The Undertakers Page 2

I struggled for words. It was a problem that happened only in front of her.

  Well, and zombies, of course.

  “I…think so.”

  “The Math Queen’s tests are always so hard,” Helene complained. “It’s like she’s not…human or something.”

  Another, rather different kind of cold shock ran down my spine. I gaped at Helene speechlessly as, from the blackboard, dead Ms. Yu declared, “Attention, class! Everyone look at me!”

  It was the last thing I wanted to do. I did it anyway. What I was looking at was a dried-up carcass loosely wrapped in a floral print dress and clutching a pile of stapled papers in one gray bony fist. Bits of flaky skin fluttered off of her, covering the floor like weird confetti. There were beetles following her with every step she took. They seemed to be feeding on the confetti.

  I glanced around at the other kids. None of them looked nervous, except for Brian, of course, who hadn’t studied.

  They didn’t see that she was a corpse. They didn’t even seem to see the bugs!

  “There will be no talking,” she said. “Your eyes will be on your papers. Forget the clock. Focus only on the test.”

  “You okay?” Helene whispered.

  I nodded miserably, wishing I could confide in her but realizing that her remark about Ms. Yu had been just a joke—one of those things that, yesterday, we’d have laughed about and then forgotten.

  Helene wouldn’t believe me. No one would.

  The telephone on the wall beside the door suddenly rang.

  I actually let out a little startled yelp. A few of the kids around me chuckled.

  “You don’t look okay,” Helene remarked dryly.

  Her speech interrupted, Dead Woman Yu moved to the phone using an ungainly shuffle that sloughed more little gray skin flakes off of her decaying body. They left a gruesome trail across the tile floor that the beetles seemed to love.

  Lifting the receiver in one bony hand, she uttered the phrase that, as always, earned her a laugh from the class: “I am Yu!”

  I didn’t join in the merriment. Neither did Helene.

  The corpse flashed the class an annoyed look. Then she listened to the voice on the other end of the line. As I watched, her withered and blackened body grew stiff—no pun intended. She turned her head and looked right at me.

  It’s Mr. Pratt! He’s called the school to tell Mr. Titlebaum and Ms. Yu that I can see them—that I can see them all!

  Without really knowing why, I glanced at Helene, who met my eyes.

  Amazingly, she whispered, “Don’t panic.”

  Our deceased math teacher replaced the receiver. “William Ritter,” she said, “you are to report to Mr. Titlebaum’s office immediately.”

  I didn’t move—couldn’t move.

  The corpse’s rotted eye sockets narrowed. Something that looked horribly like a smile flashed across her skeletal face. “Did you hear me, Mr. Ritter?”

  “Y-yes, ma’am.”

  Moving in slow motion, as though trapped in a nightmare, I collected my books and stood, ignoring the dismayed look on Brian’s face. The classroom was as quiet as a graveyard. The other kids somehow sensed that something very bad was going down.

  My dead math teacher watched me march slowly toward the door.

  As soon as I’m in the hallway, I’ll run for the nearest exit. I’ll get home somehow—walk, or hitch, if I have to. I’ll tell Mom what’s happening. I’ll make her believe me.

  But as the classroom door closed behind me, I knew that wouldn’t be possible.

  Dead Man Titlebaum stood twenty feet away at the end of the corridor to my right. To my left, two more zombies were waiting. I didn’t know who they were, although both wore janitors’ overalls. They were the juicy kind, like the assistant principal. Together their three sets of lifeless yet malevolent eyes burned hungrily into me, their dripping, decaying bodies blocking any hope of escape.

  “This way, William,” Mr. Titlebaum commanded. He waggled one swollen purple finger at me.

  I clutched my books to my chest, paralyzed.

  “P-please…” I felt a tear trace down my cheek. “I…want my mom.”

  “No. Mom. Boy,” the assistant principal said, this time speaking in that same strange way that Old Man Pratt had—without moving his lipless mouth. “Go. On. And. Cry.”

  Suddenly I found myself praying that I was crazy. Crazy had to be better than what these things had in mind.

  The zombies advanced.

  I knew I ought to run, but my legs wouldn’t budge.

  Ms. Yu’s classroom door burst open behind me. “Move!” a voice exclaimed. I was shoved roughly aside. My books crashed to the floor as a figure darted past me.

  As I watched, thunderstruck, Helene Boettcher crossed the corridor at a run and yanked down on the fire alarm.

  An electronic horn blared out of the school’s PA system. The three zombies stopped. Seconds later, doors started opening up and down the hallway. Kids filed out, all wearing that interested, somewhat amused expression that comes whenever something unexpected breaks up the day’s routine.

  If they only knew.

  I felt the first faint whisper of hope.

  Then a dry bony hand dropped onto my shoulder. Ms. Yu’s voice whispered in my ear, “What do you see, Mr. Ritter?”

  A dozen feet away on either side of me, the zombies had recovered themselves and were focusing their attention on Helene now. Dead Man Titlebaum charged at her, moving with surprising speed, his strong hands extended.

  Seemingly unafraid, Helene reached behind her back and produced a gun!

  Except it wasn’t a real gun. It was molded plastic and dyed a pale blue color.

  A water pistol?

  Standing there with Ms. Yu’s dead fingers digging painfully into my shoulder, the notion struck me—crazy though it was—that Helene would be expelled for bringing that thing to school!

  As the assistant principal neared her, Helene fired a stream of water right into his face. To my astonishment, the dead man staggered back, clutching at his eyes as though blinded. Then, spinning on her heel, she fired twice more at the deceased janitors. This time she aimed low, catching them in the pants legs.

  One of them changed direction and marched right into the wall, knocking off a mounted fire extinguisher. There he stood, twitching helplessly. The other one’s legs stopped altogether. The corpse overbalanced and—his arms pinwheeling—crashed to the floor. When he tried to get up, I saw with horror that some of his face stuck to the floor and peeled away, revealing the underlying muscles.

  Helene ignored them, crossed the hall, and fired another stream over my shoulder. It nailed Dead Woman Yu full in the face, driving her back through the open classroom door. I stood stunned, barely able to register what was happening.

  A small, warm hand closed around mine.

  “If you don’t want to die,” Helene said, “follow me.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Dead Men Hunting

  Wait…a…minute!” I cried.

  Helene ignored the protest, dragging me roughly back into the classroom, her water pistol trained on Ms. Yu, who had pressed her back to the blackboard and was now spasming as if in some kind of fit.

  Around us, most of the kids were standing beside their desks—probably in response to the fire alarm. They were watching their math teacher jumping and thrashing like a hooked fish, their expressions ranging from astonishment to fear.

  Only Brian seemed to have a voice. “Will? What’s…going on?”

  I had no idea what to tell him.

  Abruptly Helene dropped my hand and snatched up a nearby desk chair. “Stand back!” she ordered. Then as we all watched in shocked silence, the girl I’d liked since September swung the chair in a wide arc and smashed out the nearest classroom window. What’s more, she did it easily, smoothly, as if she shattered school windows all the time.

  “Climb through!” she ordered me. “Watch out for broken glass.”

  “She broke the win
dow!” Brian cried.

  “No!” Our math teacher shrieked. She stumbled forward, reaching for us with her mummified hands, her skull’s face twisted with rage.

  I thought, What on Earth are these other kids seeing right now?

  Helene didn’t even look at the approaching corpse. She simply raised one arm and fired her pistol into the dead woman’s right knee, just below the hem of the flowered dress. Ms. Yu suddenly veered to her right and began turning in a sloppy, frustrated circle around a leg that now seemed to have been rendered useless.

  Still trailing behind her, a bunch of beetles got stomped.

  “Get going!” Helene told me.

  Feeling numb, I obeyed, gingerly avoiding the shards of glass that lined the window frame like shark’s teeth.

  The outside air was crisp with autumn’s chill. The trees along Ridge Avenue were turning orange and yellow. Fifty yards to the left, the busy Shurs Lane intersection buzzed with late morning traffic. To the right—

  To the right, three more zombies rushed toward me from the direction of the school’s main entrance. They were all dressed like teachers and looked to be in varying stages of decomposition. One was so far gone that some of his body parts seemed about to fall off of him. Still he kept coming. They all did, closing in on me with terrifying speed.

  “There. Catch. Boy. Kill. Girl. Catch. Boy.”

  I heard Helene exclaim, “Run for Shurs! I’m right behind you!”

  “Wh-what are those things?”

  “Just run!”

  So I ran, looking over my shoulder long enough to see Helene spring through the broken window after me. Behind her, the remaining windows of our mathematics classroom were filled with the pale faces of frightened kids. Brian’s was among them.

  No test today, dude.

  We reached the intersection. The light was red, the traffic heavy. I stopped, panting and clutching a lamppost for support. Helene hardly seemed winded at all.

  “Now will you tell—?” I began.

  “Keep going!” She grabbed my hand again and pulled me down Shurs Lane in the general direction of home. “They’ll be spreading the word about us! We’ve got to get off the main roads!”

  A couple of blocks later, we turned left onto Mitchell Street, darting across the busy road and earning ourselves some angry horn blasts. Mitchell was a more typical Manayunk street, narrow and lined with houses. Through open windows I could hear TV’s and radios playing—the sounds of normalcy.

  After another block, Helene turned again and then again after that, leading us gradually downhill toward Main Street and the river. We ran until our hasty footfalls were all I could hear—well, those and my labored breathing.

  “Where…are…we…going?” I croaked. She didn’t reply. Somewhere off in the distance, police sirens blared. I swallowed and asked a different question. “They’re hunting for us, aren’t they?”

  Helene treated me to a look that seemed to say Duh!

  “My house is close by,” I offered. “My mom—”

  “No,” she said flatly. “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s no time to explain. Just—please, we have to keep going!”

  She led me down a series of alleys and side streets, all of which finally dumped us near St. John’s Church and the empty playground at Manayunk Park across from it.

  “There!” Helene exclaimed. “Quick!”

  She crossed the street and vaulted the playground fence like a hurdle jumper. Feeling outclassed, I had to climb it. Once inside she yanked me wordlessly to the ground—and just in time too. Lying there in the bushes, we both watched as a police car buzzed slowly down Churchview Street, coming from the direction of the school. Its lights were flashing, but its siren was off. I could see two uniformed policemen sharing the front seat.

  The one on the passenger’s side was clearly dead.

  I almost cried out, but Helene clamped a small hand over my mouth.

  The police car slowed briefly in front of the playground. I could almost feel the corpse’s milky eyes scanning the empty swings and monkey bars. It made my skin crawl. Surely the thing had spotted us!

  The cruiser disappeared around the next corner.

  Pressed so close beside me that I could almost feel her heartbeat, Helene sighed with relief. “They’re gone. Let’s go.”

  “Okay,” I squeaked.

  We finally reached the bottom of the hill. Here, Main Street ran the length of Manayunk, following the path of the Schuylkill River. Lined with hip shops, antique stores, and fancy restaurants, this part of town was almost always busy. Huddled together along a narrow side road, we peered out at the pedestrians and passing traffic.

  “Two cop cars,” Helene reported. “One three blocks south and heading away from us; the other coming this way and stopped up at the Cotton Street light.”

  “Are they all…zombies?” I asked.

  “Don’t call them zombies.”

  “Why not?”

  She just shook her head.

  “Okay—are they all dead?”

  “No.”

  “Then can’t we find one who isn’t and, like, ask for help?”

  She scowled at me. “And who do you think that cop’s gonna believe? A couple of kids who just attacked some teachers and took off from school…or another cop?”

  She was right, of course. It made me feel sick.

  “So…what do we do?” I asked.

  “We wait til it looks clear. Then we cross Main and head down to the tow path.”

  “The tow path?”

  She nodded.

  “But where are we going?”

  “For now, just to a place where we can be safe for a little while.”

  I nodded. My side hurt from running. Hesitantly I asked, “Helene?”

  “What?”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  She gave me a long look. “I’m an undertaker,” she replied.

  “What?”

  But instead of explaining, she peeked around the corner again and declared, “The second cop car just turned down Cotton Street. Let’s go!”

  We went.

  The tow path was a boardwalk that ran behind and below Main Street, right along the hundred-year-old Manayunk Canal. Popular with joggers and cyclists, it ran the length of the neighborhood and was spanned by a handful of bridges that connected Manayunk with some old factories that were perched between the canal and the Schuylkill River.

  We hurried along the boardwalk, seeing no one, and crossed one of the bridges. On the far side, Helene led me to a weedy vacant lot that sat in the shadow of a huge concrete railroad trestle. To our right was the canal and, beyond it, Manayunk. To our left, the Schuylkill River gurgled through the trestle supports and under the Belmont Avenue Bridge. Traffic noise rumbled close by.

  I followed Helene down a makeshift stairway of broken concrete that reached almost to the edge of the river. Down there a large cement pipe lay half-buried in the bank, probably left over from some construction project.

  Inside the six-foot-high pipe, a big hunk of plywood had been laid flat, creating a floor of sorts. On it were a sleeping bag, a big backpack, and a camper’s kerosene lantern.

  Helene produced a lighter and lit the lamp. Its yellow glow filled the space.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “It’s where I sleep.”

  “You sleep here?”

  She nodded absently and went to work shoving the meager assortment of personal effects into the backpack, leaving me to look around, feeling bewildered. What had she planned to do when winter came?

  “Helene—” I began.

  “I like that,” she interrupted.

  “What?”

  “My name. You pronounce it right…with three a’s and no e’s. Most people don’t. I like that.”

  “So is that why you helped me—because I say your name right?”

  She laughed but without humor. “No.”

  “Then why—
?”

  “There’ll be time for that later. They’re gonna keep looking for us, and sooner or later, they’ll come down here.”

  “Helene, I wanna go home.”

  She paused in her hasty packing, giving me a look of such regret that I went cold inside. “I know you do,” she said. “But you can’t—at least not right now.”

  I didn’t want to hear that, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have to listen. I could just take off and run home. It was still early in the day. Mom might still be there. I could almost feel her hug me. Heck, right now even one of Emily’s sticky kisses would have seemed like paradise.

  “You’d put them in danger,” Helene said as if reading my mind. “Right now the best thing you can do is come with me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Center City.”

  Center City Philadelphia, with its skyscrapers, museums, and monuments, lay a few miles to the southeast, along the river.

  “What’s in Center City?” I asked.

  “You’ll find out when we get there,” she replied. “Look, Will, I know you’re scared. If it makes you feel any better, I’m scared. But you’ve got to trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

  That seemed quite a promise coming from someone who lived in a pipe. Was Helene homeless? She didn’t look homeless—she was always dressed neatly, her hair clean and brushed. And homeless children didn’t go to school—at least not in Manayunk.

  Besides, weren’t homeless people sometimes crazy? Helene wasn’t crazy.

  Then, as I watched, she started talking into her wrist.

  “This is Manayunk One,” she said. “I’m coming in.”

  I blinked.

  There was a crackle of static, followed by a male voice. “This is Haven, Manayunk One. What’s your situation?”

  “I’ve got a Seer with me. We’ve been blown, and the Corpses are looking for us.”

  “Okay, Manayunk One.” There was a pause. “The Chief’s here. He wants to know if it’s Ritter you’ve got.”

  Helene smiled slightly. “Tell him yes.”

  Another pause. “The Chief wants you to bring him here.”

  Helene frowned. “To Haven?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Not First Stop?”