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

by Peter Meredith

  “And I wished I hadn’t.”

  Jack waved away a fly, dripping blood in the process. “That’s not the point. You could have stopped her, and you did. Right at the end. Now, cut yourself before I scare the locals more than I am. It’s probably gotten around that I bought a sword and then there was Dr. Loret…” Her eyes went big and she started to stutter out a question, but he waved that away as well. “I’ll tell you as soon as you cut yourself. Come on, Cyn. We’ve never been stronger than when we’re in things together.”

  “That’s just it, I don’t want to be strong. I want to be me, just a girl in love with a boy. I don’t want to be Mr. and Mrs. Rulers of the Universe. I have my shotgun…Or I had it. That’s all I need to take on Robert.”

  “Maybe, but I really doubt it.”

  She pulled not only her hand back, but also her entire body. Without looking up she whispered: “She went too deep and now it’s all there wide open. I don’t think you know what I’m trying to say. I’ve felt you when you were at your weakest and yet you were still you. Deep, deep down, you were still you, but I…I feel like I’ve been pierced.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “I think I understand.” And he did. When he was whole and safe, he knew that his soul really wasn’t murky or muddled. It was more of a medley or a stew of different ingredients that only added to the flavor, but no matter what, Jack had always kept that kernel of himself deep, deep down.

  He guessed that it was true for everyone and yet few people had ever had their soul tested in battle. Cyn had been tested, only her first test had been against the Mother of Demons—one of the Gods of the Undead. It would be a wonder if her soul hadn’t been pierced right through, kernel or no kernel.

  “So Chaqra?” he asked, giving her a smile and then wrapping his hand in a napkin.

  She was glad for the change of subject. “Yes. They want us to fly out as soon as they can get a proper plane into Luxor. They’ve had people searching for us all over the desert. When they found the Volvo they knew we were close.”

  Jack shoved his plate away. “Well there goes any shot we had at sneaking up on Robert. Chances are he knows exactly where we are now.”

  Cyn didn’t agree. “I doubt it. He has every major intelligence agency on the planet looking for him. He is probably so engrossed in hiding that he’s forgotten us. And if not, then he’s got his own plans he has to worry about.” She went for his fork and started to dig around at the odds and ends until her eyes went big. “There’s a hair. Oh, that’s so gross. Come on, let’s get out of here. I just hope the food is better in Lebanon.”

  Chapter 18

  Nekhen, Egypt

  Cynthia Childs

  They did get to eat, eventually, though they didn’t eat at all in Lebanon. From Luxor, Egypt, they flew to Tel Aviv, Israel where they ate until they were round in the belly and sleepy. Then came a three hour drive, which they both slept through, that ended at Chaqra where their appetites disappeared altogether. The destruction and the stench of the corpses that had been left to rot in the sun had Captain Vance and his four man team of Raiders gagging.

  Cyn and Jack, though no longer hungry, went among the dead unfazed at least when it came to their stomachs. Their emotional state was a different story. Seeing the ordinary people torn apart like they had been had Jack blinking back tears every few seconds.

  “It’s not our fault, Jack,” Cyn whispered, taking his hand. “We wouldn’t have gotten in here in time even if we had been with the other Raiders.”

  “Oh yeah? Then why does everyone always keep looking at us as if we were somehow to blame for all of this? Maybe I should get teeshirts made that say: Not my Fault! Or maybe one that says: Am I My Cousin’s Keeper? Do you think they would get it then?”

  Cyn gave him a tired smile and said nothing. Besides the Raiders and the three tired companies of Knights that stood dejectedly around the battleground, there were a few hundred Lebanese soldiers, a cadre of government types and a handful of imams, all of whom were red-eyed and furious; they frequently cast dark glances at Jack and Cyn.

  She pulled him away from the dead and he went with her, eagerly. They both knew that there was nothing in the pools of blood and the cast away limbs and the flayed skin hanging like morbid banners that would lead them to Robert. To get to the bottom of this, they would have to go deeper than this top layer of blood.

  After a short conversation that consisted of a lot of gesturing, a Lebanese officer pointed them south and sent a soldier with them to unearth what Robert was really after.

  The soldier, skinny and nervous, walked with his head bent back toward Jack and Cyn so much that he tripped on any little thing. Finally, Jack strode past him. “This way?” Jack asked. The soldier nodded to where a drainage ditch cut a third of the town away from the rest. It was an open, slow moving sewer that stank as badly as the city of corpses. Again, Jack and Cyn walked unaffected until they came to a veritable bog of refuse that overflowed its banks.

  “What the hell?” Jack whispered under his breath. The drainage ditch had been dammed and now was backing into the town. The soldier pointed around to the left and they followed, carefully until they emerged on the other side of a makeshift wall of rock and dirt that had been erected by hand—by undead hands.

  Robert had used a portion of his undead army to throw up the dam. His thralls had then begun an excavation beneath the sewer ditch. There was a tremendous hole, thirty feet across that went straight down into the earth. There were Lebanese soldiers here as well, but they kept well back and had their weapons pointed at the hole as if expecting it to suddenly explode with ghouls.

  “Has anyone been down there yet?” Cyn asked.

  Captain Vance shook his head. “I asked the same thing but not even the Knights wanted to chance it. They say they have no idea how deep it goes.”

  Jack and Cyn went to the edge of the hole and looked in. The bottom couldn’t be seen and the smell coming out of it was that of condensed evil. The hole was perfectly circular and along the side was a carven ledge that spiraled down. “There’s nothing here,” he said to Vance. “No monsters, I mean. They’re long gone. What you smell is the residue of the creatures that had dug the hole. There had to be a hundred ghouls down in there.”

  “Yeah,” Cyn agreed. “Watch.” She picked up a stone and flung it into the pit. It fell a long time before there was a muffled thud. Vance waited for a few seconds, with his head cocked, listening. “See?” she said. “There’s nothing down there that’ll hurt you.”

  The spiraling footpath seemed safe enough. It was five feet wide and the slope was gentle as it wound down into the earth. Jack and Cyn led the way with Vance and the nervous soldier following. Cyn was once again decked out in her Kevlar armor and there was a new shotgun pitched up on her shoulder. Jack’s sword was also new. With great forethought, the quartermaster of the Raider Squads kept extra swords and kevlar armor for both him and Cyn on hand.

  Jack demanded a precise length and balance to his swords. He knew that these sorts of demands were frowned upon and that they made him look a bit like a prima donna, but he didn’t care. The scimitar had been an ugly, hacking weapon and had been tossed away and promptly forgotten at the sight of “his” sword. The scimitar just wasn’t a weapon for a fencer.

  Though he carried the sword, he left it sheathed. There was nothing to fear in the hole. Yes, it was very deep, well over sixty feet deep, and the darkness multiplied with every step down, but he wasn’t afraid in the least. Robert was long gone.

  Vance had a flashlight joined beneath his tactical shotgun. It wasn’t very practical as a light source. Both Jack and Cyn wanted to study the walls for clues as they descended but Vance was adamant about keeping the gun pointed the way they were going; he didn’t trust Jack’s assurance that the hole was empty.

  As their feet disappeared into the murky dark, Jack fingered a pinch of sand in his pocket and showed it to Cyn. She shook her head at him, knowing that a show of sorcery would only ups
et the Lebanese soldier, who appeared on the verge of bolting.

  “We need the light to figure out what Robert had been after,” he whispered. She could tell that all the nasty looks he’d been getting had put him in a mood, one that even she couldn’t affect, at least not down in a hole where the smell of blood wafted up.

  When they reached the bottom of the hole and the sky was only a dim disk high above, Jack blew on the sand in his palm and immediately the little group was inundated with golden specs that hung in the air. Even though she knew it would cause trouble, Cyn couldn’t help smile. It felt to her as if there were a thousand fairies floating above her. The light warmed her soul, but she was in the minority.

  With a cry, the Lebanese soldier backed away, his hand feeling the walls as he fled, never taking his eyes off of Jack.

  “Impressive,” Vance growled. “But then so are these inventions called flashlights. There was no need to make a scene. The Lebanese are half out of their minds already.”

  “I asked for light on more than one occasion,” Jack said. “Next time, give it to me.”

  Vance gave Cyn a look that she read as: Control him! She pretended not to see it. Jack wasn’t a dog whose leash she could yank and who she could order to heel.

  She walked away to inspect the bottom of the hole. Unfortunately, it didn’t appear as though it was going to tell them much. Yes, there was a circle of obscured glyphs and there was a hollowed-out gravesite complete with the impression of a skeleton and a few crumbled pieces of bone, all of which amounted to little more than debris and bone dust.

  To learn anything, someone would have to take samples to a lab. With a sigh, she looked up at the sides of the hole.

  Next to her, Vance tried to wave away the particles floating near his face, which only caused them to spin about him in a dizzying fashion. He had to duck low to get away from them. “Listen, Jack,” he said. “There’s not going to be a next time. Not with me and not with anyone else. In case you were wondering, your reason for murdering Metzger and the others is complete and total crap. That’s pretty much what everyone is saying. There’s not a Raider team who’s willing to work with you now.”

  Jack didn’t look all that upset at this. In fact, it looked as though he hadn’t heard; he too was busy studying the walls. “Too bad for them,” he said to Vance, absently. Vance’s eyes went wide and his knuckles turned white on his gun.

  Cyn quickly put herself between them and pointed up at the wall of the hole. “This find is deep, wouldn’t you say so Jack? Though it may not be that surprising since a lot could have happened in the last six or seven thousand years to bury it.”

  “I don’t think we’re looking at that sort of timeline,” Jack replied. “Look at the strata. See how thick it is? That’s clue number one. That suggests…”

  Vance interrupted, grabbing Jack and spinning him around. “Too bad for them? Really? Did you really just say that? Because I think it’s too bad for you. You’re hanging by a thread with the Justice Department. Everyone knows that.”

  This earned Vance a shrug. In Jack’s world, there were many things worse than jail. “I only meant that it is too bad more people will die because of that attitude. Now, if you don’t mind, there is more to my job than just shooting a gun and complaining about things I don’t understand.”

  Vance started to puff up in anger and Cyn quickly grabbed Jack with one hand and gestured at the walls with the other as if she were a game-show model. “Are you saying this is strata from a river bed? Or a flood plain?”

  He eyed Vance for a moment before answering: “I can’t tell yet, but the layers are thick enough to suggest a major flood event every forty years or so. You don’t get that anywhere else but a flood plain or river bed. Vance, shine your light higher up the wall…please.” He had forgotten his manners until Cyn elbowed him.

  The light, higher than the glow of Jack’s suspended particles, showed more of these deposits of silt stacked one atop another. “I would say flood plain,” Cyn said.

  “But this is an exceptionally dry land,” Jack countered. “I say river bed. We’ll get some samples taken and…”

  Vance dropped the light, suddenly. “Aren’t you going to find out who was buried here? Isn’t that more important than whether this was a river or some plain?”

  “We’re getting there all in good time,” Jack said. “But you can go look if you want. If you see a tombstone that says: Joe Blow, let me know, but if there’s only a few shreds of this or that and the dust of bones, then keep quiet, will you? The first thing we should do is establish a time line.”

  Still glaring, the soldier stalked away and shone his light down at what was left of the skeleton. Dropping into a squat, he poked a piece of thigh bone with the end of his gun. “Why did the ghoul leave behind these pieces? You know, when it was animated or possessed or whatever you call it.”

  Jack rolled his eyes at the interruption and let out an aggravated breath. “Because it wasn’t animated. There just wasn’t enough of it left to allow a demon or ghoul in.”

  Cyn decided to humor Vance and knelt down next to him. She touched the blood glyphs, feeling the evil in the dried blood. They had been kicked away and were impossible to read.

  Next she inspected what was left of the bones and the ground under them. “He was tall,” she said. “Close to six foot. And you were right, this isn’t six-thousand years old.” She held up a crumble of what looked like rust; Jack grunted at it.

  “What?” Vance asked, shining his light at her hand. “That looks like rust.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Which puts this find in the iron age. In the mideast that means that what we’re looking at is 3,300 years old at the most. Though I would say that it was closer to 2,000 years old.”

  Jack finally came to kneel next to the others. In his hand was one of the glowing grains of sand. He set it to hovering over the remains. “I agree. Likely a Roman and at his height, a centurion.”

  “And you know he was a centurion, how?” Vance asked.

  Jack, who had his nose down inches from the bones, said, “First, the age of the find: iron age. The length of the line of rust, just a hair over two-feet, suggests that what had been here was a gladius: the Roman short sword. And see this, what looks like ancient red mulch? It was likely from a scarlet cloak, again common among Roman soldiers. Now the fact that he was buried alone and not in either a mass grave or a mausoleum puts his rank somewhere between common legionnaire and a Primus Pilus. Any one of higher rank than Pilus would have been buried with honors, even on a battlefield.”

  Cyn gave a shrug. “Sound logic, but who was he? Robert went to a lot of trouble in digging this guy up.”

  “We’ll never know,” Jack said. “Robert did all of this and killed all those people for nothing. This guy’s bones are too far gone to resurrect. I don’t even know why he tried.”

  “Ha!” Cyn cried, jumping to stand tall over Jack and Vance. “Oh, what a rookie mistake. It’s elementary my dear, Jack. Robert does indeed know who this was.”

  Even though she was clearly making fun of him, Jack grinned up at her, sitting back next to the remains of some long dead centurion as if he was in a school library ready to have story time. “Tell us, Cyn, how does Robert know?”

  She began pacing back and forth, holding a single finger aloft, feeling like herself for the first time since her ordeal with the Mother. “First, the glyphs. Yes, you can’t read them, but, you can tell there’s only a single ring. To raise the dead three spells and two rings are needed.”

  Jack’s face lost its pleasant grin. His blue eyes narrowed as he stared at the smeared glyphs. “One ring of twenty-two symbols. That doesn’t match any of the spells I know, either.”

  “Exactly,” Cyn said, beaming at her star pupil. “Robert wasn’t trying to raise the dead. If I had to guess, he was just trying to talk to the dead, which would suggest he knows who this was. There is no way he would just start talking to random skeletons sixty feet beneath
the earth.”

  They all stared down at the remains until Vance asked: “So who is that? He’s got to be someone important.”

  “He’s probably a mistake,” Jack said, though for once, he didn’t sound so sure of himself. “He must be. There is no connection between a first or second century Roman soldier and the necromancers who reigned four-thousand years before Rome existed. And Rome wasn’t known for its sorcery. Babylon and Ur, yes, but not Rome. If I had to guess, Robert didn’t know what he was getting and yet…and yet, he came right here. Someone or something directed him.”

  Cyn reached out to touch the last shard of skull. “So he was important. But how so?”

  Jack put his hands out and hovered them over the smeared glyphs and then the flakes of bones and the crackles of rust. He sighed and there was a touch of anger to it. “I’m getting nothing. There was some spell work done but I don’t know what was used.”

  He knelt over the glyphs for a good hour and during that time, Vance stood to the side, looking bored and Cyn collected various samples from the gravesite and a few spots along the walls that she found interesting.

  Eventually, when they didn’t suddenly divine Robert’s current location and plans from some rust and a bit of blood, the Lebanese moved them along to bring in their own “experts,” imams of proven valor.

  These, it turned out, were few and far between. It came as a shock to the religious world that those spiritual leaders who taught intolerance, and preached death to gays and the murder of “infidels,” and who treated women not even as second class citizens but as chattel, were not actually holy at all and had no power over the undead.

  Jack’s earlier spell work had caused a ruckus among the locals, who wanted to put a torch to anyone who had even a whiff of magic about them. Before a riot broke out, he and Cyn were bustled out of the hole and into a sand-brown truck that rattled so much they were sure that it was losing pieces by the mile. They sped out of the destroyed town kicking up great flocks of fat birds; these had feathers of black and beaks that dripped red.