The Undertakers: End of the World Read online

  He had nowhere to go.

  Seconds later, he was gone—vanished, popped out of existence.

  Forever dead.

  And behind where he’d been stood a man. A living man.

  He looked a little older than Amy and Emily. Maybe in his early forties, with thinning dark hair and thick glasses that were broken at the bridge, the two halves held together with electrical tape. He wasn’t particularly tall, and his shoulders were thin.

  In his hand, he held what looked like an old-fashioned fountain pen.

  “Here’s my pocketknife,” he said, offering up a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  “Oh God,” Emily said, her voice half-choked with terrified sobs. “Thank you, Steve.”

  Steve?

  Steve Moscova?

  Chapter 4

  Tomorrow’s City

  I gaped at the dude in front of me. He looked like the Steve I knew. I don’t mean in the way that Future Amy reminded me of her younger self or the way Emily looked a bit like our mom. I mean he looked exactly like him, only older. More than three times older. His skin was a little looser, and there were these tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. But the eyes themselves were the same, dark and intelligent and more than a little bit nerdy, hidden as they were behind broken glasses that looked a lot like the broken glasses he used to wear.

  Heck, he even seemed to be the same height!

  “It’s called a Maankh,” Future Steve said, helping me to my feet and proudly displaying his Corpse-killing fountain pen. “I took the name from the Egyptian god of sight. He was best known for—“

  Yep. Exactly like him.

  “Later,” I interrupted, probably more harshly than I should have, given that he’d just saved my life. But right now, it seemed more important to make sure my life stayed saved. And his, too. And Amy’s and Emily’s.

  Because, you see, I’d realized something.

  These people couldn’t fight worth a crap.

  “Where’s Amy?” I asked him.

  “Amy?” he said, blinking in that vaguely detached way he’d always had. “I … thought she was with you.”

  I looked at Emily. My big little sister’s eyes kept moving from me to the pile of deaders and back again. “I grew up hearing the stories,” she said, incredulous. “But I never really believed you were that good! Not at your age!”

  “I’m not,” I told her. “Listen up, both of you. This is a pincer movement. The Corpses will be hitting the hospital from every possible entrance, hoping to trap us with sheer numbers. We need to get out through this exit!”

  The two grown-ups swapped uncertain looks.

  Steve said, “But … won’t there be Corpses coming in that way, too?“

  “There were,” I replied impatiently. “These are them!”

  “We have to find Amy, first!” my sister exclaimed.

  As if on cue, her radio chirped and a voice said, “Em … you there?”

  Emily snatched it up and hit the mike button. “I’m here. Ames, where are you?”

  “I got out through the basement. They almost spotted me, but I think I’m clear. I couldn’t get to Steve, though!”

  “Steve’s here with us,” my sister said, relief in her voice. “Can you meet us at the boat?”

  “I’m almost there. But hurry! There’s a ton of them pouring into that place!”

  “We’re on our way.” She clicked off and announced, “Let’s go.”

  “What happened to the jamming?” I wondered aloud.

  The adults ignored me.

  Emily took point with Steve right behind her, heading down the hallway toward the swinging double doors. I spared a moment to pry my pocketknife out of Corpse Lady’s eye socket, and then I followed.

  I seriously hoped I was right about the deaders’ attack scheme.

  When we reached the doors, I motioned for the others to stop. Against Emily’s protests, I slipped past her and peeked carefully through one of the small round windows set into each door at eye level. The corridor beyond looked empty.

  I listened.

  Nothing.

  It struck me as strange and a bit eerie for a hospital—usually a pretty noisy place—to be this silent.

  “Clear,” I said.

  We pushed through into another, wider corridor, this one leading all the way down to an abandoned emergency room waiting area. Beyond it were windows, though I could tell from here that they were all broken. Evidently, it was dark out. In fact, it looked pitch dark. No city lights filtered in from street lamps, passing cars, or other buildings.

  It was just—black out there.

  “What floor are we on?” I asked Emily. I happened to know that Children’s Hospital had twelve floors.

  “First,” she said, as if that should have been obvious.

  First? Then where the street lights outside?

  The emergency room looked like a tornado had hit it. Blocky visitor’s chairs had been overturned, their vinyl upholstery long since shredded or rotted away. A big central oaken nurse’s station had been dismantled, maybe for its wood. Every one of the mounted televisions had been torn down and kicked in. Papers and trash peppered a hardwood floor that had once been clean and polished, but was now scraped and scratched, some of the individual boards ripped up and gone.

  And there were stains, big ones, that could only be dried blood.

  “What happened here?” I asked.

  It was Steve who replied, his tone matter-of-fact in a way that set my nerves on edge. “The same thing that happened everywhere.”

  Emily led us away from the main entrance that opened onto Civic Center Boulevard. Instead, the three of us slipped through a heavy, rusted fire door that spilled into a shadowed alley. As Steve eased the door shut behind us, I noticed that he’d put his Maankh away.

  “Should probably keep that thing handy,” I told him. “In case we run into more deaders.”

  He shook his head. “It’s empty. One shot each.”

  “Do you have another?” I asked.

  Again, he shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “That was a prototype. But now that I know it works, I can make more … a good deal more.”

  I blinked. “You mean … you’d never used that gadget before tonight?”

  “No.”

  “So, you just decided to bring along the only one you had?”

  “Yes,” he replied, looking a bit put out, as if I’d made him repeat himself.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” I told him.

  He grinned. “Thank you!”

  I rolled my eyes and turned away. Too much, too fast. I had to keep reminding myself that I was in the future—the actual, honest-to-God future—and that these strangers were, in fact, friends. Undertakers. One of them was my freaking sister!

  But where was Steve’s brother, Burt? Or Tom and Sharyn. Or my mom?

  Or Helene?

  Jeez! What’ll it be like to see Helene doing the ‘adult’ thing?

  Emily said, her voice a careful whisper, “I’ll scout out the mouth of the alley. You two hang back. I’ll signal if it’s clear. If I’m spotted … I guess I’ll try to lead them away.”

  “Better let me,” I told her, keeping my voice low.

  She shook her head. “You’ve already taken enough risks. We can’t lose you. There’s too much at stake.”

  I had no idea what that meant. But before I could press the point, my sister headed off, moving lightly down the alley to its dimly visible street exit. Once there, she peered around the corner.

  I waited, my heart in my throat.

  Finally, she waved for us to join her.

  We emerged onto 34th Street, which runs past the hospital before connecting with Civic Center Boulevard. For the moment, at least, there wasn’t a deader in sight. In fact, there wasn’t anyone at all. The night around us felt cool and welcoming. I’d always liked the night; it
had shadows and shadows concealed.

  But this unnatural silence unnerved me.

  No traffic. None. We were in Philadelphia, the fifth largest city in the country. Two million people lived here. There were cars, buses, trains, pedestrians—noise. Always, everywhere, noise.

  But not here. Not now.

  Feeling a coldness that had nothing to do with the weather, I took my first hard look at the surrounding buildings. We were in the middle of University City, where no less than three major colleges and two world-class hospitals wrestled for real estate on the western bank of the Schuylkill River. Construction around here was commonplace; they were always putting up some new skyscraper or other. As a result, the buildings all tended to look sleek and modern and new.

  But these were ruins.

  Children’s Hospital, which should have been towering behind us—wasn’t. I’d wondered why the Undertakers had set up their “temporal clean room” on the first floor of such a big building. Now I knew.

  The upper floors were gone. Oh, a little bit of second floor seemed to be there, along with a few scraps of the third. But the rest was simply missing. And University of Pennsylvania Hospital, just across the street, had fared no better. Two entire walls had collapsed, revealing what had once been patient rooms, now long since abandoned. The surrounding roads and sidewalks stood deserted and barren, their tarmac cracked and littered with debris. Every streetlamp was shattered, many of them having toppled over like felled trees. The few cars were nothing but burned out wrecks, and virtually all the glass in every window in sight was either shattered or missing altogether.

  “What …” I stammered, feeling my blood turn cold. “What … happened?”

  Neither of them replied. They both seemed—lost. I hoped it was just for words.

  To the east, past the ruins, I could see the drop-off to the Schuylkill River and, across from there, Center City Philadelphia. It was a site I knew as well as I knew the back of my hand. Yet, despite Emily’s protests, I found myself wandering out into the middle of the deserted street. There I stood, staring in open mouthed horror at the familiar skyline—

  —that wasn’t there.

  Well, some of it was. I could see City Hall well enough, though the huge gothic structure, still topped by its famous William Penn statue, was illuminated only by moonlight, all its windows dark. Around it, however, the more modern skyscrapers were gone. The glass and steel Comcast Building, the tallest in Philly, had been completely demolished. Nothing remained at all. Beside it, Liberty One, with its pointed spire, had apparently collapsed against its sister building, Liberty Two. Both had since fallen into total ruin, now little more than a single, gigantic, co-mingled superstructure, kind of like a skeletal Godzilla.

  Even the nearby South Street Bridge, which connected University City to downtown Philly, was missing. It now continued barely halfway across the river before ending at a jagged, uneven knot of abandoned cars and broken concrete.

  I looked back at the others. They stood on the curb, watching me.

  “What happened?” I demanded.

  “You need to be quiet,” my sister begged.

  But there was no a chance of that, not right now. “Tell me what happened!”

  “The Corpses happened,” Steve said.

  “But we beat them!” I exclaimed.

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Dave died to beat them!”

  “Yes,” Emily said.

  “We won the war!”

  She came up and took my hand. Her fingers felt cold, bloodless. “Yes, big brother. You did win the war. But—”

  I looked into her face. My sister’s face. Our mother’s face. It struck me that she was beautiful. Little Em had grown up beautiful. “But … what?” I asked.

  “They came back,” she said, and the misery on that beautiful face was like the toll of a funeral bell. “Two years ago, the Corpses came back.”

  Chapter 5

  The Second War

  We found Amy.

  Steve, Emily and I had been making our way along 34th Street, moving from shadow to shadow, trying to reach the edge of the river. That, Emily explained, was the pre-arranged rendezvous point, if things at CHOP ever went south and their team got separated.

  Well, tonight, things had gone very south.

  And the dead were everywhere.

  Dozens of them prowled the streets, moving in and out amidst the ruins of University City, searching every alley and abandoned building. Emily and Steve, I noted to my great relief, proved better at evading them than fighting them. They both knew when to move and when not to move, when to melt into the current well of shadows and when to advance to the next.

  They didn’t say anything and I didn’t ask any questions, but simply followed along, ready to shout an alarm if we were spotted.

  We weren’t.

  At least not until Steve noticed Amy. The blond woman was gesturing cautiously to us from the top of a deserted on-ramp to the Schuylkill Expressway, which ran alongside the river. She’d picked her moment perfectly, waiting until any nearby Corpses had moved off.

  As the three of us hurried over, Emily gave the other woman a hasty hug. “We thought maybe we’d lost you!”

  “You almost did,” Amy replied. She looked frightened, but she was grinning. “But here I am, and I’ve got the boat ready.”

  “Good,” Steve said. “Let’s go.”

  The boat turned out to be an old fiberglass canoe, about twelve feet long and with bench seats for six. As we pushed off from the riverbank, Amy paddled at the front while Emily took the rear. Steve and I sat in the middle. Above us, Corpse flashlights cut the night all along the broken South Street Bridge and surrounding neighborhood.

  It may seem strange to imagine legions of the dead conducting a careful, deliberate search using flashlights. But it’s important to understand that these weren’t “zombies,” the slow, stupid creations of George Romero fame. These were Corpses, alien invaders occupying stolen cadavers. And they were fast, smart, and organized.

  We stayed quiet as the women paddled, taking us upstream. Fortunately the canoe had been painted black and, with the moon having disappeared behind a thick bank of clouds, we were all but invisible in this strange and lightless city.

  As we made our way north along the Schuylkill River, my mind reeled.

  A few hours ago—thirty years ago—my best friend had ended the deader invasion. He’d pulled the plug on one of the only two Malum Anchor Shards on our planet. This one had been used by Lilith Cavanaugh, the Queen of the Dead, to bring her people across the Void between the Malum homeworld and Earth. When Dave “the Burgermeister” Burger had yanked the alien crystal from the car batteries powering it, he’d closed the Rift and caused the death of every single Corpse on the planet, including Cavanaugh.

  And, in the process, he’d sacrificed his life.

  Except now it turned out that all he’d really done was buy us—what?

  Twenty-eight years?

  I desperately wanted to say something, to protest, to scream against the injustice of it. But any screaming would have to wait until I, and my new/old friends, were someplace safe.

  Or, at least safer.

  When we reached 30th and Market, Amy and Emily immediately guided our canoe off the river proper and into a man-made tunnel of some kind. As they did, Steve produced a small, battery-powered lantern and switched it on. It didn’t give off much illumination—just enough to let Amy and Emily navigate the narrow, flooded passage before turning us into a much wider one. All around, dark water lapped at the sides of the canoe.

  “What is this?” I asked in a whisper, mindful of the way my voice echoed off the high ceiling.

  Steve replied, “It was part of a failed defensive initiative. Early in the second war, a number of cities, Philly among them, partially flooded key subway lines with saltwater in the hopes of slowing the invasion. People would then be able to evacuate to train
platforms during an attack.”

  “But the river’s fresh water, isn’t it?” I asked.

  He nodded. “The water was artificially salinated at the tunnel entrance we just passed through. The system worked for a time, but then the Corpses managed to destroy the machines that put the salt in the water and, by then, there were no resources to repair them. Now we use the flooded tunnels to move about the city unseen. I don’t think the Corpses even remember the waterways are down here anymore.”

  I took all this in, then asked, “When exactly did the invasion happen?”

  “Halloween,” he replied. “Two years ago. Took us completely by surprise.”

  “It hasn’t been at all like the first time,” Amy said as she paddled, her movements steady and rhythmic from long practice. “They haven’t tried to ‘infiltrate’ or ‘destroy from within.’ This invasion isn’t about making that world-ending ‘art’ of theirs.”

  “Then what is it about?” I asked.

  “Revenge,” Steve replied.

  From behind me, my sister added, “They’re pissed. Humanity beat them and no race had ever done that before. We even killed their sovereign. They no longer care about subtlety or patience. They just want to wipe us out.”

  “And they’ve all but managed it,” Steve said. “We never really stood a chance. On the ‘Last Halloween,’ as it’s called, the dead rose. All of them. Everywhere. Bodies fairly exploded out of their graves, out of morgue drawers, funeral parlors … millions of them.”

  “Maybe billions,” corrected Amy.

  Steve continued, “They attacked everyone and anyone, killing them and then leaving their bodies to be suddenly possessed by more Malum. Rifts started opening all over the planet. The whole thing spread like wildfire. This time, no one had any illusions about what was happening. There were no Masks. No fake names. These were simply the dead, coming to life and attacking the living.”