The Undertakers: End of the World Read online

  Emily remarked dryly, “A genuine zombie apocalypse.”

  Steve nodded. “Except, of course, these creatures were intelligent and had a plan. It was a brutally simple plan, but there’s no denying that they executed it well. Innocent men, women, and children died by the millions. Inside of three months, the U.S. government fell. By the six-month mark, there were only pockets of resistance, scattered and uncoordinated. And before the next October 31st rolled around, the deaders had completely conquered the Earth. Then they set about the process of hunting down and wiping out the few remaining survivors.”

  I’d listened to this with mounting horror, struggling to wrap my head around it. I asked, “How many people are left?”

  Once again, the three of them shared an uncertain look. “Better let the chief explain that,” my sister suggested.

  Maybe it was my state of mind—which we should probably label as “half-nuts”—but my eyes lit up at the mention of the Chief of the Undertakers.

  “Tom!” I exclaimed. “Yeah, take me to Tom!”

  The three of them swapped looks. “We could,” Steve said.

  Amy asked, “What about the Corpses?”

  My sister answered, “They’re still looking for us on the other side of the river. It should be safe enough, safer than usual, in fact. Besides, he’s got a right to know. It might make things easier … later.”

  “Know what?” I asked. “What’re you guys talking about?”

  But no one replied.

  The women kept paddling, taking us further along this subterranean river. In the surrounding darkness, barely illuminated by Steve’s lantern, I recognized the walls of what, in my day, had been the Market-Frankfort subway line. In the “tomorrow” world, it was an underground channel of filthy black water, with rusted iron walkways bolted into the walls, just high enough to stay dry. These had probably been installed to allow access for refugees, back when all of this had been meant to do somebody some good.

  The only ones strolling along those catwalks now were rats. Big rats.

  Finally, we reached 15th Street. The old subway platform was still there, though the entrances and exits had gotten bricked up long ago. From the look of things, the Undertakers had converted it into a kind of dock. By the light of additional hanging lanterns, I saw a half-dozen canoes like this one, all tethered to cleats mounted along the platform’s edge.

  Amy and Emily bumped us up against an open spot and tied us off before climbing out of the canoe. Steve and I followed, the narrow, round-bottom boat wobbling below us. How terrible would it be if I fell in? Was the water cold? Given all this ruin and destruction, was it even water anymore, strictly speaking?

  It smelled like death.

  Emily took one of the lanterns from the post and led us along the platform to a maintenance door. Through the door was a narrow concrete hallway, dark and old. “Stay close,” my sister said. “The floor’s uneven in spots.”

  So I stayed close while, all around us, rats squealed and scurried away from the light.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  Then I heard a bizarre howl, utterly alien. The others took it in stride. And so did I, but only because I recognized it.

  A cat.

  “City Hall,” I said, answering my own question.

  Emily nodded grimly, her face pale in the lantern light. “Yeah, they’re still here.”

  I shrugged. “At least some things haven’t changed.”

  Philly’s City Hall had been infested with feral cats for more than a century—closer to a century and a half now, I supposed. During the Corpse’s final attack on Haven, Tom had even made weapons of the little monsters, capturing dozens and then dumping them all on top of invading deaders. The cats were scavengers, and they loved dead flesh.

  From the piping and smell, I guessed all this had to be part of the city’s old sewer system. And, when we stopped, I realized that I’d guessed right; Emily shone her lamplight on an ancient iron ladder leading up to what looked like a good old fashioned man-hole cover.

  “I’ll go first,” she announced. “Once I’m sure it’s clear, I’ll signal for the rest of you to follow.”

  “Sounds good,” Steve said.

  “Watch yourself,” Amy said.

  “What’s up there?” I asked, but no one replied.

  Giving Amy her lantern, Emily climbed the ladder. The rungs creaked, but held.

  At the top, she hunkered down and, for a second, I thought she meant to try to shoulder off the manhole cover with brute strength. But that was crazy! I knew from personal experience how heavy those things were.

  Instead, she pulled two little gadgets off of her belt, palm-sized black boxes with no markings on them.

  Holding one in each hand, my sister placed them against the underside of the cover and, pressing a button on each, lifted the circle of heavy iron as if it weighed next to nothing.

  “Whoa,” I muttered.

  “Magnetism,” Future Steve explained. “The devices, when used together, create a repulsive magnetic field that can lift any iron-based object up to five hundred pounds.”

  “Nice,” I said. “You’re still a pretty amazing inventor, Mr. Moscova.”

  “It’s Professor Moscova these days,” he replied. “And those particular devices aren’t mine. They’re Emily’s.”

  I gaped at him and then up the ladder at my big little sister, who had moved the manhole cover aside and was peering out at the nighttime city beyond it. Then, ducking her head back in, she announced in a whisper, “It’s clear.”

  Amy gave a nod to Steve. “You,” she said. “Then Will. Then me.”

  “Okay,” the professor replied.

  It took me a few seconds to figure out where I was when I finally emerged into open air. That might sound weird, since I’d been in this very spot about a hundred times. But the years had changed it—a lot.

  The four of us stood in City Hall’s courtyard. The space was a hundred or so feet wide, with entrances at every compass point. Except now those entrances were all sealed, bricked up so tight that I couldn’t even glimpse the streets beyond them.

  And, occupying the exact center of the courtyard, was a statue.

  I stared at it, uncomprehending. Then I looked to Emily for help, but she only turned away, tears in her eyes.

  I stepped closer and peered up into the face of the person whose bronze image stood atop a marble pillar. The statue was life-size, more than six feet tall. It portrayed a broad-shouldered man in a suit and tie. His eyes gazed eastward, a heartbreakingly familiar look of calm determination on his face.

  Mounted into the stone pillar was a plaque. It read:

  THOMAS JEFFERSON

  U.S. SENATOR AND STATESMAN

  Oh my God, I thought.

  No.

  Chapter 6

  Chief

  Back into the sewers again, though not back into the canoe.

  Instead, we returned to the 15th Street subway platform, where the Undertakers led me to a niche set into one wall that was so dark as to be barely there at all. In it stood a service door that clearly hadn’t been opened in years.

  My sister stepped up to it and, ignoring the knob, ran two fingers along the outer edge of the door frame. I heard a faint click. The door remained closed, as solid looking as ever, but the entire door frame, including bits of camouflaged masonry around it, swung outward.

  “Cool,” I said, maybe a little unenthusiastically; I was still shaken by what I’d seen in the courtyard. Even so, the illusion was impressive. It reminded me of the fake brickwork that had hidden the entrance to the original Haven, back when I’d first joined the Undertakers.

  “The chief’s idea,” Professor Moscova told me.

  “Who is chief?” I asked. “Now that Tom’s … you know.”

  None of them replied.

  Behind the door, we found a small room with nothing at all inside it except a spiral staircase, leadin
g up into darkness.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “The base of the tower,” Amy replied. “We installed the staircase ourselves, after the rest of City Hall was bricked up and closed off. Right now we’re standing in the old sub-basement. Right behind there …” She pointed to a dusty brick wall. “… is the rear wall of the cafeteria in our Haven, the one you and I were in together. It’s all flooded out now.”

  Emily added, “This staircase goes up nine stories. Hope you’re ready for a climb.”

  And a climb it was. I stopped counting steps at around two hundred. Amy went first, then Emily, then me, and then Steve. There were lights along the way, all battery-powered electric lanterns, hanging on hooks mounted into the iron railings that guarded the stairwell. By them, I could see the floor beneath us gradually fall away into blackness. At the same time, the roof overhead—always assuming there was one—stayed buried in shadow.

  It was a weird effect, kind of dizzying.

  So, if only to distract my mind from the climb, I asked my sister, “So, you’re … what? A Brain now?”

  “We don’t use the old crew names,” she replied without breaking stride.

  “But you’re a gadget girl,” I said. “Those magnets you invented rock!”

  “Steve’s taught me a lot. After the first war ended, he went on to become a full professor of applied sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

  “He’s a genius,” she replied.

  “I know,” I told her, though there was something in her tone that surprised me. Something that maybe went a little further than simple “respect.”

  “I call them Hugos,” she remarked suddenly.

  “Huh?”

  “My magnetic field generators. I call them Hugos.”

  “Hugos?”

  “After our step-dad.” Then she abruptly stopped and looked back at me. “Sorry. I forgot … all that happens later for you.”

  My brain tried to process what she’d just told me, but all I got was the mental version of the “blue screen of death.” My mouth tried to make words, failed, and tried again. “Um, Hugo … like in Hugo Ramirez?”

  She nodded.

  “He’s our step-dad?”

  “He was,” she replied. Then, turning away, she started climbing again.

  For a few moments, I just stood there—while Steve waited patiently behind me.

  Hugo Ramirez was an FBI special agent, and one of the few adults we were able to convince about the Corpse War. I knew he and my mom had become—friendly. But step-dad? The very idea made me a little sick to my stomach.

  “Wait a minute!” I exclaimed, running up the metal stairs after her. “Whatdya mean, ‘he was?’”

  “He’s gone,” she replied sadly. “Like so many others. But he was a terrific guy. To be honest, he’s the only dad I really remember. I was a lot younger than you when our father died. He was good to us both, and he was great for mom. They loved each other.”

  More processing.

  Then Emily said, “… and, when the war got bad, he helped us set up this new Haven.”

  “This?” I asked. “This is where Haven is now?”

  She nodded. “For the past fifteen months, we’ve occupied the whole of City Hall Tower.”

  “What about the rest of the building?”

  “Abandoned shortly after Last Halloween,” she replied. “We considered reclaiming all of it, but it’s just too hard to defend. So the chief had us seal off the lower eight floors.”

  The mention of “chief” made me go quiet. It was thirty or forty steps later before I mustered the courage to ask the question that had been drilling into my brain since I’d seen the statue in the courtyard. “What exactly happened to Tom?”

  Now it was Emily’s turn to go quiet. In fact, it was twenty more steps before I got an answer—and that answer came from Steve, who walked behind me. “He died about six months into the Second Corpse War. By then, of course, the Undertakers were history. Literally. They taught about us in schools. Then, after the Last Halloween, when everything went to hell, Tom … he was a U.S. senator by then … returned to Philly and tried to rally us back together. And he managed it, to a point.

  “But by then the city was falling apart. Governments had collapsed everywhere. The police and all the city officials were dead. Tom, Jillian and their three teenage kids were holed up in their Society Hill home. A lot of people tried to do that back then. But the Corpses got in and …” He swallowed. “Tom was the only one who escaped.”

  “Oh jeez …” I muttered.

  Ahead of me, Emily nodded and took up the thread. “There was so much death back in those days. It was everywhere, all the time. Anyway, Tom radioed a few of us … the phones were all fried by then … and asked us to meet him at City Hall. But when we arrived, he wasn’t here. Instead, we found a sealed letter from him at the deserted guard’s station on the ninth floor, right at the base of the tower. But, try as we might, he couldn’t find him.

  “Then … about a week later, we did. It turns out he’d died, along with hundreds of others, during a battle that had broken out on Market Street. There were maybe a dozen deaders around him. Tom had a shotgun. It looked like he’d been shooting Corpses in the head … you know, to destroy the brain and trap them in their hosts. But when he was overwhelmed, he … shot himself.”

  It felt like a hand was squeezing my heart.

  Future Steve added dismally, “He didn’t want the Corpses to … use … his body. So he made sure they couldn’t.”

  Practical to the end. That was Tom.

  But I’d just seen him, only a couple of hours ago, in Haven. My Haven.

  Thirty years.

  How had it all come to this?

  I touched Emily’s shoulder—my sister’s shoulder, though I was only beginning to accept the fact that this woman and the little girl I’d left behind in Haven were one and the same. Steve and Amy were proving a little easier, probably because I hadn’t grown up with them—hadn’t helped change their diapers!

  “Em?” I asked hesitantly.

  “Yes, Will?”

  “What about … Helene?”

  Her heart-shaped face, already rendered pale by the uneven lamplight, turned almost ghostly white. With a long, measured sigh, she said, “The chief’ll want to tell you about that personally.”

  “Is Helene the new chief?” I pressed.

  She didn’t answer.

  “What about Sharyn? At least tell me if she’s still alive.”

  Emily nodded, but there was something behind that nod. Something I didn’t like.

  “And our mom?”

  At that, my sister stopped between steps and took my hand in hers. “Mom and Hugo died together, about a year ago. The Corpses killed them. It was right after we’d all moved into the new Haven. I’m … sorry.”

  So was I, though a part of me weirdly dismissed the idea.

  In fact, I found myself dismissing a lot of what I’d seen and learned since following Amy through the Rift. This future was just too—dark, too utterly different from anything I’d ever imagined. So empty. So bleak. Tom couldn’t be dead. My mother couldn’t be dead. The world couldn’t be dead!

  It couldn’t.

  Finally, we reached a landing at the top of the staircase.

  “That’s a tough climb,” I remarked, breathing hard. The rest of them, I noticed with some annoyance, barely seen winded.

  “We’re used to it,” Amy said.

  Then she went up to a single heavy steel door that looked newer than the surrounding brickwork, and knocked. Instantly, a panel slid aside and a camera lens, like a large dark eye, peered out at her. No one said anything. No passwords were asked for or given. Instead, after a few seconds, the camera lens withdrew and the door clicked.

  Amy pushed it open.

  “Welcome to Haven, Will,” she said without even a
trace of joy or pride.

  Beyond the door was a bare room, roughly octagonal and about forty feet wide. The floor looked to be made mostly of concrete and cracked tile—a lot of cracked tile in the future—surrounded by walls of crumbling plaster intermixed with tall, recessed windows, all of which had long ago been bricked up. A narrow elevator shaft occupied the center of the room.

  Bare bulbs that hung on wires from the high ceiling offered the only light.

  By that light, I saw that there were people here. Dozens of them. Men, women and children in rags, all huddled in small circles. Many were sleeping on old cots or thread-worn blankets. Others ate from cold cans of beans or vegetables, some with bent spoons but most with their fingers. Their eyes were dull with exhaustion and fear. Most of them barely registered us as we stepped in among them.

  “Who are they all?” I asked.

  “Refugees,” Emily replied. “People we’ve rescued from around the city. There aren’t many survivors in Philly. But those we find we bring back here, give them food and a safe place to sleep. It’s all we can really do at this point.”

  “This place,” I said, looking back at the elevator. “It’s … familiar.” Then it dawned on me. “This is the Tower Museum!”

  She nodded.

  “I’m going up to the lab,” Steve said. “I want to initiate Maankh production.”

  Amy added, “And I want to check on my patients in the Infirmary. I’m worried we might have another round of typhoid to deal with.”

  “Okay,” Emily said. “We’ll ride with you. I’m supposed to take Will straight up the chief.”

  I’d ridden the tower elevator before, both as a kid and as an Undertaker. I’d always found the ride slow but interesting, as the old elevator clattered its way up through the empty interior of the huge, cast-iron pinnacle of the tower, past the backside of the four antique clocks that faced each compass point, counting off the minutes and tolling the hour. I wondered vaguely if they still did that.

  Probably not.

  To my surprise, the interior wasn’t empty anymore. Where once the tiny elevator had been an express from the ninth floor museum to the Observation Deck at the top, this one now made several stops along the way.