The Undertakers: End of the World Page 2

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Philadelphia,” she said.

  Same place we’d left. The same city where the Corpses had first invaded, the Undertakers had first formed, and the war had been mostly fought and eventually won. Familiar ground, at least. “Where in Philly?”

  “CHOP.”

  CHOP, or Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was a top-of-the line healthcare facility on the west side of the Schuylkill River, near the University of Pennsylvania. My mom, a professional nurse, had studied there for a while. Both my sister and I had been born there.

  “Okay,” I said. “What now? And what did you mean when you told me that you’d ‘lost a bet’ when I agreed to come?”

  “She meant,” said a voice, “that she owes me a dessert ration!”

  A door that I hadn’t even noticed was there, now stood open. Its facing surface was completely tiled so that it blended in with the rest of the wall. Standing in its threshold was a second woman. She looked a little younger than Amy, and a little shorter. Her hair was also blond, but it was sandier, and cut short so that her ears showed.

  She almost looked like—

  “Mom?” I gasped. But that couldn’t be right. This was thirty years in the future, and my mom would be in her sixties. That bizarre thought filled me with a stab of alarm.

  I suddenly felt way out of my depth and far from home.

  The newcomer smiled. “No, not Mom,” she said. Then she came forward. There was a smile on her face, but it was a strange smile. Part welcoming and part—what? Nostalgic?

  I looked at her, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

  Then the penny dropped and, for a second, the room seemed to tilt. That’s how bad a shock it was.

  “Emily?”

  “Hello, big brother.”

  Then she came over and hugged me.

  The Emily Ritter I knew was a six-year-old girl. This was a grown woman, way older than me. The same age as our mother! A stranger, really. And yet so much of her was familiar. Trying to wrap my mind around it made my brain hurt. I’ve written more than once about a phenomenon that I call the “Holy Crap Factor.” It’s that bizarre moment when truth seems to turn reason on its head.

  Well, my reason was doing handstands right now.

  The woman pulled back and looked me over.

  “This is … weird,” she remarked after a few moments.

  “Tell me about it,” I croaked.

  “I’ve seen you before, of course. In here, I mean. But you were always asleep … hooked up to machines that fed you and monitored your vital signs. This is the first time I’ve seen you up and around and looking like … well … you.”

  Looking like me?

  “Sure,” I said, though I wasn’t feeling “sure” about much of anything right them. “Um … what bet?”

  Emily—hard to call her that—laughed a little uncomfortably. “Amy didn’t think you’d agree to come. She said we should have picked a later time … given that, to you, the Burgermeister had just … I’m so sorry, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling my throat close up.

  She continued, “But I was afraid that, once you left Haven, it would be harder to get a lock on you. So we made this ridiculous bet. Now, given the circumstances, I feel bad about it.”

  I didn’t know what to say to any of that. Frankly, I didn’t know what to think. Too much was coming at me too fast.

  “Um …” I said. “Could I … get a drink of water?”

  “What?” Emily asked. She looked surprised by the question, which made her face go almost comically blank. When she did that, she reminded me so much of her younger self that it was almost like a physical blow. “Oh! Of course.”

  That’s when the alarm went off.

  Shrill but distant, it came from somewhere beyond the open door.

  Looking that way, I couldn’t see much beyond a sliver of hallway: another tiled floor, checkered this time, and a wall behind it that had been painted a dingy blue.

  Emily and Amy exchanged a look I didn’t like.

  “Where’s Steve?” Emily asked.

  “Javelin training,” Amy replied, giving me a sideways glance.

  “Steve?” I asked. “Steve … Moscova?”

  They ignored me.

  “He might not hear the proximity alarm from there,” my younger sister—my older sister—told Amy. Then, in a practiced move, she pulled a small radio from her belt and clicked its mike button. “Steve. It’s Emily.”

  When she released the mike, a thrum of static filled the room.

  “Jammed,” Amy said, sounding breathless. “This isn’t a patrol. They know we’re here.”

  “Who knows?” I demanded, only to be ignored again.

  Typical grown-ups.

  My sister said to Amy, “You get Steve. I’ll take Will out through the south fire exit. Try to join us there if you can. Otherwise, meet us at the boat.”

  “Will do,” my “angel” replied. “Be safe.”

  “You, too.” To me, she said, “We need to get the hell out of here … now.”

  Then she grabbed my hand and yanked me toward the open door and the hallway beyond it. As we ran, I thought to myself, Mom would be pissed if she heard her using that kind of language.

  Funny what runs through your head when you’re totally freaked.

  Chapter 3

  The Impossible Enemy

  The moment Emily pulled me out into the hallway of Children’s Hospital, dragging me along as if she was a grown-up and I was a kid—which, of course, nailed the situation perfectly—I got my first inkling that things in “tomorrow” weren’t, well, good.

  In the white room, the tiling had looked worn. Out here, it was positively ancient. Maybe a third of the one-foot-diameter squares were missing, showing old dried grout and rotted plywood underlayment. Many others were in pieces, their jagged shards littering the floor. The rest looked so dingy that they weren’t checkerboard black and white anymore, but an almost uniform gray.

  The walls and ceiling were no better: spider webs and holes; dangling fluorescent lights; medical signs that either hung precariously from rusted nails or had fallen and now littered the floor like autumn leaves.

  “What happened here?” I asked as we hurried around first one corner and then another, finding more of the same. No doctors or patients. No people at all. Just ruin.

  “Later,” my sister told me. “I’ll explain it all. I promise. Right now—”

  At that instant, the swinging double doors at the end of the hall, the kind that emergency gurneys are always getting pushed through at high speed, were torn off their hinges.

  And the living dead poured in.

  My heart stopped. I swear it did.

  That’s not possible!

  There had to be a dozen of them. Type Fours, mostly. That was our rating system for degrees of decomposition: One to Five. Fours were a month dead and pretty far along. Normally, the Corpses didn’t use them in combat. Too fragile.

  But here was a whole bunch of them, and they were charging.

  Emily gasped and put on the breaks, whirling around and pulling me back the way we’d come. At the same instant, she used her free hand to snatch the radio from her belt again. Into it, she called frantically, “Amy! Steve!”

  “Lemme go!” I said.

  She ignored me, still dragging me along behind her. Behind us, the wall of deaders kept coming. A fresher Corpse could run seriously, terrifyingly fast. But the tendons and ligaments in Type Four legs had shriveled and dried, making them slower and stiffer, much like their movie zombie cousins.

  “Emily,” I snapped. “Let go of me!”

  “No!” she exclaimed. “We have to find Amy and Steve and get out of here!”

  I dug in my heels and yanked my hand free from hers. She stopped and stared at me, her face—still heart-shaped—flushed with panic.

  “There is n
o way out,” I told her. “They’ll be coming in through every possible exit. They want us to run, box ourselves in somewhere in the building where more of ‘em will be waiting.”

  My sister, her eyes wide, seemed to consider this. Then she visibly swallowed and nodded.

  “Do you have any weapons on you?” I asked her, glancing over my shoulder.

  The Corpses were maybe twenty feet away now, their milky eyes glaring hatefully at us, their withered arms outstretched. And they were moaning. Sometimes they moaned; I had no idea why.

  She pulled out a water pistol. It was an old one, taped in places, probably to seal up cracks. It was filled, presumably with saltwater. But it was small. Too small. To add to that, I had my pocketknife, which could be of some use against one or two of the walking dead. But here there were too many of them.

  We needed a bigger “gun.”

  Luckily, I’d stopped in this particular spot for a reason.

  “Will—” she began.

  “Save the pistol,” I told her, turning toward the advancing Corpses. “I’ve got an idea.”

  I waited until the horde—a smallish horde, I’ll grant you, but still a horde—came within eight feet of us, until I could smell their musty odor and see the grotesque clouds of dust they produced as their skin literally shook from their rotting bones. Then I reached to my right and pulled the fire extinguisher off the wall.

  I had no idea how long the thing had been hanging there, or why it had remained untouched when the rest of the hallway lay in such ruin. And I didn’t care. In combat, you take whatever good fortune fate decides to throw your way. I learned that lesson pretty early on.

  The extinguisher was big and heavy. That was good; it meant it was still at least partly full. It also was a “B/C” model, not an “A.” That was even better, because an “A” extinguisher is for wood and cloth, while a “B/C” is designed to put out oil or electrical fires.

  I pulled the pin, pointed the big conical nozzle at the nearest deaders, and fired.

  White foam spewed forth, catching them full in the face. It didn’t gag them as it might a human, since the dead don’t breathe. But it did momentarily blind them. Better yet, it caused the first few to stop in their tracks, which forced the rest to slam into them from behind.

  Then, as the whole of the horde struggled to regroup, I lowered the nozzle and soaked the broken tiles at their feet.

  Another difference between “A” and “B/C” extinguishers: “B/C” foam is really slippery.

  They went down—hard.

  It would have been funny if I hadn’t been so scared.

  Still blinded, they landed atop one another, hissing and moaning with rage and frustration. If they’d been Type Twos or even Threes instead of Fours, they’d have recovered almost immediately. But, decomposed as they were, their bones had turned brittle.

  I actually heard some of those bones snap.

  As the first of the deaders struggled to rise on legs that bent at impossible angles, I stepped up and slammed the butt of the steel extinguisher into its skull, which crumpled like an eggshell. The Corpse immediately went limp and dropped. As the next rose up, Emily nailed it with a saltwater squirt in the eye that sent it into violent, crippling convulsions. A second smack with the extinguisher caved its head in.

  We put down four that way, my sister and I—not that we actually killed any of them. Killing a deader wasn’t so easy as that. By destroying their brains, all we’d done was make it impossible for the alien monsters hiding inside to control their stolen bodies, effectively trapping them in prisons of rotting flesh.

  But, for now, that was enough.

  Five down. Six. Seven. Emily was running out of saltwater and my arms had begun to feel like lead and as I brought the extinguisher up and down, up and down, like a piston in an engine. It was awful, gruesome work, but I’d long ago gotten used to it.

  A terrible thing to say, but true.

  The remaining Corpses, seeing what we were up to, frantically scrambled back. A few of them managed to find their feet, and were still undamaged enough to do me some serious hurt. When Emily’s pistol finally ran empty, I hastily flattened two more of their buddies’ heads. Then the rest of them—five in all—regrouped and came for me, moving even more slowly than before, having to cautiously navigate the minefield of fallen bodies.

  “Undertaker,” one of them growled. The word was in English, not the weird telepathic Deadspeak they sometimes use, so it came out as little more than a raspy wheeze. This dude’s vocal chords were rotted mostly to dust at this point.

  “You know it,” I told him. “Catch!”

  Then I threw the extinguisher at him.

  To his credit, he tried to catch it, but it slammed lengthwise into his sunken chest and knocked him backward and into another deader, who actually uttered a yelp of dismay. Then they both went down again. One of their heads—I couldn’t tell which—snapped off and went clattering down the corridor, bouncing off the ruined walls like a grotesque soccer ball.

  That left just three. But three were deadly enough.

  I pulled out my pocketknife.

  About six inches long and made of weird golden metal, this wasn’t the kind of gadget you can pick up at an Army Surplus. It was given to me by Amy—Future Amy, I mean—under conditions that, at the time, were hardcore mysterious. Now that I was actually here, in the “tomorrow” from which the pocketknife had presumably come, maybe I’d finally learn its origins.

  Of course, first I needed to survive the next few minutes.

  The pocketknife had eight buttons. I hit numbers 3 and 2 together. This caused the five inch blade to pop out of one end, and the Taser—yeah, a Taser—to pop out the other.

  As the first deader lunged for me, I ducked under his grasping arms and tagged him in the small of his back with a hundred and fifty thousand volts. Then, as he stiffened and toppled forward, I rammed the blade deep into the sweet spot at the base of his skull.

  Down.

  Another, a female this time, lunged for Emily, seizing her by the wrist. My sister cried out in alarm and tried to pull away, but the Corpse held her fast, grinning savagely with her gray, lipless mouth.

  Terror flashed across Emily’s face.

  I stepped up and kicked the side of the deader’s knee, using the edge of my foot to shatter the Corpse’s patella, or kneecap. Dead Lady felt no pain, of course, but her knee buckled and she toppled sideways.

  Up until now, you’ve all probably been thinking that I’m some kind of super soldier. I mean, there were a dozen of them and one of me, and I’d managed to whittle their numbers way down in only the first minute of combat, right?

  Well, the truth is that a lot of what I pull off in combat situations—seriously, a lot of it—is luck. I got lucky that these were Type Fours and not something fresher and harder to fight. I got lucky that the fire extinguisher had been where it was. I got lucky that it was the right kind of extinguisher and that it even worked. And I got lucky with how many of the Corpses I’d managed to incapacitate before the rest regrouped.

  But now my luck had run out.

  I’d been hoping that Dead Lady would release Emily’s arm as she fell. She didn’t. Instead, she managed to hook her free hand into my hair and drag us both to the floor. I landed first, with the Corpse atop me and Emily atop the Corpse.

  Not good.

  Emily kept screaming and beating at the dead hand that still gripped her wrist. Meanwhile, Dead Lady’s attention had now fixed on me, her milky eyes bright with predatory hunger. This close to her face, I could see maggots still nibbling at the flesh below her skin. Her fingers remained tangled in my hair, twisting and pulling until pain and tears half blinded me.

  Worse, the last Corpse standing was now reaching down for me with gray, gnarled hands.

  My own hand, the one with the pocketknife in it, had gotten pinned beneath me. Desperately, I fought to pull it free.

  Meanwhile
dead fingers grabbed at my other arm. A dead mouth moved down toward me, rotted teeth snapping open and closed.

  I got my hand out and, ignoring the final Corpse’s attack, rammed the point of my knife deep into Dead Lady’s left eye.

  She hissed, her mouth opening, revealing rows of loose, yellowed teeth. The smell of her hit me like a wall, nearly gagging me. Nevertheless, I shoved the blade in deeper, putting as much force behind it as I could muster. Her body bucked and writhed atop me, but I kept pressing, until the point of my blade found her stolen, decomposing brain.

  She stopped moving.

  I blew out a sigh.

  That’s when the last one bit me.

  He dropped to his knees beside me, clamping surprisingly strong hands onto my arm. Then he sunk his blackened teeth into the meat of my shoulder, chomping right through my shirt.

  The agony was electric!

  I screamed and struggled, but I was still pinned beneath Emily and the deader I’d just lobotomized. Pain lanced down my arm, so crippling that I lost my grip on my pocketknife. All but helpless, I twisted and squirmed, trying to worm out from under the pile of bodies. For a second, no more, I managed to shove the Corpse back, shaking his hand off of me. But he was still too close—way too close—his milky eyes bright with sadistic glee. Any second now, he’d latch onto me again. And this time he’d rip out a whole chuck of flesh and then go at it again, and again, and again.

  The horror of the moment hammered down on me, sapping my strength.

  The deader’s mouth opened wide.

  He exploded.

  One second, Dead Bitey Guy was kneeling beside me, and the next he was a pile of dust settling to the ground. I slumped immediately, my shoulder feeling as if it had caught fire.

  Finally, Emily managed to find her feet. Once she did, I was able to kick myself out from under Dead Lady and turn toward the spot where her bitey friend had been kneeling.

  He wasn’t there anymore.

  The Corpse’s stolen body had been utterly vaporized, though I had no idea how. All that remained was the Malum, the alien invader, who had occupied it. It took the form of a shimmering man-sized cloud of red energy, without mass or substance, now fatally exposed to Earth’s unfriendly environment. It stared at me with eyes that weren’t eyes, its gaze filled with hatred and terror as it searched for a fresh host in which to hide. But the fallen deaders around us were all occupied by his trapped comrades.