The Undertakers: End of the World (25 page)

“Boy!” a voice called in English.

I turned to see a single deader. He stood about fifty feet away, up near the corner of Chestnut and 6th Street. He wasn’t anything special. Not a Royal. Not even leader caste, by the look of him. He was a Type Four, rotted and weak. In single combat, I could probably take him barehanded.

But all that was over now.

I looked at him.

He looked back at me.

Then, with a snarl that seemed more silly than scary, he raised his hands and staggered toward me.

Seeing this, I felt—nothing. No fear. No anger. Just a bizarre awareness that I was looking at the last Corpse I would ever see.

I closed my eyes and stepped through the Rift.

And, as promised, it snapped shut behind me.

When I opened my eyes again and glanced behind me, there was only a wall of dusty bricks at my back. Well, that and a dead, withered arm that had fallen to the floor at my feet. Apparently, the Corpse had managed to reach through the portal just as it closed and, for his trouble, had gotten his limb sliced off. The cut looked as clean and smooth as if made by a guillotine blade.

A part of my mind, the part that could somehow still think, wondered,
But how can that arm be here, if the deader it belonged to never existed at all?

I swear, you can go crazy trying to figure out this time stuff.

“Will?” a voice asked.

It wasn’t until I turned forward again, toward the sound of my name, that I registered where I was. My room in Haven.
My
Haven. There was my cot, still rumpled from when I’d stretched out on it earlier, trying and failing to sleep in the hours after the First Corpse War ended.

And there was Dave’s cot, unused. Never to be used again.

“Will?” the voice repeated.

My eyes found Helene’s. She stood in the curtained doorway, the lighted corridor at her back. Not Helene Ritter, of course, but Helene Boettcher. Fourteen years old and tall for her age. Slender and dark haired and beautiful. Her eyes glittered in the light from the candle that glowed beside my cot as they moved from my face to the severed limb at my feet and then back to my face again.

She blinked.

Then she frowned.

“William Karl Ritter,” she said. “What did you
do
?”

I laughed and went to her and pulled her into a hug. I didn’t kiss her. This didn’t feel like a “kiss her” moment. I just wanted—

—I guess I just wanted to make sure she was real.

She hugged me back, confused and maybe a little frightened. “What’s going on?” she asked.

I answered her question with one of my own. “How long was I gone?”

She pulled away from me, her hands on my forearms. Her eyes searched my face, and I wondered what she was looking for. “Gone?” she asked. “Gone where? You only walked outta my room like two minutes ago.”

I’d returned to almost the same moment I’d left, just as Amy had promised.

Helene said, “Will …
please
tell me what’s happened!”

“Okay,” I replied. That weird hyper-awareness was going away. I was home. After everything that had happened to me, I was back where I belonged.

And I had a job to do.

I added, “But it’s a long story and not a fun one. So I’d like to tell it just once. Can we go find Tom?”

Helene looked at me.

“She never left my side. Not through high school. Not through college. Never.”

His words. My words. Spoken in a future that, if I had anything to say about it, would never come to pass.

Except for that part. Except for the Helene part.

Finally, the love of my life shrugged and replied, “Okay. Let’s go find Tom.”

The Doomsayer

Tom Jefferson, the seventeen-year-old Chief of the Undertakers was in the Infirmary, and he wasn’t alone. My mother, Susan Ritter, was there too. So were Sharyn and Jillian and Steve and Burt and Amy. Even Alex Bobson, looking sullen as always, was on hand. The Undertakers who’d been hurt when Lilith Cavanaugh, the first Queen of the Dead, had attacked Haven—
this
Haven—were gone. Evacuated probably. But where to?

Mom waved to me, smiling. Then she read my expression and her smile died. “Are you all right?” she asked, concern on her face. She hurried over and hugged me. “You’re pale as a ghost!”

I tried to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. Mainly, I was enjoying having her arms around me. Think your mom’s a pain in the butt? Try feeling sick to your very soul and then see if a mom hug doesn’t help.

Tom came forward. “Bro?”

Slowly, reluctantly, I pulled myself away from my mother and asked for a glass of water. Amy, as silently helpful as usual, ran and fetched it. While she was handing me the plastic cup, I couldn’t help but see the woman she would become—and remember what had happened to her.

No! I can undo it. I can undo it all!

Reboot.

“Listen everyone,” I said as they gathered around me. “Something’s happened. I get that no time has passed here. But for me, I’ve been gone for more than twenty-four hours.”

Most of them swapped confused looks. My mother scowled and said, “I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

But Tom simply asked, “The angel?”

I nodded.

“You got a lot to tell us, bro?”

I nodded again.

“Cool. Burt, could you and Alex go grab some chairs? I figure we got another hour ‘fore Hugo gets back. Let’s use it.”

Hugo. Hugo Ramirez.

My future step-dad.

“Where is he?” I asked.

It was my mom who answered. “After you and Helene left the Infirmary, Hugo made some calls and managed to get us some ambulances, no questions asked. So at least the wounded are being taken care of. But, with all that’s happened here, he warned us that the FBI would arrive in force by dawn. That’s only a few hours away.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then let’s get to it.”

So I told them all of it, or at least most of it. Some of the details they didn’t need to know. For instance, I told Tom that he’d died and, insofar as I knew, how it had happened. But I left out the statue in City Hall’s courtyard; he wouldn’t have liked that. I told Amy about her being the angel that everybody knew visited me from time to time. But I left out the part about her turning mole again and trying to kill me. I mean, what was the point? And, of course, I told them about Steve and his inventions, and about Maxi Me, and about Emily.

“She was amazing, Mom,” I said when I’d finished. Then, looking around, I asked, “Where
is
Emily, anyway?”

“Sleeping, back in our room,” my mother responded. She had tears in her eyes. “Oh God, Will. Is all of this … possible?”

Steve remarked, “Maybe not.”

Everyone went quiet.

Burt elbowed his brother.

“Ow! Well, it needs saying! Will, you just lost your best friend. Isn’t it possible that you maybe fell asleep and had a dream?”

“Or a stroke,” Alex muttered darkly.

I looked from one of them to the next. Even Helene seemed skeptical.

So I fixed my gaze on Tom. “What do
you
think, Chief?”

He replied without hesitation. “I think it all went down exactly the way you’ve told it.”

“You
always
believe him!” Alex snapped.

“Only when he’s on the level,” the chief replied. “Besides, what he’s sayin’ is corroborated.”

The Monkey Boss blinked. “What? By who?”

“By me!” Sharyn exclaimed. Then, when everyone looked at her, she grinned. The Co-Chief of the Undertakers always did have a flair for the dramatic. “I know about this javelin thing. Except it ain’t Project Four … F-O-U-R, like the number. It’s F-O-R-E, like what you yell when you golf. It’s an old British army term to warn soldiers when a big explosion is coming. That’s where he got it from.”

“Where
who
got it from?” Steve asked.

Sharyn’s grin widened, “
You
, Steve-o.”

Steve looked positively thunderstruck.

“Well then that makes even less sense,” I said with a groan. “Steve … Professor Moscova … told me with his dying breath that ‘two plus two’ is four. At least that was true when I thought it was ‘four’ the number. But two plus two equals ‘fore’ doesn’t mean anything.”

“It’s gibberish,” the man’s younger self remarked, a strangely sour expression on his face.

Alex said to Sharyn, “So you say
you’ve
been having these dreams?”

“Straight up.”

“Where some old guy who looks like Steve’s been teaching you how to fight with some kind of magic spear?”

“A javelin,” she corrected. “A spear’s only got a point on one end. This has points on both ends.”

“Whatever!” Alex snapped. Alex—Young Alex—tended to do a lot of snapping. “How long have you been dreaming this?”

Sharyn shrugged. “Maybe a month.”

“And you didn’t
tell
anyone?”

Tom said, “She told me.”

“Yeah,” his sister added. “Who else do I
gotta
tell?”

I knew she’d also told the Burgermeister, but had apparently decided to keep that to herself.

I understood.

Alex opened his mouth to say something more. Then he shut it again.

Steve cleared his throat and asked her, “Did you know the guy training you was … me?”

She shook her head. “Didn’t know
who
he was. Though, now that I think about it, he did
remind
me of you. Thing is: He wasn’t trainin’ me, exactly. More like he was showin’ me the way to train myself. I’d spend hours in that one big room with him while he sent these mechanical
Malum
after me. They were just robots, but fast and smart robots. AI, he called it.”

“Artificial Intelligence,” Steve translated. “Highly-sophisticated programming, able to adapt to new situations.
Very
cool.” He actually sounded a little bit proud.

Sharyn went on, “And I’d use this fake Fore he gave me to fight ‘em off. Same size and weight as the real thing, but no electrical stuff. I went at it, night after night, until I got pretty good. Then, when we were done, he’d flash this gadget at me … white light … and I’d wake up on my own cot. Even so, I figured they couldn’t be just dreams ‘cause the next morning I’d have the cuts and bruises I got from the last session.”

Amy said, “She kept coming in so Mrs. Ritter and I could treat her.”

My mother nodded. “You said they were training injuries.”

“And that’s what they were,” Sharyn replied.

“I asked her to keep it between us,” Tom explained. “Too much was going down at the time. No need to muddy the waters with whatever was happening to my sister.”

Burt said, “So … you can use this Fore to destroy the Eternity Stone?”

“Yeah,” said Sharyn. “Practiced
that
too. The guy in the room told me the javelin was programmed to set up something he called a hormonal residence.”

We all looked at her.

She added sheepishly, “I might have that last part wrong.”

“Harmonic resonance,” Steve corrected. “It means the electromagnetic energy running through this … Fore … is at the right frequency to shatter the crystal in the Eternity Stone. It’s pretty brilliant, really.”

“Not that you’re patting yourself on the back or anything,” his brother remarked.

“Whatever,” Sharyn said. “Anyway, he told me that, if I managed to plant my javelin in the stone, it would start a chain reaction that would completely explode the thing. He even told me I’d have an escape window. That, once I stuck the crystal, I’d have four minutes to get to safety before it shattered.”

“That’s great … but we don’t have the javelin!” Helene exclaimed. “What was the point of all the training, all that info, if this Professor Moscova guy never gave you the real thing?”

I said, “He told Emily … Future Emily … that Sharyn would know how to get it when the time came.”

Sharyn frowned at that. “Well, seems to me the time’s come, and I ain’t got a clue!”

“Could we use something else?” Tom wondered. “A gun maybe? Would a bullet be able to break this big crystal?”

He looked at Steve, who shrugged helplessly. “Not enough data, Chief. Might work. Might just chip a chuck off. Might bounce away completely. Maybe if I could run some experiments on the Anchor Shard Will brought back …”

“Can’t risk it,” I said. “This shard’s all we’ve got, and there’s no way I can really explain to you everything that went into getting it. The whole world was sacrificed … literally.”

Tom nodded. “Will’s right.”

“How about the
other
one?” Helene suggested. “The one from Mifflin.”

“The government’s got that,” Burt replied.

“No, they don’t,” I said. “That one turned to dust the instant they tried to collect it. It was even more brittle than ours.”

“You sure?” Helene asked me. “Maybe that hasn’t happened yet. Maybe if we get word to the government guys fast enough …”

“It’s worth a try,” Tom said. “I’ll talk to Hugo.”

“Okay, but the sooner, the better,” I told him. “Because, whatever we do, we gotta do it quick. I figure if we can set things up, open a Rift, go over there, and hit them
now
, while they’re still reeling from their defeat last night, we might be able to pull this off more easily.”

That’s when my mother stood. “I’m sorry, kids. But none of you is doing any such thing!”

Hard Realities

I actually felt the blood rush up into my face.

I mean, seriously, is there
anything
more embarrassing than your mother speaking out of turn?

Everyone stared at her in mute astonishment. And my mother stared right back at them, her face set in an expression that I knew all too well. She’d reached a decision, and nothing and no one was going to sway her.

It was her Mom Look.

“Susan—” Tom began.

But she cut him off. “No! This time you listen to me, Tom Jefferson. The war is
over
. Do you all understand that? It’s over! The truth is out. Hugo told me that Senator Mitchum is preparing a statement in which he’s going to reveal everything: the Corpse Invasion, the Undertakers, the Sight, all of it. That’ll be happening sometime today.”