Dead City

by James Ponti

  “Seriously?” she said, shooting me an incredulous look. “How hard is it to remember to return a book?”

  “Apparently, harder than it sounds,” I responded. “Now, do you mind not passing judgment? Just know that I don’t have any library books.”

  “Well, then, what’s this?”

  She held up a medium-sized green book and turned it so that I could read the stamp along the side: “Property of MIST Library.”

  “Well, I don’t know why it was at the morgue,” I said, “but that’s the book they had. I never saw it before that scary zombie dude burst through the door and held it up in the air.”

  Natalie cracked a crooked smile as she shook her head. “Then something’s really wrong here,” she said. “Because it does not make sense that three zombies would climb out of their graves, stage an elaborate death scene, tear up the morgue, and fight to the death to get a copy of this.”

  She turned the book so that I could see the cover. And when I saw what it was, I had to agree that it didn’t make any sense.

  The book was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

  Geek Mythology

  As Natalie stood there holding the book, I tried to think of any reason why three zombies would be so desperate to get a copy of Little Women.

  “Ever read it?” she asked me.

  “Of course,” I answered. “Haven’t you?”

  She shook her head. “Never interested me.”

  “Really? Not even in fifth grade?”

  She laughed. “In fifth grade my favorite book was Emerging Principles of Nanotechnology.” (Sometimes Natalie almost makes me feel normal by comparison.)

  “Well, then, you’ve really missed out, because the book is sooooo good. It’s set in New England during the Civil War and is about four sisters who try to keep up their spirits despite hard times. They take care of their neighbors, go to parties, and put on plays for their friends and family.”

  “In other words,” she answered, “it’s the exact opposite of twenty-first-century killer zombies who live beneath Manhattan.”

  “Pretty much,” I said. “So you’ve got to wonder why they’d go through so much trouble to get a copy of a book they could pick up at any bookstore.”

  “Well, it’s not actually Little Women,” Natalie said as she opened it to the title page. “That’s just what it says on the cover. The full title is Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the Theatricals of Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth March, by Margaret Key.”

  She handed me the book, and I flipped through it. Sure enough, a writer named Margaret Key had written entire scripts based on the plays put on by the sisters in the novel.

  “Okay, so what, then?” I asked, half joking and half trying to figure it out. “The three of them want to start performing girl plays for their friends down in Dead City?”

  Just the thought of them dressing up as the sisters made me laugh out loud.

  “Not exactly Shakespeare in the Park,” she replied.

  “I can tell you, though, who would have loved this book,” I added as a happy memory danced through my head. “My mother was obsessed with Little Women. It was her all-time favorite novel. She even named my sister Beth after one of the sisters in the book.”

  I handed it back to Natalie, and she flipped through it some more.

  “I get that your mom would have liked it,” Natalie replied, “but not why Cornelius Blackwell was so desperate to get his hand on it.” She gave me a little wink and a smirk. “Notice I said hand—as in only one?”

  “I had to chop it off,” I said defensively. “It was the only way to get the book.”

  “And you’re sure this is the book you pried from the fingers of that severed hand?” she asked, holding it up by the corner as if it suddenly had cooties.

  “Positive,” I said, replaying the gory scene in my head. “And I specifically remember that he checked the cover to make sure he had the right book. This is what they were after.”

  She thought about it for a second. “Now that you say that, I remember him checking it too.”

  We sat there dumbfounded, trying to think of any reasonable explanation and coming up with exactly zero.

  “Okay, let’s forget for a minute why they wanted it,” I suggested, “and try to figure out what a book from the MIST school library was doing in the New York City morgue.”

  “Change of perspective. Good idea.”

  We mulled this over for a minute, and then Natalie made that “eureka” face she gets when she comes up with a brilliant idea.

  She flipped to the back of the book and carefully slid the library return receipt from the pocket inside the cover. It was brittle and faded, but when she held it up to the light, she could still make out the faint writing. She read it and then laughed. “I know one thing the morgue and MIST have in common.”

  “What?” I asked eagerly.

  “Apparently, you’re not the only one in the family who’s lousy at returning library books.”

  Now I realized what MIST had in common with the morgue. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said as she handed the slip to me.

  I checked the slip and could not believe my eyes. The book was last checked out nearly thirty years earlier by a MIST student named Rosemary Collins. My mother.

  “You were right when you said your mom would have loved this book. She loved it so much, she checked it out and never returned it.”

  That’s when the doorbell rang.

  “I bet that’s the boys,” Natalie said. “I texted them from the delivery truck and a couple more times when you were in the shower. You were in there for a while.”

  Sure enough, Alex and Grayson were at the door, relieved to see us healthy and whole. Before we could fill them in on our adventure, my dad popped out from the kitchen.

  “Hey, Molly, want to introduce me to your friends?”

  “Sure thing, Dad. This is Natalie, Alex, and Grayson. We’re working together on a research project for school.”

  “Nice to meet you all,” he said. “I’m making baked rigatoni for dinner, if any of you would like to join us.”

  Alex, ever the food monster, smiled gleefully. “Is it true that you were selected the best cook in the entire New York City Fire Department?”

  Dad, almost embarrassed, nodded. “I don’t know how tough the competition was, but yes.”

  “Then I, for one, would very much like to have baked rigatoni.”

  “Me too,” added Grayson.

  All eyes turned to Natalie.

  “Do you have enough for three extra people?” she asked sheepishly.

  “More than enough,” he answered with a smile. “I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  I could tell Dad was thrilled at the prospect of other kids visiting. I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m not exactly a social butterfly (let’s be honest, I’m not even a social caterpillar), and whatever friends Beth has, she tends to meet up with them away from home.

  Dad went back into the kitchen while we headed to my room. Natalie and I filled the guys in on what happened at the morgue, our escape by way of the bakery, and our utter confusion about the book. That’s when Alex caught us all by surprise by announcing, “Little Women rocks!”

  “Are you serious?” Grayson asked incredulously. “You’ve actually read it?”

  “Multiple times,” Alex answered, without a hint of sarcasm or shame. “I have three younger sisters, and I read it to each one when they were little. I even did different voices for the characters. My Jo . . . off the charts.”

  “If you know it so well, maybe you can figure out why they wanted it,” Natalie suggested as she tossed the book to him. “’Cause we sure can’t.”

  Alex opened the book to the table of contents and then flashed a smile that up until that point I had seen him use only while looking at food.

  “What a great idea,” he said as he read through the play titles. “There’s The Witch’s Curse, that’s the one
where they perform on Christmas at the start of the book, The Captive of Castile, The Greek Slave . . .”

  His voice trailed off as he continued down the list.

  “What’s wrong?” Natalie asked.

  “Well . . . some of these aren’t from the book at all.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Like this one,” he said. “Atlas and Prometheus.”

  “Now that sounds good,” Grayson said, suddenly interested in the conversation.

  “What do you mean?” asked Natalie.

  “I may not know anything about Little Women,” he answered, “but I know almost everything about Greek mythology.”

  “You sure you don’t mean geek mythology?” Alex asked with a laugh.

  “Call it what you want. I used to read myths to my little brothers at bedtime. I even did voices. My Hephaestus would put your Jo to shame.”

  We all laughed at that.

  “Why would there be a play about Atlas and Prometheus in this book,” Natalie wondered, “if it’s not in the original?”

  “Maybe there’s something in the myth,” I suggested. “What’s it about?”

  “Atlas and Prometheus were Titans, and they were brothers,” Grayson replied. “But when the Titans went to war with the Olympians, Prometheus went against his own kind.”

  “All right,” Natalie said, nodding. “Do you think that might have something to do with three Level 3 goons?”

  Grayson shook his head. “Nothing I can think of.”

  As we looked further into the book, we discovered that most of the plays were not, in fact, from Little Women. Despite this, Margaret Key had written them as though they were. Each one featured the four sisters and was written in Louisa May Alcott’s style.

  We were stumped, staring off into space and trying to figure it out, when my father entered.

  “Dinner’s almost ready—” he said, before stopping himself and laughing at the perplexed looks on our faces. “Homework’s that hard, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  “I don’t suppose you know anything special about Atlas and Prometheus,” joked Alex.

  “Just the obvious,” my dad said with a shrug, as if we all should know what he meant.

  “What’s ‘the obvious’?” I asked.

  “You really don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “What kind of New Yorkers are you?” he asked. “Atlas and Prometheus are the two giant statues at Rockefeller Center. Atlas is across the street from St. Patrick’s.”

  “And Prometheus is right in front of the ice-skating rink,” Grayson finished. “How did I miss that?”

  “Yeah, how’d you miss that?” Alex asked, with a friendly toss of a pillow.

  “There’s a big statue out in the harbor, too,” Dad joked. “Tall lady with a crown and a torch. I think her name may be Something Liberty.”

  “Very funny, Dad.”

  “Anyway,” he said, with a clap of his hands, “dinner’s in about half an hour.”

  He walked back toward the kitchen, and we turned to one another, our minds digesting this new information.

  “Do you think it’s a coincidence?” Natalie asked. “Or do you think the play actually has something to do with Rockefeller Center?”

  “Let me see the book again.” Alex picked it up and turned to the first scene of the play. He stared at it as if something might jump off the page and catch his attention. It took a moment, but something did, and a smile slowly began to form. “That’s interesting.”

  “What?”

  “Come here and look at the heading on the script,” he said. He motioned to all of us, so we crowded next to him and scrunched together. “Read the top three lines.”

  PERFORMERS: JO, MEG, AMY, BETH

  LOCALES: ZEUS’S HIDDEN APPLE ORCHARD,

  TARTARUS, THE CHAMBER OF IAPEDUS

  “So?” Natalie asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “Not that I can see,” added Grayson. “The locations are all from the classic myth.”

  Alex smiled. “Watch what happens when I cover the edges.”

  He pressed his hands down flat on the page so that they covered the edges.

  “Now read it.”

  Suddenly a new phrase was visible in the middle.

  O MEG A

  ’S HIDDEN

  CHAMBER

  “Omega’s hidden chamber?” I said, stunned.

  Alex nodded. “I don’t think this is a play. I think it’s a code.”

  Book of Secrets

  We scoured the book, looking for any possible connections to New York, zombies, or the Omegas and discovered something interesting in a Christmas play called A Present from St. Nicholas. In the story, Santa Claus brings a toy to a lonely prince named Belvedere. At first glance, it couldn’t have less to do with the undead.

  But hidden in the script, we found clues about St. Nicholas Heights, which is where City College is located, and Belvedere Castle, a European castle in the story, but also the name of a building in Central Park.

  Still, other than the fact that they are both in New York, we couldn’t come up with a connection between the college and the castle until Grayson found it online.

  “Here’s one thing they have in common,” he announced while looking at a website about historic landmarks in the city. “They were both built from the same material.”

  “Gee, let me guess,” I joked. “Bricks?”

  “No,” he answered, shaking his head. “They’re both made entirely from Manhattan schist.”

  Alex gave him a look. “Seriously?”

  Natalie was reading over Grayson’s shoulder and noticed something else. “Here’s another building made from Manhattan schist,” she said. “The Sea and Land Church, down on the Lower East Side.”

  “And . . . ?” asked Alex, unsure of where this was leading.

  “Listen to this.” She picked up the book and read one of Belvedere’s lines from the script. “ ‘Oh, Saint Nicholas, I have searched my kingdom for this toy all along the East Side, across Sea and Land.’ ”

  It began to make sense why the undead were so interested in the book.

  “What is all this?” Natalie said, flipping through the pages.

  Grayson took it from her and held it. “To maintain secrecy, virtually everything we know about the Omegas and the undead has been passed down orally,” he offered. “In fact, the only written records we know about are the Book of the Dead, which contains all the census information we collect, and the Book of Secrets.”

  “You guys told me about the Book of the Dead during training,” I said. “But nobody said a thing about the Book of Secrets.”

  “That’s because none of us really knows anything about it,” Alex explained. “We don’t even know for sure it exists. It may just be a rumor passed down from generation to generation.”

  “Supposedly,” Natalie continued, “it contains codes and clues that lead you to a place where you can find the names of all Omegas, past and present, locations of hidden records and information, and even a doomsday plan to eliminate the entire undead population in case of an emergency.”

  I looked at Grayson. “And now you think The Theatricals of Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth March is a third book that nobody knew about?”

  “No,” he answered as he held it up. “I think it is the Book of Secrets. It would be a classic Omega trick to hide it in plain sight right there in the MIST library.”

  We were all quiet for a moment as we considered the seriousness of what he was saying.

  “I think so too,” Natalie agreed. “And for some reason, your mother thought it needed to be moved out of the library, so she took it and eventually hid it in the morgue for safekeeping.”

  We all turned to Alex, who had taken the book from Grayson and was looking at its spine.

  “What do you think?” Grayson asked him.

  “I think the answer is right here in the Dewey decimal number from the library,” he said. He turned it so w
e all could read the spine.

  812.31

  KEY

  If you look in your local library, you’ll see that 812.31 is right in the heart of the drama section. But if you look at the periodic table, you’ll also see that it’s a coded message: 8 stands for oxygen (O), 12 is magnesium (MG), and 31 is gallium (GA). All strung together it reads:

  OMGGA

  KEY

  “Omega key,” Alex said. “The key to all the Omega codes and secrets. I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s inside here.”

  “Then we need to stop looking right now,” Natalie said, taking charge again. “Whatever this is, we’re not supposed to know about it. Grayson, when you get home tonight, send an emergency message to the Prime Omega. The Prime-O will tell us what to do.”

  Before she could say anything else, Dad called, “Dinner!” Further planning would have to wait.

  Dinner was great. As expected, Dad’s rigatoni was a huge hit. Less expected, Beth was actually nice to all my friends. Of course, that may have been because she thought Alex was cute. Then, about halfway through the meal, there was a knock on the door.

  “Another guest?” Dad laughed as he got up to answer it. “Suddenly, we have the most popular apartment in the building.”

  “Word must have gotten out about your rigatoni,” Alex mumbled, his mouth full of pasta.

  At first I was surprised to see Dr. Hidalgo, but then it kind of made sense. I’d begun to suspect that in addition to being friends and coworkers, Dr. H and my mother had been Omegas together when they were at MIST. This kind of confirmed it. He may have given my dad some excuse about being in the neighborhood and wanting to say hello, but I knew he was there to make sure Natalie and I were all right.

  “Alex, Grayson,” I said, handling the introductions, “this is Dr. Hidalgo. Natalie and I interned for him down at the morgue. Well, technically, Natalie interned and I was just hanging around . . . you know . . . because I’m weird.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Nice to meet you both,” he said, shaking their hands. Then he turned to me and Nat. “And very nice to see you two looking so well.”