The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic (26 page)

It was a golden feeling compared to the horror of the souls and it soothed his mind and calmed his conscience. It also kept him from puking, something he had been sure he would do.

But it also fed into the demand for more and he had to get away from her before he gave in to the temptation to
take
all of her. He broke the connection between them and immediately walked away, saying over his shoulder: “Call the choppers…please. I need some time and some air.”

What he needed was space. Her soul was pure and sweet and wonderful, while the others inside of him were horrors that screamed in desperate pain, filling his ears with their cries. They weren’t full souls. They were the shredded remains; strangely shaped bits of beings that spun and twisted, trying to entwine with the little kernel of what was left of his own soul.

They were searching for something, their other parts, likely. Jack had the distinct impression that they were trying to complete themselves. It was an unpleasant feeling, full of great sadness and horror and, if there wasn’t the possibility of facing Robert, he would’ve set them free. Though in truth, they would never be free. The Mother owned the rest of their souls and thus they were bound to her. Freeing them simply meant freeing himself of them.

“It’ll be okay,” he whispered to himself. “I just have to give them some time to settle a bit.” Keeping his head down, he walked the length of the cemetery, and while he walked he breathed deep and steadily, doing his best to calm the souls. They responded best when they were able to enmesh themselves in the tiny bit of Cyn’s soul. They still cried out and thrashed about but it was easier for Jack to take.

When he reached the far end of the cemetery, he didn’t hesitate. He climbed right up the chest-high wall and leapt down into the real world where the air was clean and the sanity close to normal. Close, but not quite.

The town was empty, having been abandoned hours before. It was eerily silent and completely still. Nothing moved. It had not been just the humans who had fled this part of France, even the birds and cats and the mice had run off.

“Hello?” he called out, only to hear his own voice bounce back at himself. “Wait…what’s French for hello? Uh, bonjour?” His words rang on empty streets. The moment was surreal and became more so when he walked to the nearest corner cafe and, after stealing a croissant and Coke, sat down at a table facing the street. His first impression was that he had been stranded between ticks of a watch; however, a second, much worse thought came to him: What if the rapture had occurred and everyone but him had been lifted up to heaven?

Even though he knew the truth, it was such a depressing thought that he tried not to think about it and forced himself to nibble on his croissant and sip at his Coke, but they only made his stomach roll over and, with a grimace, he was forced to push them away. The bits of souls were not settling down as much as he had hoped, in fact they weren’t settling down at all.

“I’m going to puke, aren’t I?” He could feel the Coke brewing like a storm in his guts and before he knew it he vomited right across the table. He hurled again and again as though he was trying to puke up the souls and splatter them on the street.

“Stop it!” he shouted and thumped his own heaving chest. “Just settle down in there!”

The shouting didn’t work. It only made the souls angrier and Jack groaned, holding his belly. As he did, the
whup-whup-whup
of helicopters came to him. Captain Vance and the rest of the Americans were on their way.

“No,” Jack whispered. “They’re too early.” His army of demons and ghouls had barely begun their fight. He could sense both groups squaring off…and he could feel some of Robert’s beasts scattering to the winds. To hunt them down took a level of concentration that he wasn’t up to with his mind pulled in so many directions.

“First things first,” he said, before forcing everything going on around him out of his mind and concentrating only on the souls. At first, he tried to separate them, each into an individual little penned up section of his mind,, but then he found two of the souls that were perfectly joined together.

They were nearly opposites in shape and texture, but there was a seam on each that matched up with the other; yin and yang. They had been warped through some unthinkable power of the Mother’s to fit together like some bizarre jigsaw puzzle.

And if two fit, it figured that the rest would.

Not wanting to be seen huddled over a pool of vomit, he staggered away from the mess he had made and went to a little park where the swings creaked under a light breeze. This little sound in the deathly quiet world was a strange blessing and, with it as background music, Jack worked the puzzle of the souls, going through each and categorizing them: squiggly, straight, firm, soft, hard.

He was still sitting on one of the swings when Captain Vance and Cyn found him. “Having a little play time with your inner child?” Vance asked.

Jack held up a hand. He had just made a discovery about the puzzle: the squiggles of souls were turning into shapes that he knew all too well. The Mother of Demons had not just given Cyn power, she had also given her a very well-designed trap. The souls fit together to spell out the three verses that opened the gate to hell.

“Son of a bitch,” he hissed. The spells were more than half drawn in his mind and now the remaining souls were going crazy, desperate to find their counterparts. He wanted to stop; not just because his mind was starting to feel as though it was being torn apart by the violence of the remaining souls, he was also honestly afraid of what would happen when he finished it. Would the gate open inside of him and would he be obliterated by the eruption of souls from hell? Would his own soul be burned out opening it? Would the Mother herself come and possess him?

These were terrible questions with equally terrible answers, but he had no choice but to finish creating the spell in his mind; it was either that or be driven insane by the rampaging souls.

“You ok, Jack?” Cyn asked him and he was dimly aware of her soft hand on his arm. She spoke more than these words, but he couldn’t hear, and she touched him on the face, pushing the hair from his forehead and looking into his eyes, but he didn’t feel any of that. All he cared about was pinning down those souls and finishing.

“We’ll get a priest,” Vance said and then began shouting orders into his radio. A moment later, he suggested: “Let’s lay him down.” Jack was suddenly nose to the sky and saw neither the sun nor felt its warmth. The spell was so close to being  done and his head was pounding and the souls were screaming and someone was yelling Latin in one ear and someone else was whispering “I love you,” in the other.

Then, just like that, the spell was whole in his mind and the souls quieted and the world was peaceful and calm and everything was silence and serenity except, of course, for the spell and the ugly demand that he use it. It banged inside his head, a steady drum and the demand was so powerful that he almost opened the gate to hell right there in the park, not caring what would come out.

Chapter 25

Tours, France

Jack Dreyden

“I’m ok,” Jack said, trying to get to his feet. “I don’t need an exorcism. I’m good. I just had a bout of something.” For some reason he couldn’t point to, he was hugely embarrassed about the spells inside his head.

Cyn came right up to his face and peered into his eyes. “Are you sure? You don’t look so great. It was that power I gave you, wasn’t it? It was bad. I knew it.”

Captain Vance agreed with Cyn’s assessment. “She’s right, you look like a crap sandwich.”

“Thanks for the concern, but I’m fine. Now, can you back off for a moment? I need to check on the progress of my undead army.” Although that sounded pretentious to his own ear, it seemed official enough to Vance for him to step away and plausible enough for Cyn to give him some breathing room. The last thing he needed was for her to pester him with a thousand questions concerning the Mother or the exact nature of the power she had put in Cyn.

The spell was there inside of him and wasn’t going anywhere, and as long as he kept focused and busy, he probably wouldn’t think about the gnawing hunger to use it. And he really did have to check on his army. Demons and ghouls were notoriously slow when there wasn’t a firm hand on the tiller. If Jack let his attention stray for too long, the creatures would fulfill their contract, but at their speed, not his, and they would prefer to take centuries instead of hours.

With far more effort than it had ever taken him before, Jack centered his thinking so that he could feel the various creatures. His ability to sense their evil presence had a range of about twenty miles and both his demons and Robert’s stood out like black spots in the world—some being darker than others, depending on the strength of their evil.

With only a thought, he could direct his minions here and there, just as Robert surely could, assuming he was somewhere in the vicinity, which Jack doubted. If Robert was still in Tours, then it was likely that his army would be surrounding him, protecting him while he finished digging up whatever he was after.

However, Robert’s creatures weren’t holed up in a defensive position. They were intent on escaping, trying their best to get away before Jack was able to corral them all. But it was too late for them, they were being bottled up nicely.

It took some time, but once he made sure the situation was well in hand, he opened his eyes and glanced around at the living. Cyn, looking fresh-faced and beautifully young once more, sat on the hood of a little box of a car, checking the bore of a new shotgun; Captain Vance, grim and bristled, sweating under his combat load, leaned against a wall of weathered bricks talking into a cell phone; a priest from one of the
Raider Squads
sat in a reclining chair that he had pulled from somewhere. He was a small trim man with a cross laying across his chest armor; he drank coffee from a tea cup.

“Care for some?” the priest asked, holding his up; strangely, at least for an American, he held a pinky jutting out from the cup’s handle. “There are also cold-cuts if you wish.” He pointed across the street at another cafe. “I found a full lunch set out, ready to be eaten. It’s so strange. And on the next street over are three bikes right in a row sitting perfectly upright on their kick-stands. It was as if their owners had calmly parked them only to
run
away. Does that make sense? This whole town is like something out of the
Twilight Zone
. I know you might be used to this sort of thing, but I can only call it eerie.”

Although it wasn’t quite true, Jack remarked: “To me, it’s just another Monday.”

The priest blinked at this and replied: “You know, I think today is Thursday.”

“That’s even better,” Jack said and then turned to Captain Vance. “I think I have the situation under control. The French can stand down and we should be able to move to the ‘site.’ You have figured out where the epicenter is, right?”

“Sorry, but that’s a negative. We know the location of the cemetery that Robert used to raise his undead army. It’s south of the Loire but north of the smaller river; I think it’s pronounced Levee Du Cher or something like that. Either way the two rivers form a rectangle of about six square miles and it’s likely that whatever he wanted was in that area, but so far we haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact location. The French have been kind enough to send out two different recon flights, but as of yet we have nothing.”

“Then we’ll use the helicopters,” Cyn said, sliding down off the boxy little Euro-car. “And we must hurry if we’re going to have any chance at catching Robert.”

She seemed completely over her run-in with the Mother, while Jack was still shaken inside and out and unable to think too much beyond the spells inside of him.

They headed back to the cemetery where the choppers had settled in among the wreckage of coffins and the ramble of broken headstones. At Vance’s orders, they began spooling up their engines, and as the rotors turned, they kicked up an odd storm of white silk; what had once lined so many of the destroyed coffins.

Around the thrumming birds the
Raiders
and
Knights
checked their gear in preparation for a fight and the priests went among them, blessing the men. Jack was handed a new sword and had his Holy Water replenished. He paused before getting on the helicopter to check the blade of the sword, and when he turned around he was face to face with the priest who had been sipping coffee with his pinky extended.

“May the Lord cast his blessing on you,” he said and anointed Jack’s forehead with Holy oil.

Jack couldn’t help himself and cringed, expecting to feel the fire of the Lord burning out the evil that the Mother of Demons had placed in him, but he felt nothing more than the slide of the man’s finger and a gentle warmth spread through his bones.

He was so relieved that all he could say was: “Okay, good. Thanks.”

Next to him, Cyn was pulling her hair back in a ponytail. “Okay, good? You sounded a touch nervous. Do you have everything under control?”

This made him laugh and the laughter combined with the oil and the blessing pushed the thought of the spell deep in the corner of his mind—and that had the effect of making him laugh harder. “I haven’t had
anything
under control since the first day I met you.”

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.”