The Undertakers: End of the World

by Ty Drago

  “Time travel,” I guessed.

  He nodded.

  “Except it wasn’t so radical,” Steve explained. “Tom and I used to talk about the possibility … in hypothetical terms. After all, we both suspected that you’d done it.” He nodded to William—and then, with an oddly amused look on his face, to me. “Or, more precisely, it had been done to you … though we didn’t understand exactly how or who was behind it. But I’d been playing with this idea of using the Anchor Slivers to power a device that could punch a hole between the present and the past. I’d done the math and I was confident I could make it happen. I’d even worked out how to get a lock on a specific person at a specific point in history … and monitor them remotely through the Rift Projector.”

  “Amy once transported me, gurney and all, to the top of City Hall Tower,” I said.

  “I recall that,” the professor replied. “The temporal clean rooms at CHOP are equipped with holotechnology. We often use it … or used to use it … to project ‘live’ images captured by the Rift Projector. What you saw that day was a hologram, rather like an instant replay of events that had already happened. Amy wanted to prove to you that your mother was okay.”

  I remembered how, at the time, no one on the Observation Deck had been able to see or hear me. It had been like watching a 3D movie.

  “The technique has been very useful,” Steve went on. “It allowed us to pick and choose exactly the right times for Amy to step through the temporal doorway and collect you. We used one of Emily’s inventions … something called a Consciousness Wand … to put you to sleep so that you wouldn’t remember moving through the Rift. It induces instant, safe sleep.” He offered my big little sister a smile. “Quite brilliant.”

  She actually blushed a little.

  “White light,” I said. “It would fill my head and then I’d be somewhere else.”

  He nodded. “That’s how it works.”

  “You guys had it all down to a science,” I remarked, maybe a little bitterly.

  “We did what needed doing,” Maxi Me said without rancor. “That’s pretty much our motto around here. But let’s get back to the real topic, okay?”

  It was Emily who picked up the thread. “After the dead rose and everything fell apart, Tom’s letter suggested that Steve should build the first Rift Projector. With it, we would send someone back in time … he suggested me, if you can believe that … to warn the Undertakers about the coming second war.”

  “What good would that do?” I asked. “Or … would that have done, I guess.”

  Time travel really fouls up your verb tenses.

  “His hope was that, with enough forewarning, humanity could institute a policy of destroying all cadavers. Cremation instead of burial. By doing that, we’d minimize the number of bodies that the Corpses could inhabit when they eventually invaded, making the war more … manageable.”‘

  I looked at them all. “So … Emily was supposed to go back to my time and, alone, try to convince the whole world to stop burying its dead?”

  “A long shot,” Emily admitted. “And, frankly, not one of Tom’s most practical ideas. But, to be fair, he’d just lost his entire family.”

  His whole family …

  “Where’s Sharyn?” I asked suddenly.

  No one replied.

  “Well? You’ve told me what happened to Jill and their kids. What about Tom’s sister? Is she alive?”

  William said, “We can’t answer that one. I’m sorry.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because … of a promise.”

  “A promise?” I demanded. “To who?”

  He just shook his head.

  I let a few long seconds pass, hoping someone would crack. No one did.

  I groaned and exclaimed, “Whatever!”

  Emily cleared her throat. “Um … so then Will, my Will … this Will …” She pointed at Maxi Me, “came up with a more workable plan.”

  William protested. “It was a group effort!”

  Yeah, that’s what I always say when people credit me with stuff, too.

  “Lemme guess,” I suggested, facing him. “You suddenly remembered Amy’s visits when you were my age.”

  He nodded. “I did. And so I sat everyone down, all the surviving Undertakers. We met upstairs, on the twenty-first floor, what would eventually become Control. And we talked. We talked about the war, and about time travel, and about Amy’s visits to me. And the more we talked, the more it became clear that … somehow … time travel had played a part in winning the First Corpse War. As children, we hadn’t known it, of course. Not for sure. But things had happened that could only have happened with future help.

  “Except now, we were the future help. We had to make sure that those things happened again, exactly the way they were supposed to. It became our version, admittedly a more complicated version, of Tom’s suggestion about warning the past.”

  I exclaimed, “Except Amy didn’t warn me! In fact, she went outta her way to not tell me anything about the future, not even that it was the future that she came from. I ended up figuring that out for myself … along with who she was!”

  Steve said, “Time is a river.”

  We all looked at him.

  “Huh?” I asked.

  He straightened and repeated. “Time is a bit like a river. It possesses a very strong, very steady current that’s hard to affect. Sending one person back to your time with dire warnings of a bleak future would be like dropping a stone into the river. A small stone makes a small splash. A big stone makes a bigger splash. But, ultimately, the ripples subside and the river flows along the same path as before. There’s no lasting change.”

  I considered that. “Okay. I get it. So Tom’s idea of sending Emily back wasn’t a … big enough stone.”

  The professor nodded. “We needed something surer, something that would alter the course of time’s river permanently.”

  Maxi Me said, “Everyone knew about the strange visitations I’d received as a child, but in my case they ended that day on the Schuylkill River, when Helene’s little sister and I nearly drowned.”

  I considered asking about Julie Boettcher—but decided against it. I figured I knew what the answer would be. Julie had been a brave girl. If she was still alive, she’d be here.

  So instead, I said to William, “But you must already have known Amy was the angel in the white room. I mean, I did … and you and I have the same memories, right?”

  “Right,” he replied. “But, be honest: Did you know it was Amy. Or did you just suspect it … up until the moment she appeared to you this last time and confirmed it for you?”

  “Suspected,” I admitted.

  “Me, too. And, after a while, I forgot about the whole thing. The war was over. It didn’t matter. Amy went home and I didn’t see her again. Decades passed. For the most part, the Undertakers scattered. And then the Second Corpse War started and those of us who were left alive gathered together again and … well, it made for a bizarre reunion.”

  “At this reunion, you saw Amy again,” I guessed.

  He laughed at the memory. “Yeah, and for the first time in almost thirty years. It was like getting slapped in the face! Here was my ‘angel,’ large as life. I think it was, right then, that the idea came into my head.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What idea?”

  “Project Reboot,” Steve replied.

  “That’s what we call it,” Emily explained. “Sending Amy back in time to visit you at pivotal moments during the First Corpse War was Phase Two.”

  “Phase Two,” I echoed. “What was Phase One?”

  In way of an answer, Steve went to a small refrigerator—like the kind you find in hotel rooms—that stood atop a nearby table. From it, he took a vial of clear liquid. “This was Phase One.”

  He handed me the vial. It was corked and unmarked. “What is it?” I asked.

  It was William who replied. “It’s the S
ight.”

  “What?”

  “What we call ‘Eyes’ or the ‘Sight’ is really a gene,” Steve explained. “Hereditary and pretty rare. It was finally identified about ten years ago, more as an academic curiosity than anything else. After all, at the time we no longer needed it.

  “It’s a gene associated with puberty. It activates at age ten or eleven, sometimes later in boys than in girls. Then it shuts off, for good, somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two years old.”

  I chewed on this. “Then I guess it’s a good thing that we won when we did,” I said. “Tom and Sharyn were getting close to eighteen.”

  “True,” the professor agreed.

  “But that still doesn’t tell me what’s in the vial,” I said.

  “Technically, it’s a virus,” the professor explained. “But not like the flu or any such thing. It’s a virus that activates that specific gene and leaves it active, permanently, regardless of the subject’s age and without doing any other harm.”

  “So … this stuff’ll let anyone See Corpses?”

  “Yes.”

  “But … why?”

  Then the penny dropped. I looked sharply at Maxi Me. “Dad.”

  “Dad,” William replied flatly.

  “He was the exception,” Emily said. “The only adult who ever had the Sight. That’s because it was given to him. Someone went back in time and injected him with the virus while he was asleep.”

  “Why?” I asked again.

  “Because we remembered him having it,” Maxi Me replied. “We had to preserve the timeline. The only way to be sure that the first war would be won was to make certain that everything happened exactly the way it happened for us.”

  “Who did it?” I asked.

  They didn’t reply.

  “Injecting him with that stuff eventually got him killed,” I said, feeling a rush of anger. “Who went back in time and did it?”

  In a small voice, Emily said, “I did.”

  I glared at her.

  She looked back at me and, in her guilt, I recognized the shy little girl she’d once been. Almost immediately, my anger faded.

  It couldn’t have been easy for her to do that.

  “Okay,” I said with a sigh. “And afterwards? You said Amy’s visits were Phase Two?”

  William answered. “Yes. I already knew exactly when Amy needed to appear and what she needed to tell you. But I also knew we had to be cautious. We couldn’t risk a mistake that might change history. So everything Amy said to you was carefully scripted.”

  “And the ‘one question’ thing?” I asked. “A couple of times, I got the feeling that she knew what I was going to ask before I asked it.”

  “She did,” William replied. “Because I asked the same question when it happened to me … and told her to expect it.”

  That made sense.

  Sort of.

  But then I remarked, “Except there were times when I surprised her, or when she slipped and said something she hadn’t meant to say.”

  “Nobody’s perfect,” remarked Emily.

  “But didn’t those mistakes risk the future?”

  “Tiny stones dropped into the river of time,” Steve replied. “In the end, they had no real effect.”

  “Thank God,” Emily added.

  “But I don’t understand!” I said to William. “If you sent Amy back in time to visit me, who sent her back in time to visit you?”

  It was Steve who replied. “You did, of course.”

  “Me?”

  “You. Him. Will Ritter. Future and past, connected.”

  Emily put a hand on my shoulder. “Trust me, don’t think too hard about it. It’ll make your head hurt.”

  “Uh huh,” I muttered. Then I thought of something else and glared at Maxi Me. “Dave died at Fort Mifflin!”

  My older self visibly paled. Whenever I pale, my freckles stand out. It was the same for him. No big surprise, I supposed.

  “I know,” he replied. “I was there.”

  “You could have saved him! You could have had Amy warn me!”

  “No … I couldn’t have.”

  Emily said, “What happened to the Burgermeister was horrible. But if he hadn’t done what he did, the first war would’ve been lost. You know that.”

  “Yeah,” I told her. “But maybe—”

  “Maybe if we’d warned you in advance, you could have come up with a way to save him and still close the Rift,” she replied. “Or, then again, maybe not. And Haven and everyone in it would have died and the Corpses would have destroyed the world.”

  “We couldn’t take the chance,” William said, looking actually sick about it. “The decision not to warn you was hard, very hard. Believe me, I know exactly what you’re feeling. But history had to be preserved. The Undertakers had to win.”

  I felt suddenly as sick as Maxi Me looked. But, confusing as it seemed to be, it wasn’t all this time travel talk that was getting to me. Or, at least, not just that.

  In my memory, I kept hearing the Burgermeister’s last words, spoken through a heavy steel door moments before he pulled the wires from the Corpses’ Anchor Shard, closing the Rift and dying in the process.

  “It was an honor serving with you.”

  I refused to let my eyes well up.

  Emily said carefully, “But once the war was won, the time came to move onto Phase Three.”

  “Phase Three,” I repeated dully.

  She nodded. “Phase Three was … is … to bring you here and show you the future.” Her voice broke a little. “Show you this … horror. So that you can go back to your own time with the power to prevent it.”

  “Prevent it? How am I supposed to do that?”

  It was William who answered. “We’re going to give you a boulder, to use Steve’s ‘river’ analogy. And, with it, you’re going to forever alter the flow of time’s river.”

  “What ‘boulder?’” I asked, though I thought maybe I knew.

  And I was right. “Corpse Helene’s Anchor Shard,” he replied. “Tonight, we’re going to go get it.”

  Sure. Piece of cake.

  “Okay …” I said warily. I didn’t like where this was going. “And once I’m back to my own time with this Anchor Shard from the future. What then?”

  Maxi Me put his hands on my shoulders. It was weird.

  He replied, “We need you to use it to reboot the world … to make sure that the Second Corpse War, all of this, never happens.”

  “How?” I asked. “How on Earth am I supposed to do that?”

  “Not on Earth,” my older self told me. “We need you to use the Anchor Shard to open a Rift to the Malum homeworld, go there, and take away their ability to threaten another race ever again.”

  Emily added, “By destroying the Eternity Stone.”

  Chapter 12

  Project Reboot

  It was about this time that Maxi Me’s radio chirped.

  As the three of us watched, he snatched it from his belt and spoke into it. Then he listened. And listened. Finally, his face going pale again, he lowered the radio and said in a rock-steady voice, “That was Control. We’ve lost contact with the Paris and Los Angeles survivors.”

  “Lost contact?” Emily asked.

  “They’ve … been overrun by deaders.”

  We all fell silent. Apparently, Corpse Helene was already making good on her threat.

  The new chief took a deep breath and let it out in a long slow sigh. “Well,” he said at last. “We knew this day would come. Control will keep monitoring the other survivor sites. No point telling the refugees about any of this. That’ll only lead to panic. If today really is it, then our only priority is to make sure Project Reboot goes into effect before the final attack comes.”

  Everyone nodded their agreement.

  Steve cleared his throat and said, “Shouldn’t we—”

  “Yes,” William replied. “Go ahead. Tell
Will what he has to know.”

  So, over the next hour, Professor Steven Moscova lectured to his classroom of one.

  He described something that he called the “Ether,” the stuff between dimensions. He told me things about the Malum that I never would have guessed—or even imagined. He explained to me how the Eternity Stone and the Anchor Shards were connected to each other, and how they could be used to create Rifts, and much more.

  Trust me when I say that the dude talked. He talked a lot.

  And by the end of it, I wanted to crawl into a hole and hide.

  Would you believe me if I said it was too much, just too damned much? These desperate people, all that remained of the human race, were asking me to do something completely crazy and utterly suicidal. Oh, Steve assured me that I could survive it, that there would be an “escape window.” But that felt like smoke and mirrors.

  My odds of living past this final—mission—felt like next to nil.

  I was thirteen years old. Okay, maybe fourteen.

  Was I really ready to trade my life to save the world?

  But I said none of this. In fact, I said pretty much nothing at all. I just let the professor talk. I let the others watch me while he talked. And all through it, I stood there, listening and trying to stay sane.

  Then, just before sunset, the lecture ended.

  “Any questions?” the professor asked.

  I must have stared at him for—like—a half-minute. The stuff he’d told me was so totally out there, so completely beyond my comfort zone, that I still couldn’t quite process it. Suddenly, I knew more about the Corpses, the Malum, than I ever had before. Way more.

  Do you have any idea what it’s like to have all your questions answered, questions that you’ve worried and sweated over for longer than you can really remember anymore? To have them addressed, completely and in detail, one by one, like they were items on a to-do list?

  You’d think it would be satisfying. And it is, sort of.

  But it’s also weirdly unsettling.

  Still, I did have one question. Well, a bunch of questions that were all really just one.

  “How can you know all this?” I asked him. “You can’t have gone over there yourself. So how can you know so much about the Malum homeworld? How can you know for sure that we’ll be able to breathe, or how the gravity works, or what the Eternity Stone looks like?”