The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic (21 page)

“It’ll be okay,” Jack assured as he whipped out his sword. In weight and length, it was a cross between the supple quickness of a rapier, and a heavier, bone-hacking saber. It blazed like the sun and sang like a song of silver as he held it up.

The men around him cheered and not just because of the sword. The squad of
Raiders
around him were grim-faced and utterly fearless, cut from the same cloth as the fallen Captain Metzger: tall and thickly muscled, with arms like iron. They were clear-eyed and brave.

They followed Jack into battle without flinching.

And what a battle it was. New York had been an endless flowing massacre, but this was a knock-down drag out fight, with neither side giving an inch. It was fought in near complete darkness with only hand flares giving them any visibility. The flares created little spheres of red light that distorted everything, making the smallest walking corpse into a fearsome beast.

The bone-creatures came on and on relentlessly, using everything at their disposal: they spun darkness, and unearthly cold. They exuded a stench that was not only revolting, it was sometimes poisonous. Still, the French soldiers fought until they were torn apart, or cast in ice by some demon, or driven to madness by the fear that radiated out of the darkness.

Only then did they break and run, pelting out of the black clouds. When that happened, and it did every few seconds, more men were sent in. The new soldiers would advance, stiff and robotic, fighting their growing terror as they entered the cloud.

As Jack and his motley team of nine men strode up to the cloud, a man suddenly sprinted from the darkness, nearly colliding with Captain Vance. The captain caught the man who flailed and kicked in spastic fear. Vance didn’t berate him or try to smack some sense into him, he only righted him, set him on his feet and let him go. They had all seen it before and knew there was no use trying to talk any sense into the man.

“I’m just taking a look at what we got here,” Jack yelled over the din of explosions and screams. “Stay with me, watch my back and don’t get entangled in the fight.”

The men were well trained and there were only nods, except one man, who said: “Yes, Skipper,” which Jack found amusing. He left them and their stern looks and waded into battle with a small smile on his lips. He smiled because he knew this was where he belonged. No one looked down on him here, or made snide comments.

This was his purpose. This was why he twisted and tore his soul. If anything, this was why he was special.

Before them were mounds of bodies and flares burning red and spitting a grey smoke that made the fight not just dark but also hazy. Everything ten steps away was dim, except when there was an explosion or a blast from a shotgun. Then the hell around them was lit for that brief second showing him the horror that Robert had unleashed.

In between the flashes, he could hear just fine. The men fighting yelled and screamed, but since the language of these screams was so pretty to an American ear, it lacked the edge of desperation that Jack was used to. French or not, the fight was fierce.

He wanted to join in, but that was not why he was there. Closing out the sound of the battle, he willed himself to relax and then willed his mind open so that he could feel exactly what he was facing.

The demons stood out in the darkness. They were holes in his mind that burned like acid. He forced himself to count all seventy-six of the beasts.

“Not bad,” he said, and began to blink, once again focusing on the battle.

Captain Vance spun him around. “How can you say that?” Jack only looked at him with a puzzled expression, which angered the hot-headed captain even more. “Three men have died while we’ve been standing here doing nothing!”

Jack turned his gaze to the string of flares. The defensive line was coming apart, eroded by death and desertion. Replacements were slow to come forward and when they did, they came hesitantly.

“Why didn’t you say something?” Jack asked. “Wait here.” He left Vance snarling like a dog—but like an obedient one. He stayed put as Jack went forward, unafraid despite the terror on the air.

Jack felt strong and light and moved like a shadow, swift and silent. He had given up the desert clothes he had picked up in Wadi Halfa and was now decked out in black with his tactical armor over that. The armor had been made to his specifications; he didn’t need it to stop bullets, only claws, and he could move with surprising agility.

He leapt into the fight, not realizing that his smile was still on his lips and it remained there as he struck like a hurricane of steel, sending hands and heads and the ugly remains of flesh flying; soon he was surrounded by piles of twitching bones.

“Your swords!” Jack cried to the French, waving his blade. They each carried a sword that had been blessed, but not one of them had pulled it, preferring to attack from a distance with their shotguns. It was understandable, wanting to keep such deadly opponents as far away as possible, and yet the guns were not as effective as the swords.

The holy nature of the swords caused the darkness in the undead creatures to come unwound, rendering them temporarily “unbodied.
”
The bones would eventually reform, but it would take time. Still they could be killed, or rather, there was a way to send their warped souls back to hell, though it was dangerous and difficult. It was simply a matter of piercing their souls with the blessed swords.

Although it sounded easy, in reality, it was far from it since demon souls were rarely more than little black knots, the size and shape of a raisin, which they kept hidden. The bones had to be searched for these nasty tumors and there was rarely time to do so in the midst of a battle, and just then, the French weren’t so much concerned with killing the creatures as they were with simply surviving and holding them back.

Jack was able to rally four of the men who made a spirited attack which kept the line from caving in at this point. They grinned and sent up a lusty cheer. “Keep using the swords,” Jack said and then started tromping back to where he had left Captain Vance and his squad. He only made it a few feet before there was a new cry.

A demon had come.

“Damn,” Jack whispered. So far, he hadn’t used an ounce of magical strength and he wanted to keep it that way. He had to be strong since there was no telling if Robert was just a few miles away in the center of the black cloud. And yet, he couldn’t leave this demon unfought.

It was a strange one and that was saying something when demons were involved. For some odd reason, it had stitched two corpses together, linking them at the hip with a length of wormy gut. It was weird and Jack expected it to be an awkward fight. It turned out to be terrifying.

The demon spun as it rushed forward, sometimes using arms like legs and legs like arms. It resembled some sort of pale, two-headed human-spider crossbreed, moving much faster than seemed possible. In a second, it was on Jack, four eyes, gleaming red, four clawed hands swinging; four bony feet lashing out with kicks.

“Damn!” he said again, though this time it was more of a cry of shock. He was fast and slick, but he had never come across something that could attack from every possible angle: left, right, up and down. It was all he could do to whip his blade back and forth in a blur as he gave up ground at an alarming rate.

The French soldiers were running and even the
Raiders
were moving back and Jack didn’t blame them. The demon was not only awkward to fight, it was craftier than most. It feinted time again so that half the time Jack’s blade whistled harmlessly by the creature, and yet it was Jack who drew “first blood.” Having timed the swirling attack, he managed to whack off a hand off at the wrist. He received a kick in the chest for his efforts that would have broken his sternum if it wasn’t for his Kevlar.

As it was, he found himself gasping.

The creature didn’t wait for him to recover and was on him like lightning, attacking without let up in a confusing melee that left Jack gasping
and
cringing. The claws cut him again and again, sending their poison into him, weakening him and making him stumble until at last his feet were kicked out from beneath him and he fell.

Chapter 20

Tours, France

Jack Dreyden

“Damn,” Jack said for the third time, this time it was only a gasp. Taking a deeper breath, he yelled: “Stop!” It was a word of command with a great deal of power behind it and such was the strength of his soul that the demon froze above him. It was “standing” supported by one arm and one leg so that it was sideways, its bodies horizontal to the earth, looking now more like a centipede than a spider.

It stopped for all of two seconds, but that was enough time for Jack to take a proper breath, and roll backwards in a crouch. The next words out of his mouth were ancient: “
Phra-isth rath em
.”

In that tiny span, the demon was above him again, blows coming from both right and left as well as from directly above, but in a blink, the demon seemed to suddenly stop, poised to strike. And it wasn’t just the demon, the entire world went from a movie to a picture. Bullets hung in the air, screams stretched out, and the dying were stayed, momentarily from their fate.

Jack had almost stopped time. It was progressing about fifteen times slower than it normally would have for everyone except him. He could move freely in that blink of an eye and yet he couldn’t maintain it for long. Stopping time wasn’t that taxing, it was maintaining it that drained him, and so he dashed forward and hacked downward with his sword just as he let the spell go.

The edge of the blade sliced right through the run of gut, splitting the demon in two parts. He fully expected one of its bodies to simply collapse and when that didn’t happen, he figured that each would be half as strong as they had been as a whole, but he was disappointed here as well.

Both bodies were now independent from the other and were just as strong and quick as they had been, and where before it was an awkward fight because of the crazy angles, now it was a desperate one. The demons—and now Jack understood that there were two separate entities that he was dealing with—were pulling out all the stops.

One would breath ice as the other blasted poison fog. One would come flying in from the side with claws extended while the other shook the earth with a stomp of its foot. Again and again, Jack was forced to use magic.

To conserve his strength he used it in bursts as the eastern sorcerer Truong had.

A dodge here, a riposte there, a dive roll, a flash of his sword. He had no time to show off his form or to display his full power. He had to get the fight over as quickly as possible before one of those claws took out an eye. A poisonous scratch was one thing. They hurt like nobody’s business, but there was no recovering an eye in the middle of battle.

As fast and wild as the two demons were, Jack was faster, especially when he controlled time.

One of the demons crouched just to his side, swinging a hand to tear off his face, while the other was eight feet ahead. Jack ducked the clawed hand that hung, outstretched by time, then threw himself forward on his knees so that he slid across the iced over ground and hacked with two hands at the midsection of the further demon, aiming for the spinal column connecting its upper body from the lower.

The force of the blow was a shock that went right up his arms and then he was sliding past the beast. It had been shorn in two and toppled over with a clatter of bones. In spite of that, both parts continued to flail at him and the head tried to spin around on its neck to blast him with more ice.

Jack’s slide carried him beyond the beast and, as his feet hit firm, hard dirt, he dove to the side so that the blast passed “somewhat” harmlessly by. His back and left side blistered and stung from the cold. He tried ducking under a poison cloud breathed out by the second demon, but he stumbled and caught some of the green gas in the face.

Hacking and coughing, he rolled like a log out of the cloud, heedless of the sticks jabbing him and the rocks cutting him. When he stopped and could squint through his tearing eyes, he saw one of the demons bearing down on him, looking to finish him off.

At Jack’s command, time slowed again.

It was just a blink, a tiny fraction of a second that allowed Jack to leap up and dart forward to get
within
the swing of one of those deadly claws. The demon had not expected for him to suddenly appear so close and certainly didn’t expect to feel the shearing blade grating across the vertebrae in his neck where its head joined the rest of its body.

The demon’s head fell and cracked wide open; the interior of its skull was alive with black beetles burrowing into a moldy mess. The bugs scattered in fear but no one saw. Like a lumberjack, Jack swung his sword in a downward arc, hacking at the demon’s left arm, while it raked at Jack’s chest with its right.

Claws dug quarter inch deep furrows into Jack’s Kevlar, while his sword took off the arm. Headless, and with only a single arm remaining, any other demon would have been hacked into pieces in seconds, but this demon was used to using its feet as weapons.

It got one good kick in, sending Jack stumbling back over the frozen corpse of some soft-cheeked French soldier, whose face was forever molded in mid-scream. The dead boy—he was no man and couldn’t have been much past his eighteenth birthday—reminded Jack of how much he hated this whole affair. Sometimes in the midst of fighting for his life and saving the world, he lost sight of the smaller details.

These were the bodies of real people lying scattered all over the battlefield. They had moms and dads who loved them. They had girlfriends and went to parties and read books and probably had wonderful futures that had been stolen from them by these monsters.

Seeing the boy brought this back. Jack was suddenly furious. Before he was workmanlike, doing his duty, killing because it had to be done, because no one else could. Now he was in a fury.

He picked up the dead soldier’s shotgun and pumped round after round into the remains of the two demons, blasting them until no two bones touched another. At last he tossed aside the smoking gun, spat on the quivering bones and then made his way to where Captain Vance and the squad of
Raiders
had been standing watching the fight.

“I want those two demons sent back to hell right this minute!” Jack ordered. The men glanced at each other, a little surprised. During the middle of a battle, and yes, the battle was still raging all around them, it wasn’t a normal request to perform an exorcism. Vance barked them into movement and at his command, the
Raiders
didn’t hesitate to carry out the orders. Seven soldiers went forward to form a thin line as the two priests began their prayers.

“That was something,” Captain Vance said, glancing at Jack out of the corner of his eye. He was no longer the swaggering soldier; he seemed somewhat spooked by Jack. “You, uh, moved so fast. How…how did you do that?”

“Magic,” Jack grunted. He turned from the soldier and looked around at the battlefield. The French were only just now sending soldiers forward to shore up the hole that the conjoined demons had caused. “Tell them that they need to use their swords more.”

Vance nodded, looking eager to get away from Jack, but Jack grabbed him. “And tell them they need better communications. No radios, of course, but maybe try using old landlines or field telephones. They have to be able to move men up quicker than they have been.”

“Field telephones? I doubt they have them. No one has used those in decades, but maybe someone can rig up something. I’ll find out.” After another sideways look at Jack, Vance left.

Jack stood near the priests, watching as the bones of the demons began to smoke and screams of rage echoed across the battlefield. Although it was so cold that their breath puffed out of them, the priests were sweating with the strain of the exorcism. It was a contest of will: one side desperate to hold onto this earth with everything they had and the other channeling the power of God through their veins.

Although it was not always the case, time and circumstance were on the priests’ side and in a few minutes the bones lay in heaps, unmoving and utterly dead. Jack spat on them a second time and said to one of the priests: “Let’s get going. This isn’t our fight.”

He had come into the darkness only to see what they were up against and it wasn’t good. He would definitely need to call up his own undead army, something that always sickened him on a level beyond the physical. The dead were meant to rest in peace.

With this breach shored up, Jack pulled the squad out of the darkness and into the light of day, where every one of them, Jack included, stopped to stare up at the sky and breathe in the warm air in great gulps. A few of them shook with the dregs of adrenaline coursing through them and a couple reached down to touch the soft earth.

More screams and explosions turned their focus back to the matter at hand. Jack found Vance. “I need one of the copters to zip me over to this cemetery: Cimetiere de Montmar. Keep the men ready to go. Once I wake the undead and get them moving, we’re going to where all this started. Oh, and find out where that is if you can.”

Vance gave him a curt nod and then Jack was jogging off to the helicopter where Cyn waited. “Was it a bad one?” she asked. “I could feel something in there, but not what.”

“Yeah, it was bad. Sort of like Siamese twin demons; two for the price of one, but Truong’s spell made things easier.”

“The time thing? Messing with time seems bloody scary to me.”

Jack shrugged. “Getting my guts pulled out is worse, trust me. Even with me using my spells, look at what one of those things did to my armor.” He pointed to the grooves.

“Oh, you poor thing. Did baby get his Kevlar all scratched up?” She grinned at him; however he could see the worry behind the watery smile. Whether she was worried about him or about the immediate future, he couldn’t tell.

“It wasn’t really that bad, I guess,” he said trying to smooth over her fears.

She replied by kicking him in the shin where he wasn’t armored. As he cursed and hopped around, she hissed: “Don’t be a git, of course it was bad. And next time you’ll take me with you, because I have to tell you, Jack, that if you think I’m going to act as baggage for you to cart around unopened and unused, you’re wrong. I’d just as soon go home if you’re not going to use me.”

Suggesting that she would “go home” was somewhat of an empty threat. She had no real home to go to and certainly no family either. “Fine, but you have to be all in. I might need your, you know, your soul,” he said.

“And I might give it to you,” she shot right back. “I never said I wouldn’t, but I’m not going to have you kicking around in my soul for fun. That’s where I draw the line.”

“It wasn’t for fun,” he said, rubbing his leg. “I wanted to see the extent of what we have together. I don’t want to be up against something big and not know how much power I can draw from you. What if I accidentally drain you completely? In the middle of battle is the wrong time to figure these things out.”

A look of pain swept her face just before she turned to gesture at the helicopter. “Well, we can’t do it now. They are waiting and people are dying.” She climbed up into the copter and made a great show of checking her shotgun, unloading and reloading the shells. Next, she drew her rapier, a weapon that she only rarely used or practiced with.

Jack didn’t force the issue. He sat down on a folding bench next to her and, as the engine began to rev, he closed his eyes. It seemed like a second later that Cyn was shaking him awake once again. “It’s time,” she said. “Can you do this without my help? Are you strong enough?”

He was tired and the fight with the twin demons had taken a lot out of him, but he felt he had the spiritual strength to cast the three spells. The only question was if he had the mental strength to do it. Allowing demons and ghouls to come into the world, even for the purpose of saving lives was not pleasant.

No one, living or dead wants their body abused by these evil things and it made Jack sick to his stomach even thinking about it.

“Yeah, I can do it,” he told her. “But can you do me a favor first? Can you see if anyone had any Pepto?
”
He didn’t want to ralph all over his glyphs.