“Ummm,” he said. All this awareness was taking up so much of his mind that he was having trouble coming up with an answer. “Uh, I’d sooner let myself be sacrificed than let anything happen to you.”
Her mouth came open, so close to his that he could feel her breath on his cheek. He was sure that she was about to kiss him; however, she started to blink in confusion and then she gave a little laugh and said: “That’s nice and I-I think I would do the same for you, which means...”
He smiled. “Which means that neither of us are candidates. The blood can’t be given. It has to be taken.”
“Just like the life,” she added. “Not that I want to die.” Her smile came back, a brief light in the dark. “I’m just afraid of who we’ll find to sacrifice. What if it’s a little kid? Can we really do that to someone?”
Jack wanted to give her a little speech about the importance of being strong, of the need to do the difficult things in the face of evil, of sacrificing the few for the good of the many, but he couldn’t find the words and if he had, he didn’t know if he could have spit them out. There were no words that could make what they had to do, palatable or even right.
They were going to commit evil, far beyond simple murder. His father had pointed at Carl’s corpse and said: You damned that man. He didn’t say: You killed that man. He had used the word damned. If the words of the spell had been literal, then they had given Carl’s soul away to the Mother of Demons in return for a few useless words.
And now they were contemplating doing it again. What if Loret was as clueless as Jack’s father? How many more people would Jack damn for all eternity in order to stop his cousin?
“We should get going,” he said, no longer concerned with his manhood. Even when Cyn wriggled down his body to get back into the Humvee, it didn’t stir.
He took them down the ridge, heading for the city of the dead. Next to him, Cyn fidgeted with the shotgun and stared out the window. After a while she asked: “We’re going back into the city?” She made it sound as if they were going back into hell itself.
It had that sort of feel to it.
“That’s where Loret is. The way my father spoke, it seems that you need the bones of a person to bring them back, so we don’t have a choice.”
“Right, I get that, but what about the uh, ‘person’ we need? Where are going to find one in the city? I can’t image anyone being left alive there. Oh, bloody hell! Look out, Jack!” In front of them was a bank of swirling darkness engulfing the road and within it were more of the creatures, seemingly waiting to ambush them.
Jack took the Humvee off road only to find their headlights illuminating more of the half-rotted cadavers. They were strung out in a long line that stretched into the dark. He charged through the trees at where he thought there were the fewest and just before he ran down a lady in a baggy, dirt-stained, brown dress, he felt his testicles draw up, and his hands went white knuckled on the steering wheel. Cyn gasped and grabbed her head with both hands.
They were passing through a cloud of fear and it seized Jack’s mind making him want to slam on the brakes. His foot came off the gas. Don’t do it! a voice...his own voice said into his mind. It was a logical-sounding Jack, and one that didn’t fit in with their dire situation. If you brake, then the ghouls will be on you in a flash and they’ll kill Cyn. You don’t want that, do you?
“No,” he whispered, holding onto a little portion of his thinking mind just long enough to crash into the lady in brown. She wasn’t sucked under the wheels, she caught the Humvee in the chest and was struck with such force that her head flew off and smashed against the windshield. It broke open like a rotten melon, spilling a black mess onto the glass.
Cyn screamed and Jack’s logic deserted him. He slammed his foot down, thinking that he was hitting the brake when in fact his foot had been hovering over the gas. The hummer leapt forward and by the time Jack found the brake, they were through the cloud of fear and bouncing up onto another road.
Jack didn’t have a clue what the two-lane road was or where it went, he was just happy to be away from the creatures...well, most of the creatures, anyway. The headless corpse had survived the rough trip through the woods and was climbing onto the hood of the Humvee.
Now, Jack slammed on the brakes, screeching to a halt. The woman’s corpse wasn’t possessed by a demon; it was a run-of-the-mill ghoul and lacked the strength to hold on. She went flying and Jack gleefully ran her remains over as he continued down the road. He even grinned, feeling suddenly and strangely happy. He would even go so far as to call his mental state: euphoric.
The feeling had also struck Cyn. She grinned right back at him, although it faded when she saw the ugly smear on the windshield. “Could you do something about that?”
“Of course,” he said and then searched for the lever to work the windshield wipers. At first the smear grew worse and Jack slowed to a crawl until the blades and wiper fluid did their thing and cleared up the mess. When it did, Jack was surprised to see a little town below them and within it was a building ablaze with lights. What was more amazing was that it was whole, unmarred by the evil in the night.
Jack would go so far as to call the building cheery and he raced down the road toward it, feeling a growing excitement in his gut. It was a church and not a very big one. It was simple in its construction: a rectangle with white clapboard siding and a steep angular roof that was dominated by a bell tower with a large cross atop it.
They pulled up in front and their strange, giddy feeling bloomed in their chests. There was singing coming from inside. The two of them jumped out of the Humvee and were so excited that they nearly ran into the church without their guns. Jack almost felt that they didn’t need them.
“Hold on,” he said and ran back to the Humvee. He grabbed the M4 for himself and the shotgun for Cyn.
“Do we knock, do you suppose?” Cyn asked as they hesitated at the front doors. Jack reached out and pushed the doors open easily. What was inside was wonderful at first; the light and the warmth and the voices raised in praise, baked into him, but he didn’t step in. This was a church; a holy place and Jack was the worst of sinners.
He had made blood sacrifices to the Mother of Demons, twice in order to save his own selfish skin and once in a satanic ritual of murder.
When he hesitated, Cyn frowned at him. “There’s power here, Jack. A power for good. You can feel it, right?”
“Yeah.” It was a light that burned and threw his evil shade on the steps behind them.
There had to be three hundred people packed into the tiny church and most were turned around in their pews, singing, but also staring at Jack and Cyn. “Come in,” a soldier said to them in a whisper. He wore a disheveled, mud and blood stained uniform. There were dozens of soldiers among the crowd and only a few possessed weapons.
Cyn pulled Jack inside and let the door close behind them. It clanged loud enough to make Jack jump. The crowd consisted of desperate, tired, but happy people. Most of them had lost everything but had found their salvation. Jack could see it in their upturned faces. They had lived through a night of terror and it had been a prelude to their discovering the Lord’s saving grace. Jack envied them.
The two of them in their odd gear should have been a ten-second wonder, but for some reason they drew attention and the singing faltered.
“Why did we come here?” Jack hissed to Cyn. The euphoria was gone and his sins large in his mind. “We have a mission, an important one, and I don’t think we can spare the time to sing a few songs.”
“Maybe you were meant to come here,” the soldier who had invited them in proposed; he was slightly older than the other soldiers; there was just the beginning of grey in his short brown hair. “Maybe the Lord has brought you to this place of worship to heal and rest. I hope you don’t think it’s rude that I say you look like you need both.”
Jack knew they certainly did and yet he was afraid of what would happen if they stopped here and relaxed for a while. Not
only would millions die while they dawdled, there was a great chance that they would become too comfortable and too content to go out and risk their lives.
“I would love to,” Jack told the man, “only we don’t have time. The mission is critical. Thank you, though.”
Cyn looked crestfallen and for just a moment it seemed as though she was going to ask to stay behind—and he would have allowed it, lonely as that would have made him. However, she didn’t ask, she grimaced and after a breath she turned for the door.
“I think you should speak to the Monsignor,” the soldier suggested. He was eyeing them both closely and even gave them a sniff which seemed to confirm something. “Yes, come with me.” It wasn’t a suggestion.
He wound his way around the edge of the crowd, stepping over sleeping children and exhausted parents and those too injured to move out of their way. Jack and Cyn followed the soldier to a side door which opened into a short hallway where they found even more people seated against the walls.
There were three doors opening off the hall and the soldier went to the closest and asked a man in bib overalls: “I’m afraid I need to see the Monsignor, next. I hope you don’t mind.”
“It’s ‘k. I’ve been tryin’ to get my thoughts in order and I’m afraid they just won’t come.”
“When it’s time, just relax and let the words flow,” the soldier said. “It’ll be fine.”
No one explained what was going to be “fine” or what words were supposed to flow from the man. And Jack didn’t ask. He was growing more and more nervous with each passing second and he actually took a step back when the door opened, treading on Cyn’s foot.
“It’ll be ok,” she said and nudged him forward after a girl of about seventeen came out of the room with her face streaked with tears. It didn’t look like it was going to be “ok” to Jack, but he allowed himself to be pushed inside.
The room surprised Jack; it was basically empty save for a chair and an odd wooden partition that could be folded open or closed. The partition sat in the middle of the room, screening a man who said: “Please sit and know that the Lord our God is the Father of mercy.”
The soldier cleared his throat and said: “Please excuse me, Monsignor. There are two people I think you should meet. They have been in contact with the dead.”
Instead of getting up, the Monsignor pulled back the folding wall and stared at Jack and Cyn, taking in every detail of their appearance with shrewd dark eyes. Jack stared right back. The Monsignor was a tall man and old, angular and infirm. His eyes were grey but cloudy and the wrinkled flesh of his neck practically obscured the hard white collar he wore.
“Yes, they have,” the Monsignor agreed. “They have both been touched by the hand of the dead and have been healed as well, and yet they have reservations about being in this room and in this chapel. Strange.”
“How do you know all of this?” Jack asked. “I’m not denying it, I’m just curious.”
The Monsignor waved for the soldier to answer. The younger man said: “Since we’ve come in contact with these minions from hell, there has been an awakening if you will within the various Christian denominations. Perhaps it’s affected the other religions of the world in the same manner, but as of yet we don’t know. We know only that many priests and pastors have discovered abilities of a biblical nature such as the healing of the sick, or the casting out of these demons. In this case, you project an aura that is unmistakable.”
“Exactly,” the Monsignor said, snapping his long, knobby fingers in excitement. “I believe that these God-sent powers have always been within us waiting on exactly this moment to blossom.”
“This moment?” Jack asked.
“Yes,” the Monsignor answered. “The second coming.”
Jack was suddenly overcome with fatigue and he went and sat down in the empty chair. “It’s not the second coming or the apocalypse or whatever. This was all started by a man...just a man.”
“And you know him,” the soldier stated with complete assurance.
“Yeah? How did you...wait, are you a priest of some sort?”
The soldier touched his own collar; on one side were the double black bars that denoted his rank as captain and on the other was a cross. “I’m a military chaplain. Strictly, National Guard. In everyday life I am a Lutheran Pastor. I am Pastor John Corley. Now you were saying how you know the man who started this?”
With Cyn’s help, Jack told their tale—all of it, including the blood sacrifices and the misery of murdering Carl. Jack had wanted to hold back, to steer the story around the parts that cast him in the most vile light, but once he started talking, the words just flowed out of him. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t seem to stop himself. During the telling, the room was dead quiet and after, it became painfully so. Finally, Jack couldn’t take it. “Are you two going to say anything?”
“You are heading down the wrong path, young man,” the Monsignor said. “Darkness cannot be overcome by more darkness. It can only be overcome by lighting the world with God’s love.”
The platitude grated on Jack’s nerves. “Perhaps what I’m suggesting is to fight fire with fire. As much as I’m amazed at this new power you priests seem to possess, I’m also a little disenchanted. The power of God’s goodness wasn’t enough for Father Paul to overcome even a few of the creatures and now we have millions to contend with.”
“It is not the goodness or the strength of the Lord that should be in question,” the Monsignor declared. “The failure of this Father Paul may be the failure of his own goodness and strength. Perhaps his faith was put to the test and he came up short. I don’t know.”
“No you don’t,” Jack snapped. “Father Paul was a good man.”
Pastor Corley held up his hands to calm Jack and, unbelievably, Jack calmed. “I am sure the Monsignor did not mean to speak ill of Father Paul,” the pastor said. “It was conjecture only. We don’t know why Father Paul failed. Perhaps we aren’t meant to stand toe-to-toe with these creatures in a battle of strength versus strength. Rarely has that been the way of the Lord.”
“Where there is faith, the Lord will provide,” the Monsignor said. “He has given us the strength to hold here. Satan’s minions tried to tear down these walls, but they could not abide our light. Jack, you see this, yet you hold back. Why?”
Jack eyed the floor and shrugged. Pastor Corley said: “My guess is that it’s because he still living under the weight of his sins and these ones are particularly heavy, aren’t they?”
The floor of this empty room never looked so interesting; Jack couldn’t seem to pull his eyes up off of it. He couldn’t bring himself to look anyone in the eye just then, not even Cyn who had been with him during the worst of his atrocities. “Yeah,” Jack said, in a whisper. “But I don’t know if I believe in...in any of this, or how much I believe, or anything.”
The Monsignor reached out and patted Jack’s leg. “You may not believe in the Lord but he sure does believe in you. He loves you, Jack, and all that it takes to be forgiven for these miserable sins is for you ask for forgiveness. It’s not an easy thing and yet you’ve admitted to murder and idolatry and that’s the hardest part; opening up. Now that you have, just ask for the Lord’s blessing and if you’re truly sorry, the Lord will forgive.”
It sounded too easy. Jack hesitated answering for so long that Cyn finally gave her opinion: “He thinks he’s going to have to do it again, that’s what I think. We talked about it, but now, I don’t see why we’d have to. Jack, can’t you feel it? There’s a presence here.”
There was a presence and a power; however, it was a new power, an untested power, the limits of which, if there were any, weren’t known. It was sort of like the fifty-caliber machine gun mounted to the top of the Humvee. Jack knew it was a powerful gun, but didn’t know how powerful, nor did he know how many bullets were in it and what sort of damage they would do.
He wasn’t even sure how to aim the thing or how the weapon would react when he started f
iring it in a real situation. Would it jump or rise or would the barrel get so hot that it would melt?
“I feel the presence, I just...” he left off.
“You just don’t trust it?” Cyn asked. When he half-shrugged, she glared, just a flash of anger before her face broke and she was practically in tears. “Jack, we can be done. We can be forgiven and we can let someone else take over the fight. It doesn’t have to be us.” When he hesitated, the glare came right back on her face and with it came a punch in the shoulder that turned his arm dead.
“Hey!”
She ignored his look of outrage and turned to the Monsignor. “Can I be forgiven for my part in all of this?”
“Of course, my child,” the Monsignor said. “Come kneel in front of me.”
In true Cyn fashion, she knotted up her blonde hair as if there was going to be something arduous about the act of penance, and knelt down in front of the priest.
“Good. Now, do you reject Satan and all his works and all of his empty promises?”
“Yes, of course,” she answered immediately.
“Do you believe in the God the Father, almighty, creator of heaven and earth?”
She was slower to answer, but eventually said: “Yes, I think so.”
“And do you believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died, and was buried, rose from the dead and is now seated at the right hand of the Father?”
It was obvious that she hadn’t been raised in a Christian home and this blanket statement of a faith that she was so new to caused her hesitation to be far more pronounced. The Monsignor gave her a benign smile and said, “Maybe we should do the short version. Some Holy Water, Pastor John, if you don’t mind?”
The military chaplain hurried out of the room and was back in seconds with a silver chalice. The Monsignor dipped his fingers in it and wet Cyn’s forehead in a cross, saying: “I baptize you, in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
Cyn grinned from ear to ear and there were diamond tears in her eyes. She opened her mouth to say something to Jack, but the Monsignor shushed her and then spoke in a rush: “God the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins. May God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead A Post-Apocalyptic Epic Page 29
