The Undertakers: End of the World (39 page)

I grabbed the board’s front wheels with my left hand and strained upward with my right.

But, as my fingertips neared it, I knew with sick certainty that I was falling short. In another half-second, my momentum would fail me, and my board and I would go tumbling back down into the pipe, with zero hope of recovering fast enough to stop what was about to happen.

Sorry, Helene,
I remember thinking.
I blew it.

Then a hand, dark skinned and incredibly strong, grabbed mine.

In a single powerful motion, Tom pulled me up out of the pipe and dropped me in a heap onto the hard flat slab that marked the limits of
Malumtown
.

He didn’t look happy to see me.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he exclaimed. “And how on Earth did you—”

I jumped to my feet, sore and exhausted but not caring. “Did you do it?” I asked desperately. “Did you throw Fore?”

Then I saw that he still held the javelin in his free hand, and felt kind of stupid.

He glared at me, maybe madder than I’d ever seen him. “I was about to! I had my head on straight and I’d made my peace and I was ready to take the throw. But then I heard my name being called and spotted Will
friggin’
Ritter …
skateboarding
through the nothing between dimensions.
Skateboarding!
”

“Yeah,” I said, still trying to catch my breath. “Well, let’s throw it. Because I just got here in under four minutes, which means we can get back … both of us … while that javelin is doing its resonance thing.”

He stared at me, still angry, but confused too. “I don’t get it.”

“I got a board for me and one for you!” I exclaimed. “This is what we in the hero biz call a ‘rescue.’” I actually added the air quotes; I was feeling
that
snarky.

His face hardened. “No.”

I blinked. “What?”

“I appreciate what you tried to do, bro. But no. I’m not going to risk your life. You go back. I’ll give it another ten minutes.”

I stared at him, not believing. “That’s nuts! Why’re you so determined to kill yourself?”

“I’m determined to make sure
you
survive. I owe it to Karl, not to mention your mom and sister. You’ve been through too much, Will. Seen too much. Suffered too much. It ends now. You go back. Grow up and do amazing things.”

I stared at him as if he’d started speaking Martian. Desperately, I wracked my brain for some way to make him understand what I’d just done and why I’d done it. But I knew that look, the one he wore on his face right now. Tom Jefferson had set himself on a course of action. And when he did that, nothing and nobody was going to turn him from it.

So I did the only thing I could.

I punched him in the face.

The Sons of Ritter

Or tried to.

He caught my fist in his, which was easily twice the size.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed, taking a step back. “Seems I ain’t the only one pissed off! Been a while since you took a swing at me, little brother.”

I yanked my hand back, feeling my face flush.

I should’ve known I could never take him by surprise, at least not in combat. “I’m pissed because I’ve got a job to do. I promised Future Sharyn that I’d keep this from happening again! I promised that I’d save you … and all I’ve managed to do is set things up so that you die even
sooner
than you would have!”

“Ease up, Captain World-Revolves-Around-Me,” he said, not smiling. “This was
my
call, not yours.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard that kind of crap before. I bust my hump to save people and they just shrug and say ‘I gotta do this’ and go off and get themselves killed anyhow. Well, that’s done! You hear me? It’s
done
! Tom Jefferson, I deny you the right to sacrifice yourself!”

He chuckled a little at that, which pissed me off even further—until I realized his reaction was more astonishment than humor. “I told ya,” he said. “It ain’t sacrifice. It’s—”

I shoved the skateboard at him hard enough to cut him off mid-sentence. “
This
is what doing what you gotta do looks like. You throw that damned spear and then you and I skate home.
That’s
what’s gonna happen!”

Tom looked from me, to the skateboard, to the Sea of Ripples. Then he shook his head, as if still not quite believing what I’d done to get here. Heck, I didn’t believe it either.

Then he said, “I love you for this, bro. I really do. But my conscience can’t handle it. Go back. Please.”

I threw my hands up and turned away, thinking furiously.

That’s when I saw them.

Malum.

A horde appeared in the distance. They were still a ways off, but close enough that I could tell there were a lot of them. A
whole
lot of them. They were watching us, maybe trying to figure out what was going to happen and whether or not they could—or should—stop it. After all, we’d won
bavarak.

But did setting us free mean they had to let us destroy the artifact that occupied the very center of their lives and culture?

Probably not.

“We’re outta time,” Tom said. “Go. Now.”

“Come with me,” I begged, still not looking at him. “Please.”

“I can’t,” he replied, sounding genuinely unhappy about it.

So I said, “There’s a statue.”

His brow furrowed. “What?”

“In the future. There’s a statue of you that stands in City Hall courtyard.”

“No there ain’t.”

“There is. I swear there is. I didn’t mention it before ‘cause I knew you wouldn’t like it. But it’s there. You’re standing tall and facing east and your fists are clenched, like you’re ready for a fight. And you know what else?”

“What?” he asked, looking horrified.

“You’re wearing a suit and tie.”

“No!”

“Yeah.”

He groaned. Then, he said, “Well, good thing we’ve undone that future. Now that statue’ll never get made!”

“Come back with me,” I said. “Or I’ll make sure they put up another one. A
bigger
one. Right in City Hall courtyard, exactly where the other one would’ve gone.”

“You wouldn’t do that to me!”

“Try me,” I said. “In fact, I’ll make it my life’s mission to take William Penn off the top of City Hall and replace him with Tom Jefferson, suit and tie and all!”

He glared at me.

I glared back at him.

Then he grinned, and I wondered if that was a good sign or a bad one. “You’re really something else, you know that? In my whole life, I ain’t never met anybody who could get under my skin like you do.”

“Come back with me,” I said,
not
grinning.

“Will, you’re not being logical.”

“You want logic? How’s this? If you stay,
I’m
staying. Then one of two things’ll happen. Either you’ll throw that thing and we’ll both die here or the
Malum
will wise up and take us out.”

“You won’t do that to your family,” he said.

“Why not? You’d do it to yours. Thing is Tom; you
are
my family! You and Sharyn both. As much as my mom and sister. And I will
not
abandon you. Period. End of story.”

He was still staring at me, but at least he wasn’t glaring anymore.

“Well?” I pressed. “What’s it gonna be, big brother?”

“And what if we don’t make it?” he asked. “What if we
both
die?”

I got up in his face. “Then I’ll shrug at you in the afterlife and say, ‘I had to do it,’ and
you
can suck it up!”

He put his hand on my shoulders and eased me back.

“Okay,” Tom said with a firm nod. “We’ll do it your way. Come on. Let’s finally
end
this thing.”

Together we ran the fifty yards to the Eternity Stone. It was exactly where it had been, big and oblivious, its light so bright that it was hard to look at. Off in the distance, the
Malum
continued to watch us.

“Why aren’t they attacking?” I asked. “They gotta know what we’re up to.”

“Maybe they don’t,” he replied. “They let us go and maybe they’re wondering why we ain’t left yet. Maybe the other Royals still haven’t shown up and they’re afraid to act without a command. Or maybe they can’t quite believe we
can
destroy the Eternity Stone. In their mind, it’s always been here, a constant in their lives. It
is
called the ‘Eternity Stone,’ after all.” Then, after a moment’s consideration, he added, “Or, maybe …”

“What?” I asked.

“Maybe, on some level, they’re
ready
for us to destroy it.”

I kind of liked that last one.

“Do it,” I said.

Tom dropped his skateboard, raised Fore and leaned back, balancing on the heels of his feet, until the javelin pointed skyward—at the crystal.

Dude looked like a Greek statue, I swear.

I watched him hold his breath, watched him steady himself.

And then he threw.

The javelin cut the air like a knife, soaring at an almost ninety degree angle. I’d once heard a term that means something being fired or thrown just right. “Flying true,” they call it.

I’d never really gotten what that meant until now.

Fore flew true, striking the Eternity Stone somewhere in the lower quarter of its mass. On impact, the javelin flashed an electric blue as its point buried deeply into the crystal, sending cracks, as thin as the threads of a spider web, running in all directions.

An instant later, a roar rose up from the wall of
Malum
, and Tom and I turned to see every ten-legged monster in the world charging toward us.

“Nice throw,” I said.

“Thanks,” he replied. “Now let’s split.”

Snatching up his board, he turned and ran. I kept pace, struggling to pull the second board out of its harness on my back while, behind us, the crystal cracked further. The sound was thin and strange, almost musical. Under that sweet sound, faint but getting louder, was the
boom boom boom
of thousands of
Malum
feet crossing the Ether.

I wondered fleetingly what they meant to do. Kill us, of course. But what difference would that make now? Whatever damage we were capable of causing we’d already caused.

Or maybe Tom had been right. They
were
finally ready to see the Eternity Stone destroyed. And now that it had been, they’d decided to do the same to us, just on general principle.

Sounds pretty
Malum
, huh?

The two of us reached the lip of the Void, the landing where the Energy Ferry would have been, if I’d ridden it here. In front of us stretched the Sea of Ripples—the maze of half-pipes between us and home. And behind us, no more than twenty yards back, came the thundering horde. Not far away, the crystal had begun to visibly vibrate, and the area around where Fore had “wounded” it looked almost as if it was throbbing.

Tom said to me. “Ready?”

I nodded. “The Sons of Ritter ride again!”

He grinned.

Then we jumped off the edge of the Ethereal slab together, dropping side-by-side into the first half-pipe.

I’d always known that Tom could skateboard. I’d always known he was good at it. But he wasn’t good at it; he was
great
at it, way better than me.

Sometimes, I think that might be a good catch phrase for the dude.

“Tom Jefferson: Way Better Than Will Ritter!”

Yeah.

Anyway, he handled each new pipe as if he’d done this a thousand times, barely straining, barely shifting his weight, every move calculated and minimal. By comparison, I felt like a clumsy idiot, struggling to keep pace, all the while terrified that I’d miss a mark and break either my board or my neck.

And, if that happened, I knew Tom would never abandon me.

So to keep
him
alive, which had after all been the point, I needed to keep
me
alive.

It took us more than a minute to reach the lengthwise half-pipe, and another minute to serpentine our way along it. I was skating faster than I ever had in my life, my mind’s eye focused on the collapsing Eternity Stone, all the while trying hard not to think about the Ether that would entomb us if we didn’t make it back to the Rift in time.

I knew we were in trouble when we passed the three minute mark, and the air seemed to change around us. I felt wind at my back, faint at first but getting stronger. Finally, at the top of a pipe, I risked a hasty look back over my shoulder, and what I saw nearly froze my blood.

The Eternity Stone was gone. In fact, the entire
Malum
homeworld had disappeared. In its place was a hard, flat vertical wall at the tunnel’s back end, a wall that seemed to be moving, coming closer.

Gaining on us.

The Ether was filling up, from the point of injury outward.

“Faster!” I called to Tom, who nodded. Then, incredibly, he
went
faster, crouching lower on his board and catching enough air on the next rise to let him jump an entire pipe and drop smoothly down into the next. I followed, putting all I had into it, praying that I could match his effort.

And I did.

Maybe not as smoothly. But I did.

I could see the Earth end of the tunnel ahead of us. No more than a hundred yards. There hovered the Energy Ferry, right where I’d left it, just below the Rift. A face—no,
two
faces—peered out through the shimmering doorway, though we had to get two half-pipes closer before I could tell who they were.

Helene and Jillian.

“Tom!” I exclaimed.

“See ‘em,” he called back. “Gonna be steep!”

He was right. The last half-pipe’s far slope rose high, just as it had on the
Malum
side. But this time the ferry blocked the top of the rise. No ollie would work here. We’d have to abandon our boards and reach for the lip of the ferry with everything we had. One glance over my shoulder showed me that the Ether was still closing in, blowing a hard wind before it as the air corridor created by the Anchor Shard was forced back through the Rift.

And the noise of it! It was like the sound of paper being ripped to shreds, only magnified a thousand times. Deafening and terrifying.

But we were almost there.