Secret of the Corpse Eater

by Ty Drago

  He also had a serious superiority complex.

  “But, since you’re both here,” he continued, “I guess there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Guess not,” Sharyn replied, smiling.

  Two of the other three proctors, a man and a woman, leaned against the nearby wall. They weren’t as hostile as Lex—in fact, one of them grinned at Sharyn’s remark.

  “This isn’t a vacation,” Lex lectured. “Your day begins at five thirty in the morning, five days a week. School—yes, there’s regular school—starts at six fifteen and ends ninety minutes before the Senate convenes. That time varies, often from day to day, so you need to be flexible. Most days, you’ll be at work at the Capitol before eleven. Expect three hours of homework, unless the Senate runs late … …very late. If that happens, sometimes homework will be forgiven. Sometimes.

  “You’ll both wear page uniforms every day: a navy blue suit and a white dress shirt. Andy, you’ll get a tie. You’ll receive name badges and page insignia lapel pins to identify you to senators and their staff. Your haircuts are … acceptable. Kim, keep your makeup minimal and don’t wear any extraneous jewelry. Understood?”

  “Sure,” Sharyn replied.

  “Andy?”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “You look young,” he remarked.

  “Thanks.”

  He blinked. “Your duties at the Capitol will include whatever the Senate Sergeant at Arms says they will. You’ll run errands, deliver messages, and clean up the Senate chamber. You will not speak to a senator unless he or she speaks first, or if you’ve been instructed to by the Sergeant at Arms’ office. Your job is to get out of their way so that they can do their job. Clear?”

  “As glass.” Sharyn grinned.

  “There are thirty pages. Some are Democrats. Some are Republicans. You will not discuss party affiliations or politics of any kind. This is important, as you’ll be spending a lot of time together. We have two sleeping floors in Webster Hall. The second floor is for the girls. The third floor is for boys. The two don’t mix. Understood?”

  “Understood,” we both said.

  He smirked. “Still glad your senator-buddy got you both in here?”

  “Never been happier,” Sharyn replied.

  Lex turned to the other two proctors. “Maggie, please show Kim to her room. Mark, do the same for Andy. Today’s Sunday, and on most Sundays the pages have free time. But you two are going to spend the day getting acclimated. Unpack. Get settled. Explore the house if you want, but stay inside.

  “Rules and security are tight. Capitol Police patrol outside. So do as you’re told. If you don’t, you’ll rack up demerits. Too many of them, and you’re gone. Got it?”

  “Got it!” Sharyn and I said together.

  Lex chuffed. That’s the only word for it: he chuffed. Then he disappeared through a nearby archway. Maggie and Mark came forward. They wore matching blue suits. “Sorry about that,” Mark said. “Lex takes a little getting used to.”

  “So does a stick up your butt,” Maggie added. “Which is what he’s always walking around with.”

  The joke didn’t quite make sense, but I laughed anyway.

  Mark said, “There’re uniforms waiting for you. Off-duty, what you’ve got on will work just fine. No jeans. No sweatshirts.”

  Maggie said, “Come on, we’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

  They marched us upstairs. On the third floor, Mark showed me an empty, small, clean room with a window and three beds. “That’s yours over there,” he said, pointing to a bed near the window. “Your roommates are Devon and Patrick. They’re both out right now. But they’re good guys; you’ll like them.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Normally, we don’t get pages in mid-term. But Senator Mitchum is Senator Mitchum, so the program director … bent the rules. First time ever. I guess when you’re chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, you can get around a few ‘inconvenient’ policies. Your uniforms are in the closet. Senator Mitchum’s office sent over your measurements. Try them on, though, just in case. We can swap out something that doesn’t fit. Both you and Sharyn will be hitting the Hill tomorrow.”

  “Hitting the Hill?” I asked.

  “Working the Capitol. Your duties will be light at first, since you both missed the formal orientation. That’s a problem. There are rules, and you’re going to have to learn them fast. Lex is a dork, but he’s not wrong about that demerits policy. While you’re living in Webster, you’re a ward of Uncle Sam, and Uncle Sam’s a strict parent.”

  “I hear ya,” I said, walking over and testing the bed. It had been a long time since I’d slept on a mattress. It felt like a cloud. “So what’s the deal with Lex? Is he in charge or something?”

  “No,” Mark replied. “He just acts like it. Try to stay out of his way.”

  “I will,” I said.

  Then a new voice spoke. “So … this is our new recruit?”

  Another young man, dressed as Mark was, stood in the doorway.

  “One of them, anyway,” Mark replied. “Andy, this is Greg Gardner. He’s the fourth proctor. Just started yesterday, in fact.”

  Smiling, Greg came forward to shake my hand. “Nice to meet you, Andy. Looks like you and me are the newbies. That means we need to stick together.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to steady my heartbeat. After shaking his hand, I resisted the urge to wipe my palm on my jeans.

  His skin was clammy, but that wasn’t surprising.

  Greg was a Corpse.

  Helene

  Crack!

  That was the sound a neck made when it broke. It always screeched Helene’s blood.

  She winced as the Corpse dressed like a mortician dropped into a heap at the Burgermeister’s feet. Beside him, Jillian looked green. Her hands shot to her mouth, her eyes wide.

  This is what we do, Helene thought.

  Dave treated the new girl to a nasty grin. He looked about to say something to her, but Helene put a finger to her lips. Then, with her Super Soaker at the ready, she listened to the house.

  Nothing.

  The Francis X. Urcott Funeral Home didn’t just sound empty, it felt empty, and Helene had long ago learned to trust that feeling. This dude, a Type Three in a pinstriped suit, had been the only person on site, Corpse or otherwise. That wasn’t surprising because Helene’s watch read three a.m., and most of Philly slept at this hour, its businesses closed. But, at the same time, it was surprising because two fresh cadavers waited somewhere in this converted Germantown row home, and the Queen should have wised up to what that meant by now.

  So Helene listened harder.

  Still nothing.

  “I think we’re good,” she whispered.

  Dave nodded, absently wiping his hands on his pants. Not that he minded breaking deader necks. Quite the contrary.

  It was the other kind of neck breaking that had gotten…tough.

  “Now what?” Jillian asked softly.

  “Now we do what we came here to do,” Helene replied.

  “Duh,” the Burgermeister added.

  Helene let it slide.

  The three of them navigated the darkened building. While funeral parlors came in all shapes and sizes, there were always similarities: big, fancy rooms with draperies and often caskets on stands for show, a kitchen, bathrooms—and, of course, the basement.

  It took them just five minutes to find the right door and another five to carefully make their way down to the “cold room.”

  “I hate this,” the Burgermeister muttered, finding the light switch.

  “I know,” Helene told him, wincing as the overheads came on.

  Ahead of them stood a wall of nine steel morgue drawers, set up in a three-by-three pattern, all closed. They’d have to open each one until they found the bodies they’d been sent here to … process.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Jillian muttered.

  “You get used to it,” Helene said.


  “Some of it,” the Burgermeister added, his snide attitude gone, at least for now. Helene knew it wasn’t how he really felt anyway. Dave was aware that Sharyn didn’t like the new girl, so he didn’t like the new girl. It was as stupidly simple as that.

  Boys.

  Then Dave said to her out of the blue, “So, you gotta spy on Will’s mom, huh?”

  “I told you,” Helene replied. “Not spy. Tom wants me to … get friendly … with her.”

  “Why?” Jillian asked.

  “’Cause she’s not ‘fitting in’ around Haven.”

  The Burgermeister scowled. “Why you?”

  It was a question Helene had been asking herself for a week now. Of all of the Undertakers to play diplomat to Susan Ritter, Helene seemed—in yearbook terms—the “Least Likely to Succeed.”

  And Tom knew that, of course. Tom knew everything.

  So indeed, why her?

  “No idea,” she told Dave. “Now, quit stalling. Let’s get this over with.”

  His scowl deepened, but he didn’t reply. Instead, he stepped up and opened a morgue drawer at random. It was empty.

  “I hate this,” he said again.

  “I know,” Helene replied.

  “It ain’t right.” He opened another random drawer. Also empty.

  “It’s necessary.”

  “That don’t make it right.” A third drawer. Nothing. Six more to go.

  Standing by the open doorway, looking small and younger than her sixteen years, Jillian watched in quiet disgust. Helene didn’t blame her.

  It was a disgusting duty.

  A couple of months ago, in a funeral parlor basement not too different from this one, Dave had demonstrated a peculiar talent. He really knew how to snap a neck. So Tom and Sharyn had decided to put him to work doing just that. And, at first, the Burgermeister had been all gung-ho about it.

  It worked like this: every day, the Hackers scoured the city’s obituaries, listing any freshly dead people whose cadavers the Corpses might want to—occupy. Then every night they handed that list to the Burgermeister who, accompanied by two other Angels, visited the indicated funeral parlors and made sure that never happened.

  It limited the flow of host bodies to the enemy. Helped the war effort. Noble, important work, right?

  Except breaking the neck of a regular human person who’d innocently died wasn’t the same as breaking the neck of an alien invader wearing a stolen body. These weren’t monsters, just folks, and the only word for what Dave did, night after night, was defilement. An ugly word that described an ugly act. It was disrespectful. Immoral.

  Wrong.

  But necessary.

  Unfortunately, knowing that didn’t make your hands feel any cleaner. Helene, as part of her Angels’ duty rotation, only had to do this on Sundays—well, Mondays given the hour. Dave, on the other hand, had been at it every night for weeks. No wonder Will said his roommate hadn’t been sleeping.

  Jillian, however, was just here to watch and learn, part of the crash-course “Undertakers 101” program that Tom had set up for her. Most recruits went through a two-week “basic training,” which helped them get used to their new lives as well as revealed which crew best suited their skills and personalities. Jillian, however, was an Angel down to her toes—that had been plain as day back on South Street. So she’d skipped the preliminaries and had gone straight into the field.

  “You miss him?” the Burgermeister asked suddenly.

  Helene started. “Huh?”

  He stood outside the fourth drawer, his hand poised on its stainless steel handle. “You miss Will?”

  “He’s only been gone for like sixteen hours.”

  “Okay, then are you gonna miss him?”

  “I guess. Aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I ain’t his … you know.”

  Helene felt her face redden. “His what?”

  “Forget it.”

  “You gonna miss Sharyn?” she demanded.

  The Burgermeister’s scowled returned, but he didn’t reply.

  “Can we just get out of here?” Jillian asked in a small voice.

  “Yeah,” Dave mumbled. “Okay.”

  Then he opened the fourth drawer. Zilch.

  Meanwhile, Helene fumed. Sometimes Dave really knew how to piss her off.

  She and the Burgermeister were friends. Totally. But on some level, they both knew that they were friends only because of Will. Without him as their bridge, the two probably wouldn’t hang out, might not even not know each other all that well. Truth be told, Dave sometimes came off as a little too—much. He was loud and quick to anger and he often said or did things without thinking about them first, a trait that Helene always found irritating.

  But doesn’t Will do the same thing?

  Helene blew out a sigh and said, “Lemme help.”

  The Angels’ job on these missions was to keep watch while Dave did his thing. But now, as he opened a fifth drawer, she stepped up and opened a sixth.

  Both were empty.

  “Huh,” Dave grunted.

  Three left.

  “How many were there supposed to be again?” Jillian asked.

  “Two,” Helene replied. “One man and one woman.”

  The Burgermeister opened a seventh drawer. She opened the eighth.

  Nothing.

  “Crap,” he muttered. He and Helene swapped looks.

  “What’s going on?” said Jillian. “Aren’t they here?”

  The Undertakers didn’t answer. Instead they focused on the last drawer.

  Helene felt her mouth go dry.

  “You do it,” Dave said.

  “Uh-uh. You do it,” she said.

  “Oh for God’s sake!” Jillian snapped, and came forward and opened the last drawer. Despite everything else she was feeling at the moment, Helene was impressed. It’s not as easy to open a morgue drawer in the middle of the night as you’d think, empty or not.

  It was empty.

  “Double crap,” Helene muttered.

  “Maybe Sammy’s crew made a mistake,” Dave suggested. “Sent us to the wrong place.”

  She shook her head. “Since when do the Hackers make mistakes?”

  And it was true. Sammy Li, the Hacker Boss, ran what was probably the tightest ship in Haven.

  “Could the bodies be somewhere else around here?” Jillian asked. “Maybe in the caskets upstairs?”

  “They keep ’em refrigerated until right before the service,” Helene replied.

  “So’s they don’t stink,” Dave added miserably.

  “I don’t get it,” the new girl said, looking from Helene to Dave. “What’s this mean?”

  Helene and the Burgermeister swapped another look. Then Helene answered.

  “We’ve been set up.”

  Helene

  Helene was astonished to see relief flash across the Burgermeister’s face.

  Then she understood.

  True, they were in trouble here—big trouble. Cavanaugh had wised to the funeral gig and arranged for her people, many of whom actually ran funeral parlors, to publish a couple of fake obituaries. Bait. There might be a dozen, maybe two dozen, walking dead surrounding this place at this exact moment.

  But at least he didn’t have to snap any innocent necks tonight.

  Cold comfort if we get ripped apart, though.

  “What do we do?” Jillian asked, sounding breathless.

  Instead of answering, Helene pulled out the new satellite phone she’d been issued. It was about the size of a regular, clamshell-style cell phone, though it lacked even basic features like an MP3 player or a camera. Just calling and texting, but untraceable calling and texting, which was the point.

  She dialed a number.

  “7-Eleven,” Dan McDevitt’s voice answered, sounding bored. With the new sat phones, a code system had been set up—added security.

  “Oh,” Helene said. “I meant to dial 911.”

  “This is 711,” Da
n told her.

  “My bad,” she said, completing the code. “Dan, it’s Helene. We got trouble. Dave, Jillian, and I are on that funeral gig up in Germantown … only the bodies aren’t here.”

  That woke him up. “A trap?” he asked in his deep baritone, even deeper than the Burgermeister’s.

  “Probably,” she said.

  “I’ll let Tom know. We’ll get you backup. Sit tight.”

  “Can’t,” Helene told him. “You’re a half hour away at least. We’re in the basement. One exit. If we get cornered down here, we’re done. We gotta move.”

  “Okay,” Dan said, taking the news in stride. He was a Chatter, and Chatters were trained to stay cool in a crisis. One person on the call panicking was enough. Not that Helene was panicking—not really. Not yet. “I’ll dispatch the Angels anyway. Let us know where to find you.”

  “Will do,” she said, closing the phone. “I’ve got a Super Soaker, a water pistol, and a Ritter. You two?”

  “A water pistol and a Ritter,” the Burgermeister replied.

  “Nothing,” Jillian admitted. “No training.”

  Dave handed her his water pistol. “Consider yourself trained.”

  Helene said. “I’ll go first. If we see a deader, I’ll shoot ’em, then Dave’ll snap his neck. Jillian, you bring up the rear.”

  “Okay,” the new girl said. She sounded scared.

  She should be.

  “Let’s do this,” the Burgermeister said. He wasn’t scared. Nothing scared Dave Burger, not that Helene had seen anyway.

  The stairs going up to the main floor stood empty. So did the hallway and foyer. It looked like a clear shot to the front door. They’d come in that way using a fancy, police-issue electric lock picker that Ramirez had scored for them. Not as quick as Will’s pocketknife, but it had done the job.

  Were they watching us even then? Helene wondered bitterly. Just waiting for us to come back out?

  There had to be another exit, maybe more than one. But the Corpses surely had the place surrounded. At least out front they’d be on the open street in a crowded, if sleeping neighborhood. Maybe, if the three of them could somehow wake the neighbors, the number of witnesses would give the deaders pause.