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

by Peter Meredith

  She was too drained for anything but a smile. “I said Donnie. As in Donnie from New Kids on the Block.”

  “That’s even worse.”

  Chapter 8

  Khartoum, Sudan

  Jack Dreyden

  A week passed in slow agony. It wasn’t his body that pained Jack. No, the priests had done their job and physically, he was better than ever. And nor was it his soul repairing itself and growing back to fill his empty innards that bothered him; that worked in the same way his fingernails grew, it just happened and he never knew when.

  No, what pained him was the waiting.

  Jack was eager to get moving. They finally had a destination, they finally had some place to begin looking for Robert. At first Metzger seemed just as eager. He rushed them out of Akron, something they were all grateful for, and back to Washington DC where there was talk of an imminent departure planned for early the next day, but that was put off for a day and then another and another.

  It quickly grew annoying, especially for Jack and especially in the first few days when he went about with all the feeling and expression of a dour manikin—except of course, when he was annoyed.

  It was up to Cyn to keep Jack from tossing Metzger out their seventh floor hotel window or punching Father Jordan in the throat when he suggested that going to Mass might do Jack some good. At these times, Cyn took Jack to a museum, and there were many, many museums in Washington.

  They were all pretty much lost on Jack. He would go about with his robotic expression whether they were at the Holocaust Museum or the National Gallery of Art. The one he seemed most in tuned with was Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. He even had a child poke him to see if he was a display.

  On the fourth day he was little improved and so Cyn took him to a pet store and bribed the cashier to let Jack sit in a back room with a dozen puppies. Finally, he smiled. And yet he still chafed at the waiting. They all did. There was a certain amount of finality in the air. If they could swoop in and snatch Robert, their days as demon hunters would be practically over. Sure, there were still strays running about but eventually, they would be hounded down and killed.

  When they were finally given the green light, Jack had packed his gear in five minutes.

  “Pretty soon you’ll have that goose farm of yours,” Jack told Cyn as they were sitting in an airport in Addis Ababa. She smiled thinly and covered her nose with her hand. Ethiopia was a land where everything smelled of goats and feet.

  Jack was reclining in a plastic chair with his legs pitched up on a piece of luggage that held his body armor. In a shipping tube next to his elbow was his sword. Perhaps the best thing about flying with Captain Metzger was that Jack could carry his weapons if he chose—and he always chose. And he was especially glad he had them at that airport.

  Planes were still hijacked in Ethiopia from time to time.

  Stifling a yawn, Jack looked around, and for him it was easy to spot at least two of the other teams that had secretly accompanied them. The priests on the teams were all African-American and dressed to blend in with the Ethiopians: loose pants of a variety of colors with a long white shirt over the top. Even undercover the priests looked rigid and nervous as if God was judging them in this minor deception.

  They were covert because the government in Khartoum had said no way to the idea of what was basically a paramilitary invasion. This had been the main reason for the delays.

  Metzger’s bosses had decided that sending in a single team of demon hunters to an area that could be simply crawling with the undead, wasn’t a smart plan. Diplomats were brought in to negotiate a proper sized force: the US wanted two-hundred trained soldiers, operatives, priests, as well as sixteen helicopters and five armed drones.

  A small detachment considering the mayhem that Robert had caused in the past.

  The Sudanese had put their foot down. They had the right and proper fear that Robert would “go big” if confronted with a small army and it would be their country who would be left dealing with the thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of undead. And they were probably right.

  After six days of bickering back and forth, the two sides had agreed on a tiny number: ten. Jack had only shrugged. He was feeling strong and hungry. Timmons and Jordan had said: This must be God’s will. Metzger complained in a stilted, formal manner which came across as though he was simply uncomfortable going in with so few men.

  Cyn wouldn’t hear of such a small number and had made a fuss which could be heard down every hall of the “Coordinating Building” on L Street where five departments and agencies: Homeland Security, Defense, CIA, FBI and the State Department came together, pooling their assets to form what was supposed to be a temporary task force: The Panel on Supernatural Displacement.

  As Cyn was integral in controlling Jack, her complaints and their volume carried a lot more weight than anyone else’s complaining, and she had been reassured that there would be “others” around to help out, though who and what sort of “others” these would be wasn’t answered.

  During the long flights and the longer layovers, Jack and Cyn had played “spot the spy.”

  The priests were harder to spot than the rock-hard soldiers who stood out among the slightly malnourished population. The soldiers hadn’t been chosen simply because of the color of their skin; each one was tall and strong. Their confident eyes roved everywhere, assessing every possible risk.

  Most of the soldiers were posing as archeologists or students, but Jack had never seen archeologists with biceps the size of his head before. Neither had anyone else and so there were also “helpers” around. People who not only spoke the local language but who also seemed to have endless wads of discreet cash on them to make questions go away.

  Their stopover in Ethiopia was a grueling seven hours of heat and stink. Next, they flew in a puddle jumper into Khartoum, and soon they were missing Addis Ababa; it smelled like a rose garden compared to Khartoum. The city was beastly hot and dry and the people weren’t inclined towards bathing regularly, so there was an uncomfortable “presence” around the locals.

  Cyn was keyed up, her eyes going to every face; there were too many for Jack to peer into, besides, faces could lie. Jack felt with his mind, searching for evil and finding it in plenty of it in the city. From the air, the city had appeared to be a sprawling mess cut up into three sections by the convergence of the White and Blue Niles. Where they got their names, Jack didn’t know. The waters of both rivers were silty brown except where oil sheens spoke rainbows on their surface.

  It was a crowded city, a busy city. Khartoum was an interesting mixture of new and old, ugly and beautiful. Good and evil—and the evil was ancient. It made Jack shudder.

  Still the evil was buried deep and it seemed to slumber. There wasn’t that harsh awareness that sometimes struck Jack when he was close to a demon.

  “Dis way,” a man said the moment they stepped out of the airport. He took Jack’s bags, giving him a wink and a gold-toothed smile. He was slim but not skinny and his eyes were wary, not of Jack, but of his surroundings. Metzger nodded, an abrupt and abbreviated move that Jack read: It’s ok, he’s one of us.

  In keeping with their surroundings, Cyn, Jack, and Metzger got into the lead car: an ancient Volvo that had all the style of a shoebox. Still, it ran and the air conditioning worked, pumping out blessedly cold air and that’s what counted to Jack, who had feared that he would have to roll down his window and choke on the smell of the city to avoid heatstroke.

  They took a number of turns, a dizzying number, so that Metzger constantly had his head cranked around back over his shoulder to make sure that the other cars in the line kept up. Somehow they all did. At one point, the driver unexpectedly pulled over. He parked for all of a minute and then just before he stepped on the gas again, a gentleman in a wilted beige suit got right into the car, nudging Cyn over with his rear.

  “Hi, hello there, hi,” the man said in a flat American accent. He wasn’t a balck man, and he wasn’t a wh
ite man exactly either, he was pink as a pig. The pink started beneath the wisps of his thin brown hair and went deep beneath his collar and possibly all the way to his toes. “Sorry about the heat. It’s like this at least once a year: 110 in the shade and that’s if you can find shade, ha-ha.”

  His laughter was high and oddly stilted. “So, one of you is a necromancer? You can raise the dead and all?” His eyes shifted, flicking quickly as though afraid one of them was going to put a hex on him if he wasn’t careful.

  “Who are you?” Cyn asked.

  “Oh, right. I’m terribly sorry. My name is Milt, and I’m with the embassy. I’m your handler so to speak while you’re in country. Sorry about all the cloak and dagger business, but if there’s going to be trouble we don’t want US interests to suffer from the fallout. With that in mind, we’ll want you to steer clear of the embassy and certain industrial areas.”

  “I can’t guarantee that,” Jack said. He had a wicked desire to begin mumbling some made-up voodoo, simply to scare Milt. Jack was in a good mood despite the heat and the smell. He felt he was close to ending things with Robert.

  Milt burst that bubble. “Oh, well, okay. This might all be for naught one way or the other. There doesn’t seem to be any arcane funny business out at Meroe.”

  “How could you know that?” Jack asked, his words slow with a hint of danger to them. “You didn’t send anyone up there, did you, because I was pretty clear on my instructions: no one was supposed to go before we got here. We don’t know Robert’s resources. We don’t know what he knows or how he gets his information.”

  “You must be Mr. Dreyden. Yes, well, it wasn’t any of our men, I assure you. The Sudanese were nervous and so they sent a team up there. The good news is that there wasn’t any evidence of what occurred in New York. The pyramids are all still perfectly intact. No mummies running around killing people.”

  Jack sat back and looked out the window. “And now Robert likely knows we’re here. Damn it! If they blew our chance…Cyn, can you feel Hor or Amanra? Or any of the others?” When it came to feeling the undead, she was more in tune than he was.

  She closed her eyes, her brow sporting three little lines just north of the bridge of her nose. “I don’t feel them, but there are other, uh, things in the city.”

  “Old things,” Jack said, nodding. This happened in some of the older inhabited cities on the planet. Sometimes creatures were summoned or found their way to the human plane and became trapped. Jack hoped that they would remain that way. Some of the beings radiated power that was well beyond his fledging sorcery.

  Milt’s lips were twisted and drawn back and he edged away from Cyn, though there wasn’t much room to. “Should I take that as good news or bad? Aren’t we worried about new stuff? You know, fresh corpses walking around?”

  “I don’t know what’s good or bad just yet,” Jack said, still with his eyes on the passing city. It was an old city, older than most people realized. Deep below the city streets and the hard baked sand was the remnants of another city, one in which the people had wielded bronze weapons and burned dried dung to cook with, one in which human sacrifice was a daily occurrence in order to appease the walking demons who posed as “Gods.” Jack could sense it and it made him shudder.

  “That’s not for us to worry about,” he whispered to the window.

  They were quiet for a while until Metzger said:“Then I guess it doesn’t matter if we send in the drones.”It was his way of asking Jack’s permission.

  Jack blinked,pulling his face from the window.“Can you wait until evening? I’d rather play this as if the Sudanese hadn’t butted in.”

  “It is their country,”Milt said.

  “Sure,”Jack replied and then ignored the man.“We send the drones in around nine and we go in once we have an idea of what might be there. Make sure that the vehicles are ready and the train conductor has been properly bribed.”

  Milt frowned.“He is I assure…”

  “Hold on,”Jack said to him.“Metzger, you make sure the pieces are in place. Now, if everyone can clam up,I could use a nap.”

  The driver snorted a laugh and wound through the city traffic. Jack didn’t actually nap. He worried with his eyes closed. What if Robert was already long gone? What if he had already picked up what he needed and zipped? They’d be left chasing ghosts once again…unless Robert left them a surprise, that is. He had done it before. Bodies or partial glyphs, and twice he had left demons behind.

  On neither occasion had it been Jack who had discovered those unfortunate traps, and people had been killed. It left him with a paranoia of opening doors and being the first to step into any room. He would do it, but he was always cautious.

  Since the embassy wasn’t putting them up, they were staying in the finest hotel in Khartoum, registered under an oil conglomerate. It was nicer than Jack expected. The sheets were wonderfully soft andJack took his nap there after sampling from the minibar. Cyn took a long soak in the tub—a very long soak. She half-floated in warm water for two hours in her own form of meditation.

  Then, in a strained silence, they strapped on their armor. Cyn prayed in a corner as Jack sharpened his sword. She would have prayed in the closet to keep out all distractions, but Jack had said once that he thought it was“weird,”and that it made him feel alone. She hadn’t done it again.

  They then laid out their gear, checking each item. Jack had new items. After the fiasco in Truong’s shop, they each carried two bottles of Holy Water and two of Holy Oil. He had started filling his belt pouches when Cyn cleared her throat; she held a silver necklace in her hand, dangling from it was a simple cross.

  “It can’t hurt,” she told him after he had looked at it skeptically.

  He slid it over his head and immediately cringed.“It burns!”he cried, earning him a punch in the shoulder that made his arm go numb.

  Then they were in Metzger’s room waiting on the video feed from the drones. There were three of the little birds up: two hummed at about a hundred feet and a third was invisible at a thousand. They ran on state of the art batteries that could keep them on station for two hours at a time; there was a second trio waiting to take over—Metzger didn’t want a break in coverage.

  So far what they were seeing was a whole lot of nothing. The infrared cameras showed only lonely pyramids and a quickly cooling desert. Nothing whatsoever moved. There wasn’t even a real archeology team on site to make things complicated. July was a hard time to spend in the Barunli Desert where the last recorded rainfall had been seventeen months before.

  How anyone had ever lived there even in ancient times was beyond Jack.“What do you think, Cyn? Everything the same?”She had actually been to the Meroe Pyramids once before on a dig with her mother.

  She was squinting mightily at the image.“Can you center on number thirty-six? That one there.”

  Metzger gave an order over a secured sat-phone and a minute later, the image changed, focusing on one of the odd little pyramids. They were nothing like the Pyramids of Giza, which were not just huge but also amazingly symmetrical. These were sharp angled and much taller than they were wide and some looked strangely positioned as if they were on the verge of tipping over.

  “Okay,I guess they’re good,” she said, leaning back. “I don’t see any signs of a new dig.”

  Jack agreed. It was all disappointingly normal.“Well, we can’t blame the Sudanese if Robert has bugged out.”

  Metzger added: “And nor can we blame Milt.”

  “Milt,”Jack said, rolling his eyes.“Is he really coming along? Is he even trained?”

  “Yes. You read his jacket. He’s not State, he’s CIA. Maybe he’s a little on the older side but he still knows what he’s doing. Besides, the CIA demanded to have eyes on the ground for this operation.”

  Cyn stood and stretched, looking relaxed.“Luckily, it doesn’t seemas if this is much of an operation. No new digs, no overturned graves, means no big fight.”

  She was relaxed; Jack was
disappointed.“Just in case, we still go in as planned,” he ordered. They left the hotel soon after, stepping out into a surprisingly cool night and a second later,climbed into the same Volvo that had dropped them off. The driver was different; he was beefier, and he smelled of gun oil. He came with them as they entered the train station, carrying Jack and Cyn’s bags as if he were a porter.

  Other teams boarded the over-night train in discreet twos and threes, making sure to spread out so that no two groups shared a car. The train’s engine began to grunt and cough and soon there was a lurch. Jack had his eyes closed and his mind open. Next to him Cyn sat rigidly upright.

  “Nothing,”she whispered.

  “Yeah,”Jack agreed. The people on the train were people with the usual amount of evil and good radiating from them. None stood out, and most definitely, none were demons. Metzger stood, tucking a newspaper beneath one arm and walked the length of the train: it was the all clear sign.

  An hour into the ride, the train slowed. A conductor came through speaking in Arabic. Jack knew he was saying: Sorry, track repair. It’ll be just a few minutes. It was their cue. The driver who had accompanied them stood, grabbed their bags and left the train. His name was Ringo and no matter how much Jack pressed him, he wouldn’t admit to a last name. He was an American of Sudanese heritage and he had a gift for languages; he spoke six as if he was a native and three more, though haltingly.

  He had volunteered for the mission and was absolutely infatuated, not with Cyn, though he appreciated her as any hot-blooded man would, but with Jack. There was a disquieting lust for power within him that reminded Jack of his own. The difference being that Ringo was good to the core and Jack could only fake it.

  The teams were no longer discreet. There was no point. They hurried to the cars waiting out in the desert. Not even pausing to sort themselves out, they piled in and drove off. Fifteen names were read off by Metzger and the radio crackled repeatedly with“Check, check, check.”