The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic (23 page)

She could sense in some deep crevice of her soul that new blood was in the air and that the final spell was being drawn. The air in the cemetery became suddenly sharp and putrid; the smell made her stop and clutch her stomach. “Okay. I’m not going to vomit. I’m not going to bloody vomit. I just have to keep walking.” Fifteen steps further on her strength left her and she knew that she had lost the fight against the growing nausea churning in her guts.

Still, she was a lady. She hurried through a gate and went to the nearest car and, as if she were admiring it, she put her hand lightly on the fender, bent over as though inspecting the tires and heaved out a gout of stomach acid. It burned her throat coming up and the stench had her heaving even more.

She tried to fight it; however Jack was getting closer and closer to finishing the spell and the need in her was terrible. There were two choices open to her: run back to him slit his throat and finish the spell as it was meant to be done, or puke up her stomach and cry.

Her hands became claws that scritched over the surface of the car. To be so close to the blood magic was a trial. It ached her soul like a rotten tooth. Time dragged out and the pull became so unbearable that she found herself clinging to the car as if it were an anchor.

“Come on, Jack. Finish it, please!” She had no idea what sort of ordeal he was going through and frankly couldn’t have cared less at that point. She was being tested, with her soul on the line. To give in meant becoming a necromancer; a true necromancer like her cousin, Robert. It meant the craving for blood would never leave her and yet it also meant power and strength.

How Jack had managed to hold on in New York, she didn’t know. When he had been put to the test, he’d had every reason to give in, and he’d had every temptation right in front of him. She had told him to fight it, but now she knew how silly she had sounded. There was no fighting this. There was only blood and the ruin of souls and the destruction of all creation. There was only one God and she was the Mother of…

The tin sound filled the air, stopping all thought, save one:
Jack has opened the gate to hell!

“Thank God,” she whispered, the need now suddenly and wonderfully gone. Cynthia Childs had passed her test. She cried as she knelt on her hands and knees next to the car. It was a warm day and sweat mixed with the tears that ran along the curves of her face and dripped from her nose to land in the splatter of vomit.

It was a pretty day and all she could see was the mess she had made.

Blearily, she looked around as if expecting the world to be filled with corpses, but the nearby cemetery was still serene, at least for the moment. She knew that soon the souls would come piling up out of the gate and then Jack would send them on to fight Robert’s army and France would be saved, and if they were very lucky, they would find Robert in all this mess, and they’d be able to kill him and be done with the entire sordid affair.

In her heart she knew that wasn’t going to happen. In fact, it wasn’t her heart telling her this. Some other part of her, what felt like that same part of her soul which could sense when the spells were being used, was ringing a shrill tone of danger within her.

It felt as though something was wrong with the spell…or there was something wrong with the gate or there was… “There’s something wrong with Jack!” She scrambled for the shotgun she had mindlessly let fall earlier and then ran for the cemetery gate in a full out sprint. 

If Jack was dead or dying then no one would be in control of the gate…no person at least. It would be open to the dead to come and go as they pleased and in no time the world would become just another aspect of hell. She ran, thinking that she would have to shut the gate or die trying, but after a mile, when her heart was hammering in her chest and her breath was like fire, she saw Jack far off.

With the distance, he appeared no larger than a toy soldier and yet she could see him climbing to his feet. In front of him lay the gate and from it souls poured out in a pale, glowing fountain. They were gauzy wisps of nothing that soared in every direction; most slipped beneath the earth to find bodies to claim; however a good number, a thousand or so, raced right at Cyn!

Given any chance, they would take her body and soul. One thing that worked against them was a blessed cross. She had one, of course, but she also had a problem with it. It was strung on a heavy silver necklace and sat nestled very comfortably between her breasts—under both her shirt and her armor.

“Oh, hot damn!” she hissed, digging at the front of her vest. She saw very clearly that she wasn’t going to get it out in time. In desperation, she flung herself back with a cry as the air warped and shimmered in front of her face as the souls massed there. Perhaps in vain, she held her breath and squeezed her eyes shut.

The souls were nothing like she expected. They appeared as soft as morning mist and yet they felt like nettles, cutting and pinching her, getting at every inch of her exposed flesh. They hurt, especially around her ears as they dug deeper and deeper until she couldn’t stand it any more.

“Bugger off!” she screamed, spastically thrashing around with one hand while still digging with the other for her cross. Finally, her finger hooked the chain and out it came. Just like that, the damned souls sped away, leaving her sprawled on the ground.

Her relief was short lived; beneath her the ground began to twitch and shimmy—the dead were digging their way to the surface. She didn’t want to be above them when they did. Again she plucked her shotgun from the ground, and sped off toward Jack, who must have heard her cursing and was stumbling in her direction. That felt wrong to her. He needed to be at the gate. The warning feeling was still within her and now that she saw he was alright she knew that there was something wrong with the gate itself.

“The gate!” she cried. Her voice was so weak and her breath so ragged from the sprint that there was no way he could have heard. She began pointing until he finally turned to look back the way he had come; by then it was obvious what was happening.

When they had first touched down in the helicopter, the cemetery had the same gentle appearance as the rest of France: the land was beautiful with gentle swells and easy valleys that looked softly green. Now the cemetery was rising up in a great mound with the gate as its peak.

Something huge and dreadful was coming. It was ancient beyond Cyn’s ability to comprehend and it was evil beyond her ability to withstand.

Chapter 22

Tours, France

Cynthia Childs

The mound grew to be a mountain. The earth shook and rumbled as it rose higher and higher. Birds shot into the sky with frantic cries as mausoleums of granite and marble shattered like egg shells, tombstones fell like dominos and coffins erupted out of the earth. In complete disbelief, Cyn glanced back the way she had come and saw that she was staring
down
at France!

She had to be five hundred feet up and getting higher with each passing second. Beneath her feet, fissures opened on the side of the slope. Some were mere cracks in the ground while others looked as though they could swallow her whole. She ran from these, zig-zagging right and left to avoid them.

At first, the mound was similar to a huge pustule growing larger and larger, but then suddenly the ground dipped and undulated like a wave. Cyn found herself running on nothing but air and then she was falling along with the land and she was sure she was going to break every bone in her body when she landed; however, seconds later, the earth felt as though it had reached up and caught her on a gentle slope of grass. She tumbled like a child rolling down a hill until she came right to the edge of a new chasm that was hundreds of feet deep.

“Holy Christ!” she hissed, clawing and kicking herself back from the edge. Somehow she was able to get to her feet and stumble away from the drop off, going from gravestone to weather-faded gravestone as she climbed.

The stone markers sat at cock-eyed angles like the bad teeth of a giant and rarely were they embedded in the dirt as deep as she could have hoped. Frequently, as she pulled herself higher and higher they toppled over, landing with a thud that was lost in the sound of the earth heaving and the shrill scream coming from the gate.

When the screaming had begun she didn’t know. At first Cyn had thought that she was making the hellacious noise because she had been screaming in abject fear as she had fallen, but the moment she had been able to catch her breath, she realized that the sound was external and coming from the top of the hill.

It was the sound of ultimate pain and was unlike anything she had ever heard in her life. She wanted to run from it as fast as she could, only she knew she couldn’t.

The screams were coming from the gate and were a horrible reminder of the evil that lurked deep beyond it. The gate had to be closed and she was the only one who could do it.

Jack was in no shape to do it. She could see his grey and exhausted face from sixty yards away. He was on an edge of the newly formed hill where the land was particularly sharp and dangerous. Every few seconds, great wedges of earth many feet across and weighing tons would shear away, dropping hundreds of feet. As she watched, a great chunk of the hill came apart beneath him and he fell only to be caught in the branches from a flowering tree that was bent far over. It was practically upside down and had half its roots exposed to the air.

Laboriously, almost in slow motion as if he had a great weight on his shoulders, he climbed limbs and then roots like a ladder. “Get to the gate!” he cried, waving her on.

That was easier said than done. The gate was now high above her at the top of a steep and treacherous slope. A sudden slip or a new tremor in the earth would more  than likely see her tumbling down at breakneck speeds. As scary as the slope was, what was perhaps worse was that the earth was beginning to give up its dead.

Bony hands, leering skulls and decayed and foul creatures were everywhere around her, burrowing up into the light of day and, as always, the undead were repulsive, both physically and spiritually. Cyn felt them drawn to her living warmth. She could sense their hunger and hatred and their perverse desire to seize her soul. It made her feel naked and afraid. Foolishly, she looked around for her shotgun in the hope that in all the turmoil the gun would be on the ground somewhere near at hand.

It was nowhere in sight, and so she faced the growing horde clawing out of the tortured earth with just her bare hands balled into weak little fists.

“Keep going! They won’t hurt you,” Jack called from his perch in the sideways tree. He was no longer climbing; after casting so many spells, he had reached the limit of his endurance and could only lie on the trunk, barely able to keep his eyes open, likely close to the point of passing into a coma.

Cyn put on a good show of bravery, waving to him while straining to keep the grimace from her face. Her guts were going squirrelly with fear as she climbed the slope, weaving in and out of the corpses. They did nothing to stop her; they simply stared with their dead eyes and watched her as she climbed to the top.

The view from the peak had to have been fantastic. She was close to a thousand feet up a new mountain in the middle of the French countryside, but there was only one view for her: the bloody glyphs, the gate, and the monster within it.

Something green and black and huge and horrible was forcing itself through a hole little bigger than a manhole cover. She couldn’t tell what the thing was. It might have been a thousand-foot tall toad for all she could tell from the slime covered and oddly bumpy flesh that was jutting up and spilling from the edges of the gate.

Whatever it was coming into the world was beyond her mind to comprehend. It was stunning to her senses. The shriek coming from it became a numb tone; the foul flesh of its body left her eyes blurred and unfocused; the atrocious smell contracted her stomach and cramped her intestines. The sight of the thing even sent her muscles into spasms.

In its presence, she was no longer human. If she had feet, she didn’t know. A mirror would have only confused her. Just then Cyn couldn’t remember her name or her mother’s face. Her mind could only focus on two things: the hell-creature and the overwhelming need to close the gate before it could get out and destroy the world. With stiff, fumbling fingers, she batted like a fearful savage at her belt where she kept four cylinders of silver.

Two of them held Holy Water and two were of Holy Oil. One of the four made it into her hand, where it burned her fingers as if it had been just pulled from a forge.

She heard a new scream, this time coming from her own lips, as she threw the burning vial. Her aim was perfect. There was cry from the creature, a sound like a million crows being crushed under foot; there was a splash of darkness that covered the earth in one tremendous blink…and then there was nothing—total nothing.

Nothing except the sound of Cyn screaming…and then an odd thud that had her looking around in confusion as her mind adjusted to the concept of reality once more. France was suddenly back to the way it had been—or mostly back the way it had been. The mountain was gone and the cemetery was once again composed of the same rolling hills and yet, it was no longer green or beautiful. The earth looked to have been pushed inside-out; there were mounds of dirt everywhere and coffins jutted up in uneven rows like the crops one would only find across the River Styx.

There wasn’t a single tombstone still standing and the mausoleums were now ruins. Everything that had been alive in the cemetery was now dead and everything dead was now alive. This included the trees, which had all been uprooted and it was from one of them that she had heard the thud. Jack was lying on the ground next to one of them, making a low groaning noise.

Truly, the cemetery looked like a battlefield except instead of dead bodies lying around everywhere, the bodies were standing. Tens of thousands of ghouls stood staring, not at Jack, who had brought them into the world but at Cyn, or so she first thought. It wasn’t until she took a step toward Jack and she heard something behind her that she realized that they weren’t looking at her at all.

The gate hadn’t been closed. It’s bloody glyphs were still shining wet and perfectly drawn and the way into hell was still completely intact. All she had done with the vial she had thrown was drive the awful creature back down into it.

But there was something in its place. A woman stood directly in the center of the gate, her feet suspended on the oily black surface. Cyn gasped at the sight of her and for the second time in a minute, she found her mind becoming unglued from reality as she stared. The woman was utterly naked, utterly flawless, and utterly beautiful. She had hair of spun gold and the shimmering eyes of pearl. Her breasts were full and engorged, her hips flaring provocatively, her skin was the color of cream and her smile, perfectly red lips over the whitest teeth, was simply bewildering.

This was the
Mother of Demons
in the flesh. Cyn knew her in an instant and not just because of the woman’s resemblance to the statue in the necromancer’s dungeon, there was a deeper personal connection, one that might have begun eons before.

“Don’t go to him,” the Mother said. “Stay here with me.”

Cyn’s knees buckled and she fell to the earth. The Mother’s voice had not been loud; it had been soft and sweet and wonderfully musical—and it had been powerful. The words coming from those ruby lips had sent a vibration through Cyn that had unwound her muscles, dropping her in place. Even if she had been able to stand or run, the words
compelled
her
to stay.

She couldn’t leave if she wanted to. Her feet were like the roots of a tree and her legs stiff as trunks. Even her hips were like clay.

“You do not need the man,” the Mother went on. “You are powerful. You are a daughter of the Mother. You can give life and you can take it as well. Is that not full of wonder? Is that not greatest of all? Stay here with me. Bring me out. Say the words to bring me out and you will know the power.”

Suddenly, Cyn was craving this unknown power. “What words?” she asked. Her own voice in her ears was so soft and weak that she didn’t think it could be heard; however the woman heard and answered.

“Beg the Mother of Demons to come into this world. Give her all that you are and she will come to you and you will share in her power. Is that not the greatest of all?”

The way the Mother spoke was so beguiling and full of charm that Cyn found herself nodding even through her confusion. “Yes, that is the greatest…only what was that middle part?” Cyn was sure that whatever the woman had said really was the greatest…except the part about giving all that she was. That little sentence got hung up in her awe-addled mind. It jarred her and awakened the rebellious streak within her which just happened to be both deep and wide. That part of her put on the brakes to the conversation right quick and it demanded to know what was meant by giving “all that she was.”

“It means your essence,” the woman answered the question that Cyn was sure hadn’t been spoken aloud. “We will join essence. We will become one once again and it will be the greatest.”

“Once again? When were we ever one? I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that.”

It was a simple question and yet the answer spanned universes. The woman attempted to show Cyn the truth of her words by sending pictures directly into her mind. It was too much information for her to comprehend in so little time. Ten million years
’
worth of pictures were shot into her mind and instead of filling her with understanding, it short circuited her brain and Cyn fell once more to the earth. How long she laid in a groggy semi-state of consciousness she couldn’t fathom.

If asked, she would have been sure that a thousand summers had passed before she could move again and she knew that she must have aged into an old crone, but when she put her hand to her face, she was surprised that it wasn’t grey and wrinkled. It was as soft and white as it ever was.

“Do you see that we are the greatest?” the woman asked in her musical voice. “Do you see that we are one?”

Again, Cyn found herself nodding and as before it was simply because she was compelled to by the Mother—if she wanted you to agree, you would agree even if you didn’t know what you were agreeing to. Cyn had not understood a billionth of what had been forced into her mind, but she knew one thing: the Mother of Demons was in fact a woman. A human woman, or she had been at one time.

“Who are you?” Cyn asked.

“I am the greatest. I am the woman. You are my daughter. Come and free me and you will have my power. Do you want to know my power?”

Before she could collect her wits, Cyn found herself nodding again. She tried to catch herself: “No actually, I don’t…”

Too late, the Mother of Demons sent more images into Cyn’s head, and with them came a surge of something wonderful and terrible. Again, the sensation was overwhelming, dropping her to the earth. Time went in and out. The sun spun on its golden wheel and the grass grew. Eventually, Cyn was able to blink once more and her mind slowly grasped the world around her as it reformed itself into her perception of reality. “Please, don’t do that anymore. It’s too much.”

“You did not like the power?”

Cyn had to think about that. Saying no would have been a lie. There was a curious and enticing thrum of what felt like electricity coursing through her. It made her feel huge inside as if her soul was supercharged and could burst out of her in a great ball of fire.
It’s magic power
, she thought to herself. It was what Jack had to feel when he was casting his spells.

The sensation was amazing and at the same time there was a tinny, gritty undertone to it, the cause of which she couldn’t put her finger on except to say that the power was also ugly. “No, I like it. But…but it also feels wrong somehow.”

“There is no wrong,” the woman said, anger showing in the smallest of frowns. The frown affected not just her face but the entire world. In seconds, the pretty blue of the sky grew dark with clouds as if it was only the Mother’s smile that kept the sun lit. “I do not do wrong. I do what is right and what is needed. So shall you, Cynthia Childs. Free me. Give me essence and speak words of power and you will be one with me. You will be one with the Mother of Demons, the Mother of All.”