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

by Peter Meredith

  She gave an odd look at his laugh, but then smirked, saying: “Don’t try to pin that on me. You came to me with your crazy story, not the other way around. I was simply an innocent bystander.”

  “Well, it wasn’t my fau…”

  Captain Vance interrupted them, yelling over the sound of the turbines. “What the hell? You two got thirty choppers waiting on you. Rap up your flirtations and get on board the damned bird!”

  “Bloody touchy,” Cyn said, speaking right into Jack’s ear. “Makes me miss Captain Metzger even more.”

  Bringing up the murdered Captain killed Jack’s laughter. He missed the man as well, just as he missed Father Timmons and Father Jordan. Though Jack had griped constantly, they had been good teammates, certainly better to Jack than he had been to them—a new regret on his part to add to the thousand he had in the cold storage of his soul.

  The pair, the last two to board the choppers, climbed in and held on. Within seconds, the French birds were in the air, leaving the abandoned town behind and flowing over the hills, which all seemed to be covered in grapevines or trees of a thousand different hues of green.

  In a double “V” formation, they sped straight west over the blue ribbon of the Loire River to Tours, where the world was thankfully no longer a black storm of horror. Robert’s demons were too busy fighting to stay earthbound to bother with the unnatural darkness or the cold or the stench, none of which would bother the undead soldiers of Jack’s forces.

  Not that the Tours was in any way as beautiful as it once had been. Thousands of buildings smoldered and sent up plumes of smoke, while the streets were strewn with corpses, some looking horribly sad, splayed out and unmoving in disjointed positions, and others fighting tooth and nail with other corpses, tearing and rending each other to pieces. There was a great deal of blood in the streets; from the air, the streets glistened a copper-brown.

  Once they crossed the river, orders were relayed to the choppers, so that the formation seemed to dissolve in midair, the birds spreading out to form a long line that slowly swept along and from each, men stared downwards looking for any sign of Robert or what he might have been after.

  Jack stared along with the rest of them until there was cry from one of the Raiders riding in the same copter. Jack couldn’t see what was being pointed at but he saw Cyn shake her head and he knew that it was a false alarm. For the next few minutes, Jack watched her instead of the ground. She was so much more interesting.

  Cyn squinted down, her face full of concentration, tiny lines creasing her forehead, her lips, normally full, were now drawn in. In that brief moment, he saw the future Cynthia Childs. He saw clearly what she would look like forty years from then and he liked what he saw. There would be grey in her hair and those tiny lines would be deeper, but she would still be beautiful and she would still have that impertinent smirk.

  A harsh thought killed the moment: She’ll still have that smirk in forty years, IF she lives that long.

  “She’ll live that long,” he muttered, pulling his eyes off of Cyn and concentrating on the ground, or at least he tried to concentrate. He tried to focus on the streets and the buildings, but soon his mind wandered and his vision blurred as the city became a kaleidoscope of ugliness. Within the horror there was a darker horror, the remnants of necromancy, the stench of blood-work. He had felt it as they passed over the cemetery Robert had used to create his army; now, he felt it again.

  Cyn could sense the necromancy better than he could and beat him to the punch. “There,” she said, pointing down at a complex of white-topped buildings, at least one of which was a church of some sort. “Set us down. I can feel…something. The spells to open the gate, I think, but since there are no cemeteries around, Robert wasn’t trying to raise a second army.”

  This suggested that Robert was after only a single person; the last piece to the puzzle? Jack certainly hoped so, no matter what the danger was. He felt stretched and worn from the long chase and was eager for it to be over with. “Have the pilot land as close as possible. In fact, get all the choppers on the ground. I want to blanket the area. Place teams at every street corner within five blocks and have them detain anyone that isn’t already dead.”

  The orders were carried out quickly, although they weren’t carried out with what anyone would call military precision. The orders were too vague and the area too large and sprawling. Pilots chose their own destinations to land generally with the safety of their aircraft in mind rather than simply dropping down among the telephone wires, the street lights and the looming buildings.

  The lead helicopter took a calculated risk to land in a church parking lot where there were light poles and sculpted shrubs and a few of the funny little cars that so many of the French drove. There was precious little room to spare for the rotors, perhaps only a few feet on either side, and Jack could see the sweat coursing from beneath the pilot’s helmet as he brought them down with a light thump.

  “Go! Go!” bawled Captain Vance. The ten Raiders, composed of two priests, six warriors, plus Cyn and Jack, jumped out of the chopper and crouched with their weapons drawn and ready, awaiting an onslaught that didn’t occur. No horde of undead broke over them. No ice-breathing demons attacked.

  After a few seconds, Captain Vance pointed at the sky and the copter lifted off. When it was gone, a deathly silence filled the church grounds. Only their breathing could be heard until Cyn said: “I don’t feel any of them nearby. I feel the remnants of a spell. It’s in there.” She pointed at one of the smaller buildings.

  Judging by the size and shape of the building, it could only be a crypt, and a crypt of someone of historical note. The entrance was dominated by Doric columns, twice the height of Captain Vance, while the rest of the structure was cast entirely in marble tile. The lettering carved into the stone above the entrance was faded with age, but still legible.

  “Can anyone read French,” Vance asked.

  “That’s not French,” Jack remarked. “That’s Latin.”

  The neat little priest who had earlier been drinking coffee out of a teacup said: “Yes, it is indeed. It says that this is the final resting place of Gregory of Tours. Very interesting, I’d say.”

  “Interesting in what way?” Vance asked. “What’s he got to do with the Roman guy or that thing back in the Sudan?”

  “And what’s he got to do with Egypt?” Jack asked. The clues were so oddly distinct and so separated by time and distance that he couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. “What’s Google say about this guy?”

  Vance raised an eyebrow at this. “Google? I thought you were an archeologist. What sort of archeologist uses Google?”

  “The kind that knows history is too vast to know everything there is about everyone,” Jack shot back. “As well as the kind that needs answers right now. We need to know what we might be facing in there.”

  “Possibly nothing,” Cyn said, her cell phone glowing bright in front of her face. “I was way ahead of you with the internet search, but as far as I can tell there isn’t a connection between Saint Gregory and Egypt, or one between him and the Mother or between him and Rome for that matter. He was the Bishop of Tours until he died in 594 AD. Before that he was a hagiographer, which is basically a biographer but one who focused on saints and he was famous in his time for his writings, most notably for a set of books on Saint Martin, also of Tours.”

  She paused for a time, her eyes scanning the pages. When she was done, she made a face of disgust. “That’s about it. The only thing that’s of note in my opinion is that he was related to thirteen of the previous Bishops of Tours. They sort of had a monopoly in that field.”

  “That could easily be chalked up to nepotism run amok,” Jack said, coming to stand hovering over her shoulder, squinting down at the screen. The article on Gregory was just as she had said, and none of it looked helpful. When he finished reading it from top to bottom, he scowled first at the phone and then in at the crypt, which was shrouded in shadow. He wasn’t afraid
of what lay beyond the broken doors. He knew there was no ghoul version of St. Gregory within it. All he could sense was the residue of the spell, reminding him of what he carried around in his head.

  “Let’s go inside and check it out,” Jack said, unable to come up with a better idea. “Maybe we’ll find more clues.”

  The soldiers went first, crouched behind their tactical shotguns. Jack and Cyn strolled in after Vance had declared the room to be: “Clear.” It was, sadly, not clear. On the floor in the middle of the room was a fresh corpse, a child with a face forever warped by pain. Around the child were the blotted remains of the twin circles.

  Just beyond that was the tomb of St. Gregory; it had been torn open by something strong enough to break a five-inch slab of granite into chunks. Vance moved up to the edge of the tomb and glanced in with a quick peek. “He ain’t here, not even scraps.”

  Jack came up next and glanced in. “Can you point your flashlight inside the tomb?” he asked Vance. “Yes, right there. You can see the faint outline of where a body used to be and that odd substance that looks like mold isn’t mold, it’s hair. Gregory was definitely here until very recently.”

  “And now Robert has him,” Cyn said. “Ol’ Greg must know something, but what?”

  “Perhaps he knows something about someone else,” suggested the slim priest. “He was a hagiographer. Maybe he knew something about one of the saints. I say we check out Saint Martin since his tomb is the closest.”

  Everyone agreed and, after another Google check showed that St. Martin’s tomb was two miles to the west, they called down their hovering chopper, which came to land once more in the parking lot. Quickly they were buzzing above the pretty trees and the strewn corpses and pools of blood.

  They were there in just over a minute. As the pilot gazed down and saw that there was nowhere to land within the vicinity and everyone else was checking out the destruction of St. Martin’s tomb, Jack was peering between moments in time.

  Their sudden appearance had surprised a sorcerer. It was a man dressed in velvety clothes of black. They swam around him, making Jack think he was wearing a long, flowing a cloak. He ran up out of a huge hole that had been dug under the north end of St. Martin’s mausoleum. Only Jack saw him and he did for just a blink; the sorcerer was there for a second and then in the next second, time changed.

  The sorcerer slowed time to a crawl so that he seemed to blaze away in an impossible blur. “Son of a bitch!” Jack seethed, knowing that if he waited for the chopper to nose about for a place to land, the sorcerer would be long gone, and he couldn’t take that chance. He had to catch the man and find out why he was at the tomb and what he knew about St. Martin and if he was working for Robert in some capacity.

  It would mean a fight, but only if Jack could catch him first, and there was only one way to do that: he leapt from the helicopter…from a hundred feet up.

  Chapter 26

  Tours, France

  Jack Dreyden

  Scientifically, Jack knew that the velocity of a free-falling object was not static. A falling object accelerated at thirty-two feet per second, and then doubled that speed every second. Meaning that in the first second an object fell, it would travel thirty-two feet and during the next second, it would fall an additional sixty-four feet and in the third second it would travel a hundred and twenty-eight feet.

  There would be no third second for Jack. He would be just a smidge into that third second before he struck with a sickening thud on the street below, becoming just another corpse in a city full of them.

  However, Jack possessed both magic and the knowledge that the speed at which he fell was dependent on time, something he could control. “Phra-isth rath em,” he said as he dropped, slowing time to a tenth of normal speed. It was a strange sensation, dropping away from the side of the helicopter and seeing the blades spinning above him, moving in long sweeps like a clock with four “second” hands. The noise of their passage was distorted in his ears, sounding like a long low rumble among a background of distortion.

  The edges of the world and everything in it blurred; everything except Jack’s sword, which he whipped out of its sheath the moment he landed at a tenth the speed he normally would have.

  Thirty feet away, the sorcerer, another Chinese sorcerer, spun about just as time snapped back. The man stood only as tall as Jack’s chin and seemed wiry within his billowing cloak. He was somewhat ageless; his tan skin smooth and his hair black as jet, and yet there were wrinkles at the corner of one of his eyes.

  The other eye was simply gone and in its place was a charred black crater from which an oily pus dripped. It looked as though someone had recently used his face to put out a torch.

  “Go your way, Visha Ra-aye and I will go mine,” he said, his hands disappearing within his cloak.

  “I just need to know what you were doing in that tomb?” Jack demanded, moving to his right, the sorcerer’s blind side. He would strive to attack from that angle if he could.

  “I said: go your way, Visha Ra-aye and I will go mine. Do not question me and I will not question you.”

  Any other day he might have gone his own way, he might have been able to put aside the hyper-aggression that seemed to come over him in the presence of another sorcerer. He might have ignored the need to do battle, but just then he had a stronger need.

  “You will tell me and then I will decide if I let you go or not.”

  Anger flared in the one eye left to the sorcerer. “You are a fool. You do not understand the gift I give. I am counted among the waters. I am the Master of the Eastern Rivers.”

  Clearly Jack was supposed to be impressed by this, but wasn’t. “Maybe I am a fool since I really don’t care what you’re the master of.”

  “You should care, Visha Ra-aye, because I am allowing you to live. My power is far greater; my magics far more subtle, my knowledge vast compared to yours.”

  “Your magics are subtle?” Jack asked. “That hole in your head doesn’t look all that subtle.” The sorcerer glared and ground his teeth, inadvertently showing Jack his “hole card” so to speak. “I see now. You’re not ‘letting’ me live. The truth is you’re hoping I don’t kill you. You tangled with something too big to tangle with and now you’re weak, so weak that some nothing like myself might just wipe the floor with you.”

  The sorcerer didn’t reply to this, perhaps because he knew that Jack would see through his lie. “That’s what I thought,” Jack said. “Now, since I don’t give a rat’s ass about what river you’re the master of, you’re going to tell me what I want to know right now or you’re going to tell me once I have my sword run up through your guts.”

  “No,” the sorcerer answered, and then in a blur, he cut himself, spraying blood and hissing: “Kru vah ah-tan!” The droplets of blood falling from the cut on his wrist suddenly changed from red to black, and from rounded drops to sharp angles. Before they struck the street, they changed course and darted at Jack so fast that he only had time to thrown himself to the side. He was too slow and a dozen of the black darts struck him. Eight of them hit his armor with the sound of bacon sizzling and leaving holes in the Kevlar.

  One hit the inside of his right elbow; there was a sharp pain and then complete numbness that spread to his bicep. Another hit his wrist paralyzing everything from the spot down to his fingertips, causing the blessed sword to drop with a clang onto the street.

  The third and fourth of the little darts struck him on the neck and on the face, making his head cant over and his mouth droop as though he’d just had a stroke. Now, even if he knew some sort of counter spell, he wouldn’t have been able to use it.

  Unable to wield either his spells or his sword, Jack was out of the fight practically before it started, and yet the sorcerer didn’t stop. He cut himself again and another dozen black blood-darts shot at Jack, who could only throw his left arm over his face and try to turn away. The arm went dead as did his left leg.

  He fell to the ground and tried to crawl awa
y, looking over his shoulder as the sneering Master of the Eastern River came on, his face screwed up with evil delight. He had won and now he wanted to punish Jack for his insolence; he wanted to hurt him. Before he could; however, a rattle of machine gun fire erupted.

  The French helicopter carrying Cyn and Captain Vance had dropped down so that it was forty feet above the street and now the door gunner fired at the sorcerer, but with seemingly no effect. The air shimmered around the man in a glowing bubble that sparked gold every time a bullet struck it and there was enough strikes to cast shadows and make Jack squint against the glare.

  With a growled spell, the sorcerer shot a bolt of lightning up through the bubble at the chopper, hitting it in the tail rotor and causing it to begin spinning out of control. Two seconds later, the helicopter dropped out of sight and crashed with a great deal of breaking glass and shrieking of metal. Jack’s heart was in his throat as he waited for what he thought would be the inevitable explosion signaling the death of the woman he loved, but thankfully none came.

  Jack sagged, both in relief and defeat, and tried to say Stop, please; however what came out of his paralyzed face was: “Shnap fees.”

  This only made the sorcerer sneer all that much harder. “I am Master of the Eastern Rivers. You will now learn what that means and where you rank.” More black darts shot out from his bleeding fist and Jack could do nothing but try in vain to roll away. He was too slow and all he did was expose more of himself to the strange numbing venomous darts.

  They stung down his back, across his left kidney and his hip. Most struck his armor but enough hit him to leave him nothing but a rag doll, and yet that did not stop the sorcerer. He hit Jack once more with the paralyzing spell—but it was one too many. One of the sharp projectiles hit neither his flesh nor his armor. It hit one of the vials of Holy Water he wore at his side. There was a crack, a flash of silver light and then the air was suddenly filled with a fine mist that rained down in gentle curtains.