vest had done everything its makers had said it would: it had resisted the blast, but it hadn’t stopped it. Had Jack been seven feet further back the vest might have held. As it was he was bleeding from fourteen different points, but thankfully none of the individual pellets had actually penetrated beyond the bone and muscle of his chest to hit his vitals.

  He couldn’t breathe simply because he had the breath mule-kicked out of him and that meant he couldn’t do magic.

  Spells needed magic words. He could’ve called lightning just by saying: shishin Ighn. Just then, the concept of magic words was ludicrous and foolish. What purpose did they serve?

  There wasn’t any actual power in them; the power was all in Jack. His soul was what gave the energy to his spells. The only thing he could think of as Bob lowered the barrel down to touch Jack’s forehead, was that the words shaped the spells in some fashion, turning soul-energy into electrical energy.

  That was likely and yet Jack didn’t even know what shishin Ighn meant. For all he knew it meant: Go-go-gadget, electricity! Or: Shazam Lightning!

  Logic suggested, and Jack was filled with deadly, cold logic in the face of death, that saying the words had little outcome on the spell if one could visualize the spell and the glyph with complete awareness.

  Jack saw the glyph in his mind—no it wasn’t a glyph or a rune, it was a character and it said: shishin Ighn which meant: lightning. To Jack, it meant lightning, even if it didn’t. He concentrated his entire mind on the word and it became lightning and lightning formed in the blood leaking into his hand. It burned and it zapped, and little arcs of blue-white light danced from finger to finger, stinging him, but he didn’t care.

  Bob cared, however. He cared a great deal when Jack touched Bob’s leg and ten-thousand volts passed into his body and sent him flying back with the ugly stink of burnt flesh filling the room.

  As if the magic had released more than just ball lightning, Jack suddenly found his breath and as he struggled to his feet, he wheezed and sucked air and smoke into his bruised lungs. He stood and swayed with the fire baking into him fanning the hate that ate him up head to toe.

  Jack ignored everything in the room as he stalked over to Bob’s body. Bob was dead. He was good and dead. His body was half in the fire and was billowing the foulest, reeking smoke Jack had ever smelled, and that was right and proper, because Bob had been the foulest creature Jack had ever met. And standing above him, his hate only increased as his numbness deserted him and his pain came on in an avalanche.

  His chest felt broken. Each breath was accompanied by a dozen lancing pains as though he was filled with shards of glass. It made him meaner. He clutched his chest and did not think of Cyn, instead he wanted to kick Bob’s corpse in the face. He was almost drained once again and compassion and caring were far down his list of needs and desires.

  What stopped his foot was that he caught sight of the spell book; it sat flapped open, blaring its wonderful secrets to the word for anyone, even those not worthy, to see. Craving struck him. Naked hunger. He just needed to step over a child, a child in misery, to get it.

  “Please, help me,” the child whimpered.

  Jack looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. Her face shown with tears, they were crystals that grabbed the firelight and blazed almost like magic. For a flash, Jack saw her as an enemy, another sorcerer and his blood-covered fist came up, a spell on his lips.

  “No,” she whimpered, her lower lip shaking and her eyes wide.

  She’s afraid of me, Jack thought, amazed. That didn’t make sense. Wasn’t he the good guy? Wasn’t he here hunting evil and saving the world? A distant part of him cried out: Yes! You should start by saving her. It was a fine idea but what about Cyn? She was bound in place as her soul was being tortured and what about the book? How was he going to save the world without the book?

  Suddenly he wanted all three with equal desire and he turned from one to another, wasting seconds he didn’t have.

  The girl was
closest and the easiest to save. Her bindings were hemp and his sword was a step away, its blade resting in the fire glowed orange. The pommel was hot, but not yet blistering. Jack went to snatch it up, forgetting that he was riddled with holes and that his chest was wheezing like a broken accordion.

  It hurt to bend over and it hurt to stand and it hurt to breathe even tiny sips of air. Thankfully the edge of his sword was keen and the ropes parted like butter.

  After being bound for who knew how long, the girl tried to stand too quickly. Her skinny, bare legs couldn’t hold her and she lost her balance, lurching into Jack, who wasn’t in any position to support her weight as he could barely hold himself up. They both tottered a few steps and then fell against the low dividing wall.

  Beyond the immediate pain, almost all Jack could think was that he was now further from his spell book. Almost the only thing. A part of him screamed: Cyn is right there!

  She was and the young girl was wobbling around the wall and heading right for her. “Get away,” Jack hissed. The girl shied back, again afraid of him. He tried to add what he hoped was a dollop of sweetness to his voice: “It’s ok, just go around her and whatever you do, don’t touch the glyphs...the writing on the ground. You’ll die a very painful death if you do.”

  The girl edged as far around the circle of glyphs as possible, staring her big brown eyes at Cyn.

  Cyn had stopped screaming and that was worse. She was twitching and jerking uncontrollably. Seeing her hellacious pain erased all thought of the spell book. This was the girl he loved. Just then his soul was dingy and worn thin; he knew the love as a fact more than he felt it as warmth.

  But there was still a little warmth.

  He came to stand just outside the circle, his mind racing, trying to think of some way to change the spells he knew; to rearrange them in some fashion in order to break the ring of glyphs. Unfortunately, he knew only four spells. He could open a portal into hell, he could call forth a demon or one of the lesser imps, he could control it, and lastly, he could summon and direct electricity.