The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead A Post-Apocalyptic Epic Read online

  The Edge of Hell

  Gods of the Undead, A Post-Apocalyptic Epic

  By Peter Meredith

  Copyright 2016

  Kindle Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect America

  The Sacrificial Daughter

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two

  The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1

  An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2

  Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3

  The Punished

  Sprite

  The Blood Lure: A Hidden Land Novel 1

  The King’s Trap: A Hidden Land Novel 2

  To Ensnare A Queen: A Hidden Land Novel 3

  The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

  The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

  The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

  The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

  The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

  The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6

  The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

  The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead, A Post-Apocalyptic Epic

  Pen(Novella)

  A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)

  The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)

  The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)

  The Drawer(Short Story)

  Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)

  The Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World

  Prologue

  Nekhen, Egypt

  The Upper Nile 1925

  The sand on top of the burial site was the same awful dun-colored grit that covered most of the miserable country. He hated the sand with a passion. It seemed to get in everything: in his bedroll, his boots, in his underwear, in the crack of his ass, in the web of lines that had developed around his eyes from squinting through the perpetual glare, and always the sand coated his nostrils.

  Of course, nothing was worse than the sand in his food. Jonathan Dreyden had lived with sand in his food for the last three months and now he chewed like an old man: carefully, slowly, even fearfully. He had lost twenty pounds; partially from the desert sun which was turning him into a dried-out husk of a man, tough and stringy, and partly because he had simply lost his once hearty appetite. Crunching down on sand once too often would do that to a man.

  Beneath the sand at the site of the dig was—he didn’t have to guess—more sand. This time a hard compact layer several feet deep. It had the consistency of concrete but not the charm.

  The burial site was out in the middle of nowhere west of the Nile and south of the “city of the dead,” the necropolis at Nekhen. They were far up the river almost to the country of Sudan where things were sketchy at best; Jonathan always kept his 1911 model Colt .45 at his side, except that is, when he was cleaning the damned sand out of its inner workings.

  As the project wasn’t of immense proportions, it took weeks of back-breaking labor for the small crew to hack through that second layer.

  It was ugly, harsh, thankless work. “And this is why God gave us heathens,” Robert Montgomery said, elbowing his father gently in the side. His father, the current Earl of Blackburn, was standing beneath a great umbrella held by another of the dozen or so local Egyptians who toiled under the blistering sun in their gallibayas, the long, loose robes that the Egyptians all seemed to wear.

  “I suppose,” Lord Blackburn replied, in the soft spoken manner he used whenever Jonathan was near. The tone was, as always, picked up by Robert. It made him mean.

  “Jonathan, dear,” Robert said. “Do you think you can move them along a little quicker? This heat is simply miserable and I wouldn’t want my father having a fit on account of it.”

  My father. It was never ‘our’ father, and it never would be and Robert made sure Jonathan knew it. Jonathan was an embarrassment. He was a living scandal. He was proof of the sin of adultery. He was a bastard in a time when the word meant something, and, what was worse, he was an American bastard.

  Robert would never let either his father or Jonathan forget it.

  It was the reason that Jonathan had accompanied them on the expedition. He was there so Robert could treat him like a servant, so he could make sure Jonathan would never forget his place in proper society.

  Robert was jealous of his half-brother. Jonathan was the spitting image of his cheating father: tall, broad shouldered, keen eyed and sharp-witted. His hair was the same sandy-blonde and his eyes the same sky blue. They were both quiet and contemplative. They both treated those of lesser birth with the same respect as they would the king.

  On the other hand, Robert had the same unfortunate qualities that his slightly inbred mother possessed—close set, suspicious eyes that were the color of mud, a thin hooked nose and the heavy lips frequent among the Hanoverians from which much of the British royalty was descended. They were the lips of a grouper, Jonathan thought.

  “I’ll get right on it,” the bastard drawled. The sound of his voice seemed to grate on Robert’s nerves—it was one of the reasons why Jonathan refused to change his American idioms. Even when he spoke to his father he could barely bring himself to use the terms: Lord or Lordship, it just didn’t feel right.

  Jonathan glanced at one of the locals, Mustafa Almara. “Let’s pick it up, Mustafa!” he yelled, clapping his hands. He also made sure to raise a quick eyebrow so that the foreman knew it wasn’t him giving the inhumane order. The crew was already glaring as they worked, casting evil eyes at Lord Blackburn, who was up in years and somewhat oblivious to the danger around him.

  The local Mohammedans bowed and scraped and made sure to appear subservient; however, they hid nothing from Jonathan. They were as dangerous as any pirate crew and Jonathan would rather dine with jungle cannibals than turn his back on them.

  Still, as an American, he was safer than either his father or his half-brother. The Egyptians had been granted independence from the British only two years before and they were still in a stew over things.

  The locals, muttering under their breath, worked the remainder of the afternoon away until one cried out and began pointing. “What is he jabbering on about?” Robert demanded. “Jonathan, be a dear and find out.” Robert did not like the idea of stepping away from the shade of his umbrella. As he had mentioned a dozen times, the idea of coming home looking like a “sun-ravaged Indian” was appalling to him.

  “He’s saying something about a scorpion,” Jonathan remarked, causing Robert to back even further away.

  His father, on the other hand, hurried forward with a leather-bound text under his arm. “Your lordship, please,” Robert said. “Let Jonathan take care of it. Scorpions are simply abysmal. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a scorpion.”

  “It’s not a real scorpion, Robert,” Lord Blackburn said over his shoulder. “They would’ve hacked it into pieces with their implements. No...it’s...it’s...” His words faltered as he saw the faint outlines of the ancient blocks that had been uncovered. They were sun-baked mud bricks, about a foot in length and width, and on each was stamped a crude scorpion. “Clear the dirt away, quickly!” Blackburn cried, following Jonathan down into the excavation pit. He was exc
ited. He ran a hand through his white hair and it stayed sprung, but he didn’t care.

  One man picked up an iron shovel but Jonathan stopped him. “No. Use the trowels and the small brooms. You don’t want to scratch any of these; they’re far too valuable.” He was not a scholar or a classically trained Egyptologist, however, both his father and brother were and three months stuck in the desert with them endlessly discussing the possible meanings of this hieroglyph or the symbols carved on that cartouche had made Jonathan almost an expert.

  “Yes,” agreed Lord Blackburn. “We don’t want to make the same mistakes as that fool Quibell. How does one unearth something as famous as the Narmer Palette and not take adequate notes? Speaking of which. Robert! Get your pen and paper. And make sure you use a fresh nib. This could be big.” He was as excited as a boy at Christmas.

  Due to the heat, Robert moved languidly. He seemed apathetic as he gazed down at the bricks that were slowly being unearthed. “I’m failing to see the bigness of this, father. If you’re thinking this is the tomb of the Scorpion King, I’m afraid you’re going to be sadly mistaken. Yes, the bricks are very nice, the placement, excellent and the workmanship topnotch, but this is not a pharaoh’s tomb. Look.”

  He pointed all around the excavation site. “No obelisks, no colossi, no cartouches, no funerary complex. I’m not saying that this isn’t a major discovery or I should say, possibly one. It is right where a proper reading of Mespero’s Pyramid Texts said we would find ‘something’ but this is no pharaoh.”

  Jonathan wanted to agree, but doing so would have earned him only a scathing look of condescension from Robert.

  “You are probably correct,” Blackburn said. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t do this in proper fashion. We should move forward as if there’s a thousand pound gold sarcophagus within. Remember Tutankhamen!”

  The story of the boy pharaoh was still new in 1925 and was responsible for the great wave of amateur archaeologists who had descended on Egypt like flies on a carcass in the last three years. A fortune in gold and precious relics had been unearthed in what had been thought to be only a servant’s tomb. Tutankhamen’s tomb had appeared so insignificant that time had swallowed it up allowing the tomb to remain intact and undisturbed for forty-three hundred years.

  The talk of gold and precious relics lit a flame in the laborers. They had a lust in their eyes and they worked with much more enthusiasm than they had been. Jonathan read the gold fever in their faces and he made sure they saw his hand on the butt of his Colt. They knew he was a marksman; once a week he practiced with the pistol, blasting targets in the empty desert. Still they spoke in low, conspiratorial tones.

  As early evening came on, Jonathan pulled Mustafa aside. “I don’t like the way the men are acting. They’re being sneaky. What are they saying when we aren’t around?”

  He was putting the foreman in a bad position; however, there was something in the air that only he suspected. Robert had such a superior attitude that he couldn’t fathom the “savages” turning on their “betters” and Lord Blackburn was too engrossed in the find to even look up. Jonathan had a feeling things weren’t right. He had relied on those feeling to get him through sixteen months of war on the Western Front and his sixth-sense hadn’t left him.

  “It is nothing,” Mustafa answered in his heavily accented English. It came out sounding like eat and is was ease. “They grumble. They make jokes. If I could, I would beat them, but these are not those times. Am I right?”

  “I guess not,” Jonathan replied, not liking the answer. It didn’t fit.

  The sun lingered in the desert and it was after supper when it finally torched the lower edge of western desert skies, turning everything golden. By that time, the workers had uncovered the entrance to the tomb: a single slab of white granite. Another scorpion had been chiseled on it.

  “How extraordinary,” Lord Blackburn, exclaimed. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. A single glyph. What do you make of it, Robert?”

  Robert looked up from his sketch. “Perhaps whoever is buried here didn’t need more. Maybe he was so famous that a single glyph was all that was needed to proclaim who he was. Either that, or he was so insignificant that the single glyph was all he was known by.”

  “I think it’s a warning,” Jonathan said. There were danger bells going off in his head and it didn’t just stem from the local thugs. Something else was wrong; in fact, nothing seemed right.

  “If you say the words Pharaoh’s Curse, I’m going to brand you a coward here and now,” Robert said with a smirk that was almost a dare.

  Jonathan’s eyes narrowed, taking in his brother’s smug face. “No, I wasn’t. The scorpion had many meanings with these sorts of glyphs and nearly all of them suggest danger. Have you considered that the person buried here might have died as a result of some sort of disease?”

  The outbreak of influenza that had swept the world following the Great War had been too recent and too fantastically cruel to discard Jonathan’s idea out of hand. Eighteen million people had succumbed, enough for even Robert to hesitate.

  “Possible…possible,” he said. “But would a disease last three thousand years in this sort of dry heat? I really doubt any could.”

  “I, for one, am willing to take the chance,” Lord Blackburn said. He was a stout old man and, apart from his dalliance with ‘that American woman’ as Jonathan’s mother was always referred to, his heart was never in question.

  Robert was quick to agree: “As am I.” He looked at Jonathan as if he had won some sort of contest.

  “Then by all means,” Jonathan said. Now that he had agreed, he was hoping they would crack the vault right there and then, but his father would not hear of it. He wanted a good night sleep so they could be fresh and alert. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed was how he put it.

  Jonathan knew he wasn’t going to be either bright eyed or bushy tailed. The scorpion glyph bothered him to no end, as did the sly look the laborers kept slipping their way. Lord Blackburn had purposely kept his expedition quiet. He hadn’t wanted to advertise a possible new find which would only generate unwanted publicity and unwanted legal headaches. He was, in essence, out on a limb. It was why Jonathan had made sure the workers knew he carried the Colt and knew he could use it.

  That night Jonathan regretted the fire that had been burning outside their tents for the last three months; the desert could become deadly cold at night. That night the crackle and snap of the fire masked sounds that pointed to deception, thievery and perhaps even murder.

  Jonathan woke up when the moon was straight above, casting everything in the pale light of the dead. He did not move except to slide his right hand beneath the roll of his winter coat that he used as a pillow. The Colt was there, a hard, deadly lump, a constant reminder that he was always one breath from his last.

  He had his hand around the grip, his finger caressing the trigger. Something had woken him. Maybe the howl of a jackal, maybe the hoot of the desert owl, maybe the scrape of a pry-bar against granite that hadn’t seen the light of day in thousands of years.

  As he laid there, his ears straining, there was another scrape of metal against stone; his suspicions were confirmed. He bit back the curse that was on the edge of his lips and then, silent as an adder, he slipped on his boots. Next, he checked the load on his .45: seven in the magazine and one in the chamber.

  With a deft hand, he pulled on the white laces that held the flaps of his tent closed and slipped out into the dead of night, the gun in his hand, the dark air settling on his skin, tenting it up in a thousand goosebumps.

  There was a glow beyond the fire; a slight one out toward the excavation site. It was wholly expected. The laborers were robbing a grave that was, in a sense, Lord Blackburn’s to rob. The moral distinctions aside, Jonathan couldn’t allow it. His father had paid for this dig and, as such, he had the legal right to whatever was found at the site.

  He stepped through the sand, lifting his feet and placing them silently; he wa
s a shadow in a land of shadows. He advanced down into the pit that had been dug that day and saw that the Mohammedans had torn back the granite covering of the crypt and that there was a flickering glow from inside. Echoes of excited whispers drifted up to him.

  Jonathan eased to the door and peeked around the corner of the granite wall and saw the men as shadows dancing on the walls; they were deep already, heading down into the earth where something dreadful awaited. Their minds were clouded with a fever that only the lust for gold could bring on, making them oblivious to the real, palpable danger in the air.

  It wasn’t poison and it wasn’t a disease. It was foreign, alien, evil.

  The little hairs on the back of Jonathan’s neck lifted right up as he followed the men downstairs of pure marble. Unlike other tombs he had been in, this one was ageless: no dust, no cobwebs, no mouse droppings. The way was incredibly clean, the tile: hand-finished marble, looked new. Both the walls and the floors were unadorned and stark white. It seemed impossible, especially with Jonathan’s preconceived notions of the ancient Egyptians as being only one step up from dirty savages.

  He followed in the dark until he came to the first chamber: a simple square room, unadorned save for a doorway straight across from the one that Jonathan was standing in, and a single block of black stone, six feet per side, sitting smack dab in the middle of the room. There was a lip that ran all around the stone, suggesting there was something within it. Four of the men were grunting over crowbars, trying to lift it, while a fifth held a lantern for them to work by.

  “Stop!” Jonathan barked, advancing into the room with his .45 pointed. The men froze, their hands coiled around their metal tools. “Step back, nice and slow,” he added. When they didn’t budge, he gave the gun a little flick to the side, the universal language of: move or you’ll get shot.

  The man with the lantern turned his head, never taking his eyes from the big bore of the pistol, and called out something in Arabic. In seconds, a light appeared from the other doorway and two men came to stand just shy of the room. The first was Mustafa. He held his empty hands out to Jonathan. Another of the workers was so close behind him that they seemed chained together somehow.