Part One: The Twins
Next time your parents gripe about rush hour traffic, tell them to try driving an old yellow school bus through a roadblock of animated cadavers in the middle of the night.
Seriously, tell them.
“Left!” I screamed. “Go left!”
“I'm trying!” Dave “the Burgermeister” Burger yelled back as he tugged furiously at the heavy steering wheel.
The bus obeyed, though so sluggishly that he might as well have been trying to steer a humpback whale. All the times I'd been inside one of these big, ugly, yellow giants — with their high square windows, rows of hard plastic seats, and filthy, rubber center aisle mats — I'd never imagined now hard it was for the drivers to, well, drive them.
Some vague, half-conscious corner of my mind wondered if, just maybe, that was why most school bus drivers were so grouchy all the time.
I mean it couldn't be the kids, right?
Of course, none of them had ever tried steering a bus while the living dead charged your right flank, their sheer numbers as deadly and relentless as a rotting tidal wave.
Welcome to my world.
There had to be fifty or more, all grasping, decomposing hands and snapping, yellow teeth. And these weren't the slow, shuffling, empty-headed zombies of George Romero fame. No, these were Corpses — capital “C” — and they were fast on their feet and knew exactly what they meant to do.
They meant to kill us.
And this freakin' bus was too freakin' slow!
From way in the back, I heard Helene Boettcher call out at the top of her voice, “Here they come! Everybody, hold onto something! Now!”
Jammed three deep onto those molded plastic seats I mentioned earlier, ninety-six kids started screaming.
At that moment, despite the Burgermeister's best driving efforts, the tidal wave of animated dead hit us — hard. Our school bus shuddered with the impact, its windows rattling. Dave, his foot heavy on the accelerator, made a final desperate bid for the open parking lot ahead. If we could just get that far, maybe it would give us some breathing room.
Maybe.
Then the bus suddenly tilted to the left. Gasping, I grabbed onto one of the steel poles mounted just behind the driver's chair, and looked back toward the rear.
Helene had fallen against the back of the seats. Around her, the kids where sobbing and hanging on for dear life — as faces appeared in the right-side windows. Dead faces. Some showed rotting skin pulled tight across decaying bones. Others were bloated from trapped gasses, their milky eyes seeming to bulge from their sockets. All sported savage, grinning expressions of pure, predatory hate. Their collective weight pressed against the bus, lifting it off its wheels. A hundred hands clawed at the windows, already breaking through the glass.
There's so many of them! Too many of them!
“I knew this was a bad idea,” Dave muttered.
Then Helene did something I'd never heard her to do before, something that I think scared me even worse than the mob of animated cadavers who were right now overpowering this huge vehicle like jackals bringing down a wildebeest.
She screamed.
“Oh my God! We're going over!”
And I knew, with awful certainty, that we were all going to die here.
***
You know what? I should probably start at the beginning.
My name's Will Ritter. I'm thirteen-years-old, and I'm an Undertaker. The Undertakers are a resistance group, of sorts — kind of an underground army. Not big and not all that well equipped. But we do okay for ourselves. And what are we resisting?
Corpses.
We don't really know where they come from. They seem to be bodiless invaders, who get to Earth somehow and then, realizing they have no bodies of their own, possess human cadavers. These they wear like suits of clothing until the stolen bodies literally rot out around them. Then they discard the husks and find new “donors”.
Corpses are smart. They've got this way of hiding what they look like, so that all anyone sees are normal, upstanding, living men and women. This illusion of normalcy stays with them, carrying over into photographs, fingerprints, and even T.V. appearances. Nobody can penetrate these Masks, as we call them. Nobody can see the rotting, bug-filled dead things that hide behind them.
Nobody, that is, but Seers.
A Seer is a kid who develops, for reasons we don't really get, the ability to penetrate the Corpses' illusion. And an Undertaker is, simply put, a Seer who the Corpses failed to hunt down and kill. We live our lives on the run, forever stalked by monsters that are slowly infiltrating the schools, the police, even city government. We can't go home, since the Corpses would find us there and murder us — and maybe murder our families, too.
So we hang together, hide, and fight back. At least, we try to.
Tonight my friends and I had been doing just that. Helene, the Burgermeister and me had been on a late night mission on Callowhill Street here in Philadelphia, maybe half-a-mile from Haven, the Undertakers' secret HQ. Midnight missions are common things; Undertakers do most of their work at night, while the “blind” city sleeps. It's just the nature of the war we fight.
I won't bore you with the details of what we were up to on this particular night — a cold one in mid-March — especially since what happened before we got to 12th Street and Callowhill was nothing compared to what happened after.
What was happening now.
“Whoa!” the Burgermeister yelled as two kids exploded out of an alley to our right and slammed straight into him. At first, they stared up at Dave's enormous frame — Dave Burger is the biggest kid I've ever met — then they screamed and tried to cut around him. But he closed one meaty fist around each of their coats and yanked them back. “Slow down,” he snapped.
They struggled like hooked fish.
Helene and I swapped looks. “Hold up,” I said to the nearest kid. They were both boys. Both blonde. Both maybe eleven years old and, I realized with some surprise, identical twins. “What're you running from?”
“Lemme go!” one of them screamed. “They're coming!”
“Who's 'they'?” Helene pressed, though from the way she now held her water pistol, I figured she knew.
Heck, we all knew.
“Dead people!” the other boy cried.
“Figures,” Dave muttered.
I heard footsteps in the alley, though whoever — or whatever — made them was still bathed in darkness. Oddly, they didn't seem to be running, or even walking all that fast.
Then, behind the footsteps, I caught words. But not English words. Not even human words. We call it Deadspeak, a non-verbal way that Corpses have of talking to each other. Steve, the Undertakers' science expert, says it's a kind of limited telepathy that most humans can't hear. Only Seers.
Lucky us.
“Must. Find. Children.”
The other “voice” replied, “This. Way. Down. Alley. Close. Find. Capture.”
“Number 14,” I said.
The Burgermeister immediately released the kids as he and Helene took positions on either side of the mouth of the alley. I'd hoped the boys would stay close. Having them there would help bait the trap. But they took off the instant their sneakers hit the pavement. I watched them tear across Callowhill Street, the traffic at this hour practically non-existent, and wondered if their panic had a destination. Panic usually didn't.
Then I rooted myself on the sidewalk and tried to look scared. It wasn't hard.
How many walking dead men had I seen? Hundreds? Thousands?
You never get used to it.
Two female Corpses, both dressed in nurse's garb melted out of the gloom that filled the alley like smoke. They were both maybe a week to ten days dead, pretty fresh, their skin blotched purple from the unpumped blood pooling in the tissues beneath. Their eyes were wide and seemingly sightless — though I knew better — and their stringy hair had been tied back to fit under a white nurse's cap.
Strangely, both wore weird pendants around their necks — little black boxes with green blinking lights on them.
As they came forward, I noticed that their arms were extended outward, almost touching as they moved side by side, while their opposite fingertips just grazed the walls of alley. Clearly they didn't want anybody slipping past them.
And their grins were matching death masks, all yellow teeth and rotting, receding black lips. They spoke again — English this time — and I was hammered by a chilling realization: these two things were enjoying themselves.
Enjoying the hunt.
“Little boys,” they chanted together in hideous harmony. “Little boys ... where've you gone? Come out. Come out. Wherever you are. We just want to play ...”
Jeez, I thought.
Then they spotted me. I was older than their twin prey and apparently alone on the sidewalk of a deserted street. And I looked scared. Their dead eyes narrowed. They stopped, still a dozen feet from the mouth of the alley.
Too far.
“What's this?” one asked, her grin widening. “Another lonely child?”
But her companion's scary smile vanished and she asked, “What do you see, little boy?”
Undertakers get that question a lot. Corpses don't kill for no reason; they're too smart for that. The twins we'd run into had been Seers, which immediately marked them for death. But I was an unknown quantity. If I played it cool, pretended I didn't have my Eyes, they'd probably question me, make up some stupid story about lost children, and then leave me alone and continue their hunt. But if I went the other way, especially if I let on that I was an Undertaker, they'd pounce like hungry lions.
The smart thing was to play it cool.
So, me being me, I mustered up a smile and said, “Hey there, wormbags! Out for a stroll?”
The one on the left snarled. The one on the right hissed. Yeah, sometimes they snarl and hiss. Then they both came at me, fast, the feet inside their sensible shoes hammering the pavement. I waited until the pair were two steps from the mouth of the alley.
“Now!” I cried.
Helene stepped up and fired her water pistol point-blank into the Dead Nurse One's ear. The small plastic gun was loaded with saltwater, which immediately hosed the Corpse's control over her stolen body. She stiffened, turned, and marched straight into the lamppost a few feet to my right.
The Burgermeister had a somewhat different style. He came up on Dead Nurse Two and clamped one hand under her chin and the other around the back of her head. Then he pushed and pulled at the same time, delivering a savage twist that snapped the Corpse's neck. It sounded like popping bubble wrap. She dropped soundlessly into a heap on the sidewalk.
“Surprise,” I heard him mutter.
I turned to the other one, who had backed away from the lamppost, only to walk straight into it again, repeating this pattern over and over like one of those wind-up robots. Reaching inside my coat I pulled out a syringe, a long one. We call these “Ritters” — please don't ask why — and they're filled with the same kind of saltwater as our water pistols. Except the pistol's effects only last a minute or so.
Ritters are a bit more permanent.
I stepped up and jabbed the needle deep between the convulsing Corpse's shoulder blades, slamming the plunger home with my thumb.
“Get back!” I told the others.
We ducked and covered.
Dead Nurse One exploded.
Like I said, she was pretty fresh — what we call a Type Two on the Undertaker's one-to-five “Rate Their Rot” system. So when she popped, she popped wet. Her stolen body had been embalmed, so there wasn't much blood. But there was plenty of other stuff, and it splashed the walls of the surrounding buildings and soaked the lamppost she'd been beating herself against. Pieces of tissue, and other stuff I didn't want to guess at, slapped the pavement all around me. One such piece landed in the small of my back — sticky and cold — causing me to yelp and throw it off.
Then, feeling a little foolish, I made sure I was the first on my feet. “We're clear.”
“Nice job, Will,” Dave told me.
“You too. Both of you. Sharyn'd be proud.” Sharyn is Sharyn Jefferson, one of best fighters I'd ever seen. She'd invented the Number 14. In fact, she'd invented most of our moves. Her brother Tom, Chief of the Undertakers, had once called her a “tactical savant”. That's a genius with a hardcore talent for warfare. On the other hand, Sharyn could be a little — impulsive at times, even immature — and I sometimes wondered if her brother's compliment hadn't been just a little bit sarcastic.
But whatever.
“Now what?” Helene asked. “This Corpse that Dave just off-ed is gonna be yellin’ for help.”
I looked down at the Dead Nurse Two, who lay sprawled in the mouth of the alley, her head turned almost all the way around. The stolen body she wore was useless now, but the creature inside it — which called itself a Malum — was alive and well. At times like this, Malum sent out telepathic distress calls. More Corpses would be coming.
So I scanned the darkened streets around us. The city felt quiet and strangely empty. I could hear traffic moving along the Vine Street Expressway several blocks from here, but the only cars in sight were all empty and parked. The sidewalks stood deserted. Even the muggers had gone to bed. Few people strolled the Philly streets at this hour, especially on a cold night —
— except for Undertakers, Corpses, and the children they hunted.
Speaking of “children they hunted” …
I figured the twin boys hadn't gone far. After all, they'd been looking for help, any kind of help, and had run into us — literally. While they'd been scared enough to keep running, they'd also sensed refuge and so had stopped around the next corner to see if the three of us could deliver.
And we had.
“There they are,” I said to Helene and Dave, who turned and looked.
The boys watched us with identical pairs of eyes.
“Hey!” the Burgermeister called, only to yelp as Helene punched him on the arm.
“You'll spook them!” she snapped. Then, as he grumbled something I didn't catch, the girl started walking toward the two young Seers. The boys watched her, looking way younger than eleven. Terror can do that to you. “It's okay,” she said. “We can help you. My name's Helene and that's Will and Dave. We're Undertakers.”
“Undertakers,” one of the boys echoed.
Then his brother remarked in astonishment, “You popped one of the nurses.”
“That's one word for it,” Helene told him. She'd reached the corner by now and had put a friendly hand on each of their shoulders. “We call them 'Corpses' ... with a capital 'C'. And making them 'pop' is kinda what we do.” She turned toward the Burgermeister and myself and nodded.
We joined Helene and the twins at the corner of 12th Street and Callowhill. The boys regarded us — especially Dave — with a sort of wary awe. “How old are you?” one of them asked.
The Burgermeister looked uncomfortable. “Fifteen,” he said.
“I thought you were fourteen,” Helene remarked.
“I'm fifteen,” Dave said again, sounding defensive.
“You're really big,” the other twin told him.
“No ...” He started to tack on a second word, but Helene punched him in his other arm and it turned into “Ow!”
“What're your names?” I asked the boys.
“I'm Michael and he's Robert,” one of them replied.
“Hi, Michael and Robert,” Helene said, somehow managing to smile at them and glare at Dave at the same time. Then, to me she added, “We gotta split. More Corpses are coming.”
“I know,” I replied. But instead of leading them away, I turned to Michael. “Why don't you tell us what happened?”
“We escaped,” Michael said. His brother nodded.
“From the Corpses?”
This time they both nodded. “They had us in the pen with the others,” Michael explained. “But this fight started and, when the dead people who were guarding us opened the gate to stop it, my brother and I managed to sneak out. We didn't get far before they spotted us. Then we just ran!”
Good for you, I thought.
But the Burgermeister frowned. “Why’d they have you locked in a 'pen'?”
It was a fair question. Most often, Corpses just stumbled on Seers and attacked. They didn't take prisoners.
Before either boy could answer, Helene whispered urgently. “Guys ... look!”
Up the street, figures approached the mouth of the alley, maybe thirty feet away from where we now stood. Grabbing the boys' collars, I yanked them out of sight, pressing them both back against the shadowed brick frontage of a 12th Street warehouse. The Burgermeister came with us, looming over the twins, while Helene peered around the corner onto Callowhill, back the way we'd come.
“Three deaders,” she reported. “No. Four. Looks like they heard their bud's call for help.”
“That was fast,” I whispered. And it was. Corpses often took as much as an hour to respond to a fallen friend. This time, I didn't think it had been five minutes!
Then Dave tapped me hard on the shoulder. “Heads up!” he whispered.
I turned and looked past him. Six more deaders were heading our way, walking south along 12th Street, no doubt also in answer to the telepathic distress call. They were still a block or more away, man-sized shapes lumbering in and out of the circled glow of street lamps. So far, hidden as we were in the shadow of the warehouse, they hadn't noticed us.
But they would.
“Oh crap ...” Helene whispered. Then she pointed in the opposite direction.
Another seven Corpses — maybe more — marched up 12th from the direction of the river. We were completely boxed in.
There were way too many of them and they'd shown up way too fast. Something very unusual was going down, and we'd managed to land ourselves smack dab in the middle of it.
“Trash cans,” Helene suggested, nodding toward a collection of them that someone had lined up across the street. They were all grouped together in front of a darkened restaurant — good cover, if we could get there.
“Not a chance,” Dave replied. And he was right. 12th Street wasn't very wide, but there were five of us — and five huddled kids scurrying like rats across an empty city street would get noticed, even at night. No way to avoid it.
Unless.
I pulled out my pocketknife.
I should probably say right now that this isn't exactly a normal pocketknife. I mean, I didn't get it at a sporting goods store or from the official Boy Scout catalog. It was a gift — a mysterious gift — and the giver is just as mysterious as what she gave me. But all that's another story. For now, just trust me when I say that Tom Jefferson owns the only other pocketknife like it, and even his doesn't do everything that mine does.
The pocketknife, fashioned out of some kind of golden metal, sported eight buttons, all lined up along one side. Of these, it was the 8 button that I was considering. I used it the least, and with good reason. Was there another way? I hated pressing it, though at street level in this part of town the effects wouldn't spread too far — I hoped.
Helene and Dave both looked at me. So did the twins.
“No hospitals in range,” Helene said.
“You sure?” I asked her.
She visibly swallowed. “I'm sure.” Then her eyes moved up and down the street, at the small army of deaders closing in on us. “There's way too many to fight.”
“Our wrist radios'll get hosed,” I reminded her. “We won't be able to call Haven.”
“What choice have we got?” she said.
“No choice at all, dude,” the Burgermeister added.
Nodding, I said a little prayer and hit the 8 button.
The streetlamps up and down 12th Street winked out. So did the lights — and there weren't many — in the windows of the surrounding buildings. So, I knew, did every other piece of functioning electronics within a three or four block radius.
It's called an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP for short.
My pocketknife is able to generate and release a burst of energy that will fry any kind of electronic equipment within its range. Cars and buses stop running. So do subway trains. Cell phones, computers, televisions and video game consoles all get trashed.
Fortunately, at ground level, the pulse didn't reach high enough to affect passing airplanes. And, if Helene was right about there being no hospitals nearby, then they — with all their life support gadgetry — would also be spared.
I could only pray that nobody in range had a pacemaker.
Bottom line: the 8 button was what Tom called “a weapon of last resort”, because the trouble it caused was often worse than the trouble that caused it — if you get what I mean.
The resulting darkness was thick, way thicker than anything you usually get in a big city like Philly. All around us, I heard the surprised grunts of close to twenty Corpses. They didn't gasp; the dead never gasp. You have to breath to gasp.
And, luckily, they don't see any better in the dark than the living do.
“Now!” I whispered.
We crossed the street, all five of us, moving fast and staying low. As we did, one of the boys — Robert, I think, but how do you really tell with twins? — started whimpering. “Shhh!” Helene told him, clamping a hand over his mouth and hurrying him along.
It took us maybe ten seconds to reach the trashcans and duck behind them. Ten long seconds.
“Stay low,” I commanding, my voice a hoarse whisper.
“And quiet,” Helene added. Then, after Robert nodded tearfully, she took her hand from his mouth.
I risked a peak over the top of the row of cans.
As my eyes adjusted to the new darkness, I watched the shapes of the converging Corpses by the faint glow that leaked in from those parts of the city outside my EMP range. They'd gathered at the mouth of the alley, clearly confused by the sudden black out. As I watched, their collective attention focused on Dead Nurse Two and the gory remains of Dead Nurse One. They seemed to be silently contemplating the carnage, but I knew better.
Words reach us through the cold night air. But not real words. Not human words.
“Who. Did. This?”
“Undertakers.”
“One. Is. Destroyed?”
“Yes. Destroyed.”
It was obvious that the very idea had rocked them. Until recently, the Corpses hadn't thought they could be destroyed — and certainly not by a bunch of human children. But that was before the Ritter.
“Destroyed? How?”
“Unknown.”
“Who?”
“Undertakers.”
Crouched beside me, looking a bit like a bear trying to hide behind a fire hydrant, I heard the Burgermeister mutter, “Duh.” And despite the situation, I smiled.
“Is it just me?” Helene whispered. “Or are they all dressed like hospital people?”
It wasn't just her. Despite the lack of light, I could tell that every single one of these Corpses wore surgical scrubs, a nurse's uniform, or a doctor's white lab coat. The odds of that happening by coincidence — well, there weren't any.
All these medical deaders had responded to the distress call because they'd been nearby.
Because they'd come from the same place.
“Let's find somewhere to figure this out ,” I suggested.
As the Corpses went to work cleaning up the remains of Dead Nurse One and carrying Dead Nurse Two away, presumably to find her a new host body, the five of us backed away from the trashcans and into the shadows that cloaked their storefront. Then I pulled out my pocketknife again, this time tapping the 1 button to activate its lock picks.
Hey, it's got an EMP! Given that, are lock picks really so crazy?
These were the electric kind — with two thin prongs that fit into pretty much any keyhole and automatically found and worked its tumblers. As I used it to open the store's front door, it struck me that this gadget — being somehow immune to its own EMP — was probably the only electronics functioning for blocks around.
As it turned out, I was wrong about that.
After maybe fifteen seconds, I heard the lock surrender. Then I turned the knob, quickly ushered everybody inside, and re-locked the door behind us.
The restaurant turned out to be one of the Chinese variety, its front half consisting of booths and square tables, the chairs overturned and stacked atop them. Oriental art adorned the walls, and a big ornate calendar that I couldn't read hung behind the cash register.
The place was very small, and it took me only a few seconds to grasp the layout. Then I led the others to the back of the dining room and through a saloon door. Inside was the kitchen, a cramped but clean space populated by stainless steel counters, gas stoves, and big commercial refrigerators. Gleaming pots and pans hung from hooks, and I lost count of the number of big shiny knives.
But at least there were no windows. That was especially important, since I felt pretty sure our night was far from over.
“We need to get these kids to First Stop,” Helene told me.
“I know,” I said. “But not yet.”
Michael asked, “What's First Stop?”
His brother moaned, “We just wanna go home.”
“Well, you can't go home,” Dave told them. Then, seeing their immediate reactions, scowled and added uncomfortably, “Cryin' ain't gonna help it. Ow!”
Helene had punched his arm again.
“Listen,” I told the twins. “There's a lot we need to talk about. For right now, you're safe. But if you go home, don't you think the Corpses will find you there?”
“Our dad's got a gun,” Michael said.
“Guns don't kill dead people. Anyway, your dad won't even be able to see them,” Helene explained as gently as she could. “Not like you do. Not like we do. Corpses hide what they look like to the grown-up world. To your parents, they'll just look like normal people. Worse, they're smart. They'll make up a story to get you in trouble. Then they'll either find a way to take you, or ...” Her words trailed off. From the look on her face, I got the impression that she'd said more than she'd meant to.
“Or ... what?” Robert demanded.
When Helene didn't answer right away, the Burgermeister did. “Or they'll waste your whole family and then take you. Don't you hit me again!” he snapped as Helene whirled on him. “It's the truth! And the faster they get that, the better chance they got of stayin' alive!”
He wasn't wrong.
“But the good news,” I told the twins, “is that we know of a safe place. It's called Haven, and it's the Undertakers' headquarters.”
“I wanna go home ...” Robert repeated tearfully.
“Where is it?” his dry-eyed brother asked. “Haven, I mean.”
“Can't tell you that,” I replied. “Not until you're there. First you need to go to First Stop, which is a special place we have for teaching new kids like you two all about the Corpses. We'll take you both there. But, before that, I want you to tell us about those dudes out there. All of them are dressed like doctors and nurses ... and I'll bet you know why.”
The boys exchanged unhappy glances. Robert wiped at his eyes.
Michael said, “There was this ad in the paper. A clinic was doing some study on identical twins. They offered ... like ... a ton of money for the 'right' kids. No older'n twelve. No younger'n ten.”
“Seers,” Helene remarked. “They were looking for kids who were just about the right age to get their Eyes.”
I nodded. Then I motioned for Michael to go on.
“Our dad saw it and he said we needed the money. He got laid off from his job last month. Our mom's ...”
“She's gone,” his brother interjected.
“Yeah,” said Michael. “So he called the clinic. They said we should come in to be 'screened'. So we took the train up from South Philly. Dad was expecting a hospital, but instead it was kind of a warehouse. That should have been a hint.”
“But we needed the money,” Robert interjected again.
“Yeah,” said Michael. “So we went in. At first, it was okay. There was this reception room with a T.V. and an XBox, and there were already like a million kids there!”
“All twins?” I asked.
Michael shook his head. “Nope. Not even most of them. Anyway, everybody got a number and the numbers got called in order. There was this lady behind a window in the wall who looked at everyone. If you weren't a twin, they sent you away. A lot of people got sent away.”
“Some of them cussed up a storm!” Robert exclaimed.
“Should've read the ad,” Dave grumbled.
“Yeah,” said Michael. “Finally, we got up there and she saw we were twins and she took our names and asked my dad to sign a piece of paper. Then another lady came out and took my brother and me through a door and down this long hallway to a little room.
“Dad had to stay behind,” Robert added, looking like he might cry again. “We haven't seen him since.”
“How long ago was this?” Helene asked him.
“Four days.”
Jeez, I thought, wondering what kind of story their father had been told.
Then again, maybe the Corpses just killed him and these poor kids don't know it.
“What happened in the little room?” I asked.
“The lady showed us a picture of a monster,” Michael replied.
“A photograph?” Helene asked. “Of a Corpse?”
Both boys nodded, their heads bobbing in perfect unison. I vaguely wondered if it was a twins thing.
Helene and I swapped pointed looks.
“They were after Seers,” she said.
“Seers who were also twins,” I added.
“What for?” Dave demanded.
But I didn't have an answer. “What happened after you looked at the picture?” I asked the boys.
As usual, it was Michael who spoke for the two of them. “We told the lady what we saw and she pretended like it was no big deal, but we could tell she was pretty excited. She told us to wait right there ... that she'd be right back. Then she left us alone in the room for a while. We were getting kinda freaked out.”
“I'll bet you were,” Helene told them.
“Then ... he ... came in.”
The Burgermeister asked, “He, who?”
Robert and Michael traded a look that actually sent a chill down my spine. Whatever horrors these boys had suffered, they'd started with “He, who”.
Michael said, “His name’s Dr. Steiger. He runs the clinic. But ...” his voice trailed.
So his brother finished for him. “But he's one of them.”
“A Corpse,” I said.
Two more matching nods. “Everybody in the clinic is,” Robert continued. “Except for the two ladies in the reception area, they're all dead.”
“What happened when Steiger came into the little room?” asked Helene.
Michael swallowed before answering. “At first, he was ... chanting.”
“Chanting?” I echoed.
The boy nodded. “Yeah. A nursery rhyme, I think.” Then he made his voice real deep and weirdly sing-song, and recited: “Ring around the rosie ... A pocketful of posie ... Ashes, ashes ... We all fall down ...” He looked up at us and shuddered. “Then he smiled with that dead face of his.”
Robert nodded. “I almost crapped my pants.”
“Been there, done that,” I told them.
“He said we were very special boys,” Michael continued. “He said we were going to be very helpful to him. But first he needed to make sure we wouldn't be going anywhere until the ... experiment ... was over. Then all these other dead guys dressed in scrubs came in and grabbed us. We screamed for our dad, but Dr. Steiger just laughed and said that nobody could hear us. Then he pulled out this funny little gun and fired something into our necks.”
Then both boys, again with that eerie, unconscious unison, rubbed the sides of their necks at the same time.
“A funny little gun,” I repeated. Something nagged at me. Something I'd missed.
I hate that feeling.
Michael said, “Then they dragged us into this big open warehouse space and locked us in the pen with the other kids.”
“Other kids?” Helene asked. “How many?”
“A lot,” Robert replied. “A whole lot.”
“Why do the Corpses want twins?” Dave wondered.
“Maybe they're trying to figure out where the Sight comes from,” replied Helene. “We gotta find a way to call Haven. Steve might have an idea.” Steve was Steve Moscova, the Undertakers’ science expert.
She was right. Except I wasn't listening — not really. I was thinking back to the alley, to those two dead nurses who'd been chasing Michael and Robert. Except they hadn't been chasing them, had they? They hadn't even been running, just walking — slow and leisurely. Like that didn't need to worry about the boys getting away. Like they had all the time in the world.
Those pendants. Little black boxed around their necks. Blinking green.
All of a sudden, I had it — and my whole body went ice cold.
“Oh crap!” I heard myself exclaim. Then, jumping to my feet. “We gotta get out of here. Right now!”
The four of them looked up at me, confused.
“What's up, dude?” Dave asked.
“Trackers!” I said, almost yelling now. “Don't you get it? Steiger lowjacked them!”
For several seconds, they both just stared at me. Finally, Helene said, “Well ... even if he did ... wouldn't your EMP have trashed them?”
I hadn't thought of that. But, of course, she was right. Those little pendants were electronic, and anything electronic would've been fried by the pulse. And even if more deaders came with more pendants from outside EMP's radius, the chips that Steiger had plugged into Michael and Robert would have been cooked too.
A wonderful relief washed over me.
We're safe.
At that exact instant, a pair of dead hands grabbed the Burgermeister from behind.
— or not.
I hadn't even heard them come in. Corpses can be cat-quiet when they want to be. This one pounced from the shadows at the front of the kitchen, near the saloon doors — a Type Three dressed in hospital scrubs, his body a bloating, purple mass of swelling tissues. Suddenly the stench of him enveloped us, making me gag. I scrambled for my water pistol but, as usual, Helene was faster. She fired a stream at the deader, only to hit Dave in the face by mistake.
Then the Burgermeister's big body was hurled over the nearest counter, knocking down more than a dozen pots and pans in a rain of bangs and crashes that rang through the small kitchen like crazed church bells.
The Corpse whirled on us and, this time, Helene tagged him. A stream of saltwater caught him in one eye and he stumbled backward. Then, as he started convulsing, I snatched a butcher's knife off the countertop and drove it deep into the base of the deader's skull.
Trapped gas, so foul-smelling that it hit me almost like a physical wave, wafted out from around the puncture wound. I staggered back, one hand cupping my mouth and nose. It had been hours since I'd last eaten — a fact that my stomach seemed determined to ignore. Meanwhile, the Corpse's neck and head actually seemed to deflate. Without anything to hold it in place, the knife fell free as bugs, mostly black carrion beetles, began scrambling through the open wound.
But I'd hit the mark. The deader fell, his spinal cord — or what was left of it — severed, his stolen body useless.
“Will!” Helene screamed.
Three more attacked from different directions, a coordinated offensive pattern. These dudes had gotten strategic on us. They'd used their little black boxes to track us here. Then, instead of immediately charging, they'd taken the time to flank us and block all exits.
Remember when I told you that Corpses are smart? Well, that's true — though some are definitely smarter than others. And, in combat, dumb deaders are like rabid dogs.
These weren't dumb.
Beside me, the twins began screaming. I didn't blame them.
The first Corpse, a Type Two female in a white lab coat, her once dark hair mostly gone and her skin as black and oily as a rotten banana peal, lunged for Helene with hands like talons. The girl dodged and ducked, sidestepping the deader and delivering a single punch to her armpit that momentarily crippled the left side of her body. With a low moan, the Corpse staggered, struggling for balance. Never one to ignore an advantage, Helene spun around and delivered a wicked wheel kick that nailed the deader in the back of the head, sending her crashing into one of the stoves.
As the remaining two Corpses closed in on me, I tapped the 2 button on my pocketknife, activating its taser.
Yep. EMP generator, lock picks and a taser. Jealous much?
At the same time, I yelled to Michael and Robert, “Get into the far corner and stay out of way!” I'd have suggested they hide, except it wouldn't do them any good — not with those chips in their necks.
They looked so terrified that it was hard to tell if they'd heard me or not, but no way did I have time to repeat myself. One of the deaders was already lunging for me, the gray skin of his hands pulled tight across flesh that had mostly rotted away to nothing. His lipless jaws opened wide to bite. When I fed him a mouthful of taser, its current actually made the lower half of his skull glow under his thin, transuclent skin.
It was freaky.
But he went down, hard.
The last deader halted when I turned my pocketknife on her. She was another Two, much fresher and stronger than her zapped buddy. Smarter too, because her dead eyes narrowed as they watched the arc of blue electricity dance between the taser's twin prongs.
When she spoke, her voice was a gurgle; her vocal chords were literally melting inside her neck from rot. “There are more coming, Undertaker.”
“I know,” I said. Helene came and stood beside me. She held up her water pistol, which had to be almost empty by now.
“Even more than you think,” the Corpse hissed. “You have something that belongs to us.”
“Do I? My bad.”
“Leave now,” she demanded. “And we might let you live.”
“Don't think so,” Helene and I said together — a total accident, but it actually came out sounding cooler than you'd think.
“We have a small army out on these streets!” the deader exclaimed. “What do you have?”
Helene and I swapped a quick smile. Then I replied, “We have a Burgermeister.”
Yeah, it's kind of a movie reference.
The fist that slammed into the side of the Corpse's head was as big as a Christmas ham and twice as hard. The deader's neck snapped like a piece of chalk, and her head lulled to the side, her lifeless eyes wide in what I could only assume was astonishment.
Then she went down.
Dave rubbed his fist. “Felt that,” he grunted. But was smiling.
“She was right,” I said, leaning over and pulling the little black box off the female, while Helene used the butcher's knife to sever the spine of the one I'd just tased. “There's more coming. They're tracking Michael and Robert with this!”
“How?” the Burgermeister asked.
“That 'funny little gun' they talked about? I've seen one like it, back before my dad died. The veterinarian used it to lowjack our cat. The range ain't great ... maybe six blocks ... but if it was enough for the deaders to find us once, they'll do it again. And soon.”
“Then let's split!” Helene declared.
“You heard that deader,” I told her. “There's a small army of them out there. We'd never make it back to Haven. Heck, we probably wouldn't get out of the neighborhood!”
She threw up his hands in frustration. “They what do we do?”
Instead of replying, I simply smiled.
“Oh, I know that look,” Dave said with a grin. “Okay, Will ... what's the play?”
So I told them.
It took us less than a minute to set things up. Then we grabbed the twins and found the restaurant's back staircase behind a narrow door set between two refrigerators. All the shops on this street were converted row homes, and most of them had long since relocated their stairs from the front of the house to the back — you know, so customers wouldn't wander into places they shouldn't. These particular steps led up to an office and some storage rooms, all deserted. Whoever owned this Chinese restaurant didn't live on the premises.
Just as well, considering what I had in mind.
Up there we found the fire escape that this house shared with its neighbors on either side. “Take the twins out there,” I told Dave and Helene. “Follow the catwalk as far as it goes and then wait for me.”
“Will?” Helene asked anxiously. “Are you sure you know what you're doing?”
I tried my best to give her a James Bond grin. From her expression, I missed the mark. “Don't I always?”
“Not even close,” the two of them said, once again in perfect unison.
That one wasn't cool at all.
I headed back downstairs. By now, it had begun to stink something awful. So I kept the door into the kitchen shut — and waited.
I didn't have to wait long.
The restaurant's front and back entrances crashed open together. No stealth approach this time. I cracked the staircase door open just enough to see Corpses — all dressed in either scrubs or lab coats — pour into the small kitchen. Ten of them. Then twelve. Then fifteeen, with more still coming. They scanned the room, taking in their fallen pals as well as the complete lack of kids.
As I watched, one of them — a male Type Two — checked his little black box. “Upstairs!” he declared after a moment.
I pushed the door wide open. “You looking for Michael and Robert?” I asked, trying not to cough.
All their dead heads turned my way as if pulled by the same string. It's always really creepy when they do that.
I managed a smile. “I've got 'em.”
“Give them to us!” the Type Two demanded.
“Know what else I've got that you don't?” I asked him.
He didn't reply.
I lifted the lit Coleman lantern that I'd found in the kitchen's pantry, probably kept handy for blackouts just like this one.
“A sense of smell,” I said.
Then I threw it at him, turned and ran, taking the stairs two at a time.
I actually heard the lantern crash, its little flame suddenly exposed.
The Chinese restaurant's cramped kitchen exploded.
That's kind of what happens when you turn all the stove burners to high, blow out the pilot light, wait a few minutes for the room to fill with natural gas, and then set it on fire.
As I ran for my life up the stairs to the second floor, I felt the walls shake. Heat welled up in the space below me as the kitchen was engulfed by flame. Within seconds, all that trapped energy would find this stairwell and use it like a chimney.
I really needed to not be here when that happened.
I cleared the final step and threw myself into the second floor hallway. An instant later, a ball of fire turned the stairway to ash and ripped through the archway at my back. The fire escape — now literally a “fire escape” — stood at the end of the hallway, through an open window. I ran for it, sweat burning my brow and my heart slamming against my ribcage like it meant to get out of me before I could get out of here.
Behind me, the walls and ceiling were ablaze. And heat, relentless and oddly predatory, nipped at my sneakers and caused the back of my jacket to smoke.
With only steps to go I saw the carpet — a frayed oriental runner — catch fire on either side of me. Suddenly, it was as if a curtain of flame had been draped over my vision. The heat seared my face and threatened to boil my eyes in their sockets.
So I shut them — and dove.
Cold air and warm air mixed as I cleared the sill and crashed painfully against the fire escape's metal railing. Still I felt grateful. If the railing hadn't been there, I'd gone right off the edge and down twenty feet into the alley.
But that didn't mean I'd made it — not yet. I tried to get up, but the heat blasting through the still open window slammed me back down with an almost physical impact. Gasping, my eyes blinded with tears, I tried to crawl forward. My body felt like it had been charbroiled. I couldn't seem to get my arms or legs to want to move.
Do it anyway! I told myself. Or you'll cook here, on this fire escape, like a burger on a grill!
Suddenly, a huge hand grabbed mine and I was yanked forward with such force that it felt as if I'd gone airborne. Then I was half-dragged, half-carried the length of the fire escape, only to be dumped into a heap at Helene's feet.
“Got him,” the Burgermesiter said proudly.
Helene knelt. “Will? You okay?”
Of course not! I'm a grilled burger!
Except, it slowly dawned on me that I was okay. Not pain-free, mind you, but definitely alive. I blinked up at her, then over at Dave, and then at Michael and Robert, who were looking at me like I wore a cape and had big red “S” on my chest.
I sat up, coughed, wheezed, and then coughed again.
Some Superman, I am.
I felt my face. My cheeks and forehead were hot to the touch and probably beet red, but at least I'd somehow managed to keep my eyebrows. Small favors.
“Jeez, dude,” the Burgermeister said. “You totally wasted that Chinese place.”
I stood up and looked back. Smoke was billowing through the second floor window — thick and black and foul-smelling. The restaurant's other windows were lit by internal flames. The fire I'd started was consuming the place, eating it from the inside out.
I really hoped the owners — whoever they were — had insurance.
“How many'd you get?” Helene asked.
I shrugged. “Not sure. Maybe a many as twenty.”
Dave grinned. “Not a bad night's work.”
“What happens now?” Michael asked. He and his brother stood side by side on the fire escape, their backs up against the cold brick outside wall of one of the adjacent buildings. But those bricks wouldn't stay cold. Fires like this tended to spread. If somebody didn't do something soon, the whole city block might go up — maybe more. Given the neighborhood, it was unlikely that anyone lived here. Unlikely, but not impossible.
Please don't let me have killed somebody ... somebody human, I mean.
I could already hear sirens. Someone had called the fire departments, and probably the Philly cops too. That was good, though it meant we needed to be gone from here — and fast. To anyone who wasn't an Undertaker, what I'd done tonight would look like arson. That's the problem with fighting a war nobody knows about: nobody knows about it.
“Now we get the heck out of here,” I replied.
Then another voice said, “All around the mulberry bush ...”
The five of us froze.
“The monkey chased the weasel ...”
I heard the Burgermeister mutter, “What the hell is that?”
Then, through a break in the smoke I saw him. A Corpse stood on the fire escape across the alley, almost exactly opposite us. He wore a white lab coat. No surprise there; we'd seen a lot of white lab coats tonight. But this deader was a Type One. Type One's are pretty rare — very fresh cadavers, less than a week gone. This dude's face, gray with death, hadn't yet begun to bloat or shrivel. His muscles and bones remained strong. Such host bodies were usually reserved for the big bosses in the Corpse hierarchy.
The really dangerous ones.
“The monkey thought it was all in good fun ...”
I spared a moment to look at his Mask. It's a Seer trick, a method of holding your eyes so that you see not only the dead body, but also the illusion that dead body projects to the world — the way the rest of the world sees that particular Corpse.
His Mask was of a man in his early fifties, tall and broad shouldered, with salt and pepper hair and a friendly, confident smile. Picture the stereotypical doctor, and you'll pretty much get it.
Except, of course, it was all lies.
“Pop goes the weasel!”
Steiger.
“Well done, Undertakers,” he said, treating us to a slow clap that was way more about condescension that congratulations. “In one fiery swoop, you've managed to severely undermine my staffing levels.”
“Happy to help,” I muttered.
He was out of reach, both of a water pistol and my taser. And something told me he knew it. Something told me this particular deader knew all sorts of things I was going to wish he didn't.
“That EMP was an especially interesting trick. I'd very much like to know how you did it.”
I said nothing – though, behind me, I swear the Burgermeister was actually growling.
Behind him, the twins cowered in undisguised terror.
“It slowed down the hunt, I admit. Fortunately, the 'minder' chips I implant in my subjects have certain safeguards against such things. I designed them myself, you see.”
“Good for you,” I said. The ladder off the fire escape waited just a dozen feet away. We could get down to the alley and be long gone before the firemen even got started fighting the blaze. But would it be that easy to escape Mr. Lab Coat over there? Type Ones were the fastest and strongest of all. And he seemed awfully confident for somebody whose “staffing levels” had just been “undermined”.
“Necessary,” Steiger explained. “Couldn't risk my subjects running off, not with all the time and trouble that went into finding them.”
“What do you want them for?” I demanded, shouting across the smoke-filled gap between us.
He laughed — a truly awful sound. “Professional secret, I'm afraid. Still, all this fuss and bother has convinced me that these two specimens in particular ...” He pointed at Michael and Robert, who seemed to shrivel up inside themselves with fear as Helene stepped reflexively in front of them. “... are beyond recovery.”
“You got that right!” Dave exclaimed.
Steiger reached into his lab coat and pulled out a gadget of some kind — bigger than the black boxes his cronies wore.
“Pop goes the weasel,” he said again. Then, grinning, he pressed a button.
The twins gasped.
Then they fell.
Helene cried out and dropped beside them, shaking them both. When they didn't respond, she touched two fingers to Michael's neck. Then Robert's. When she looked up at me, her face was a mask of horror and disbelief. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.
Despite the nearby fire, despite the heat, I felt suddenly cold.
“What did you do?” I screamed across the alley.
“Another little precaution,” Steiger replied, putting away his killing toy. “A drop of toxin was delivered to their carotid arteries. Instant and painless. A mercy, really.”
“You poisoned them ...” I said, trying to take it in. After everything they'd gone through, this — monster — had just murdered two innocent kids as casually as I might swat a pair of flies.
“Quite so. Now then, Undertakers, I'm afraid I must leave. You've created quite a bit of extra work for my remaining staff, and I need to be sure we stay on schedule. Good night and good health!”
I gazed down at the boys on the fire escape floor. Their faces were peaceful. They could have been sleeping. But, of course, they weren't. The Corpse had murdered them. After all, that was what Corpses did. More than any of their other, countless crimes: they murdered children.
“Look at me!” I screamed, whirling back on Steiger, who had turned away. He paused and glanced back at me from across the alley, wearing a bemused expression. “Remember my face!” I called to him, yelling through the smoke and open air between us. “Before this night is over, you're gonna see it one more time! Just one more time, wormbag! Right before I kill you!”
To my horror, he merely smiled. “I look forward to it ... Undertaker.”
Then, with the bizarre agility that Corpses sometimes demonstrated, he climbed the side of the building opposite our own and disappeared over it's roof.
“Will ...” Helene said. She put a hand on my shoulder, but I shook her off.
“Dude,” Dave added. “We ... um ... we gotta split. Cops'll be here, if they ain't already.”
He was right. But I couldn't move — not just yet. Instead, I just stared at the empty rooftop where Steiger had vanished. “Listen to me,” I told them both. “We're not done tonight. Not by a long shot. We're gonna find that deader. And we're gonna find the rest of those kids he's got in that pen of his. We're gonna get them out ... all of them.”
I turned and looked at them both. My two best friends.
“And after that,” I said. “We're gonna waste that sack of bugs.”
Helene and the Burgermeister swapped glances.
Then, in perfect, twin-like unison, they replied, “We're in.”
TO BE CONTINUED ON MAY 31, 2013
To read more UNDERTAKERS adventures, consult your favorite bookseller or visit
http://www.jointheundertakers.com or http://www.tydrago.com
THE UNDERTAKERS: RISE OF THE CORPSES, Sourcebooks/Jabberwocky April, 2011
THE UNDERTAKERS: QUEEN OF THE DEAD, Sourcebooks/Jabberwocky October, 2012
And coming in 2014: THE UNDERTAKERS: SECRET OF THE CORPSE EATER