The Undertakers: End of the World (12 page)

She smiled. “I know. But I also know that, when the time comes, you’ll rise to the occasion. It’s who you are.” Then, looking back at William, she added affectionately, “It’s who you
both
are.”

“There is no ‘both,’” he corrected. “I’m him.”

“And he’s me,” I said with a grin.

“Ain’t
that
the truth?” our sister replied wryly. “Are we ready?”

Maxi Me said, “We’re ready. Will, Amy’s in charge while we’re away. Help her hold down the fort?”

“Sure,” I said halfheartedly.

Then I stepped aside and watched the three of them leave Haven and disappear down the staircase and into the darkness below the city.

I suddenly felt very much alone.

So, unable to think of anything else to do, I took the elevator up to the Infirmary to see what Amy was doing. There I found more cots, most with sick or injured people lying on them. But no Amy Filewicz.

Instead, I noticed a man in torn overalls who was moving around the room with a tall ladder, changing light bulbs. He could have been a refugee, I supposed, but the way he navigated around the octagonal space suggested something else, something like familiarity. Like he’d been here, doing this kind of thing, for quite a while.

So I went up to him and watched him work atop his ladder for a few minutes.

Then, when he finally came back down, I said, “Excuse me?”

He looked at me. Half his face was pretty badly burned. For several heartbeats, his expression was the same as on most of the faces I’d seen in this new Haven: weary, resigned. But then a flash of recognition lit his eyes.

“Ritter?” he asked.

“Um … yeah.”

“I forgot how skinny you were back then.”

Inwardly, I frowned. Did I know this dude?

Then it hit me, and my heart sank.

“Alex?”

Alex Bobson was, or had been, the Boss of the Monkeys, the crew responsible for maintenance and construction inside Haven—
my
Haven. Though a loyal Undertaker and a wizard with tools, Alex had never been my biggest fan.

“Heard they’d brought you up the timeline,” he remarked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Um … how’ve you been?”

“Me?” He crossed his arms. They were big arms. “Let’s see. I got myself burned across a quarter of my body when the Corpses set Philly on fire last year. As a result, my left hand is pretty useless and I can’t walk without a limp. Used to be a mechanical engineer with a Master’s Degree from Rowan U. These days, I’m a glorified janitor. I keep the generators stoked and the lights on and the lift working. But hell, I’m still alive, which is more than I can say for most of the rest of the world. How’ve
you
been?”

“Okay,” I replied. God, that sounded lame. “Um … have you seen Amy?”

“She headed up in the elevator a few minutes ago, probably to look in on Sharyn.”

It was an effort to mask my surprise, but I managed it. “Sharyn? Does … she do that a lot?”

“Twice a day,” he replied. He folded up his A-frame ladder and walked off with it, heading around the octagonal room toward another hanging bulb that had gone dark. Wordlessly, I kept stride. “Occasionally three times,” he continued matter-of-factly. “Sharyn has good days and bad days.”

“Why’s that? What happened to her?”

He paused, eyeing me suspiciously. “The chief didn’t tell you about her?”

I considered lying. But, to be honest, I lacked the energy. “No.”

“Then I probably shouldn’t say anything.”

“Where is she?”

He didn’t reply.

“Come on. I’d really like to see her,” I said.

Again, no reply.

So I asked him abruptly, “Still hate my guts?”

At that, one corner of his mouth turned up. Given his burns, I wasn’t sure the other corner was capable of such a thing, so maybe this counted as a smile. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Ritter. I
never
hated your guts. Fact is that I admired the crap out of you. But back then I was all into this hard-as-nails, strong silent type thing.”

I had no idea what to say to that. I felt my mouth drop open, so I closed it again.

He chuckled. “Yeah, you
could
be a pain in the butt sometimes,” he admitted. “But then I figure I wasn’t your favorite person either, huh?”

I tried to think of a response. Again, the truth won out. “Nope.”

Then he did a funny thing. No, not a “funny” thing. An unthinkable thing.

He threw an arm around me and pulled me into a quick hug.

I was so surprised that I didn’t immediately react. I certainly didn’t return the hug. He didn’t seem to mind. After a single hasty squeeze, he let me go. “Fact is: You grew up into a helluva man, Will Ritter. I know all this must be a serious mind-freak for you, but I hope you understand that much at least. The chief is one of a kind.”

“Thanks,” I replied, though it probably wasn’t the right thing to say. But in my defense, Emily Post never covered situations like this.

Emily Post?
Look her up.

“Listen,” he said. “Sharyn got it worse than me. Worse than most. In balance, it might have been better if she’d died, but she didn’t. So the chief looks after her. We
all
look after her, but really it’s Amy who does the actual caregiving. Some things don’t change, I guess.”

“I guess,” I said, though to be honest I was thinking exactly the opposite. Some things—some people—
did
change. Alex Bobson was living proof. “Will you tell me where she is?” I asked him tentatively.

He considered. Then he nodded. “Nineteenth floor. There’s a door right off the elevator. Not too much privacy in Haven. But Sharyn, at least, has got her own room. Nobody minds. She needs it.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“So, you gonna go back and rewrite history?” he asked.

He said it so casually, as if people did that sort of thing all the time, that I couldn’t help but laugh. After a moment, I replied, “They tell me that’s the plan,”

He nodded again, this time gravely. “I do my thing around here. I shore up the defenses and keep the place going as far as power and water go. I’m not Steve Moscova or your sister Emily. I don’t get even a little bit of that freaky deader science of theirs. And when the chief pulled us all together a while back and told us about his scheme … Project Reboot … well, I figured he was pretty much nuts.”

Another laugh. Softer this time. More thoughtful. “But then he said that
you
were the one we’d be bringing up from the old days to do it. That in a way,
he’d
be the one … since he’s you.”

Weird. Too weird.

Alex continued, “And I knew right then and there that this crazy plan would work.”

“You’re putting a lot of pressure on me,” I said, trying for what I hoped was a crooked grin.

He shrugged. “Will Ritter under pressure. What else is new? Go see Sharyn. I got work to do.”

And, with that, he turned and left me standing there, the stupid grin still on my face.

The Woman Upstairs

I rode the elevator up to the nineteenth floor. This was where the Undertakers, the six of them who remained, had their personal space. The moment I pushed aside the door and stepped out, I saw that Alex had been totally right: no privacy. Here there were more cots, no different than the one I’d slept on last night. Each was separated from the rest by short plywood walls or stacks of old crates. A few had blankets draped over mildewed clotheslines, maybe to give people a place to change.

And I’d thought
my
Haven was bad.

There was a word for what I was looking at.

Squalor.

Here the chief slept, and Amy, and my sister, and Steve and Alex, I supposed. The entire Undertakers compliment—minus one.

A single door stood right across from the elevator. Unmarked. Uninteresting.

I crossed to it and tried the knob. It didn’t turn.

So I knocked.

Nothing. Maybe Amy wasn’t in there, after all.

But was Sharyn? And if so, why hadn’t Emily or Maxi Me offered to take me to see her? For that matter, why refuse to talk about her at all?

And why is my danger detector
…
detecting?

I stood there for a half-minute, trying to decide what to do. This wasn’t my Haven. If this door was locked, then it was supposed to be locked, and who was I to question that? But the tickle in the back of my mind remained. Why
would
this door be locked? Presumably, this wasn’t an armory, where some refugee might wander up and help themselves to who-knew-what. This was just somebody’s bedroom.

Then again, people often locked their bedroom doors, didn’t they? A little flash of knowledge from my old life. In the Undertakers HQ I knew, we didn’t even very many doors, much less locks.

This is wrong. I should just walk away. I can find Amy later and ask her about Sharyn.

But I didn’t move.

Then suddenly my pocketknife was in my hand, my thumb poised over its
1
button—the lock pick.

I could call and ask William for permission; he’d given me one of their short-range radios. But that seemed a stupid question to pose to a guy—even a Future Me guy—who was out risking his life against the Corpses. This was curiosity, not emergency.

Wasn’t it?

Don’t intrude.

I still didn’t move.

Then I pressed the
1
button.

Something’s not right here.

I didn’t know what it was, or even how I knew. But the feeling was solid. If Sharyn
was
in there, then why didn’t she answer? Could her condition be
that
bad? And if it was, then why wasn’t she in the Infirmary? And if she
wasn’t
behind the door, then where was she? This Haven wasn’t all that big a place. You’d think I’d have run into her before now.

Just walk away.

Too late.

And it was. The long prongs of my lock pick were already in the keyhole, humming as they did their business. The
click
was nearly immediate.

Suddenly, and almost without any conscious decision on my part—
almost
—the knob turned in my hand and the door swung open.

The room within was small, lit by a single electric lantern. There was a bed—not a cot but a genuine bed, with sheets and everything. Beside it stood a small table loaded up with what looked like pill bottles.

Across the room, an old woman sat in an antique rocking chair. Her gray hair was long and kinky, her shoulders slumped and her head lowered, her face hidden in shadow.

I gave the rest of the room a cursory look. No Amy. Then I returned my attention to the figure in the chair.

“Sharyn?” I asked, my voice a croak.

The head came up. A voice every bit as croaky as my own said, “Who’s that?”

I took a step forward. My legs felt stiff. I took another step.

It can’t be her. It can’t be!

I came around the chair and knelt beside it.

The woman’s head turned toward me. To my horror, I saw that her eyes were gone. Not merely blinded, but entirely missing—just jagged holes in her face, long since scarred over.

I had to stifle a gasp.

The skin around those empty sockets was ashen, and sweat burned on her forehead. She wore a simple nightdress, one that the Sharyn Jefferson I knew would have hated.

“Who are you?” she asked, wariness in her voice.

“It’s me,” I said. Then, realizing what an utterly ridiculous thing this was to say, I swallowed dryly and tried again. “It’s Will. Will Ritter.”

She raised one hand and brushed the air with it, as if dismissing what I’d told her. Her long fingers were little more than skin over bone, her arms withered to the point of being broomsticks. Gone was any trace of the lean muscle that used to be there. “I know Will Ritter’s voice. You ain’t him. Hold still. Let me have a look for myself.”

She twisted around in the rocker and slowly reached up with both hands. Cool fingers touched my face, moving over my forehead and nose, down along my cheeks. They brushed across my lips and tested the shape of my chin. Then, frowning, she moved them up to the top of my head, running her fingers through my hair.

She sat back, her mouth hanging open.

I knelt there, waiting.

“Little bro?” she asked.

My eyes welled up. “It’s me, Boss.”

“Damn,” she muttered. “I told ‘em not to let you see me. I knew you was comin’. Will … the chief … he told me so. But I begged him not to tell you ‘bout me.”

“He didn’t,” I whispered. “I kinda came on my own.”

Her face crumpled a little. “‘Course you did,” she said. “Wouldn’t be
you
if you didn’t. Should’ve figured on that. But still, I didn’t want you seein’ me … not like this.”

“Why not?” I asked. “You look great.”

For a second, her face seemed to crumple further. Then, a bit to my surprise, she grinned. And you know what? She still had the same old Sharyn grin. “Always were full o’ crap,” she said.

Then, moving with surprising swiftness, she pulled me into her arms. Most of her strength may have left her, but her fierceness remained, hidden away inside this withered body. She couldn’t be fifty years old yet, but she looked like she was eighty—a shell of a woman, the broken survivor of
something
. And I had the terrible feeling that blindness had only been a part of it.

“Little bro,” she said again, her voice catching. “How long you been here?”

So I told her my story. She listened carefully, without interruption. When I’d finished, she took my hand in both of hers. “Well, look who’s travellin’ through time and space like it ain’t nothin’!” She chuckled. “So, the chief’s off to get the Anchor Shard so you can rewrite history, huh? He clued me in on the plan. Told me what he was gonna do and how he was gonna do it. Figure it had to be the craziest thing I ever heard. Then again, he’s Will Ritter. And I learned a long time ago what
that
means.”

I hate it when people say stuff like that.

I started to protest, but she cut me off. “Can’t say I’d miss the last couple of years. Been cooped up in here for most of it.” She blew out a long sigh, one filled with loss and regret. “Guess you heard Tom got killed.”