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

by Peter Meredith

  Cheated of the soul, the necromancer roared and spun to face Jack and so Jack shot him, too. Though the air shimmered and the buckshot fell harmlessly, the balance of power was now in Jack’s favor. Modern weapons were far stronger than the necromancer could have ever imagined.

  Jack blasted the creature again and again, not giving it a moment’s respite. Finally, it threw up a wall of darkness between them. It was a weak spell from a weakened creature and Jack charged right through it, knowing it wasn’t likely very deep, just enough to hide the beast.

  It would hide and try to feed and that meant it would need warm bodies. “Come on, Cyn!” Jack yelled, orienting on the feel of the beast and the sudden screech of one of the soldiers. Jack found three Knights cowering before the necromancer, their great courage finally undone.

  With the necromancer draining them, Jack shot them like dogs. It was sad and yet Jack wasn’t sad because he didn’t care. Not having a soul meant not having to care. It really was as simple as that. But he would care later if he lived. What he was doing would haunt his dreams and keep him far from the confessional even though what he had done was wholly justified.

  He committed murder in order to stop the necromancer. Jack killed everyone within reach and when there was no one left for the necromancer to feed off of, Jack grinned. The necromancer was failing. It tried to run, but bullets were faster and it no longer had the power left to stop time. Jack pumped full loads of buckshot into it until the shimmering in the air was thin as a whisper.

  Cyn had come to stand next to him by then, a found gun in her hands, its barrel smoking. Her eyes had never been so cold. She was so white, Jack wondered briefly if she would pass out. He really didn’t care about that either. She wasn’t going to die and that’s what mattered, or so he guessed.

  As the necromancer faltered, Jack’s gun dropped to the sand and his sword rang as he swept it out; the smell of the Holy Oil on it was like perfume. He could have killed the necromancer with the gun, but that would’ve been wrong. The sword had meaning. He would grow using the sword. His power would double at the least.

  “On your knees,” Jack said, knowing that the necromancer would never agree. There was five thousand years between them, but they were very much alike. They would fight to the death. They would hold onto every second.

  The beast charged and raked with its long claws, but Jack was ready for it; he knew its strength, just as he knew that the necromancer was no warrior. As impressive as it was in size and fantastic in its bearing, it was a creature of magic, and without magic it was just another enemy waiting to die.

  It tried, however. It loved its life above all else and the closer to death it came the more desperate it became, but against an opponent who was both warrior and sorcerer, it did not stand a chance.

  The edge of Jack’s sword was far more keen than the necromancer had ever faced; his armor lighter and yet tougher than anything found in antiquity, and Jack trained constantly, daily, sometimes twice if he had the energy. Jack trained because he had known there would be days in which he would be pitted against some five thousand year old monster.

  That day had come once again and Jack’s blade was swirling madness. He gave the necromancer no let up, hacking limbs uncaring of the sluggish grey blood that dribbled or the outlandish rotting smell that soured the air when he sliced open the belly of the beast.

  All he cared about was that final killing stroke. He could have taken it three different times, but Jack was an artist who craved perfection and got it when he sliced the head of the beast right off its neck. It was a perfect stroke.

  When the head with its now dull eyes thumped onto the ground, the monster toppled and Jack grinned. The grin lasted for all of ten seconds and then it faded away to nothing, and nothing was all he felt. Even when he looked at Cyn, he was empty.

  She had watched the battle with her gun at the ready. Now she shrugged in an odd sort of way and gazed down at the dead necromancer for a few seconds before staring around at the battlefield and the strewn bodies of forty-five trained men. “Timmons was a good guy,” she said, absently as though trying to remember what it meant to feel.

  “And Metzger,” Jack added. They were silent for a few minutes and then Jack said: “Remember Father Paul?”

  “A little,” she answered.

  “They never found his body. He could still be alive.”

  “Yeah? That’s good.” Listless, she walked over to where Ringo laid sprawled. His life had been sucked out of him, his face shrunken and pulled tight to his bones. “I don’t like this, Jack. I can’t feel that I don’t like this, but I know I don’t. It’s weird.”

  They were silent again.

  “We should look for survivors,” he said after a time.

  “There are none…I would know.”

  He knew what she meant. She was empty inside and unlike Jack, she could fix that in seconds; she was a necromancer by birth and she could feel the souls. They were hot in a universe of ice. A shiver ran up her. “They’re all gone, except those guys who ran away; they’re probably embarrassed.”

  Another moment, long this time, and then Jack took Cyn by the hand until he found her pack, which had been left forgotten, leaning against the side of Beg 22. Inside were two boxes of Junior Mints. They shared them as they stood over the necromancer; neither really trusted a dead body anymore—sometimes they came back to life.

  When it didn’t stir, Jack went to Ringo’s Volvo. There was a radio inside, crackling and spitting out words of worry. When Jack didn’t immediately answer it, Cyn said: “We’ll need a cleanup crew here. I don’t think we should leave this for the locals to find. Who knows what they’ll think. And maybe we should go after the survivors. I think there were three or four of them. It was hard to tell with so much going on. Jack? Are you listening to me?”

  He had been staring at the radio. “I’m listening.” He hadn’t been; his mind was far away trying to piece together the cunning trap that had been set for him. It was so intricate and detailed that it was hard to wrap his mind around it. “Go on,” he said to her.

  “Go on? What do you mean? I said that we should go after those guys who ran away, though I don’t know where they might be heading. Shendi? If they regained their senses they’d go to Shendi. If not, they’re somewhere in this bleedin’ desert.”

  “Right, the desert.” The radio crackled out more anxious questions. Cyn reached for it, but Jack grabbed it first and tossed it into the sand. “I think we need to disappear. Robert has us dialed in. He knows us and he’s playing us. He allowed Truong to find him just so he could set this up, just so he could kill us.”

  Cyn looked down at the radio with just the slightest hint of worry in her eyes. “And he almost succeeded. But what about those men? Shouldn’t we care? They could die out there.”

  Jack knew that they should care and in a day or two he would, in the meantime he would rationalize: “They’re all trained men and really, it’s hard to get lost in this part of the Sudan. There’s only one road that runs to Khartoum. It’s just west of here. And the sun will be up soon. If they can’t figure out which way west is by the stars, then the sun will clue them in.”

  And dry them out and shrivel them up and kill them if they don’t get picked up or find shelter. Jack shoved those thoughts away. Finding and killing Robert was bigger than the lives of a few men, no matter who they were.

  “They’ll be fine,” he added, partly to mollify his own conscience; it didn’t take much.

  “What are we going to do with that?” Cyn asked, pointing at the body of the necromancer.

  Jack hated the idea of leaving it for the government to find. Whatever secrets the body held were best lost for all time. And then there was the sarcophagus...it had not just imprisoned the creature, it had hidden it from both Cyn and Jack.

  “I think we need to take a closer look at the sarcophagus,” Jack said. He took up one of the discarded flashlights and went to the coffin. It was indeed solid gold; eas
ily a thousand pounds. Inside it were glyphs; he wasn’t surprised.

  “A binding spell,” Cyn said, taking pictures with her phone. They both looked back at the necromancer. “A binding spell inside a sarcophagus? Maybe it’s not as dead as we think. I mean, it won’t re-grow its head will it?”

  Jack went back to the body. It hadn’t budged. He poked it with a finger. “It is truly dead, I believe. I used a Holy Sword. It unbound whatever evil was holding the thing together.” He didn’t add: I hope. “Just in case, we should burn it.”

  They cast about for a fuel source and saw only rocks and sand. In the end, they gathered Holy Oil from the bodies of the dead. It amounted to only about a quart, and yet the corpse was rendered to ash as if a bonfire had been set.

  Next, Jack went to each of the deceased and rifled their pockets for cash; they would need to disappear and that meant they couldn’t use credit cards and it also meant bribes at border crossings.

  Lastly, he dragged the bodies of his team, Metzger, Timmons and Jordan to one side and prayed over them: “Lord, please bless their souls. They were good men and each deserves Heaven as a final reward for their efforts.”

  There was silence for a minute and then Cyn, who looked like a blank slate, said: “I wish I could cry for them.”

  “You will,” Jack replied. “It’ll come, don’t worry.” He would cry when no one was around and he would hurt, and he would dream of the men he had killed and he would tell himself that he had saved their souls; and he had. Of course he had also saved his own skin in the process and when he cried he would know the truth: he hadn’t killed to save any soul but his own.

  “Let’s get moving,” he said, heading for the Volvo. “We should try to make it to Wadi Halfa by morning.”

  Chapter 12

  Wadi Halfa, Sudan

  Jack Dreyden

  Jack wanted to disappear without a trace into the Barunli Desert before heading north to Egypt, but his plans changed when they saw one of the Raiders who had run away—he was heading back to the pyramids. It took guts not just to face the possibility that the necromancer yet lived, but also the guilt over running in the first place.

  “It’s dead,” Jack assured him right off the bat as he pulled up in the Volvo.

  “I ran,” the man said in a dusty voice. There were tear stains running through the dirt covering his face.

  Cyn leaned over Jack and said through the window: “And you were smart to run. Everyone who stayed died, so don’t look like that. Some things are beyond us. You were able to accept that and you made the wise decision.”

  The soldier eyed her, his lip curled in self-disgust. “You don’t get it. I ran! I ran away like a coward. I left my friends back there to die. I disgraced myself.”

  This elicited a shrug from Jack. “You did,” he said, not seeing the point of belaboring the obvious. “When you get back, I need you to do something for me. I need you to make sure the two of us are counted among the dead. Not among the missing, but among the dead. I want two corpses in two body-bags; one with my name on it and one with Cyn’s.”

  “You runnin’ away, too?” the soldier asked.

  “No. That trap back there was laid out months ago and if my cousin thinks I lived, he’ll start preparing his next one. Clearly, he wants me out of the way so that he can get on with whatever he’s planning next and I’d rather he spring it while I’m still around to stop him...if I can.”

  The idea that he could actually stop Robert was now more in doubt that ever. Where had he come across the necromancer? Had Robert locked it in the golden casket? If not, how did he know what was in it and if so, it meant that he had somehow bested a creature that had nearly won a fight against a sorcerer and fifty of the best soldiers in the US military.

  A very scary thought.

  Whichever it was, it pointed to the fact that Robert was gaining in strength at a much faster rate than Jack. What was worse was that he had access to the power of seven billion souls. Jack only had his own.

  These thoughts haunted him as they left the soldier to make it back to the pyramids on his own and drove north along the Nile. The sun glared from his right as the desert began to bake. He was exhausted and his insides were hollow and hungry. Next to him, Cyn slept with her head lolling against the window, and he glared at her.

  She was just as empty on the inside as he was, perhaps even more so since this had been her first time she had let her soul be used and abused. She couldn’t have stayed awake if she tried, but that didn’t matter to Jack. He was hungry and snappish, only there was no one to be snappish at and so he glared at her and at the desert and when they passed a vulture sitting on the gnarled remains of a tree, he glared at it as well.

  To make matters worse, the road was crap. For the most part, it was only a rutted dirt path, except when they passed through a couple of dried-out towns and then the road was paved in white stone. The Volvo felt like it was shaking to pieces.

  Cyn sat up bleary and disheveled. “What the bleeding hell? Cobblestone? What century is this?”

  “Don’t they have cobblestone roads in England?” Jack asked.

  She glared, as angry a look as he had ever seen on her face. “There it’s quaint. Here it’s sodding pathetic. Where are we? Is this still Sudan?” She looked around at the dirty little town. It was one of the poorest places Jack had ever seen. Despite the abysmal heat turning the ground into a frying pan, the children went shoeless and many wore little more than rags.

  Before answering, he swerved out of the way of a kicked ball and yawned like a bear. “Wadi Halfa and I need to find a hotel, badly. I need food and I need sleep. And I need you to start acting like you usually do.”

  “You sound like a baby,” she snapped. They glared at each other, neither backing down. A second later, Jack nearly hit a chicken that was running loose in the streets and they both stared at it as if blaming it for all their problems. “I’d eat that chicken if I could,” Cyn whispered.

  “We’ll get something. They have to have restaurants in this town.”

  Cyn laughed and gestured around. It was a very small town; a few hundred one-story buildings made of desert-baked mud bricks. “Where? I was here three years ago on a trek from Nekhen to Meroe and I don’t remember seeing any restaurants. We stopped for some petrol and you can guess what their loo was like.” A shiver ran up her at the memory.

  “We’ve had our shots,” he answered, taking a left off the stone path and down what he thought was another road but which turned out to be an alley. He had seen a splash of color and had hoped that they had chanced on an out of the way hotel.

  It was a feed store and there were more stray chickens wandering about, each skinny and gaunt. Jack figured that it would take six of them to make a decent meal.

  After twenty minutes of driving they had seen the entire town. There were two “hotels.” They by-passed the first because, with its tin and canvas roof and its scrap-wood covered windows, it looked ready to be condemned. Unbelievably, the second hotel was worse. The rats were like livestock or pets that wandered around unnoticed and there was a smell emanating from the building like that of a decomposing body.

  They returned to the original and since they were not husband and wife, they were forced into separate rooms. Cyn took the “Top” room as described by a woman who looked to be just shy of a hundred—and she was right. Cyn’s sheets were clean and the mattress was newish; early this century new. What made it the “Top” room, however was the metal box duct-taped into the window that hummed and blew out a steady stream of cold air.

  Jack’s room had a fan that made a steady tac-tac-tac sound but hardly moved the torpid air. His bed listed at an angle and there were odd sounds emanating from beneath the dresser.

  After hanging their Do Not Disturb signs, Jack, feeling like a teenager, snuck into Cyn’s room and passed out as soon as his head hit the pillow. The two slept hand-in-hand for the next twenty hours. Jack had one dream that stretched through every one of those
hours. In it, he was facing the necromancer, who seemed eighty feet tall. Jack tried to fight the beast but the shimmering glow around him thinned and his strength failed. Then Cyn grabbed his hand.

  His dream consisted of her holding his hand and feeding him with her energy. When he woke, stiff and groggy, the cut on his hand was completely healed and he was halfway to feeling like himself...in fact he felt halfway to feeling like something greater than himself.

  Cyn eyed her hand; it too was clean and unblemished. “Your power is increasing,” she said with equal parts fear and awe. The strength of his soul had been increasing for months, but in the last week it had doubled and now it had doubled again; he was amazed as well.

  Jack flexed his hand and then touched his chest where the necromancer had punched him. The bones were completely knit back together as sound as they had been. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. Powerful or not, he didn’t see how he could heal himself, let alone her. “Maybe it was you,” he suggested. “You were always much more in tune with God. Everyone knows that I’m a...”

  His words faltered as he suddenly remembered what he had done. He had murdered men in cold blood. The tally of innocent lives he had taken was growing. His soul was a powerful and filthy thing.

  “It wasn’t me who healed us,” Cyn said with another look at her hand. “I don’t really have much in the way of power and I don’t really want what I do have.”

  “I guess I’ll never understand that. You could be a great sorcerer. You have the ability, you just have to force yourself. It’s an odd feeling but not a bad one.”

  She shrugged and now her newly healed hand touched the cross around her neck. “I won’t do it, because I know it’s wrong.” She hopped up suddenly and went to a window that was so dirty, the street outside seemed like it was from another era. She laughed suddenly and asked: “Why don’t we make this our honeymoon retreat?”