Queen of the Dead (2 page)

What do you call it when you're running for your life from a rotting, animated cadaver wearing a cop uniform who—if he catches you—will savagely rip you limb from limb with his maggot-riddled hands?

Me, I called it “Thursday.”

Well, “Friday,” I guess. Because it was after midnight.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I could say all this trouble started about twenty minutes ago, but that wouldn't be true. It really started four months before that, on the day I stepped out of my house and discovered that my next-door neighbor had become a walking dead man rotting inside his JCPenney bathrobe. After that, it was my assistant principal and then my math teacher. Suddenly, they were everywhere—cops (like the dude chasing me now), store owners, and even TV news anchor guys. Thousands of them, with more showing up every day.

Corpses, with a capital “C.” That's what we call them.

Not “zombies.” Zombies are staggering, moaning morons. Corpses, on the other hand, are fast, smart, and organized. To the rest of the world, they're normal-looking people. Only kids can see them for what they really are—and only some kids. Guess I'm one of the lucky ones.

Since that morning, I haven't been home.

My name's Will Ritter, and I'm an Undertaker.

“How many are there?” Helene asked me twenty minutes ago.

I peered through the telescope at the goings-on at the prison gate across the street. The night vision turned the world a sickly green, but it penetrated every shadow. With it, I could clearly make out a small group of Corpses. They were doing something at the back of a Philly police car that stood idling at the curb, its headlights and flashers off.

“Four,” I replied. “And whatever they're up to, they're being pretty low key about it. One's standing watch. Another's opening the gate, and the last two are pulling something out of the trunk.”

“What is it?”

“Wait a minute.” I peered closer. “A body!”

“Maybe one of them wants to transfer,” Helene suggested.

“No…he's moving.” I frowned. “I think they've got a person there…I mean a living person. Looks like he's handcuffed. Hands and feet. Gagged too.”

“Lemme look,” Helene said, her misty breath clouding her face. It was freakin' cold on this dark street—just past twelve o'clock on a clear February night in Philadelphia. We'd stationed ourselves on Fairmount Avenue, hidden in the shadow of a storefront awning across from the enormous front façade of Eastern State Penitentiary.

I handed her my pocketknife—my weird, amazing pocketknife. It'd been given to me by a mysterious, nameless woman who'd visited me in a dream. I'd been pretty badly injured at the time and would have assumed that my battered head had conjured her up if I hadn't found this gift under my pillow.

It had taken me a while to fess up to the story, but most of my friends now knew the gist of it: I'd been visited by an angel.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

Well, my life over these past few months has kind of redefined “crazy” in my personal dictionary.

For example, take the Corpse Invasion—an army of the walking dead who somehow projected the illusion that they were ordinary men and women, an illusion that stayed put no matter how many slowly decomposing bodies they inhabited, wore out, and then replaced. For the past three years, long before I got involved, they'd been worming their way into city government, planning to take over. Last fall, one of them—a news guy called Kenny Booth—even tried to run for mayor.

He didn't win. We stopped him. The Undertakers.

Each of us is a Seer, somehow able to look right through the Corpses' illusions and spot the festering, stolen cadavers underneath. We
could
blow the whistle on them. We
could
stop these creatures in their tracks. Except, we're kids; the oldest of us is only seventeen.

And nobody believes kids, not about stuff like this.

Ever.

So we fight the war that no one else can. A guerrilla war. We hide in the shadows, only coming out at night. We watch the Deaders, and when we see an opportunity, we hit them. We hit them hard. Then we disappear.

Pisses them off no end, believe me.

Tonight, Helene and I had been quietly following a bunch of Corpse cops. To anyone else, they'd look like normal, upstanding members of the Philadelphia Police Department. To us, they were a pair of “Type Twos” and another pair of “Type Threes.” That was a kind of rating system we had based on how far along a particular cadaver was in its decomposition. Type Ones were freshly dead, still fast and strong, though sometimes a bit juicy. Type Fives were dry husks that didn't move well, fought worst, and tended to fall apart.

These were in the middle.

Four Deaders in one cop car were rare. Normally, they liked to spread themselves pretty thin, infiltrating as much of the city's infrastructure as possible. Whenever we spotted more than two of them together at one time, it was a real red flag.

And almost always meant they were up to something.

After tailing them through the city streets for maybe half an hour, we'd wound up here, on Fairmount Avenue between Twenty-First and Twenty-Second streets, spying on them from a reasonably safe distance.

“They're carrying him inside,” Helene reported, my pocketknife pressed to her one eye, the other eye squeezed shut. She was looking, as I'd been looking, through its night vision telescope.

Yeah, it's got a night vision telescope.

“Three are going in,” she added. “But the fourth is staying put. Probably a lookout. Hold it!”

“What?” I asked.

“Looks like something fell out of the guy's pocket while they were carrying him through the gate. It's lying on the street. I don't think the Corpses noticed it.”

“Can you see what it is?”

She shook her head.

“Zoom in.”

“I'm as zoomed-in as this toy of yours goes. It's square and dark. A wallet maybe.”

Interesting.

“We should get it,” I suggested.

She lowered the pocketknife, frowning at me. “Forget it. No way.”

“It could be important,” I pressed.

“We're on recon. No direct contact, remember?”

It was true. Helene and I were “Angel” trainees. Angels was the name given to Undertakers crew responsible for most of the guerrilla war stuff I mentioned earlier. They were bossed by a girl named Sharyn Jefferson, the Chief's sister, and she ran it like an army general—by the book. Trainees were allowed to go out and scout for suspicious Corpse behavior, spy on them, and report back to Haven, the Undertakers' headquarters.

But we were
not
to go toe-to-toe with Deaders. It was part of the “rules and regs” that we lived by or, more to the point, survived by.

Still—

“Helene, they've snatched a living person…and an adult, not a kid. Not a Seer. Don't you think it's worth a little risk to maybe find out why?”

She considered, still frowning. Her brown hair was tied back and hidden under a heavy wool cap. Her pale face and hazel eyes shown in the dim light. For a long moment, she didn't answer.

Then she did. “Not tonight, Will.”

“Not tonight? Why not?”

“Just…not tonight.”

Now it was my turn to frown. “That's stupid.”

“Yeah? Well, those are the rules and regs. You know them as well as I do. Plus, I'm senior on this mission. So, stupid or not, you're not going anywhere.”

I bristled, giving her a look that I hoped conveyed how I felt about her pulling rank on me. “So if I go out there on my own, you'll…what? Kick my ass?”

“Wouldn't be the first time,” she said.

True enough.

“Come on. I'll keep it low and quiet. Nothing crazy. You cover me with your Super Soaker. Once I'm close enough, I'll tag the guard with my pistol, grab the whatever-it-is, and be gone before the rest of the Corpses even know I'm there.”

Helene wavered. “Will…I don't think…”

“You don't trust me?”

She swallowed. “You know I do.”

“Then trust me when I tell you I can do this!”

I watched her forehead wrinkle with consternation. Finally, with an exasperated sigh, she gave in. “Fine. But I swear…if you get yourself killed, I
will
kick your ass!”

“Deal. Um…I'll need my pocketknife.”

Her expression turned suspicious. “What for?”

“Just in case.”

She shook her head. “Uh-uh. I'll need it to keep an eye out…‘just in case'
you
get into trouble. Play it slow and smart, and you can nail that Deader before he even sees you. Just make sure you turn your radio off. You know how those things have a habit of beeping or chirping at just the wrong time.”

I looked from her to my pocketknife and back again. That strange gadget was my most prized possession, and the idea of going into battle without it felt wrong.

“Helene…”

She gave me one of those looks, the one with a single eyebrow raised sharply—Mr. Spock-style. “You doing this…or not?”

I gave up and peered across the street. The prison lights were still off, its walls dark. But enough illumination shone from nearby streetlamps to give me a good view of the Corpse lookout. He stood at his post, maybe fifty yards away, his stolen body as stiff as a tree trunk and big enough to snap my neck like a pretzel stick.

But something told me this was important, and lately, I'd learned to trust my instincts.

A car rolled by, heading east. I ducked back into the shadows and instinctively covered my eyes so the headlights' glare wouldn't blind me. Fairmount Avenue could be a fairly busy street, but it was late, so traffic was pretty thin. Still, I'd have to be careful crossing, as much to avoid getting pinned by highlights as run over.

Another car passed, this one going west, toward where the guard stood. Then the street quieted again.

Now!
I thought.
While
the
Deader's got the glare in his eyes!

But just as I tensed to run, a hand caught my arm. Annoyed, I looked back to find Helene staring pointedly at me.

“It's past midnight,” she said.

“So?” I asked.

“So…don't die. Not today. I don't need the irony.”

Surprised, I nodded. She let go, and I made my move, keeping low as I hurried across Fairmount Avenue, using the patchwork of shadows for cover and the noise of the retreating car to mask my footfalls.

So…don't die. Not today.

Helene knew it was my birthday.

Eastern State Penitentiary wasn't a prison—at least not anymore.

When it was built back in 1829, it was the largest structure in the United States. The outer walls, with their towers and parapets, had been designed to be imposing, kind of an early crime deterrent. The whole thing looked like a huge medieval castle. All it lacked was a moat.

In its day, Eastern State hosted big-name prisoners like Al Capone. Then, in the 1970s, it was closed as a prison and reopened again in the 1990s as a museum. Years ago, I went there on a field trip. Most Philly kids do, sooner or later.

The place is huge and creepy, kind of like Dracula's castle, only surrounded by restaurants and microbreweries.

But now, it was closed again by order of the city as part of a restoration effort. They said they were going to make the old prison “prettier.” And in the meantime, the Corpses were apparently using the place for their own reasons—reasons that involved bringing a bound, living human through its gate in the middle of the night.

I dropped into a crouch beside a brick landscaping shelf—maybe four-feet-tall—that skirted the sidewalk all the way from the eastern corner of the prison to the front gate. Atop this shelf, which was maybe ten feet deep, decorative shrubbery, most of it little more than sticks this time of year, filled the space between me and the thirty-foot perimeter wall.

Looking west, I once again spotted the Corpse guard standing just outside the gate. If he'd noticed me crossing the street, he gave no sign.

So far, so good.

There weren't a lot of hiding places between me and him—not if I stayed on the sidewalk. So I waited for another westbound car to pass and then climbed up onto the landscaping shelf, pushed through the web of plants, and pressed my back against the cold stone of the prison's outer wall.

The shadows were deep here, especially with the prison's exterior lights unlit. I started inching forward, careful not to make too much noise, staying close to the wall. After a couple of minutes, I finally neared the gates, which stood tucked away inside a brick structure that jutted out from the rest of the prison, giving me a perfect corner to peek around.

So I peaked around it.

The Corpse guard was a big one and definitely a Type Three. His bodily fluids were draining freely now, leaving the skin shriveled and tight over muscles that were rotting out from the inside. His eyes, partially hidden beneath a policeman's hat, were sunken and milky. Dead eyes. Corpses always had dead-looking eyes—so dead you could almost make yourself believe they couldn't see you.

You'd be wrong.

This was an animated cadaver, and the invader inside of it could you see you just fine; though thankfully their night vision wasn't any better than ours.

But whose cadaver? That was the part that always bugged me when I saw these guys. That body had once belonged to a living, breathing person, one who deserved better than to end up being worn by some evil, otherworldly thing. Worse, this one wore a cop uniform.

My dad had been a cop. Karl Ritter had in fact founded the Undertakers before a particularly clever and nasty Corpse had tricked and murdered him. That Corpse—Kenny Booth, former news anchorman and Philly mayoral candidate—was toast now. I'd handled that myself.

Nevertheless, seeing one of them wearing Philly blues always ticked me off.

This particular dead cop was facing the street, his lipless mouth spread in a permanent sneer. His weight kept shifting from foot to foot, squishing about in a deepening puddle of noxious fluid that dribbled out his pant legs and over his police-issue shoes. Cadaver juice.

There'd been a time, not long ago, when such a sight would have sent my stomach into somersaults. Now all it did was make me happy. This Deader was clearly bored.

And a bored Corpse was a Corpse off his guard.

On the sidewalk about three feet to his left, between him and me, lay the small black square that Helene had spotted.

It
did
look like a wallet.

But getting it wouldn't be easy.

I edged closer, wrinkling my nose against the stench. Type Twos and Threes smell the worst of all of them. The newer ones don't reek too bad yet, while the older ones have pretty much lost their smell. It's the ones in the middle that really make you want to vomit.

A little Corpse fact for you.

Moving west, the landscape ledge tapered downward, meaning that I had only a one-foot drop to the sidewalk instead of a four-foot drop. Another break. I took it very slowly, being careful not to stumble. I was in full view now, crouched just behind and to the left of the dead cop.

Close enough.

Reaching into my coat, I pulled out my pistol and leveled it at his ear.

For
you, Dad.

Then I squeezed the trigger.

The stream of saltwater caught the Corpse right in the temple. For a moment, he just stood there. A moment after that, his limbs started twitching, then jerking, then spasming wildly. He collapsed to the sidewalk, helpless, his whole stolen body wracked by convulsions.

I stepped forward and scooped up the wallet.

Nothing to it.

Corpse hands—swollen with rot—were on me half a second later.

Not the fallen guard but another one. He'd leapt out of the shadowy tunnel that led to the prison gate and wrapped his cold, sticky hands around my neck before I even knew he was there. I barely had time to gasp in surprise before he yanked me off my feet so hard that I almost left my sneakers behind. Suddenly I was inside the gatehouse tunnel, pinned against the brick wall and dangling a foot off the ground, face-to-face with a purplish Type Two whose hair had begun to fall out in shriveled clumps.

“
What. This? Little. Mouse?
”

Deadspeak. Talking without moving his lips. They all do it. An Undertaker I know, a science geek named Steve Moscova, thinks it's the way Corpses naturally talk to each other—their native language, so to speak. Seers can hear it more or less the same way we can penetrate their illusions. “An advantage,” he called it.

Maybe. But that didn't keep it from being creepy as hell.

Gasping for air, I forced myself to stay calm. Undertaker training. Be as scared as you want, but don't panic. Right now, he was holding me helpless at arm's length. I'd dropped my pistol when he'd grabbed me.

But if I could get him to pull me closer—

“Wait…” I stammered. “Please…”

He grinned. He had rotting yellow teeth, and don't even get me started on his tongue.

“
What. Mouse. Taste. Like?
”

This dead cop was going to bite me. They do that. It's crazy because they have no working digestive systems, but they do it anyway—and they do it, well,
savagely
is the only word I can think of to describe it. I'd seen with my own eyes what kind of damage Corpse teeth can do.

Sometimes, I still dreamed about it.

“Wait!” I coughed. “I…know a…secret.” This last word was hard to get out past his tightening thumbs.

The Deader frowned at me. “Secret?” he asked, this time in English. Then he pulled me closer. “Tell me, mouse. And maybe I'll kill you fast.”

Bingo.

I let go of his thick wrists and let my arms dangle, as if I were getting weak. Then I turned my hands into tight fists but with my thumbs stiff and pointing up at a sharp angle. More Undertaker training.

“Tell me!” he snarled.

I drove my thumbs into each of his armpits, seeking—and finding—the place where the nerves met. His expression turned slack with surprise as his arms went numb and he unceremoniously dropped me. My knees buckled, and I slid down the wall of the tunnel, landing on my butt.

“
Here!
” he called in Deadspeak, both his arms flopping uselessly at his sides. “
Undertaker! Quick! Here!
”

In seconds, the remaining two Corpses would come running from inside the prison, answering their buddy's call for help.

Time to go.

I scrambled up and headed for the street end of the short tunnel, but one of the Corpses was faster, putting his big body between me and the only way out.

“
You. No. Leave. Boy!
”

“Will! Catch!”

Helene appeared at the mouth of the tunnel, her own pistol pointing at the fallen lookout, who still lay twitching on the pavement. At the same time, her free hand swung in a smooth arc, tossing me something.

Yes!
I thought.

My pocketknife sailed over the second Corpse's shoulder. I snatched it out of the air, barely dodging the armless Deader's teeth as he snapped at my hand. Then I hit the
2
button on the face of the closed knife. Two small steel prongs snapped out one end. Holding the button down, I shoved the Taser against the Corpse's broad chest.

His milky eyes widened. His whole body shuddered. Then he collapsed.

A hundred and fifty thousand volts will do that to you.

I love my pocketknife!

At the same moment, Helene fired point-blank into the face of the Deader in the street just to make sure he stayed put. His convulsions worsened. Saltwater. It messed up the neural receptors or something—more Steve-speak. A good shot in a leg made a Corpse walk in circles. A good shot in the face put this one down, at least for a few minutes.

Unfortunately, it didn't do anything permanent.

Footsteps sounded in the courtyard beyond the closed gate at my back.

“Let's go!” Helene snapped.

The two of us bolted across Fairmount Avenue and around the corner of Twenty-First Street, where we'd stashed our bike. Yeah, I said “bike”—singular. We were trainees, you see, not true Angels, which meant we had to share a bike when out on recon missions. Sharyn said it was because the cool saddle-seated Stingrays the Angels rode were in short supply. Really, I suspected it was her way of making sure we didn't get too cocky.

Kind of like I just had.

Helene pedaled because, well, she was almost a year older—and just a little bit stronger—than me.

It bugged me sometimes, but at least she didn't rub it in.

“Hold on!” she exclaimed completely pointlessly. I leaned back on the long seat and reached behind me to grab the chrome safety handle. I could have wrapped my arms around her waist instead. It might even have been safer.

But I never did that with Helene. I didn't really know why not.

Behind us, the prison's iron gate ripped open. Deadspeak doesn't have curse words—at least none that I've heard. But these dudes did their best anyhow.

As Helene kicked at the pedals, taking us out onto Twenty-First, heading toward Center City Philly, I heard the cop car rev up.

They were coming after us.

“Tell me you got the wallet!” Helene yelled.

“I got it,” I said. “It's in my pocket.”

She nodded and pedaled harder as behind us, in a squeal of tires, a Philadelphia police cruiser turned sharply onto Twenty-First Street, no doubt driven by an enraged cadaver with murder on his mind.

Bikes are slower than cars. But they're also smaller and much more maneuverable. So for a biker to stay ahead of a pursuing car is less about pedaling hard—though that's part of it—and more about picking a route that has as many turns as possible. Some parts of Philly make this easy, offering short blocks intermixed with nice, tight, shadowy alleys for shooting down and disappearing.

Unfortunately, this wasn't one of those parts.

And such maneuvers generally required only one person on the bike. After two blocks of lumbering turns, I knew this one wasn't going to work.

“Drop me off!” I called.

“What?”

“We can't make it…not with both of us riding! Drop me off! I'll find a place to hide and call Haven for help!”

“Forget it!” she snapped. “I'm not leaving you here!”

“Then they'll kill us both and get the wallet! Trust me! I can lose them—at least until backup gets here!”

She wavered, unhappy.

Behind us, the cop car was bearing down like the two-ton wall of metal it was. The Deader had his siren and flashers off. Even his headlights were dark. One of the big risks in going against dead cops was that they often radioed for backup. This worked for them because even if it was a human cop who eventually caught us, the Corpses could always arrange something nasty later.

You see, they knew, like we knew, that regardless of what story we told while in custody, no one would believe us.

But this Deader stayed dark, which suggested that he didn't want us falling into “official” police custody.

He just wanted to kill us.

Helene clearly saw what I saw. More than anything else, it convinced her.

“I'll cut around the next corner,” she said, sounding very unhappy about it. “You jump off!”

“Okay!”

If she'd cut the corner of Wallace Street any closer, we'd have both ended up splattered against the brick wall of the neighborhood bar. But her move was a good one—so sudden and perfectly timed that the dead cop overshot the intersection altogether, buying us precious seconds that were punctuated by the squeal of breaks.

“Take the wallet!” I told Helene as she stopped the bike in the tavern's shadowed doorway.

“You keep it,” she replied.

“Take it!” I said again, shoving the small black square of leather at her. “In case they catch me!”

“Just make sure they don't!” she snapped. Then, before I could argue further, she kicked off and headed down the street in the direction of Center City. Glancing the other way, I saw the cop car right itself and come after us. His lights were still off.

I slipped the wallet into my coat pocket and stepped back in the shadows of the entrance to the bar, pressing myself against its heavy wood door. Light shone faintly from within, and I could hear music playing. But I didn't dare go inside. For one, I'd get thrown out immediately for being underage. For another, if a dead cop followed me, the bartenders and customers would hand me over without a second thought.