The Undertakers: End of the World (7 page)

He shook his head, as though trying to clear it. “It’s so strange. I’ve been anticipating this moment … meeting you … for more than a year. But, now that it’s happening, I have no real idea where to start. There’s so much I have to tell you.”

“Did you have any kids?” I asked.

“What?”

“Helene and you,” I said carefully. “Helene and
me
. Any kids?”

He smiled behind his red beard, a sad smile. “Two boys. Karl and Dave.”

I liked that, too. But then I found myself wondering where they were and suddenly I
didn’t
like it. “They’re … dead?”

He nodded.

“I hate this place,” I said.

He nodded again.

“The future sucks,” I said.

He nodded a third time. Then he pointed to the map. “See these pins?”

“Yeah.”

“Each one represents a pocket of humanity. The Corpses have hunted mankind to the brink of extinction. Those few who are left have holed up in places like this one, fortresses to stave off the living dead, who are forever attacking. Los Angeles. Dallas. Paris. Munich. Athens. Beijing. Capetown. Sydney. That’s what the people working up here in Control do all day, communicate with the other groups.”

“Are they Undertakers?” I asked. “The folks here and … everywhere?” I motioned to the board.

“Not really. The term ‘Undertaker’ is usually reserved for those of us who fought in the first war. The rest are just … people. And people are rare enough not to need labels. It’s been six months since we made a connection with any new groups. It seems pretty clear at this point that these eight places … plus Philly … are all that’s left of our kind.”

I stared dismally at the map. “How many … humans … are there?”

“All together?” he asked.

“Yeah. All together.”

“Roughly a thousand.”

“Jeez …” I muttered.

“Jeez, indeed.”

“Do the Corpses know you’re here? In City Hall Tower?”

“Yes,” he replied grimly. “But this building isn’t like the more modern skyscrapers, the ones that fell in the first weeks after the war started. Those were glass and steel, too easily invaded by determined deaders. As you’ve probably seen, most of the city burned. There isn’t much left except ruins now. But you’re standing in the largest masonry structure in the world. This place is flameproof, solid, and defensible … especially since we bricked off all entrances into the Tower. Now, the only way in is through the river system far below us and, as near as we can tell, the Corpses don’t know it’s there.”

“So they don’t attack?” I asked.

“They attack all the time, climbing the walls like ants, pouring over the low roofs and into the central courtyard to reach us. But we’ve put certain defenses into place. Each time they’ve tried, we’ve pushed them back … so far.”

“What about the other survivors around the world?” I asked. “Are they also holed up in ‘impregnable’ places?”

“They must be,” he said. “Or they wouldn’t still be alive.” Then he turned his attention once again to the map, a thoughtful, resigned expression on his face.

Me,
I thought.

Me as a grown-up.

I had to keep reminding myself of that fact. Here was a man who remembered what I remembered, plus thirty years of living on top of that. How strange it was to look at him. And how strange it must be for
him
to look at
me
!

“Do you remember this?” I asked suddenly.

He looked up. “Remember what?”

“This conversation. Do you remember being
me
and having this conversation with
you
?”

“I never had this conversation,” he replied. “Not as you, I mean.”

I blinked. “What? But I thought—”

“Will,” he said. “There’s a lot you need to know. You’re not here on a whim. It’s all part of a very carefully conceived plan. I absolutely intend to explain everything to you. But, I know you haven’t slept, not since before you met the Zombie Prince. So I want you to get some rest.”

“I’ll rest later,” I told him angrily. “I want some answers now.”

“No,” he replied. “Though I knew you’d say that. Sleep now. Answers later. I promise you, you’ll be glad for the break.”

Then he took a radio from his belt and spoke into it. “Send somebody up to collect Will and get him settled.”

Someone replied—Emily maybe, or Amy—her voice a harsh crackle.
“Coming, Chief.”

I considered arguing some more, but he was right. I’d been up for almost a full day now, and it had been a crazy, insane day. I
was
exhausted. In fact, I’d reached that hazy place that comes
after
exhausted. And now that I considered the possibility of sleep, I found myself craving it.

Behind me, the elevator clanked to life again. My escort was coming.

“One more question,” I said. “Just one … for now.”

He looked almost as weary as I felt. But he nodded.

“What should I call you?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Most people call me ‘Chief’ or ‘Will.’”

“I don’t think I can call you ‘Will’,” I said. “And, no offense, but to me, ‘Chief’ will always mean Tom.”

A final smile. “I get that. How about ‘William’ then?”

I considered it. It was the name Future Amy had always called me, back when I’d still thought she was some sort of magical being. In fact, though she’d never said, I’d come to believe it was a private little joke on her part. Her younger self, the sweet quiet girl she’d once been, had taken to calling me William, after “William the Conqueror.”

“Okay,” I said. Then, carefully, “William?”

“Yes, Will?”

“We’re going to lose this second war, aren’t we?”

He met my eyes, his gaze—my gaze—like stone. “Going to? Will, we’ve lost it already. I’d have thought that much was obvious.”

Assault

They gave me an old cot to stretch out on, which at least was familiar territory. I had one just like it in
my
Haven.

I was crammed, along with maybe fifty other people, on the tenth floor. Three-dozen cots, just like this one, were bumped up against one another, often with two adults or three small children sharing them. The accommodations were tight and noisy. Lots of whispers and tears. Very little laughter.

Okay,
no
laughter.

I tried to sleep. It’s something I’m usually pretty good at. Soldiers learn quickly to take rest where they can, because there’s no telling when the next opportunity will come along. But, though I used every trick that Sharyn taught me, the Z’s just wouldn’t come.

I’m in the future!

Even after everything I’d learned since my arrival, I didn’t think that fact had really hit home until I’d come face-to-face with
him
.

With
me
.

That’s when it had finally sunk in that this
was
thirty years forward on the calendar and that, during that time, I’d lived a life, or would live a life. I would stay with Helene, marry her, have two boys who’d be named for my father and my best friend. And then I would lose it all and become that unhappy but resolute bald guy upstairs.

It was seriously depressing.

Why am I even here?

That was the question that haunted me. While trying to convince me to come, Amy had said that the future “needs your help.” Well, here I was and, so far, I couldn’t imagine what help I could possibly be.

So, yeah: I couldn’t sleep.

Then, finally and without warning, I did. Just nodded off without realizing it. The old Sandman sneaks up on you sometimes.

A bell sounded. Loud.

I snapped awake, my hand instinctively grabbing my pocketknife, which—as always—I’d tucked under my pillow. The sound of this particular bell was unfamiliar. But I knew an alarm when I heard one, and I found my feet with the dregs of some half-remembered dream, probably
not
a happy one
,
still echoing inside my head.

Throughout the dormitory, people murmured fearfully.

Whatever was happening, it wasn’t good.

I spotted Amy. She stood near the elevator shaft, talking into the same kind of radio that Maxi Me—
William, call him William
—had used. I caught her eye and she looked hard at me, as if trying to make a decision. She said something into the radio, then listened to the reply.

Finally, she waved me over.

I had to tread carefully through the crowded room, excusing myself past men, women and children, most of whom didn’t give me a second glance. None of them, it seemed, knew they harbored some kind of time traveling V.I.P. from the past. To most of them, I was simply another refuge, rescued and brought here by the Undertakers.

“What’s going down?” I asked Amy when I reached her.

As I did, the elevator arrived. Amy pulled its rattling door open and waved me inside.

“The Corpses are attacking,” she said, matter-of-factly. “The chief wants me to bring you up.”

“To that operations room?” I asked.

“We call it ‘Command’,” she reminded me. “And no. To the deck.”

“Oh,” I said.

City Hall’s Observation Deck sat atop the tower, right below the thirty-foot statue of Billy Penn, which was still perched atop the big building’s pinnacle, the largest statue to sit atop any building in the world. There’d been a time, back in the 1980’s, when this had been the highest point in the city, when a “gentleman’s agreement” had existed never to erect a building taller than Billy’s hat. That admittedly stupid idea had finally been abandoned and major skyscrapers had quickly surrounded the tower, dwarfing it.

Now, however, all of those skyscrapers had either been burned down or collapsed. So, once again, the “gentleman’s agreement” held sway.

I supposed there was a little irony in that somewhere.

A minute later, the elevator reached its final stop. As Amy pushed the door aside, I smelled fresh air; I hadn’t realized how rank it was in that dorm. Unfortunately, it quickly became obvious that the air wasn’t really all that fresh—that, carried on the wind, was a stench. A familiar one.

The dead.

Amy led me through the small iron enclosure housing the elevator and out onto the narrow circular walkway that surrounded it. It was sometime in the early afternoon. I must have slept for longer than I’d thought. Then I looked past the railing and all thoughts of time went right out of my head.

I’d been up here before, both during the daytime and nighttime. But never when the only view was of a shattered city.

From this height, the ruin of Philadelphia was like a knife to my gut. The toppled skyscrapers were bad enough. But the rest of the city, nearly everything from City Hall east to the Delaware River, had been burned to ashes. Independence Hall still stood—I could see its steeple rising in the distance. But the Liberty Bell’s glass pavilion was gone. So were the National Constitution Center and every square inch of the park called Independence Mall. Left behind was a wasteland of scorched concrete and debris that reached to the limits of my vision. On the other side of the tower, looking west, Love Park was still there, though the buildings around it were nothing but shattered husks.

Yet that silly “LOVE” sculpture, in front of which I’d once taken a sniper’s bullet, had somehow survived. Something about the way its four colorful letters peeked up out of the rubble made me think the “oversight” had been deliberate.

Corpses were sometimes known to have a nasty sense of humor.

“Over here,” said a voice.

Maxi Me stood at the railing, beckoning my way.

I went, looking back at Amy, who had wordlessly returned to the elevator. Evidently, this was supposed to be another private audience.

William said, “I’m sorry. I’d hoped we’d have some time to prepare you for this, but they showed up sooner than expected.”

“What’s happening?” I asked him.

In answer, he pointed over the railing. In my day, there’d been a wall of windows running all the way around the deck, so that you couldn’t really look straight down. Those had been removed, a fact made clear by the chill wind that sliced through my shirt and blew my hair around.

I suddenly wondered what month it was. It had been June when I’d left my time.

I filed the question away for letter and stepped up to the railing, peering over it.

Deaders filled what was left of the streets, thousands of them. They surrounded the entire building, clamoring and snarling and clawing at the hundred-year-old masonry walls. More of them than I’d ever seen. More of them than I’d ever imagined.

And I found myself thinking miserably,
I’m sorry,
Burgermeister.

As I watched, a wave of them perhaps a hundred strong threw themselves at City Hall’s brick façade, finding handholds and climbing. A second wave followed, until deaders lined the outer walls, scaling the huge building the way an army of spiders might scale a stack of bricks.

“Does this happen a lot?” I asked.

“Two or three times a month,” he replied.

“What do we do?”

He glanced at me, perhaps amused at my ready use of the word “we.” Then he raised his radio to his lips and said, “Make it rain.”

Looking down over the railing, I spotted at least a dozen of those small-wheeled sprinklers, like the kind that hang from middle school ceilings. Each was mounted onto the end of a pipe that jutted out from the tower walls. A few seconds after Maxi Me delivered his command, they all spun into action, hurling a torrent of water down on the Corpses.

Almost immediately, the top row of climbers began to convulse. They lost their grips on the building’s brickwork and toppled down into their friends, who were subsequently knocked off the wall and into the others below them, and so on. Within moments, the first and second waves were nothing but spasming, helpless piles of bodies littering the base of City Hall.

I grinned. “Saltwater.”

“Saltwater,” he said.

The “rain” kept going, soaking the Corpses more and more, until the ones on the top of the piles stopped twitching altogether. It would have been nice to think them dead, but I knew better. Saltwater couldn’t kill Corpses, though enough of it could permanently mess with their stolen bodies, trapping them in useless prisons of flesh. They’d be stuck like that, until and unless their buds could find them new cadavers to possess.