Queen of the Dead (3 page)

Because, of course, to them he wouldn't
be
a dead cop. The Corpse's Mask would show them a perfectly normal police officer just out doing his duty. Their noses wouldn't burn with the reek of his putrefying flesh. Their ears wouldn't hear the squish of his decomposing feet inside his shoes. And their eyes—well, they just wouldn't see the truth.

It was the Corpses' greatest weapon.

The cruiser rolled noisily past me, chasing after Helene. His lights stayed off, and he didn't slow. He hadn't seen me. The trick had worked—so far.

I raised my wrist to my lips and whispered, “Haven. This is Angel Four.”

For a few seconds, there was no reply, and I felt a sudden stab of panic. Had I broken the makeshift gadget during the fight with the Corpse? It wouldn't have been the first time.

“This is Haven, Angel Four. That you, Will?”

“Hey, Justin. Yeah, it's me,” I said. “Listen, we ran into trouble. I'm on foot, and Helene's coming in hot.”

“What? Oh, barnacles! Hold on…”

I thought,
Barnacles? SpongeBob? Really?

The wait felt like hours but was probably half a minute.

“Will, I'm showing you at Nineteenth and Wallace. Helene's a block away. She's moving fast.”

You just gotta love GPS.

“She'd better be,” I said. “There's a Deader in a cop car on her butt.”

“Barnacles!” he said again. “One sec…”

I rolled my eyes.

It was more like fifteen “secs,” but who was counting?

“Marlee's already talking to her on another line,” Justin told me. “We're setting something up. I've also radioed Sharyn. She's on her way. Stay put.”

And as he said that—I mean
right
as he said that—another Corpse came around the corner of the building and bumped right into me.

Like the one in the car, this Deader wore a cop uniform. Seeing him clearly by the light of an overhead streetlamp, I realized this early Type Three was big, solid—and familiar.

He was the Corpse I'd zapped back in the prison entrance.

“Undertaker,” he snarled.

“Dead guy,” I replied.

I went for my pocketknife, but he was faster. Corpses are often a lot faster than they look. His first swipe knocked the golden gadget from my hand, sending it flying across Wallace Street. His second swipe sent
me
flying. I slammed into the side of a mailbox, the impact knocking the wind out of me. Worse, I actually heard the crunch of plastic as my water pistol shattered. I'd shoved it into the rear waistband of my pants, and now it was leaking cold saltwater into my underwear.

This Deader had just disarmed me in the space of maybe two seconds. And he knew it.

He grinned. I always hated it when they grinned.

“My. Turn. Boy.”

Behind him, the bar door suddenly opened and a man—a nice, human-looking man—staggered out. He looked blearily at the Corpse. “'Scuse me, Ocifer,” he said in a slurred voice. Then he noticed me in a heap on the sidewalk with my back against a mailbox. He blinked. “There some poblem here?”

The Deader glared at him, and for one horrible moment, I thought he might go for the guy's throat. But Corpses are smarter than that, and their Masks are important to them, usually more important than the condition and safety of whatever body they're wearing.

“No problem, sir,” he said in English. “Just caught a vandal.”

Ever get the wind knocked out of you? It isn't painful so much as scary. Apparently, your diaphragm—that's the big muscle in your chest that helps your lungs expand and contract—gets hit and kind of seizes up, making it very, very hard to breathe. You can't talk. You can't get air.

Scary.

Well, that was happening to me, and while I knew from bitter experience that it wouldn't last, I simply didn't have time for it. I needed to shout something right now, or this drunken dude was going to wander off, and then Dead Cop would kill me.

With my chest heaving, I slammed my elbow into the side of the mailbox. It made a loud, low, metallic thump like a drum beat.

The Corpse's glare turned my way. The other guy looked skyward, as if he'd heard thunder.

I did it again.

This time, the bar dude looked at
me
.

“What's ee doin'?” the man slurred.

“Ignore him,” Dead Cop said. “Just go about your business, sir. I have this covered.”

I did it a third time.

“He's gonna wake the neighbers,” the drunken guy observed.

“I'll stop him,” the Deader said. Then he took a step toward me, his decaying feet making squishy noises inside his Philly police-issue shoes. I wasn't sure exactly what “stop him” meant, but I figured it couldn't be good.

Fortunately, I'd just caught my breath.

“Help!” I screamed. “This guy isn't a cop! He's crazy, and he wants to kill me!”

The Corpse hesitated. Then he made a bad mistake. He turned and glanced back at the drunken bystander in a way that even from my vantage point looked really guilty.

The guy in the bar doorway narrowed his eyes.

“'Ang on a second…” he said. “Lezzee some ID…‘officer'…”

“Of course, sir,” the Corpse said. And why wouldn't he? After all, he
had
ID. He
was
a cop!

But his back was to me, his attention fixed entirely on the suspicious bar dude, and that was all I'd wanted.

In one reasonably smooth motion, I found my feet, stepped up, and punched Dead Cop in the back of his neck right at the base of the skull. Corpses have a vulnerable spot there, the place where the spinal cord meets the base of the brain, and a good shot paralyzes them. It doesn't last long.

But it lasts long enough.

Dead Cop went stiff—no pun intended. Then he fell forward, right into the drunken dude, and they both went down in a heap against the door of the bar. Though he couldn't see it or smell it, the poor human guy got himself lathered up pretty good in cadaver juice. I wondered if, tomorrow morning, his wife would notice that he smelled like roadkill.

Time to disappear. The drunken guy was struggling under the weight of the fallen cop and at the same time staring at me in bleary confusion. Wherever I ran now, he'd report to the cop. Worse, the Corpse atop him was already twitching. This Deader was a strong one and would be back on his feet in a minute, maybe less.

Fortunately, while I'd been flopping around on the sidewalk beside the mailbox, trying to catch my breath, I'd also picked out my hiding place. Well, the building anyhow.

Empty buildings come in two flavors in Philly: boarded up and not boarded up. How many of each you find depends on the neighborhood. This particular street was mostly row homes and small corner shops. While I had been fighting to breathe, I'd managed to spot one house in particular that looked like nobody lived there.

How could I tell? It wasn't a lack of lights on in the house; it was after midnight after all, and the whole neighborhood was dark. But something else was missing from its windows.

Curtains.

In Center City, Philadelphia, everybody lived on top of everybody else. Privacy was hard to come by. So curtains and blinds were usually kept closed, especially after dark.

And a house that didn't even have curtains pretty much
had
to be empty. Or so I hoped.

I leaned over the Deader and yanked the baton from his belt. Like his shoes, it was a Philly police-issue weapon. Wood on the outside and lead on the inside. He had a gun too, but those were pretty useless against Corpses. This, however, might do some damage—if it came to that.

Then I made for my target building, crossing Wallace Street at a run.

“Hey!” the drunken man slurred after me. “Come back eere!”

Right
, I thought. I wondered if, in all the history of the world, any fugitive had ever obeyed that command.

I wanted to look for my pocketknife, but I hadn't seen where the Corpse's blow had sent it. It might have been under a car, buried in a clump of sparse shrubbery, or down the sewer for all I knew. But I just couldn't risk the time. Instead I made right for the first-floor window and smashed it with the baton, keeping my face averted. Then, mindful of the jagged glass in the frame, I climbed inside.

The living room was dark and empty. No furniture. No carpets. It smelled of mold and rat poop. Yep, definitely empty.

It looked like a pretty standard Philly layout. Living room leading to dining room leading to kitchen, with a staircase on the left. Upstairs, there were likely three bedrooms: a front, middle, and back. It would be the back bedroom I wanted.

I headed that way, taking the stairs two at a time and almost kicking the door in. The bedroom, like the rest of the place, was empty and deserted. Two dark, rectangular windows filled the rear wall. Beyond them would be a twelve-foot drop into an alley or, if I was lucky, a fire escape.

I was lucky.

From downstairs came a heavy crash. Evidently, the Corpse had recovered. He'd be searching the house for me, not skipping a room. Time to be a little quieter.

On tiptoe, I crossed the bedroom's hard wooden floor to the windows and pulled one of them open. It was old and creaky, but at least it wasn't painted shut. Then, glancing back toward the hallway door, I listened furiously.

Nothing. No footfalls. He was being quiet down there, probably hoping to surprise me.

Swallowing, I climbed out onto the fire escape. A quick look up showed that there was no roof access. A quick look down revealed the expected alley. A retractable ladder hung at the far end of the iron scaffold. Before I went to it, however, I took a moment to peer—one last time—back into the darkened house.

Dead Cop was there.

I mean
right
there
—grinning at me.

“Hello. Boy.”

Corpses were like that, lumbering one minute and cat quick the next. How this wormbag had come up the stairs and into the bedroom so fast and quiet was a puzzle I had no time to solve. Before I could react, before the chill that ran down my spine even had time to freeze my backside solid, he bent at the waist and lunged his upper body through the open window, his big purple-gray hands like claws.

I think maybe I screamed. To this day, I'm not sure.

I recoiled, catching myself just before I upended over the fire escape railing and went tumbling down to the alley floor the hard way. The Deader was all over me in a heartbeat, his fingers smearing stinking fluid all over the front of my coat as they scrambled their way up toward my neck.

Undertaker training kicked in. Rather than retreating, I leaned forward over his shoulders and slammed the window closed, pinning him at the waist. He felt nothing, of course, but the pressure held him in place, and the angle kept his rotting paws away from my throat. Better still, the move earned me a few spare seconds—long enough to raise the baton.

I brought it down with all my strength, slamming it across the side of the Corpse's head. He grunted. Then he bared his blackened teeth and surged forward again. I hit him a second time. Then a third. And all the while, I was making noises—either warrior cries or terrified sobs—again, I'm not sure. My mind felt fogged over by fear, desperation, and more than a little rage.

I
hated
these things.

With the fourth hit, I thought I heard something—like a dull crack. Had I broken the Corpse's neck? If so, he'd go limp immediately.

He did, his heavy arms flopping to the latticed floor of the fire escape. His kicking feet, still inside the bedroom, dropped like twin bags of sand.

Panting and sweating despite the winter's cold, I stepped back. My eyes felt as wide as dinner plates as I stared at him, still clutching the baton, ready to use it again if I had to.

I spared a moment to cross my eyes and take a quick peek at Dead Cop's Mask. It was a Seer's trick, something that most Undertakers picked up pretty fast. If you held your eyes a certain way, you could sort of see a Corpse the way the rest of the world—the adult world—saw him.

Not surprisingly, this Deader's illusion was of a pretty big guy, with dark skin and dark hair. He hung motionless, pinned by the window sash, his Mask hovering almost ghostlike over his true worm-food body. I switched off this trick of vision almost at once, partly because it tended to give me a headache and partly because doing it was a little depressing. It seemed to drive home—at least for me—just how alone the Undertakers were in this war.

This dude wasn't dead, of course. You couldn't kill a Corpse with a gun or a knife, much less a lead baton. Stakes through the heart were useless. So were silver bullets, sunlight, garlic cloves, and wishes.

But you
could
damage their stolen bodies badly enough that they became useless to the entity inhabiting them. With his spine crushed, this Corpse was down for the count. He wouldn't be able to move until another body became available to him. And
that
wouldn't happen until his undead buddies found him and were able to discreetly move him to a more secure location.

Thing was, Corpses had this weird link that let their friends know when one of them was in this kind of trouble.

Which meant there'd be more on the way.

Time to go.

I staggered over to the retractable ladder and wasted half a minute trying to figure out the release mechanism in the dark. Finally, with the jerk of a lever, the metal ladder crashed downward, stopping three feet from the alley floor. The noise of it made me jump—nerves.

I descended as fast as I could and dropped onto the concrete. The alley was a blind one, and on three sides of me, the darkened backs of row homes rose like canyon walls. The fourth side was the only obvious exit, and it opened onto a lit city street.

I blew out a sigh. It steadied my pounding heart—a little. Then I raised my wrist and said into my radio, “Haven? This is Angel Four.”

Nothing.

I peered at the watch, but it was too dark to see if its LCD screen was working. Chances were I'd busted it either climbing into or out of the empty house. Stupid things were always breaking.

With another sigh, I turned toward the mouth of the alley—

Just as a figure leaped down from the fire escape to block my path.

“Hello. Boy.”

My heart nearly exploded in my chest—I swear.

The Corpse towered over me like a pillar made of rotting flesh, once again wearing his black-gummed grin. His head was bent at a slightly odd angle. But as I watched, horrified, he reached up with one hand and shoved it roughly back into alignment. There was a sound like chalk breaking. His grin widened.

“Fooled you,” he sneered in English.

And he had. He'd known I'd effectively trapped him in the window, so he'd faked going limp. And I'd been just scared enough and desperate enough to buy it.

And now I was going to die for it.

Standing there, rooted by fear and exhaustion—frozen in place despite all my training—I whispered a silent good-bye to the mom I hadn't seen in four months.

Happy
birthday
, I thought.

Then the Corpse's left arm came off.

One minute, it was there, attached to his beefy shoulder, and the next, it was on the ground at his feet, a useless lump of dead flesh. Together, we both looked down at it. Then we both looked up at each other, and I could see he was every bit as perplexed as I felt.

“Hey, big dude!” a voice called. “You dropped somethin'!”

Dead Cop whirled around.

Sharyn Jefferson, boss of the Angels, stood right behind him.

In her hands, poised to strike, was Vader, her Japanese wakizashi sword. “Hi, Red!” she said to me, once again using the nickname I was sure all redheaded people despised. Her lips wore a wry smile, but her dark eyes were as hard as granite.

The Corpse growled—actually
growled
—and then it went for her, reaching out with his remaining hand.

Big mistake.

Sharyn was a tall girl, dark-skinned and athletic, with kinky black hair done up in dreadlocks. At seventeen years old, she and her brother, Tom, ran the Undertakers—and had ever since my dad had been killed by the Corpses.

She was also the best fighter I'd ever seen. Well, maybe the
second
best.

Moving with catlike grace, she sidestepped the attacking Deader. Her sword slashed in a silver blur. And this time, it was his right arm that hit the concrete.

The Corpse swayed on his feet, his milky eyes literally radiating hatred. In English, he hissed, “Stupid girl! You can't kill me!”

Sharyn smoothly sheathed her sword, and from inside her coat, she produced a mean-looking hypodermic. The needle had to be ten inches long, and its syringe was filled with clear liquid. Grinning, she held it up. The Corpse's eyes followed it.

“Wanna bet?” Sharyn chirped. Then, in one fluid motion, she turned on her heel and backhanded the needle into the Deader's chest, slamming the plunger home. “Watch this, Will!”

Dead Cop peered down at the big hypodermic sticking out a few inches below his collarbone. For a moment, the menace left his expression, and he looked as befuddled as a dead and desiccated face was capable of looking.

Then he exploded.

Once second, the mutilated, walking cadaver stood rooted on the alley floor, and the next, pieces of him went whizzing off in every direction. There was very little blood; the cadaver had probably been embalmed weeks ago. But the parts themselves were plenty gross, and I ducked and threw up my hands to keep from getting smacked by chunks of flying dead guy.

In Dead Cop's place—for only a second or two—stood a human-sized figure of dark energy that glared savagely at Sharyn. I could almost feel the evil radiating off the alien thing as, without a host body to sustain it, it shriveled up and vanished with an odd little pop.

“Ta-da!” Sharyn declared.

Then she bowed. There was Corpse stuff all over her.

“What
was
that?” I asked.

“Later,” she replied. “For now, let's split. There might be more of 'em on the way.” She started to turn, but I put my hand on her elbow.

“Is Helene okay?” I asked.

Her smile widened, as if I'd just passed some kind of test. “Yeah, she's cool. Lost the Deader cop about eight blocks from here. Would have come back looking for you, but I called her off. I was closer.”

I might have asked how she had found me, but I already knew. My wrist radio had a built-in GPS chip that apparently still worked despite the rest of the gadget being toast. Thank God for Steve Moscova, who made each one of them by hand.

“Sharyn…” I stammered awkwardly. “I know we broke the rules and regs. But don't blame Helene. It was my idea.”

“That right? 'Cause when I radioed Helene a few minutes ago, she told me it was
her
idea. Funny thing, huh?”

“She's just trying to cover for me!” I protested.

“'Course she is, little bro. By the way, here's a little something of yours I found on the street.” She pulled my pocketknife out of her coat and handed it to me. “Figure you dropped it while you was playing around with Big, Dead, and Ugly.”

“Thanks,” I said with relief, welcoming the familiar weight of the gadget in my hand.

“No sweat. Now…you got something for me?”

“Huh?”

She chuckled. “The mystery wallet, little bro…the thing that might just make this stunt of yours worth it. You got it?”

For a mouthful of bitter seconds, I was afraid that I
didn't
, that it had been lost somehow during the fight with the Deader! But then my shaking hands found it right where I'd put it—in the inside pocket of my coat.

I handed it to her, and she opened it, holding it up to the meager light from the street.

After a moment, her face split into a wide grin. “Oh yeah, dude. Totally worth it!”