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

by Peter Meredith

  “Why don’t you tell me what you know?”

  A sigh escaped Jack. He sat himself down on an ancient tombstone and said: “Sure. He’s been desperately trying to kill me. Other than that I haven’t a clue what he’s up to.”

  “Oh please! You think he cares about you and that Barbie Doll cousin you’ve been shacking up with? I really doubt it. He’s grown strong, Jack. He’s beyond you, now. He’s filling his soul. He’s gaining spells and strength and power. Here’s what I think: he trying to become like the old ones, like that necromancer. Oh, he was something. I could feel the residue of his power. It was luscious.”

  The word “luscious” caused Jack to raise an eyebrow.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Loret said, seeing the eyebrow. “You don’t know what it’s like not caring about money or women. It’s all about the power on the other side. It’s the only thing that matters.”

  That wasn’t true. Jack had raised his father from the dead and there hadn’t been an ounce of hunger in him. He had been happy where he had been, content to spend eternity with his wife. He’d been in love in life and he was in love in death. Based on that, Jack didn’t like to think what he would be like in death. Somewhat in the same manner as Loret, he craved power, he could feel the demand for it in him.

  He liked to think that the craving was all about finding the strength to defeat his cousin, but who knew at this point?

  “So Robert’s after power?” Jack asked. “That’s not exactly news. Where is he trying to find this power?”

  “Not in Africa. He’s been gone for weeks; at least that’s what the scuttlebutt is. Oh yeah, don’t look surprised. The undead community is big here, lot of movers and shakers, lots of talk, lots of gossip. You should hear what they say about you…or should I say what they said about you. Everyone thinks you’re dead.”

  “Keep it that way,” Jack said with a hint of warning in his voice.

  Loret shrugged, uncommitted. “Maybe…tell me how you defeated the necromancer and maybe I’ll keep this little meeting to myself.”

  That was easy. “I didn’t defeat him. He tried to go up against forty-two trained soldiers, eight priests, and four military helicopters.”

  “And one sorcerer,” Loret added. “Don’t try to fool me, Jack. I can feel your power. You’re not the same. You’re not as strong as your cousin, but you’re not the same. You’re a mishmash, that’s what I think. The aura coming off of you is like a sail that’s been built of quilts and jackets and pieces of yarn.”

  A shiver went up Jack’s back because Loret had read him with far too much accuracy. He was a mishmash. He could feel the tiny light of Father Timmons in him and the cunning of Truong, and the menace of the necromancer and then there were the demons…so many demons—there was even a touch of the Mother of Demons in him.

  Each of these people and creatures had added a little to him, growing his power and making his soul feel like it was a junk yard of odds and ends, making it feel as though his soul was no longer even his own.

  He stifled the sudden queasy feeling that had bloomed in his gut and said: “Let’s just say he was defeated in a joint effort. I just happened to have lived through it. Now, about my cousin. What’s his ultimate goal? It can’t just be about power. He has to have more of an end motive.”

  “Some people might think that power is a goal in itself,” Loret countered. “Or maybe since Robert is being hunted on four continents, his goal is simply survival?” Loret paused and then suddenly brayed like a donkey, spewing rotting lung on Jack, who only stared in growing impatience. “Sorry, but that’s just funny. Okay, I don’t know what he’s up to…really, it’s true. You know that I’ve dedicated my life…my ‘unlife’ to finding him and killing him. Why would I lie to you?”

  Jack figured that he probably wouldn’t and so he shrugged. “So why are you here?”

  This seemed to infuriate Loret. “I’m here because I can’t just catch a cab or a train. Do you think I can board a plane with this face? But maybe if I had some money…”

  “You want money from me?” Jack asked, incredulously.

  “I can’t exactly get a job, now can I? I don’t need much. A few hundred dollars. It’s either you give it to me or I kill to get it. Those would be deaths on your head.”

  This was a new low, Jack thought. He was being blackmailed for money by something that was only a step above a zombie. And yet what could Jack do? He had created Loret and it would’ve been justice to send him back to hell where he belonged; however Jack couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  One day Loret would go back to where he belonged and would likely find Jack there waiting for him.

  Another sigh, this one a long deserty sigh, escaped Jack as he dug out the money Cyn had wired to the bank in Aswan. Loret’s eyes went big but Jack said: “Naw, don’t get your hopes up. First off, this isn’t my money and second, I owe the priest more than I can possibly give you.”

  In truth, he didn’t owe the priest a penny; however the state of his church could be described as “ramshackle,” and that was only if Jack was being generous; he couldn’t leave without giving an offering.

  Slowly, feeling disgusting, he peeled away four hundred dollars from the roll and gave it to Loret, making him promise “To be good,” without defining exactly what that meant. The ghoul nodded without listening as he flicked back the twenties, counting with a line of drool coming from one of his numb lips.

  Jack left him and went to the priest and tried to explain the state of things. It was clear that the priest had expected a battle of some sort with Loret and not a lot of talk, and he especially didn’t think that it was right for Jack to have given the ghoul any money.

  He was slightly mollified when Loret disappeared into the night and it also helped that Jack gave him five hundred dollars and all the coins he had taken from the necromancer’s vault, to go towards fixing the church.

  Wrapping the sword once again, Jack made his way back to the hotel. He was sure that Cyn would still be sleeping and he wondered what she would say in the morning when she found out that he had given away the majority of her money. What they had left was barely enough to get to Cairo on the dilapidated and listing bus that came through the little nothing of a town every two days.

  These thoughts were on his mind as he entered the hotel lobby and he was slow to catch on that the Egyptian standing at the counter was bigger than the others in town and that there was a gun at his side beneath the long flowing shirt that he wore. Was it the police? The Muslim Brotherhood? Or was it the Egyptian version of the CIA or the KGB? Had they heard that a foreigner was in town trying to buy weapons?

  His purpose was unknown and yet the danger around him was heavy in the air. The man turned and his eyes widened as he recognized Jack; he went for his gun and he wasn’t slow. Perhaps he went for it just as a precaution, or perhaps he was there with murder on his mind. Jack couldn’t take the chance to find out which.

  Jack’s breath came out hot and strangely full and in a literal blink of the eye, the heavy, near useless scimitar was in his hands and the blade was suddenly a millimeter from the man’s neck.

  Something had happened. Something fantastic and scary. He had slowed time just as Truong had and just as the necromancer had. Time had snagged on nothing, slowing for everyone but him.

  Then it blinked back to normal.

  “Don’t…please,” the Egyptian said with his mouth hanging open and his brown eyes popped wide.

  Jack hadn’t been fully charged to begin with and slowing time had drained him again, but not as badly as he had expected. Still, he was relatively apathetic towards the Egyptian. Just then he could have sheared his head off or bought him a cup of coffee and he didn’t know which the man deserved.

  He was mulling the two choices over when something hard nudged into the side of his head. It was the barrel of a gun. Jack could smell the residue; it had been fired recently.

  “Drop the sword, Mr. Dreyden.”

&
nbsp; Chapter 17

  Nekhen, Egypt

  Jack Dreyden

  Slowly, Jack turned. The gun pressed against his face didn’t bother him so much; his mind was barely aware of it. He was still dwelling on the fact that he had just slowed time to a crawl. How had he done it and who’s whispered breath had come from his mouth? Had it been Truong’s, the necromancer’s, or had it come from the Mother of Demons herself?

  All three had the power and knew the spell, but the breathy nature of it was from the necromancer, he decided. The moment the golden lid of the necromancer’s sarcophagus had been lifted off, the creature had shot straight away at Jack and there had been an echo in his mind or in his ears right before the necromancer had tried to bury its fist in Jack’s chest. It had been a whisper and it only registered on his subconscious…and clearly his soul as well.

  Necromancer or no necromancer, how had Jack done it? He had almost stopped time without even being aware and, more importantly, without having cut himself. How could he do magic without a portal to his soul? Was there a gate to his inner being in his lungs? Or had it simply been in his breath?

  “Put the sword down, Jack,” the man with the gun ordered. He was one of the Raiders. Jack could smell the Holy Oil, and feel the blessed blade that he carried. He was like all of them: tall and strong, short bristly hair, hard eyes.

  At that moment, Jack didn’t know if he was really in the mood to move the sword off the Egyptian’s bare neck—after doing magic, he didn’t like being told what to do. His sorcery made him feel special; it made him feel greater than even this captain of men, who was all muscle and grit. It had Jack wanting to make those he deemed lesser than himself cower in abject fear…

  But then he took another breath and he was himself again, the haughtiness gone.

  He lifted the sword. “Sure. Sorry about that. I think I was just a bit jumpy after everything that’s been going on. You…you’re Captain Vance, right?” He had met him twice, both times introduced by Captain Metzger. They’d been friends. Jack’s eyes slid away.

  “Yes, I am,” Vance answered, his voice like ice.

  “You heard about Meroe I take it?”

  “I heard enough,” Vance said. “I heard that fifty men died and yet you walked away unscathed, once again. And I heard that some of the men had been shot to death; murdered in all likelihood. I heard a lot of people are looking into it.”

  A familiar angry feeling began to come over Jack and now the scimitar no longer felt so unwieldy or heavy. “Then you heard wrong.” The sword came up, the tip glinting with the oil. Even with his gun, Vance had to know that he was no match for Jack, and yet he didn’t back down. The two faced each other as the desk clerk and the tall Egyptian backed away.

  “Okay, forget what I heard. What about what I saw?” Vance asked. “I saw the corpses in bodybags stacked like bales of hay and inside were friends of mine.”

  Jack glared, feeling the power grow within him. Vance had his finger in the trigger guard; he was too well trained for that to be chalked up to emotion. He was a moment from firing his weapon.

  “Stop!” a high voice demanded, breaking the moment and shifting their focus. Cyn was standing on the stairs that led from the upper floors. She was dressed in the clothes that Jack had bought for her. Somehow she made the loose fitting ‘shrouds’ appear sexy as if they hinted of the fine woman beneath instead of concealing her.

  “The truth is the truth, Jack,” she said. “Don’t pretend it doesn’t exist.”

  Vance lowered his weapon and asked: “What is the truth? What happened to Metzger and the others? They were shot. No one needed to see the autopsy report to know that.”

  Cyn took a moment to answer. “The truth is that brave men died doing their duty. The truth was that they were facing an ancient necromancer…one of the Nephilim, one of the race that ruled the world and enslaved man back even before the Egyptians or the Uruks. They were mentioned a couple of times in the Bible. They were giants, but I didn’t know they were magical in any way.”

  “He was one of the last of his kind,” Jack said, speaking words that were mostly just an echo in his head. Some part of the necromancer was buried deep inside of him, but was still alive and would remain alive until Jack breathed his last. “But how do you know?” he asked Cyn. She had not slain the necromancer and she hadn’t been connected to it as Jack had been.

  Now it was her turn to avert her eyes and Jack understood. She had her own connections—The Mother of Demons; The Queen of Souls.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter,” Jack said, making light of something with far reaching implications. Whatever those implications were, they didn’t bear on that moment. He turned to Vance and handed over his sword. “I liked Metzger, he was a good man and that’s why I killed him. I killed him to save his soul and to defeat the necromancer. Cyn will tell you. I need something to eat.”

  Any sorcery made him hungry, but just then he wanted to get away from Vance and his Egyptian friend as fast as possible. The story of how he had killed Metzger and the others was an open wound that didn’t need salt poured on it. Weaponless, he went back out into the town, looking for a bar to start drinking in; however, this was a Muslim country and since the Event, muslims had drawn in and had become even more fundamentalist.

  With the ban on alcohol being stringently enforced, Jack settled on a place that specialized in strong tea, strange meats, dates and sticky rice.

  He was digging into a plate of what seemed like a combination of all four when Cyn found him. “They’re not too happy with my explanation,” she announced as she sat down.

  “Good for them,” he answered and then scooped in another mouthful of food. It didn’t taste good, but it was filling and he felt empty, not just spiritually but also physically; his insides were a cavern, echoey and cold.

  “It’s not good. There’s been another ‘incident’ as they call it.” Jack looked up from his food quickly and Cyn shook her head. “No, not another necromancer. It wasn’t even a fiend. Just a big bunch of ghouls and a few demons. Vance said: ‘two-hundred little and twelve big,’ but I knew what he meant.”

  Two-hundred ghouls and twelve demons—it was too much for all the Raiders combined. “How many good guys were on the ground?”

  “A few hundred plus helicopters, but they were late to the party. It was a blood bath among the civilians. By the time the Raiders got there, basically everyone was killed. An entire town of thirteen thousand, all dead.”

  Jack stared at his plate, feeling guilt over the fact that he had chosen to hide from his cousin for the last week. “Where did all this happen?” he asked, wondering if he could have done anything to stop it.

  “That’s the strange thing, it happened in this town in Lebanon that I never heard of, Chaqra or something like that. Anyway, Robert stirred up a graveyard so that he could get what he wanted without being noticed.”

  “And what did he want?” he asked. She had begun eyeing Jack’s plate and she didn’t look up as she shrugged. Jack stirred his tea absently and said: “Chaqra. What the hell was in Chaqra?”

  She shrugged a second time and then poked around in Jack’s plate for a piece of meat. “Well, that’s chewy,” she said after popping something grey into her mouth. She chewed for a long time and then eventually spat out the hunk into a napkin. “Never heard of it and neither has anyone else. Not even Google…well I guess it has listings like anywhere else but there’s nothing there of a historical note.”

  After gnawing for a time on what Jack was beginning to think was the foot of a goat, he said: “Perhaps nothing that is in most text books, but Robert was there for a reason. Something pointed him to that village…or to that area in general. Lebanon has been well travelled and populated since man started plodding out of Africa. The Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Uruks, all traveled in that area, but where are the ties to ancient Egypt?”

  “That’s the mystery that the government wants us to solve.”

  “Just like that?
Did Vance even say please?”

  This time Cyn tried her luck with the date-rice combo. It was chewy as well but at last she swallowed. “No, but the orders didn’t come from him and he wasn’t exactly happy about it either. He doesn’t trust you.”

  “And you? Do you trust me?” He meant the fact that she hadn’t touched him at all in the last day and a half.

  She didn’t hesitate. “Yes I do. I’m just in a weird spot and thinking some bad thoughts. And really it wasn’t you who I didn’t trust.”

  “You don’t trust yourself. I get it, Cyn. I’ve been there. In fact, I’ve been there frequently. I second guess myself all the time, but I’ve never second guessed you. You’re my anchor. Here, let’s get something out of the way right now.” He glanced around at the seedy little coffee house, taking in the patrons, fifteen men, ranging from a table of geezers with wrinkles as deep as river canyons to a few teenagers trying to look tough despite their baby faces.

  The men spoke in low voices and looked their way every few minutes, though it was mostly toward Cyn that they directed their eyes. Custom dictated that women didn’t belong and yet she was clearly a foreigner and since they needed the tourist dollars desperately they only ground their teeth and made comments they were sure couldn’t be understood. They weren’t subtle.

  Jack waited until no one was watching and then brought out his knife. With a practiced, move he cut the heel of his left hand and then held the knife and his hand out to her.

  Cyn began to bite her lip. “Jack, I don’t know about this. What if She is still in me somewhere? It won’t be safe for you.”

  “It’ll be safer if we find out right now instead of in the middle of a fight. And if she’s in there, maybe we can evict her or perhaps make her less than she was. Remember, Cyn, this is your body. No one runs it except you. Remember when we were in the necromancer’s dungeon? I tried to take the power of your soul and you stopped me cold.”