The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic (13 page)

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?”

Her attempt to change the subject was jarring, which told Jack not to force the conversation back to sorcery. “What? You didn’t like Khartoum? Now that place had charm. Metzger said that Khartoum was...” Jack stopped, remembering how he had killed his friend. With perfect twenty-twenty vision, Jack had seen Metzger’s eyes right before he had killed him. Those eyes were saying:
Jack’s going to save me
, but he hadn’t. Jack had saved his own skin instead.

Cyn knew the reason for the hesitancy and quickly filled the void. “Or maybe Paris. We could go today. I bet we could be there by nightfall. I think. I wonder what time it is?”

“Paris? That sounds nice.” Jack put on a fake smile; it was all lip going nowhere near his eyes. His depression wasn’t going to be so easily cast away. He didn’t deserve Paris; he didn’t even deserve the “top” room in Wadi Halfa. At best he deserved to sleep among the headstones at Attamhim where the ghouls lay just beneath the first layer of dirt. Or better yet: New York.

The utter destruction of New York could be traced back to his weakness. He had given in to temptation and now the city lay in ruins, with bleached bones lying everywhere. It was a tremendous city of the dead, the ultimate necropolis.

Jack gave a jerk as suddenly something clicked. “Paris sounds great and we should do that but what about Nekhen? There’s a necropolis near Nekhen.”

“Don’t be so down on yourself,” Cyn said, turning from the window. “You did what you had to do, not just to save us, but also to save those men’s souls.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” he answered, leaping up and pacing. He pointed suddenly north. “Nekhen! Do you see? Don’t you remember what my father said? He said that his grandfather discovered the tomb of Rath-ara near the city of the dead! Why didn’t I think of this earlier? Robert has been there, I’m sure of it.”

Cyn held out her hands. “Slow down, okay? You of all people know that there are hundreds of so called necropoli in this part of the world.”

“And how many of them are a first dynasty necropolis? You said it yourself, the sarcophagus of the necromancer was first dynasty or earlier. Robert was there...but why move the necromancer all the way to Meroe to set up an ambush?”

Jack paced and Cyn drummed her nails on the bed frame. There were marks on it, suggesting that it had been used as a scratching post by some long dead cat. “Maybe he wanted to make sure that no one focused on Nekhen,” she suggested. “Maybe, he wanted to keep it as secret as he could. And that means he was there for more than just digging a necromancer out of the ground.” Her smirk was back and Jack matched it.

Within minutes they had showered and were ready to check out. The proprietor of the inn, using gestures, and three words of English: “Eat, eat, eat,
”
insisted that the two of them stay and have breakfast, which consisted of stiff rice, flavored with curry and dates. It wasn’t very appealing and yet they were so famished that they scarfed it down and had a second helping. Next they filled the gas tank of the Volvo, bought four extra jerry cans and filled them as well.

They then moved on to the local market, where they were treated like rubes and were forced to buy supplies of water and food at outrageous prices. As they were swindled, old men hovered around the pair, laughing and nudging each other, enjoying the show, while underfoot, shoeless children ran around with bright smiles in their dark faces. They hinted outrageously, pointing at the baskets of candy.

One little girl with a bow of yellow yarn spun up in her black braids was particularly savvy; she curtsied and then did a little dance. “I’m going to regret this,” Cyn said and then handed her five pieces of what looked like saltwater taffy. Within seconds, they were surrounded by children, their pale palms held up in the universal sign of begging.

It took ten minutes and twenty dollar’s worth of over-priced taffy to extricate themselves.

There were no roads leading from Wadi Halfa into Egypt and that left them with two choices: a three day drive through the desert in the plodding, thirty-year old Volvo, or they could bribe an official to get on the Aswan ferry. The boat would take them three hundred and thirty miles up Lake Nasser to the city of Aswan, Egypt.

Fearing that the car would never hold up, they went with the bribe which ended up costing them half of their money. A very long day later, they discovered that a second bribe was needed to actually land in Egypt. “Don’t freak out, Jack,” Cyn said, handing over the last of the cash that they had taken from the dead back in Meroe. “I doubt that Robert is so powerful that he can trace a bank transmission from a dry little town in the middle of the Egyptian desert.”

Despite this description of Aswan, it was a tremendous step up from Wadi Halfa and they were able to find a bank and a hotel that had every modern necessity. Still only half recovered, the two of them stayed the night, each enjoying an hour long soak in the tub.

The night’s stay in Aswan left them clean and refreshed, and they stayed that way for a full thirty minutes the next morning and then they stepped out into the July heat which immediately wilted them. Cyn, her porcelain skin prone to burning, stood in the shade of the hotel until Jack could get the Volvo and its air-conditioning going. The heat gave it a case of the “vapors
”
and it a dozen tries to get it to start.