The Undertakers: End of the World Page 7

  I stared at him, unable to make words come out of my mouth.

  William turned away. “So, I can’t help thinking that it would be better … kinder … to let my wife sleep. Let her sleep through the end of the world.”

  Without thinking, I slammed my hand down on the railing hard enough to hurt. “Why did you even bring me here?” I demanded. “Amy told me you needed my help. That’s the only reason I came! Is showing me all of this supposed to be some kind of warning? Have I become so twisted that I think it’s better to know in advance that I’ll grow up and lose everything when the world comes to an end?”

  “Will—” he began.

  But I cut him off. “I don’t know who you are, but you’re not me! If you were, you’d be running to Helene’s rescue! Corpses be damned! You want to go down swinging? Then go down bringing the fight to them!”

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  “You’re right! I don’t understand! I don’t understand you at all!”

  I fell silent then. My face burned and my stomach felt like it had flipped over on its side. I was suddenly tired, maybe more tired than I’d ever been in my life.

  William said, “You’ve got it wrong. We didn’t bring you here to warn you.”

  “Then why?” I demanded. “Enough with the bleak future history lesson! Why am I here?”

  “I’ll show you,” he said.

  Chapter 10

  Shards

  Without another word, William headed for the elevator.

  Angry and so frustrated that I felt like kicking his ass—my own ass—I followed.

  As we rode down past the eighteenth floor, I spotted Amy. She was moving purposefully along the Undertakers dormitory floor. As the elevator rumbled by, I noticed that she wore a stethoscope around her neck.

  I wondered if she’d heard Corpse Helene’s threat about tonight.

  “She became a doctor, you know,” Maxi Me remarked as we continued downward. “Amy, I mean. She did it to honor Ian’s memory. So many years ago.”

  I didn’t reply. To be honest, I couldn’t reply. Ian’s death was still pretty fresh for me, though not as fresh as the Burgermeister’s.

  I’d buried too many friends.

  At the thirteenth floor, we stopped and William pushed aside the elevator’s gated door.

  “Welcome to our version of the Brain Factory,” he said, without much enthusiasm. “Though nobody calls it that.”

  It was smaller than the Factory from my time. This wasn’t surprising, since even the biggest floor in City Hall Tower—the ninth—wasn’t very big. But it seemed roomy enough for Future Steve, who was busily working at a long table topped with a collection of weird “sciencey” stuff. Emily was with him.

  Around them, running along the octagonal walls, were metal shelves that reached from floor to ceiling. Most were filled with gadgets, all of them carefully labeled Project This or Project That. Some looked to be prototype weapons of one kind or another. Others were more mysterious—though, on one shelf, I spotted a set of the magnetic boxes that Emily had used on the manhole cover in the courtyard.

  How many of these gizmos did my kid sister dream up?

  It was surreal.

  As we approached, I saw that Emily was loading Maankhs into a cardboard box. Four other boxes had already been filled.

  “What’s the count?” Maxi Me asked her.

  “Exactly forty,” my sister replied. “Then we ran out of slivers.” She looked up at him, her expression worn. Suddenly, to my eyes, she looked even older. “Not enough.”

  “You heard?” the chief asked.

  She nodded. “Through the external microphones. But we didn’t feed it through the rest of Haven.”

  “Good,” William told her. “No point panicking everyone. We’re not beaten yet.”

  That struck me as odd since, from what he’d said up on the Observation Deck, “beaten” was exactly what we were.

  Emily threw a glance my way. “I know it,” she replied.

  “Steve,” William said.

  The guy with the broken glasses looked up from what he was doing. In typical Steve Moscova fashion, he’d barely noticed us until the chief addressed him directly.

  Maxi Me said, “It’s time to tell Will why he’s here.”

  The professor nodded.

  He retrieved a small white box from a nearby shelf and presented it for inspection. I’d seen it before, or one like it. Amy had put it in her satchel right after she and I had come through the Rift.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked me.

  “A time machine,” I replied.

  “Incomplete, but not wholly inaccurate. I call it a Rift Projector. It creates a tear in the fabric of spacetime, allowing people and objects from one time and place to move to another time and place.”

  “It’s how Amy kept pulling me out of my time whenever I got hurt or she wanted to tell me something,” I said.

  “One and the same.” He turned the box over in his hands. “You’ll notice there’s no electrical plug. It doesn’t have batteries, either. Can you guess what powers it?”

  I couldn’t. Then, all of a sudden, I could. “The Anchor Shard?”

  He grinned. “Very good, Will! Yes, the Anchor Shard. The very one, in fact, that we all used back during the First Corpse War to heal the injured, conduct Rift experiments and so forth. Well, not exactly the same, I suppose. You see, just when the first war ended, the Anchor Shard was … damaged.”

  “Damaged? How?”

  The man in the broken glasses pushed their taped bridge a little further up his nose, a nervous gesture that I instantly recognized. “On the last night of the First Corpse War, when the Corpses attacked Haven, I got this idea to fit our Anchor Shard into a harness with a battery and a kill switch. This allowed me to charge it briefly and then release that charge directionally, atomizing anything the energy wave touched. I used it against the invading dead.”

  Tom had told me some of this. In fact, to me, it had all happened only yesterday. During the final battle, Steve had suddenly shown up with his brand new Anchor Shard weapon to successfully defend one of Haven’s—my Haven’s—three entrances, saving Tom and God-only-knew-how-many other Undertakers in the process.

  I smiled. “Kind of the first Maankh.”

  “A bit,” he admitted, though he didn’t return my smile. “Except I never counted on the effect my idea would have on the crystal. The repeated charging and discharging ended up damaging its structure, making it brittle. Toward the end of the battle, the Anchor Shard shattered, right there in its harness … all while I was still shooting deaders.” He shook his head at the memory. “If you and the team at Fort Mifflin hadn’t managed to end things and kill every Corpse on Earth about thirty seconds after that, you and I probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “Oh,” I said. That part I hadn’t known.

  “At first, I was devastated,” the professor went on. “Such scientific potential, lost. Though, at the time, my brother thought it was just as well. He said he was happy to be rid of the thing.”

  His brother.

  I didn’t ask where Burton Moscova, Steve’s athletic younger brother, was; I could guess. But the professor told me anyway. “We lost him nine months ago. He died fighting, being an Angel.”

  “That sucks,” I told him.

  Steve nodded. “Yes, it does.” Then he shrugged and added with an unhappy smile. “I suppose he’s with Chuck now. Even after so many years had passed, Burt never stopped talking about that boy. The two of them were always so tight, as I’m sure you know. The truth is: my brother liked him better than he liked me.”

  Hearing this, Emily wrapped her arms around the man’s thin shoulders. It was a surprisingly tender gesture, and I noticed that he didn’t resist or complain.

  These two are an item.

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  But as far as Burt
and Chuck were concerned, I knew exactly how I felt. “Wrong,” I said.

  Steve looked at me, confused. “Wrong?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I told him. “Those two were friends, sure. But you were his brother, and Burt never once forgot that.”

  The professor didn’t respond, but something in his face seemed to relax a little.

  Maxi Me said, “The point is that the Anchor Shard was broken.”

  “Shattered,” Steve corrected as my sister let him go. “And rather spectacularly. Literally hundreds of slivers, some big and some tiny. I collected them all, every last piece. The largest of them I used to try to recreate some of my earlier experiments. But success was … limited. Eventually, I put them in a lockbox and hid them away for decades. Then, after the Last Halloween, I pulled them out again and restarted my work. As things turned out, the mistake I’d made as a child may have been fortuitous.”

  Fortuitous. Look it up.

  “How?” I asked.

  “I believe I once said that the Anchor Shard was like an electrical capacitor, storing energy. Well, even after all those years in my lockbox, each piece still contained a portion of that energy. One of the larger … Anchor Slivers, we call them … is inside this Rift Projector,” he replied. “Powering it. We’ve used smaller slivers to create other devices, like the Hugos. And the tiniest ones we set aside to turn into Maankhs.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, motioning toward the boxes of pen-sized Corpse-disintegrators.

  Emily added, “If Steve hadn’t had the foresight to keep the slivers, we wouldn’t have lasted even as long as this against the Corpses.”

  “Be that as it may,” the professor said, “the technology isn’t without its drawbacks. Each Maankh, for example, is only good for one burst of destructive energy. After that, the sliver within is spent. Drained. Useless.” He held up the Rift Projector. “The sliver in here is larger … good for perhaps a dozen activations. Then it too is spent. As it happens, this one is already empty. It was used up last night, when Amy brought Will up the timeline.”

  For a second, alarm shot through me. “Are you saying you can’t send me back?”

  It was the chief who answered. “No. There’s another projector.”

  “Indeed, there is!” Steve agreed. He went to the backpack he’d been carrying last night when he, Amy, Emily, and I had escaped from CHOP. Unzipping it, he pulled out another box, exactly like the first. “We’ve needed two,” he said. “Because while Emily and Amy have been working with you, I’ve been working with Sharyn—”

  “Steve,” the chief said. A warning.

  “Oh,” Steve replied, his face reddening. “Right.”

  What are they not telling me?

  Emily cleared her throat and remarked, “But having a working Rift Projector isn’t enough. To do what we need to do requires an unbroken Anchor Shard.”

  “What about the one from Fort Mifflin?” I suggested. “The one Cavanaugh used to bring the Corpses through from their world. Where’s that one?”

  But the professor shook his head. “You wouldn’t know this, but Cavanaugh’s Anchor Shard was critically damaged when Dave pulled its wiring to end the first war. Like ours, its crystalline structure had turned brittle, no doubt from having been subjected to a continual electrical charge for more than three years. The moment the authorities tried to take possession of it, it fell apart at the atomic level.”

  “Turned to dust,” Emily translated.

  I said, “Well, there must be others. All those Rifts that the Malum opened up on Last Halloween. They must have used Anchor Shards. Could we maybe get one of those?”

  “A good idea,” Steve replied. “Except nearly all of those Rifts have been closed for more than a year, the shards powering them deliberately destroyed. After all, with most of humanity gone, the Corpses no longer need them. The only remaining open Rift on Earth is on the other side of the world, somewhere in the Baltic Mountains, we think, unreachable by human hands. And the only reason they keep that one running is so that the Corpses here on Earth can remain alive and, when humankind is finally extinguished, return to their homeworld.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “If the Rift Projector works, what do we even need an unbroken shard for?”

  Professor Moscova said, “Every Anchor Shard is a piece of a much, much larger artifact that the Malum call the Eternity Stone.”

  I’d heard of that, an ancient and powerful crystal that the Malum stumbled across thousands of years ago. By harnessing its power, they could search the universe, looking for intelligent life. And, when they found it, they would chip off a piece of the Eternity Stone—an Anchor Shard—and use it to open a Rift between their world and that new one, all so they could invade and destroy it.

  This had been their culture, their national pastime, twisted as it was, for who-knew-how-many centuries.

  “So I’ve heard,” I replied

  “But what you may not have heard,” he told me, “is that, with an Anchor Shard, it would be possible to cross from our world to theirs, simply by stepping through a Rift. But the slivers we have, while good enough for opening doorways in time here on Earth, are too small to create a portal between dimensions … at least one that’s big enough and stable enough to allow someone to travel through it. That’s why we need an intact Anchor Shard.”

  Cross over to the Malum homeworld? That sounded completely insane! Why would anyone want to do such a thing?

  Not that it mattered. After all, the Corpses couldn’t live on Earth without human cadavers to inhabit. So how could humans possibly go there?

  “But there aren’t any Anchor Shards!” I said. “At least none that we can get to.”

  “There’s one,” corrected Maxi Me. “Right here in Philly.”

  Emily nodded. “The head Corpse, the one who … looks like Helene. She keeps it, as a souvenir I guess, a symbol of her victory over mankind.”

  At the mention of Helene’s name, I glanced at William. But his face was stone.

  “Do you know where it is?” I asked our sister.

  They all exchanged another of their looks. Emily said, “Yes, we know where it is.”

  “Where?” I pressed.

  “It’s on a chain,” Maxi Me replied, “around that monster’s neck.”

  Figures …

  I stared at them all. “Okay … so what’s the plan? March down to Independence Hall, wade into that army of dead killers, and ask their leader to just hand it over?”

  William smiled thinly. “Something like that.”

  “Well, then,” I said with a resigned sigh. “When do we leave?”

  “Given the Corpses’ deadline, as soon as possible,” he replied. “But not before it gets dark. The odds are long as it is without risking a raid in broad daylight. And there’s no ‘we.’ Not in this case.” He turned to me. “You’re staying here.”

  “What? Why?”

  Emily said, “You’re too valuable to risk.”

  “Okay, enough!” I snapped. “Everybody’s been talking around it for too long. Why did you bring me here? William’s already told me it isn’t to warn me.”

  For a few long seconds, none of them responded. Finally, my big little sister said, “The chief’s right, big brother. We didn’t bring you here to warn you. We brought you here to do what you do best … what you’ve always done. We brought you here to save the world.”

  Chapter 11

  Time Stream

  “The idea started with Tom,” Maxi Me explained. “Remember Emily mentioning that letter he left here right before he died. Well, in it, he spelled out a loose blueprint for what he thought we needed to do, now that the Corpses had proven themselves to be unbeatable.”

  “Blueprint?” I asked.

  “A series of steps,” Emily elaborated. “The first was to turn City Hall Tower into the new Haven, to brick up all the windows and close off all access from the rest of the building. He said it had
the potential to become the most defensible place in Philly, and he was right.”

  He usually is, I thought.

  Was.

  “By then,” William said, “the city was overrun with Corpses and the building had been deserted for months. So we slipped in quietly, just a handful of us, and went to work, smuggling materials in through the flooded subway tunnels.”

  I asked, incredulous, “How did the deaders not find you?”

  “They weren’t looking for us in particular. They were just hunting … well … everyone. We kept our heads down and worked as quietly as we could, mostly at night. It took less than three weeks to turn City Hall Tower into a castle keep. By the time they wised up to who we were and what we were doing, we’d already hunkered down inside here.”

  “That was fourteen months ago,” Emily added. “And the rest of city had already fallen. Millions were dying all around us. It was horrible! For a while, all you heard … twenty-four hours a day … was people screaming. We wanted to go out and help them, go out and fight. But we knew we couldn’t win. There were just too many Corpses.”

  Beside her, Professor Moscova nodded. “It was terrible,” he agreed. “But sometimes I think it’s worse now. Now all you hear is nothing, the silence of an empty world.”

  For a minute, the four of us went quiet. And not one of those comfortable, happy kinds of quiet.

  More like funeral quiet.

  William said, “But that wasn’t all that Tom wrote in his letter. He also laid out a plan. This second war, he knew, was already lost. We hadn’t been prepared and the dead had overrun us too completely. So he proposed a radical idea …”