The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic (20 page)

“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.

Cyn couldn’t stand the sight of so much death and kept her chin tucked down; however, Jack stared out. His anger at the wonton death was like heat rippling off of him.

When the town was well behind, they leaned into each other and fell asleep, listening to the truck disintegrate beneath them. An hour out of Tel Aviv, they pulled over and they could hear Vance talking excitedly. “I can get there in forty minutes,” they heard the soldier say, his words quiet, grim, tired.

“He’s done it again,” Jack said to Cyn in a whisper, his lips so close to her ear that it tickled. That he meant Robert had opened another gate into hell was a given.

Cyn closed her eyes and tried to sense the spell her cousin had used; she came up blank. “Can you feel it?”

“No, it’s too far away. I can usually feel it when he does the spells if it’s within about a hundred miles, but he’s far out of range. He could be anywhere really, though I would bet he’s back in Egypt. Egypt or China. If he knew about those eastern sorcerers, he’d be there in a heartbeat.”

It turned out that he was wrong on both counts. “We’re going to France,” Captain Vance said a minute later.

Chapter 19

Tours, France

Jack Dreyden

“I know where we’re going but not why. What’s in Tours?” Captain Vance asked as they boarded a fat-bodied military transport, the same plane they had flown in on. The three of them went to the front and found a spot of privacy behind a pallet of supplies. Jack dropped into some webbing which made a hammock of sorts and then shrugged at the question.

Vance grew livid and poked him in the chest. “You’re the expert here. What’s your cousin after? Is there a museum there? Or a privately owned collection of ancient Egyptian crap?”

Jack could only shrug a second time and Cyn added: “We have no idea what he could possibly want in that little town and neither does Google.” Along with her new shotgun, Cyn had received a new cell phone. She had diligently researched Tours but hadn’t come up with anything about the town that connected it with Egypt or Lebanon. It made no sense for Robert to unleash a horde of undead on the people there.

“Really, I’m not holding back. If I knew I’d tell you,” Jack said. “How long till we get there? I need sleep. I need to be as fresh as possible.”

Vance glanced down at a scrap of paper in his hand. “Three hours to the airport and then a chopper ride of about twenty min…”

“Three hours!” Cyn cried. “Robert will be long gone by then.” She began pacing, chewing her lower lip.

“It is what it is,” Vance snapped. “We can’t get there any faster, so we deal with it.”

Cyn looked ready to draw blood. Her eyes were lit with a fire that went deep, but then it seemed as though the fire was suddenly quenched. She fell into the webbing next to Jack and asked: “Tell me, are we just chasing ghosts? This’ll be the third time in a week that we are hot on nothing but a shadow. How does he just pop up here and there without anyone knowing?”

The army captain gave her an exaggerated shrug. “That’s not our job to deal with. Our only job is to fight these monsters and yes, I wish it could be perfect, but it’s not. When we finally catch up to Robert, he’ll meet extremely swift justice, I promise you that. We have shoot on sight orders. Now, as I was saying, from the airport it’ll be twenty minutes by chopper to the town. We’ll have three companies of US Army
Knights
, some French special forces—don’t ask me how good they are, because I don’t rightly know. And lastly, we have what’s left of the
Raider Squads
.”

“We?” Jack asked, lifting an eyebrow. “I thought that nobody wanted to work with me anymore.”

“Shut up and listen. The latest arial recon puts the numbers of undead at about twenty-thousand.” Vance didn’t seem like the type of man who ever showed his fear, but Jack saw it was there at the edges. “We need all hands. No, don’t say anything. We both know that you’ll come and do what you have to. And you know that we’ll put up with you. Like I said to Cyn: it is what it is and we deal with it.”

He was right, but that didn’t mean Jack would roll over and agree to everything. “I will go, but you need to know who’s in charge: I am, so now it’s your turn to listen up. You are going to let me sleep until we land. Don’t wake me for anything unless it’s to tell me that Robert is dead. And you are going to make sure that whoever you put on my squad knows the risks and accepts that what I say goes. And that includes the priests.”

“How am I going to do that?” Vance asked.

“Figure it out,” was all Jack said. Vance started to leave, but Jack stopped him. “And when we land, I’m going to want some crepes. Something sweet and I’d like some French bread. And Cyn’s going to want some eggs. Make sure they’re fresh. We need to be at full strength.”

Vance looked as though he was going to tear Jack’s head off. He rubbed his temples with both hands as he reluctantly nodded. He left as quickly as he could before Jack could make any more strange demands.

A minute later, as the C17’s engines began to rev up, Jack turned to Cyn and said: “Twenty-thousand. It’s not going to be easy. Can you look up whatever graveyards are near Tours? I’m going to have to bring at least twenty-five thousand of my own ghouls and maybe more to be on the safe side.”

She spent a few minutes researching and then she handed Jack a list. “You got millions of corpses to use if you want them. There seems to be cemeteries on every corner in that part of France. This one here, Saint…whatever that says, is the closest and a good place to start.”

“There’s never a good place to start,” Jack said. He was dreading the idea of creating another zombie army, even a relatively small one of twenty-five thousand. So much could go wrong. The worst of which would be if Jack were killed. Then the number of their enemies would suddenly double. Worse than that; however, was the fact that Cyn would be the only one left who could stop Robert.

Jack hated the thought of that. She had never tried sorcery and the triple-spell to open the portal and control the demons that came out of it would likely kill her.

“I can’t worry about that just yet,” he whispered under the drone of the engines. He had to sleep; he had to be a hundred percent, on the off-chance that Robert was still somewhere in the town when they finally got there.

Falling asleep for Jack took little effort. He simply closed his eyes and let the engines lull him out. It felt like no time before Cyn was shaking him awake. She said: “We’re here,” but she needn’t have. Even though the creatures were still fifty miles away, he could feel them as an ugly cloud away to the east.

As he was still groggy from his nap and had a stain of drool on one shoulder, she helped him up. “Put your arm out. There you go.” Cyn dressed him, as though he were a toddler—an armored toddler.

As she was belting his scabbard across his hips, Vance came up fisting a number of brown bags. “I got breakfast,” he said, although the sun was just setting. What he was carrying was definitely not crepes and baguettes. The brown bags were from McDonalds.

Jack took one and glanced in. “Yummy. McDonalds, just like mom used to make.”

Cyn tried to give him a smile, but it was all teeth and no eyes. She hadn’t looked in her bag. “It’s the worst we’ve experienced since New York,” she said, waving a hand at the air in the plane as if she could feel the evil with her fingertips. “I really don’t like it. There’s no reason for Robert to have come here, you know? Do you think this might be another trap? There are so many cemeteries around that town. He could spring something on us as soon as we set down.”

Vance had one of his big paws wrapped around a double quarter pounder. He took a bite and said: “Don’t worry. We’ll have helicopters waiting to evac us in case something bad goes down. We should be…”

“Do you remember what happened in New York?” Cyn demanded, interrupting the captain. “Robert’s demons filled that town with so much darkness you couldn’t land a helicopter anywhere. He could do the same thing here, trapping us. He could destroy all the
Knights
and all the
Raiders
, as well as Jack and me, in one move.”

Captain Vance took another large mouthful. “It’s possible,” he said as he craned a handful of fries out of the bag and loaded them into his jaw. “Come on, eat up. You got three minutes before the choppers land.”

“It’s possible,” Jack said. “But would Robert really go to that much trouble?” He had suddenly lost his appetite, and yet, he too tucked into his food. He ate standing in the dark cargo hold of the plane. Vance looked as though he was going to reply, but then just shrugged and took another bite. Cyn held her bag and looked miserable.

“Can you pull up a map,” Jack asked her. “I want to see what we’re dealing with here.”

Her fingers flashed over the screen of the phone and in a second she showed him the town. “Here, here, and here are cemeteries,” she said, pointing. “I mean they’re all over this country. We could use the corpses ourselves to pre-empt Robert, but that feels wrong.”

“That’s because it is wrong,” Vance said. “Though in this case, I don’t think we have a choice. The official French position is that it will be considered criminal if you raise the dead. That being said, they’re also saying do whatever it takes. They’ve had at least ten-thousand people killed in the last few hours, but they have managed to hold a line around the town. It’s taking everything they have but it’s…”

He stopped as the heavy thump of helicopter blades filled the air. He pointed to the map. “We’ll head to this cemetery first. Supposedly there’s like fifty-thousand corpses interred there. Now, let’s move.” Hamburger in one hand and a shotgun in the other, Vance left the plane.

Jack and Cyn followed. This was Jack’s first time in France and it wasn’t pretty. To the east was the constant rumble of artillery, while jets and helicopters zipped back and forth overhead. The air was thick with the stench of jet fuel and the dead—even from miles away, he could smell the bodies.

Thirty or so helicopters settled onto the airstrip not far away and a torrent of grim-faced and sweating
Knights
and
Raiders
bustled towards them. It was an odd sight. They were in their combat gear and ready for battle and yet each man was munching down on McDonald’s hamburgers or trying to dip fries in ketchup as they boarded.

When Jack climbed into the lead copter, he yelled over the din to Cyn: “Eat your food. You’re going to need your strength. If I get killed…” Just like the others he was eating as he spoke. It was comfort food and just then, on verge of battle, the McDonalds burger tasted far better than he ever remembered—except for that bite. It seemed to get stuck going down.

When he could clear his throat, he said: “If I get killed, you need to take over. You’re the only one who knows the spells. You’re the only one who can counter Robert.”

She had been nibbling on the edge of a burger. Now she looked suddenly green. “I can, but I don’t want to. I can teach someone else the words and the glyphs. It’s not that hard, anyone can learn.”

The chopper suddenly lifted off and Jack almost lost his very recently downed hamburger. He almost lost it a second time a minute later when the copter was rocked by a low-flying plane. Cyn pushed her dinner away. Jack pushed it back. “Eat, please,” he insisted. “Yes, anyone can learn the language. That’s not the point. If I die, the spells have to go to someone who won’t abuse the power. You know how close I was to losing it and going off the deep end.”

“And you know that the
Mother of Demons
had me like that.” She snapped her fingers.

“Maybe because you haven’t strengthened that part of you that has the ability to resist. Now eat.” In answer, she threw her bag of food over the side of the copter. She glared at him, but he only smiled and said: “That’s precisely why you would be perfect.”

Miserably, she nodded.

“I would have eaten that,” Vance said, crossly. “They say that you should never go into battle with food in your stomach, but I say hell to that. Get what little happiness you can before you go to your death.”

Jack scowled him into silence.

No one spoke much after that. The fires of battle were raging and could be seen blurring the horizon and it seemed as if in no time they were right over them. From the air, the world was black and white. Wonderful and foul.

The countryside was beautiful and softly green, the homes were idyllic cottages, the sky a gentle, cloudless blue—and right in the middle of it there was a line of fire and smoke, and explosions and screams. Old corpses walked in the day and drew blood and feasted. New corpses were strewn everywhere like so much trash.

They had a sad, but perfect view of the battlefield. It was a roiling black cancer, irregular in shape, about four miles at its widest. The perimeter was a good fourteen miles in length, and the French fought stubbornly for every inch.

Closer up, things were far worse. Men fled from the scene, their eyes insane, their minds cracked open. If they were exceptionally tough, they fought and died in place; however, the average man would fire only a few shots and then break and run.

But this was not all bad. The French had learned lessons from what had happened in New York. They held their priests back, keeping them safe where they could bless the men and restore their strength. They also had roving bands of soldiers, designed to scoop up the thousands of deserters, not as punishment, but in order to return them to duty in an honorable way. They were also issued appropriate weapons: shotguns and swords and grenades.

Unfortunately, they lacked in three areas: realistic training, combat experience, and a concept of the amount of ammo that could be expanded in battle. On average it took ten shotgun shells to bring down one of the creatures and as they would only reform thirty seconds later, the French were draining their resources by the minute. Men were going into battle now with eight loads of shells.

It was never enough and the loss of life was staggering.

Jack directed that only his chopper set down where the fight was raging the hottest. “Wait here,” he ordered Cyn as they landed fifty yards from the battle. “I’m just checking things out.”

She glared but remained in the chopper. The rest of the soldiers and priests ducked out of the helicopter and fanned out around Jack, who pushed through dozens of men, some fleeing, some standing, trying to get their nerve up in spite of the shrill, cried coming from the demon created darkness.

Even with the Holy Oil still wet on their foreheads, the French soldiers were tense and nervous. They gripped their weapons as if they were life preservers and they were about to be tossed off a ship.