The Undertakers

by Ty Drago

  I shook my head

  Tom pointed. “Those dudes over there are cutting wood for building materials. We’re trying to break this place down into smaller sections a little bit at a time. It’s a privacy thing. Now, over there—those dudes are upgrading our wiring. We got piles of electronics already, with more getting hooked up all the time. But we keep popping fuses. And those dudes—we call them the Hackers and the Chatters. The Hackers run all our computer jobs, anything from legit stuff to breaking into secure systems. The Chatters—now, they’re the communication pros. They keep us linked with the Undertakers out in the field.”

  “And all the Undertakers are kids?” I asked.

  Tom nodded.

  “Because they’re the only ones who can See the Corpses?”

  “That sorta is the main qualification for membership.”

  “But my dad could See them.”

  Another nod. “Yeah, but he’s the only adult who ever could. We don’t know why. The rules about Seeing are pretty mysterious, although it looks like it runs in families. If one kid in a family gets the Sight, odds are good that the others’ll get it too, sooner or later. Steve thinks it’s a gene.”

  I knew a little something about heredity from science class. “So you think I inherited the Sight from my dad?”

  “It’s one theory.”

  “Then why’d I only start Seeing them today?”

  “Girls start Seeing around eleven,” Tom explained. “Boys around twelve. Might have something to do with the start of puberty. Nobody knows for sure—yet. But we’re working on it. The real worry is that the Corpses are working on it too.”

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  Tom smiled thinly. “You think it’s a coincidence that you ran into so many of them this morning? That you bumped into the woman in the Laundromat that Sharyn decapitated? Doesn’t it kind of seem like they’re everywhere around you?”

  I blinked. “I guess so…”

  “The Corpses have been watching you.”

  A chill raced down my spine. “What for?”

  “Because they knew your dad could See them—was, in fact, the only known adult who ever could—and they wanted to know if you’d start Seeing them too. So they set things up to stay close to you, just waiting for today to come along.”

  “Oh,” I replied. “Then I guess I’m lucky that Helene was there.”

  Tom’s smile widened. “That wasn’t luck either. I sent her there, Will. We knew you’d turned twelve, and we figured that you’d probably get the Sight sometime in the new school year. So Helene went into your school undercover, with orders to keep an eye on you. If you rolled in one day with the Sight, she was supposed to bust you both out of there fast and bring you to us. And she did one serious job of it too!”

  “Yeah, she did,” I admitted. “So she was like my—bodyguard?”

  “Something like that. We’ve got Undertakers in every middle school in town, all looking for kids like you.”

  “Schoolers,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “And how long have you all been doing this?” I asked.

  “About three years.”

  “Have you always been in charge?”

  “Nope. Up front, your dad was the man. I kind of took over after he got—after he died.”

  “My dad died more than two years ago.”

  “I know,” he replied.

  “So for a year before that, he was, like, a general, fighting against the Corpses?”

  “Well, yeah,” Tom said. “But that ain’t the way it started.”

  “Huh?”

  “Hang on. I was holding off on showing you this, but all of a sudden, now feels like the right time.” Putting an arm around my shoulders, he led me toward one of the small plywood “rooms” that lined the walls of Haven. As we neared it, the Chief stepped aside and motioned for me to go in first.

  Feeling bewildered, I did—and gasped.

  The room, like the dorms, had no ceiling, just eight-foot walls enclosing a single army cot, a small footlocker, a desk, and a wall of pictures—

  —all of my father.

  I suddenly felt light-headed. Slowly, as if in a dream, I examined each of the photos, trying to wrap my mind around what I was seeing.

  In one, Karl Ritter was standing in the Big Room, which looked much emptier than it did now. He had his arms around a somewhat younger-looking Tom and Sharyn. All three were smiling.

  “We took that the day he got us this place,” Tom said wistfully, coming to stand at my shoulder. He towered over me. “Back then it was just us three. The camera was on a timer, stuck up on top of a stack of boxes.”

  How happy my dad looked! I felt a sudden, sharp stab of jealousy. This had been my father, not theirs, and yet these strangers had claimed a portion of Karl Ritter’s time that he might otherwise have spent with his family.

  With me.

  “Sharyn told me that you first met him after the two of you robbed some house,” I said.

  Tom laughed. “Yeah. We’d boosted the place clean, and we were slipping out the back when he just kind of whistled. It’s probably the only time in my life I ever heard Sharyn scream. We turned around, and there he was—this redheaded plainclothes cop, leaning on a lamppost and wearing this funny smirk. He didn’t pull his gun or nothing.”

  “Did he arrest you?”

  “He played it that way up front. Cuffed us. Stuck us in the back of his car. I was already thinking what kind of lawyer we could get. By then we’d been ripping off rich houses for a couple of years, and we’d saved up some dough. So I figured we could afford somebody good. Thing is, all we really had was maybe two grand, and that was buried in a mayonnaise jar under an overpass near Callowhill Street. When you’re looking to hire top legal muscle, two grand don’t even buy them lunch!”

  He shook his head, lost in the memory.

  “If your old man had played it straight, Sharyn and me’d still be in a juvie lockup someplace, waiting to turn eighteen. ’Stead he talked to us—the first time anybody’d done that in longer than we could remember. And not social worker crap about ‘the challenges of orphanhood’ neither. We’d had that stuff shoved down our throats back in the fosters. Nope, Karl talked about brains and talent and the guts it took to do what we did and pull it off for so long.” Another laugh. “At first Sharyn and me figured that he might be after a cut of the action!”

  “What did he want?” I asked.

  “For us to use our talents in a better way. He said he had connections with the city government—that he could hook us up with a gig that’d challenge our skills, keep us in green, and be legit.”

  “And you said yes?”

  “Not right off. We’d been on the streets for years by then. We had what you’d call trust issues. But when he didn’t dime us out and instead just kept tabs on us and talked with us every chance he got—” Tom shrugged. “After a while we started seeing that he was on the level. And once we saw that, we finally understood just how sweet a thing he was offering us.”

  Another of the photos showed my dad wearing his police uniform—something he rarely did once he’d made detective. In this shot he was surrounded by a half-dozen kids, all standing at attention and saluting the camera. Tom said, “That one got took about a week before he died. By then we’d been fighting the Corpses for a while, and this was a rare chance to chill. Burt Moscova—that’s him there in the back—wanted to see Karl in his old cop outfit. And your old man did it, just that once, just for us.”

  I frowned at the photo, hurt, but not quite sure why. I could remember a time when I hadn’t wanted to share Dad with my new baby sister! The idea of him spending so much time in the company of these thieves when his son—his own son!—had been waiting at home…

  “You okay?” Tom asked.

  “What is this place?” I asked, trying to hide my feelings.

  He was my dad!

  “Ain’t you guessed?”

  I shook my head, although in t
ruth I had.

  Tom said, “This was Karl’s office after we opened this place.”

  His office. His secret office in his secret clubhouse where he did his secret work.

  “Uh-huh,” I said sourly. “Okay, so then what was his work? What was Haven? Before the Corpses showed up, I mean.”

  “A shelter for runaways. We’d get them here, feed them, give them a safe place to sleep, try to hook them up with some counseling. Back then we called it Haven House. Sharyn and me kept the place clean, running, and organized. Officially, we were ‘helping Karl out.’ But the truth is that he had you and your mom and your sister, so most of the time, it was just the two of us here alone.”

  Hearing that made me feel a little better. Maybe our family had been a priority in my father’s life after all.

  A thought struck me. “Tom, did my dad own this whole building?”

  The Chief shook his head. “Nope. City owned it. Still does. Your dad set things up for us to lease it—for charity purposes. It’s a little complicated. Let’s just say your old man knew how to work the system.”

  “But how do you pay for everything? I mean…you’ve got to have money, right? Who buys the food and the blankets and the computers—”

  “—and the telephone system, the utilities, the annual lease payments on the building,” Tom finished for me. “All that?”

  “Yeah.”

  He gazed at the pictures of Karl Ritter. “About six months before he died but long after we’d dropped the charity stuff and started fighting Corpses full time, your dad took out this life insurance policy on himself—a big one. They ain’t easy to get when you’re a cop, leastwise outside the department. And he couldn’t do it the usual way because he couldn’t risk anybody finding out about us. So he kept it on the sly, and it cost a load of cash, but he did it. Then later, after he got…well…just when we figured we’d have to give up the war, this check rolls in.” He looked me in the eye. “A quarter-million dollars.”

  I stared stupidly at him—the holy crap factor at work again.

  Tom continued, “Yeah, we couldn’t believe it either. It was all rigged to go into this fancy trust that only Sharyn or me could hit for money. And owing to some serious financial management, the Undertakers have been getting by just fine on that dough ever since.”

  I understood maybe half of this—but it seemed clear enough that my father had believed in this cause, believed with all his heart. And that he’d kept it a secret—at least from me.

  “Does my mom know about this place?”

  “She used to, back when it was just a shelter,” Tom replied. “Then later, after the Corpses showed up, Karl figured that he had best protect her. So he told her the shelter’d been closed down. After that all our business was done on the sly.”

  “Even from her?”

  “Especially from her,” said Tom. “Since he’s been gone, we’ve kept doing what he taught us. Karl rigged it with City Hall so we could renew our lease every year without no trouble and with no questions asked. We just fill out the right forms and pay the right fees.”

  “But the signs outside!” Will protested. “This building is condemned.”

  The older boy shook his head. “We made those signs, man. Helps keep folks from sniffing around. Even the street people pretty much stay clear of us these days. Besides, we got ways of handling trespassers.

  “Will, the thing you need to get is that everything the Undertakers are…is because of your father. He’s our founder and our inspiration. He may only have fought in this war for a year, but in that year he taught us what we needed to know to keep on fighting it without him.”

  I looked from the photos to Tom and back again.

  My dad had this whole part of his life that I never knew about.

  Then another thought struck me.

  But he must have known that—someday—I’d find out.

  Maybe he even counted on it.

  Without even knowing I was going to, I asked, “How’d he die?”

  Tom was silent for maybe half a minute. “What’d they tell you?”

  I would never forget the day: the policemen who came to our house; their somber faces; the way Mom had cried. “They said he’d been sent to investigate a break-in in North Philly, that something had gone wrong, that he’d been stabbed and found dead at the scene.” All that had been two years ago, and the pain still felt sharp and fresh, as if it had happened just yesterday. Suddenly and against all my best efforts, familiar tears stung my eyes.

  Tom nodded grimly. “Like I said, your dad fought with us for a year after the Corpses showed up. He wrote most of the rules and regs that we still follow. He showed us what to do and how to think so we could survive. But more’n that, he got involved. When we found a Seer in a jam, he led us on the rescue, sometimes going head to head against the Corpses himself.

  “As near as we figure, one of them must have ID’ed him. He was set up that night, Will. There wasn’t no burglar in that North Philly shop. It was a Corpse—maybe more’n one. They iced your old man and rigged it to look like some random street killing.”

  I stared at him. “How do you know that?”

  Tom replied, “Because he called us before he died.”

  “Called you?”

  “We got special wrist radios that we use. Maybe you’ve seen them. Well, after that Corpse shivved him and left him for dead, he somehow found the strength to call us and spill what went down and where he was. Sharyn and I got there as fast as we could, but by then the cops had already surrounded the dump. We couldn’t do nothing but watch from an alley as they carried him out on that stretcher with a sheet over his face.” He looked down at me. “I’m really sorry, bro.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, although it wasn’t.

  “No, it ain’t. Now all we can do is honor what he was. Your dad changed everything for my sister and me. He took a couple of juvie felons and turned us first into reformers and then into soldiers. That’s why we set up this room for him. It’s a shrine—a memorial. We loved him, Will. I guess I just wanted you to know that. That’s why I brought you in here.”

  I looked at the pictures and thought about what Tom had said. A lot of this still felt like a betrayal, although I was starting to get why my father had kept it secret. Since coming here, everyone had been badgering me about how important it was that I not go home, that doing so would put Mom and Emily in danger. For the first time, I understood that those were actually my dad’s words being passed down to me through the mouths of strangers. I began to see the truth in them.

  It broke my heart.

  “I don’t want to stay here, Tom,” I whispered.

  “I know it.”

  “But I have to…don’t I?”

  “No, bro. You don’t. You can bail anytime you want. Nobody’ll come after you a second time, I promise.”

  “But doing that’ll probably put Haven in danger, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And my mother and sister too?”

  “Yeah.” Again that strong arm settled around my shoulders. My dad used to hold me that way. Since his death, I couldn’t remember anyone else doing it.

  “Thing is,” Tom said, “we don’t think the Corpses know why some kids can See them when everyone else can’t—but we know it’s got them freaked. You, me, Sharyn, Helene—all the Undertakers—we’re the flies in the ointment, the bugs in the system, the ghosts in the machine. Get it? They can’t afford to let us keep breathing. So when they find kids with the Sight, they kill them.”

  “How many have died?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Ain’t no way of knowing that. Not every boy or girl who suddenly starts Seeing Corpses ends up an Undertaker. Most of them end up dead.

  “But ruthless as they are, the Corpses ain’t stupid. They don’t kill for killing’s sake or folks would start asking questions. That’s why they didn’t grab you or ice you right off. They waited to see if you’d get the Sight—waited til you became a danger to th
em. Once that happened, they tried to snatch you, probably to arrange one of their little ‘accidents.’ It’s the same with your family. So long as the Corpses got no reason to think they know something they shouldn’t, your mom and little sis are safe.”

  I put my face in my hands. “I can’t go home.”

  “Nope.”

  I looked up at him. “Can I stay here?”

  Tom actually laughed a little. “Will, that ain’t never even been a question.”

  “But what can I do here? I don’t know anything about wars! I can’t fight, and I sure can’t build walls or rewire things. What good would I be?”

  “We’ll teach you the skills you need,” Tom assured me. “And for whatever its worth, I believe in you. You’re Karl Ritter’s only son, and that’s saying something in my book. Be an Undertaker, bro. Help us fight the Corpses. In return we’ll help you get home someday.”

  With that he stepped back and held out his hand.

  I looked at it, somehow understanding that this wasn’t just a Hi, how are you? handshake. This one meant something. This one was binding.

  After a moment’s thought, I shook it.

  CHAPTER 13

  First Stop

  When I awoke after my first fitful night as an Undertaker, my pillow was damp with tears. Most of the other kids were already awake and gone from the dorm. Stiffly I followed them.

  Breakfast consisted of cold cereal, milk, and juice. It made me long for Mom’s cooking. Today was Thursday. My mother had the afternoon shift, which meant she’d be home making pancakes, this time just for Emily.

  Except, of course, she wouldn’t. She’d be out looking for me.

  I wondered if she’d slept as badly as I had.

  The idea made me sick to my stomach.

  Overall the Haven dining experience was a lot like lunchtime at school. Everyone sat with their friends, leaving me to pick a lonely spot near the end of one of the long tables. There I sat, trying to dredge up some interest in corn flakes and a bruised apple, when Sharyn plopped down across from me.

  “Mornin’, Red! You ready to start your training today?”