Queen of the Dead Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Ty Drago

  Cover and internal design © 2012 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover illustration by Eric Williams

  Cover design by William Riley/Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.jabberwockykids.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Source of Production: Versa Press, East Peoria, Illinois, USA.

  Date of Production: September 2012

  Run Number: 18499

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1. Crossing Over

  2. Recon

  3. Prison

  4. The Deader and the Barfly

  5. Good Will Hunted

  6. Totally Worth It

  7. Message in a Bottle

  8. Battle Plans

  9. Breaking In

  10. Number Eleven

  11. The Tide of Battle

  12. Lilith’s Morning

  13. Spitting Image

  14. Opportunity Knocks

  15. Agent Ramirez

  16. Monkey Business

  17. The Burgermeister and Helene

  18. Grown-Ups

  19. Darkness

  20. Getting the Band Back Together

  21. Invasion of the Body Snatchers

  22. Floor Plan

  23. The Demonstration

  24. Dueling with the Dead

  25. Swapping Stories

  26. The Last Straw

  27. Desperation

  28. Power Drills and Olive Branches

  29. The Mom Trap

  30. Bitter Truths

  31. The Phone Call

  32. Will’s New Mission

  33. Haven’s Librarian

  34. Friends

  35. Breaking In Again

  36. The Dirt Tube

  37. Rescue

  38. Juggernaut

  39. Life after Death

  40. Resurrection

  41. Eulogy

  42. The Eyes of the Enemy

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Susan Drago McDevitt,

  a loyal fan, a great sister…and an even better friend.

  I love you.

  “The first casualty of any war is innocence”

  —Anonymous

  Chapter 1

  Crossing Over

  The Queen crossed the Void between worlds on Halloween, and the dead welcomed her.

  She arrived without escort, emerging through the Rift without form—an entity of seething dark energy.

  Her minions were already assembled, dozens of them, as many as would fit into this arched, windowless chamber. Being here was, of course, a tremendous honor—and only the most highly ranked had been invited. They stood at patient attention, a vanguard for the Army of the Dead, lit only by the Rift, which resembled a wide, fiery crack in the chamber’s rear wall.

  This “crack” did not close once the Queen’s “Self” had fully entered this human realm.

  The Rift never closed.

  In the midst of the welcoming dead, resting atop a steel hospital gurney, lay the body of a young woman. The cadaver was the freshest available, as suitable a vessel as the legions could find. For the occasion, she had been dressed in tailored clothes and adorned with gold jewelry.

  No expense was spared.

  Nor was time wasted. No sooner had the Queen emerged from the Void than her dark energy leapt into the waiting body. This is essential, as their kind couldn’t exist in this world without a host.

  The eyes of the woman on the gurney, which had been respectfully shut, snapped open. She sat up, moving stiffly with muscles that had begun to decay, and gazed down at her hands. In life, they had probably been long and delicate. Now they appeared purple, the fingers stiff with rigor mortis.

  Seeing them, the Queen felt disgusted but resigned.

  She rarely traversed the Void personally. But the sudden and inexplicable death of her predecessor, the late Kenny Booth—so well respected and accomplished a conqueror—had made it necessary.

  Oh, how she wished she could make that overrated fool pay for his failure. Sadly, his destruction made that impossible.

  But someone would pay. Oh yes. Someone would most definitely pay.

  “How long has this host been deceased?” she demanded, speaking English for the first time, wrapping her unfamiliar tongue around the unfamiliar language.

  “Six hours!” came the reply, barked by a dead man in a tailored suit who stepped dutifully forward.

  The Queen eyed him. His cadaver, she noted, was nearly as fresh as her own. But while his host was of interest, she also examined his Cover.

  They all had Covers, the illusions that allowed them to move unchallenged among the bald monkeys populating this revolting planet. Each Cover, each false persona, had been meticulously crafted to suit the individual. His was of an Earth male in his fifties, his smooth face distinguished and his hair pepper gray. To humans, he would appear as the picture of respectability, of professionalism, of thoroughly human prosperity.

  The Malum, after all, were masters of disguise.

  The Queen slid herself off the cot and stood, testing her new legs.

  They would do.

  The man before her smiled. “Welcome, mistress.” She noticed with some approval that he spoke English, as was the protocol.

  “What is my name?” she asked.

  “You’re Lilith Cavanaugh,” he replied. Then he held up a folder of papers. “Your dossier is here: education, employment history, personal references. You have tax records going back twenty years. It’s as perfect an identity as has ever been fabricated. I handled it personally.”

  The Queen accepted the paperwork and scanned it. Later, when she was alone, she would read it through several times. Embracing a Cover, making it part of yourself, was important. One had to believe the lie. It had been a long time since she’d personally harvested a world, but there could be no forgetting the Old Rule: a successful Cover was as much bluff as illusion.

  “Acceptable,” she pronounced, dropping the folders casually onto the gurney behind her. “And you are?”

  “James Dye, mistress,” the man replied. Then he smiled, his Cover showing perfect white teeth, while the ones in the cadaver he inhabited were yellow and visibly loose.

  “Dye…an amusing name and one with which I’m familiar. You were Kenny Booth’s personal secretary, were you not?”

  Did his smile falter slightly? She wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter either way.

  “I had that honor, mi
stress. Yes.”

  “And what became of Booth while he was under your care?”

  This time, the smile did falter. “Mistress, I wasn’t—”

  She took a step toward him. His smile vanished completely.

  “Wasn’t…what?” the Queen asked, closing the distance. “Wasn’t in the television studio when your master was poisoned using the candies he so greedily and obsessively consumed? Wasn’t on hand when his home was invaded? Weren’t you laid low, along with the rest of his staff, while a collection of children…children!…bested you all?”

  She was very close to James Dye now, enjoying the fear that shone in his eyes—not his dead eyes or the more expressive eyes of his Cover. No, it was the being within, his Self, that quaked before her—and with good reason.

  “Mistress…please…”

  The Queen reached up with her dead purple fingers and cupped the trembling man’s head between them.

  “Shhh,” she cooed.

  “Mercy,” the man whimpered. “Mercy.”

  “No.”

  Then, in a single hard motion, she twisted and pulled, roughly ripping Dye’s head from his shoulders.

  There was no blood, as the host’s heart hadn’t been beating. But there were juices, and some of these trickled out as his body fell heavily to the stone floor.

  Lilith held the head a moment longer, admiring the way the illusion closed its eyes, as if in sleep. A human witness wouldn’t have seen the decapitation. Blinded by the Cover, a typical bald monkey would have thought the well-dressed man had collapsed, perhaps fainted. They might even have come forward to offer aid, never knowing that the only aid available to James Dye now was a new host into which to transfer his trapped Self.

  The body he currently occupied—being suddenly and decidedly headless—was no longer usable.

  “He doesn’t transfer,” the Queen announced to the rest of the assemblage. Then, growling with only partially spent anger, she hurled Dye’s head into the open fissure between worlds.

  Her minions murmured fearfully.

  “He doesn’t transfer!” And this time, she screamed it. Then, reaching down, she picked up the rest of the decapitated cadaver, and with a tremendous heave, she cast that into the Void too.

  The Malum who had called himself James Dye was, like Kenny Booth, forever dead.

  More murmuring, and the Queen noticed with irritation that none of their lips moved. They were speaking the Old Tongue.

  “English!” she declared, her words reverberating off the arched brick ceiling. “Under my command, no one speaks the Old Tongue. You get one warning! Then you follow this fool! Is that understood?”

  The murmurs ceased. Dozens of pairs of dead eyes locked on her, their Selves as well as their Covers looking suitably terrified.

  Better.

  “In time, one of you will attend me,” she said. “The way James Dye attended Booth. If that Self fails me as Dye failed his master, he or she shall meet the same fate. As you have no doubt heard, I’m neither patient nor forgiving, and the necessity of my visit to this wretched world has done nothing to improve my mood. But I can be generous…if served with loyalty and competence. Is that understood?”

  None spoke. None had to. Silence was assent.

  “Good,” the Queen said.

  She briefly scanned the first page of her dossier. Lilith Cavanaugh was five feet ten inches tall, with shoulder-length blond hair and green eyes. There were, of course, no photographs since, before tonight, Lilith Cavanaugh had never truly existed. But starting tomorrow, her face—or rather, her Cover’s face—would begin to appear in local newspapers and on local television. The Malum were expert publicists. Soon the entire city would recognize her on sight.

  Time to select the face they will see.

  Smiling thoughtfully, the Queen centered herself—

  —and donned her Cover.

  In moments, a beautiful, blond-haired woman stood in place of the purplish cadaver, wearing the tailored suit and gold jewelry as if she’d been born in them. She touched her face and once again examined her hands, which no longer appeared dead but were smooth and elegant, with alabaster skin and polished fingernails.

  Acceptable.

  Then Lilith Cavanaugh addressed her minions. There was much to do, and she knew exactly where to start.

  “One of you will now escort me to my new home,” she commanded. “Once there, I will rest and study and ready myself to begin living the new life that has been prepared for me. But before that happens, will someone please explain to me about these…Undertakers?”

  Chapter 2

  Recon

  What do you call it when you’re running for your life from a rotting, animated cadaver wearing a cop uniform who—if he catches you—will savagely rip you limb from limb with his maggot-riddled hands?

  Me, I called it “Thursday.”

  Well, “Friday,” I guess. Because it was after midnight.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  I could say all this trouble started about twenty minutes ago, but that wouldn’t be true. It really started four months before that, on the day I stepped out of my house and discovered that my next-door neighbor had become a walking dead man rotting inside his JCPenney bathrobe. After that, it was my assistant principal and then my math teacher. Suddenly, they were everywhere—cops (like the dude chasing me now), store owners, and even TV news anchor guys. Thousands of them, with more showing up every day.

  Corpses, with a capital “C.” That’s what we call them.

  Not “zombies.” Zombies are staggering, moaning morons. Corpses, on the other hand, are fast, smart, and organized. To the rest of the world, they’re normal-looking people. Only kids can see them for what they really are—and only some kids. Guess I’m one of the lucky ones.

  Since that morning, I haven’t been home.

  My name’s Will Ritter, and I’m an Undertaker.

  “How many are there?” Helene asked me twenty minutes ago.

  I peered through the telescope at the goings-on at the prison gate across the street. The night vision turned the world a sickly green, but it penetrated every shadow. With it, I could clearly make out a small group of Corpses. They were doing something at the back of a Philly police car that stood idling at the curb, its headlights and flashers off.

  “Four,” I replied. “And whatever they’re up to, they’re being pretty low key about it. One’s standing watch. Another’s opening the gate, and the last two are pulling something out of the trunk.”

  “What is it?”

  “Wait a minute.” I peered closer. “A body!”

  “Maybe one of them wants to transfer,” Helene suggested.

  “No…he’s moving.” I frowned. “I think they’ve got a person there…I mean a living person. Looks like he’s handcuffed. Hands and feet. Gagged too.”

  “Lemme look,” Helene said, her misty breath clouding her face. It was freakin’ cold on this dark street—just past twelve o’clock on a clear February night in Philadelphia. We’d stationed ourselves on Fairmount Avenue, hidden in the shadow of a storefront awning across from the enormous front façade of Eastern State Penitentiary.

  I handed her my pocketknife—my weird, amazing pocketknife. It’d been given to me by a mysterious, nameless woman who’d visited me in a dream. I’d been pretty badly injured at the time and would have assumed that my battered head had conjured her up if I hadn’t found this gift under my pillow.

  It had taken me a while to fess up to the story, but most of my friends now knew the gist of it: I’d been visited by an angel.

  Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

  Well, my life over these past few months has kind of redefined “crazy” in my personal dictionary.

  For example, take the Corpse Invasion—an a
rmy of the walking dead who somehow projected the illusion that they were ordinary men and women, an illusion that stayed put no matter how many slowly decomposing bodies they inhabited, wore out, and then replaced. For the past three years, long before I got involved, they’d been worming their way into city government, planning to take over. Last fall, one of them—a news guy called Kenny Booth—even tried to run for mayor.

  He didn’t win. We stopped him. The Undertakers.

  Each of us is a Seer, somehow able to look right through the Corpses’ illusions and spot the festering, stolen cadavers underneath. We could blow the whistle on them. We could stop these creatures in their tracks. Except, we’re kids; the oldest of us is only seventeen.

  And nobody believes kids, not about stuff like this.

  Ever.

  So we fight the war that no one else can. A guerrilla war. We hide in the shadows, only coming out at night. We watch the Deaders, and when we see an opportunity, we hit them. We hit them hard. Then we disappear.

  Pisses them off no end, believe me.

  Tonight, Helene and I had been quietly following a bunch of Corpse cops. To anyone else, they’d look like normal, upstanding members of the Philadelphia Police Department. To us, they were a pair of “Type Twos” and another pair of “Type Threes.” That was a kind of rating system we had based on how far along a particular cadaver was in its decomposition. Type Ones were freshly dead, still fast and strong, though sometimes a bit juicy. Type Fives were dry husks that didn’t move well, fought worst, and tended to fall apart.

  These were in the middle.

  Four Deaders in one cop car were rare. Normally, they liked to spread themselves pretty thin, infiltrating as much of the city’s infrastructure as possible. Whenever we spotted more than two of them together at one time, it was a real red flag.

  And almost always meant they were up to something.

  After tailing them through the city streets for maybe half an hour, we’d wound up here, on Fairmount Avenue between Twenty-First and Twenty-Second streets, spying on them from a reasonably safe distance.

  “They’re carrying him inside,” Helene reported, my pocketknife pressed to her one eye, the other eye squeezed shut. She was looking, as I’d been looking, through its night vision telescope.