The Undertakers: End of the World

by Ty Drago

  I didn’t know what it was, or even how I knew. But the feeling was solid. If Sharyn was in there, then why didn’t she answer? Could her condition be that bad? And if it was, then why wasn’t she in the Infirmary? And if she wasn’t behind the door, then where was she? This Haven wasn’t all that big a place. You’d think I’d have run into her before now.

  Just walk away.

  Too late.

  And it was. The long prongs of my lock pick were already in the keyhole, humming as they did their business. The click was nearly immediate.

  Suddenly, and almost without any conscious decision on my part—almost—the knob turned in my hand and the door swung open.

  The room within was small, lit by a single electric lantern. There was a bed—not a cot but a genuine bed, with sheets and everything. Beside it stood a small table loaded up with what looked like pill bottles.

  Across the room, an old woman sat in an antique rocking chair. Her gray hair was long and kinky, her shoulders slumped and her head lowered, her face hidden in shadow.

  I gave the rest of the room a cursory look. No Amy. Then I returned my attention to the figure in the chair.

  “Sharyn?” I asked, my voice a croak.

  The head came up. A voice every bit as croaky as my own said, “Who’s that?”

  I took a step forward. My legs felt stiff. I took another step.

  It can’t be her. It can’t be!

  I came around the chair and knelt beside it.

  The woman’s head turned toward me. To my horror, I saw that her eyes were gone. Not merely blinded, but entirely missing—just jagged holes in her face, long since scarred over.

  I had to stifle a gasp.

  The skin around those empty sockets was ashen, and sweat burned on her forehead. She wore a simple nightdress, one that the Sharyn Jefferson I knew would have hated.

  “Who are you?” she asked, wariness in her voice.

  “It’s me,” I said. Then, realizing what an utterly ridiculous thing this was to say, I swallowed dryly and tried again. “It’s Will. Will Ritter.”

  She raised one hand and brushed the air with it, as if dismissing what I’d told her. Her long fingers were little more than skin over bone, her arms withered to the point of being broomsticks. Gone was any trace of the lean muscle that used to be there. “I know Will Ritter’s voice. You ain’t him. Hold still. Let me have a look for myself.”

  She twisted around in the rocker and slowly reached up with both hands. Cool fingers touched my face, moving over my forehead and nose, down along my cheeks. They brushed across my lips and tested the shape of my chin. Then, frowning, she moved them up to the top of my head, running her fingers through my hair.

  She sat back, her mouth hanging open.

  I knelt there, waiting.

  “Little bro?” she asked.

  My eyes welled up. “It’s me, Boss.”

  “Damn,” she muttered. “I told ‘em not to let you see me. I knew you was comin’. Will … the chief … he told me so. But I begged him not to tell you ‘bout me.”

  “He didn’t,” I whispered. “I kinda came on my own.”

  Her face crumpled a little. “‘Course you did,” she said. “Wouldn’t be you if you didn’t. Should’ve figured on that. But still, I didn’t want you seein’ me … not like this.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “You look great.”

  For a second, her face seemed to crumple further. Then, a bit to my surprise, she grinned. And you know what? She still had the same old Sharyn grin. “Always were full o’ crap,” she said.

  Then, moving with surprising swiftness, she pulled me into her arms. Most of her strength may have left her, but her fierceness remained, hidden away inside this withered body. She couldn’t be fifty years old yet, but she looked like she was eighty—a shell of a woman, the broken survivor of something. And I had the terrible feeling that blindness had only been a part of it.

  “Little bro,” she said again, her voice catching. “How long you been here?”

  So I told her my story. She listened carefully, without interruption. When I’d finished, she took my hand in both of hers. “Well, look who’s travellin’ through time and space like it ain’t nothin’!” She chuckled. “So, the chief’s off to get the Anchor Shard so you can rewrite history, huh? He clued me in on the plan. Told me what he was gonna do and how he was gonna do it. Figure it had to be the craziest thing I ever heard. Then again, he’s Will Ritter. And I learned a long time ago what that means.”

  I hate it when people say stuff like that.

  I started to protest, but she cut me off. “Can’t say I’d miss the last couple of years. Been cooped up in here for most of it.” She blew out a long sigh, one filled with loss and regret. “Guess you heard Tom got killed.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They showed me his statue, down in the courtyard.”

  She nodded. “Wanna hear somethin’ funny? That statue ain’t got nothing to do with the Corpses, or even the Undertakers. Tom got himself elected to the U.S. Senate and took point on this big international push that ended all that bad stuff in the Middle East. Can you believe that? Turned him into an even bigger hero than he was already. Got the Nobel Peace Prize for it … and a statue in his home town.

  “He was alive and well when they did it, too. They don’t usually put up statues of living folk … ‘less they’re sports heroes or something like that. But they did for my brother. And he hated it. Wanted nothin’ to do with it. Wouldn’t even come to the unveiling ceremony. Told everybody he was sick, which was crap. Tom didn’t tell too many lies in his life, but that was one of ‘em. He just couldn’t bear all the …” She struggled for the word.

  “Attention?” I said.

  “Fuss,” she said. “Same thing. But I went. Oh, yeah. Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away. Jill went, too. She brought the kids. Mayor made a speech. Everybody cheered. After that, me and Jill took the kids for ice cream. That was a good day. Jill rocked. I know I didn’t always think so. But she did. God, how I miss ‘em all.”

  “Sharyn?”

  “Yeah, little bro?”

  I asked carefully, “What happened to you?”

  Her smile vanished and her hands fell limply into her lap. “One night pretty early in the war, a small army of Corpses hit Tom’s place. They got Jill and the kids. My brother and me met up a few hours later, right down on Market Street. But deaders were everywhere, thousands of ‘em. We ended up cornered, right outside Macy’s. They were ten-to-one against us, but my bro and me held our ground. Then, when he saw it was hopeless, he told me he wouldn’t let ‘em have his body. So he took this shotgun he’d been usin’ and …” Her voice grew thin, frighteningly so. “An awful thing. But maybe I should’ve done it, too. Looking back, I sometimes wish I had. But I just kept swingin’ Vader, figurin’ I’d get taken down soon enough.

  “Except they didn’t kill me. No, their boss … some kinda Corpse princess … said she wanted to send a message. So they … hurt me.”

  My God …

  “They took my eyes. Then they beat me. Nothin’ works right anymore. Can’t walk. Can’t feed myself. Amy comes and spends time with me. She helps me do … what needs doin’. Will, too. He’s chief now, you know.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Guess that means you’re chief!” She shook her head. “Ain’t that something?” she said again. “Sometimes he brings a wheelchair with him when he visits and takes me outta here. Once, on a warm day, we even went up to the Observation Deck. That rocked.”

  She smiled sadly.

  “So yeah, little bro,” she said. “I’d be totally cool with it if you’d erase this miserable world and start over.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  Sharyn went quiet for a half-minute, so long that I was afraid she’d forgotten I was there. Then she seemed to startle a little, as if suddenly recalling something. “You know, little bro,” she said in a sly ton
e. “You ain’t the only one they brought here from the past.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Straight up. They used to do it to me, too.”

  “Who did?”

  “At the time, I didn’t know. Found out way later that it was Steve-o.”

  I remembered the professor’s comment about having been working with Sharyn. I thought he’d meant this Sharyn, Future Sharyn. But he hadn’t. “Steve was bringing you forward in time?”

  She nodded. “Sure was. Made ‘em seem like dreams … weird, recurring dreams.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Training,” she said. “He was teaching me to use a new weapon. An electric javelin.”

  “A what?”

  Sharyn laughed. “That’s what it was. He called it ‘Four.’ Didn’t ever find out why. Except I never actually got to play with the real javelin. He said it was too precious for that. So I learned with a copy. A fake. Kind of like when you sword train and start with a blunt wooden one.”

  “What was he trying to get you to do with this … Four?”

  “He wanted me to learn how to kill Malum with it. Not deaders, mind you. But real Malum … ya know, like the Corpse Eater? And then, at the end, he’d have me practice throwing the javelin up at the ceiling, at this big crystal that he’d project up there. A hologram.”

  “A big crystal?” I asked. Then it clicked. “The Eternity Stone?”

  Sharyn nodded, grinning broadly. “Yeah, but I didn’t know that back then. Truth is, all that trainin’ just … stopped suddenly. And I never had the dreams again. Never got my hands on Four. Never used it. After a while, I just kinda forgot the whole thing. Went on with my life once the war … the first one … got ended.

  “But then all this went down, the deaders back an’ all, and Steve and Will hatched their plan to prevent the future by saving the past. Steve told me about how he was trainin’ my younger self and bam, it all came rushing back. Funny. Crazy. It took thirty years for those dreams to get explained to me.”

  Time is a circle.

  I had to struggle to sort through this sudden rush of new info. Sharyn—my Sharyn—had been dreaming that she was learning how to use an electric javelin to kill Malum and destroy their power source. It was the first I’d heard of such a thing.

  Besides, wasn’t that supposed to be my job?

  Sharyn continued. “Steve says the younger me’s gonna go with you when you head over there. Says she’s gonna have Four and use it to kick some serious alien ass!”

  Here was a part of Project Reboot that Emily and William had skipped telling me about for some reason. Maybe the skipping had something to do with the “promise” the chief had made not to mention Sharyn’s situation. Whatever the reason, I found that the news actually made me feel a little bit better. If—make that when—the time came for me to do my part in this crazy scheme, open the Rift to the Malum homeworld and cross over, at least I wouldn’t be going alone.

  In that moment, I think I finally understood that Amy’s last visit to me, when she’d brought me from my time into hers, had been a line of sorts. A line in the sand. A line on the calendar. A line between “what was” and “what could be.” That single act had altered the timeline, or at least given us the potential to alter it. It was why William had no memory of meeting his old self when he was a kid. For him it never happened. It was also why this Sharyn remembered the training but never using that training. For her, actually wielding this—electric javelin?—had never happened and never would.

  These people weren’t trying to change the future.

  By bringing me here, they already had!

  And it was going to be my job, and Sharyn’s, and the rest of my Undertakers’, to make sure they’d changed it enough.

  But something still didn’t compute.

  “Why would Steve, of all people, try to teach you how to fight?” I asked.

  Sharyn laughed again. She had the same musical laugh as her younger self. Hearing it come out of his shell of a woman almost broke my heart. “Oh, he wasn’t actually teachin’ me. He just set up this nerdy scenario with these Malum-shaped robots he’d cooked up. Then he’d give little me the training javelin and kinda let me teach myself. I’ve always been pretty good at that. Taught myself to use Vader, ya know.”

  “No,” I admitted. “I didn’t.” In fact, I’d never so much as wondered how Sharyn had gotten so good with her amazing wakizashi sword.

  “Steve did. He said so. Said he was counting on me becomin’ an expert.”

  “How long did this training go on?”

  “A month, maybe? The younger me never mentioned it to ya? These … ‘dreams?’”

  I shook my head. Then feeling stupid, since she couldn’t see it, I said, “No.”

  “Huh,” she replied thoughtfully. “Wonder if I told Tom. Or Hot Dog …” Her words trailed away. Then she said again, more wistfully this time, “Hot Dog.”

  That had been her nickname for Dave Berger. At first, he’d hated it. But, by the end, I think it had grown on him, kind of the way Sharyn herself had.

  The two of them had been tight. Real tight.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It sounded lame, even to my own ears.

  “I still think about him,” she whispered. “So long ago, yet not a day goes by …”

  I tried to think of something more to say. Once again, I drew a blank. That’d been happening a lot lately. Besides, my mind was still reeling. Reeling and churning.

  I couldn’t save everyone. Dave was gone. So were Ian and Chuck and the others who’d died in the war. They were on the wrong side of that line in the sand. But Tom and Helene, Burt and Hugo and my mom—they were in play.

  Them, I could save.

  And this poor broken woman here. I could save her, too.

  “Guess it’s all pretty fresh for you, huh?” Sharyn asked me, shaking me out of my thoughts. “The first war. Hot Dog’s death. All of that.”

  Dully, I nodded. Then, feeling stupid again, I replied, “Yeah.”

  “Regret,” she said. “All the stuff that might’ve been but never was. It’s not something you ever feel when you’re young, like you. But later … well, never mind.”

  She couldn’t cry. Her tear ducts had gone the way of her eyes. But she looked like she wanted to. Clearly, a change of subject was called for.

  “Sharyn,” I asked. “Why was the door locked?”

  She frowned again. “Locked? Was it? It’s never locked.”

  “Who was the last one in here?”

  “Amy,” she said. “Your angel. Ain’t that a freaky thing?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “How long ago did she leave?”

  “Not sure. Maybe ten minutes ‘fore you walked in. I lose track o’ time. Can’t exactly read a watch these days.”

  Just ten minutes. “Do you think Amy locked the door?” I asked.

  Sharyn’s narrow shoulders rose and fell—a weary shrug. “Who else? Now that I think on it, she did seem… funny … this time.”

  “Funny?”

  “Strange,” she said. “Kinda stand-offish, like I’d done somethin’ to piss her off. Been sitting here wonderin’ what it might’ve been. Or maybe she’s just gettin’ sick of looking after an old, blind cripple.”

  I didn’t want to say what I thought: That Amy had probably been reeling from the knowledge that today was likely her last day on Earth. Did Sharyn know about Corpse Helene’s threat?

  I doubted it.

  Then Sharyn said, “Or maybe Amy got herself hurt sometime lately. Maybe that’s why she was actin’ funny. When I hugged her, I did feel something.”

  I blinked. “You felt something?”

  She nodded. “Like a scar. Under her shirt. Right at the small of her back. Wasn’t there yesterday, I’m pretty sure. But we all got scars, don’t we? Maybe I just never noticed.”

  I jumped to my feet.

  “Little bro?” she asked.
“What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. And it was a lie, because everything was suddenly wrong. “I have to go.”

  Sharyn turned her sightless head up toward me. She may have only been a shadow of the girl I knew, but even that shadow had some strength left in it. It’s surprisingly hard to read the expression of someone without eyes, but I thought I saw something like dawning realization in her shrunken features.

  “A check mark,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “It was a check mark!”

  “Are you totally sure?” I asked, a little breathlessly.

  “No,” she replied. “But I’m sure enough.”

  “Did Amy say where she was going?”

  The blind woman shook her head. “No. But I heard the elevator going up as soon as she left. So it’s probably either Control or the Observation Deck.”

  “Are you sure? Could it have been someone else you heard?”

  “Little bro … I ain’t got nothing to do all day but sit in this chair and listen.”

  “You missed me knocking,” I pointed out.

  “Did not,” she said. “Just didn’t figure the knocking was at my door. Nobody ever knocks. Fact is: my eyes bein’ gone has made my ears that much better. Trust me, it was Amy on that elevator. Now get after her!”

  I started for the door.

  “Wait!” Sharyn called, twisting around so far in her rocking chair that I thought she might fall out of it. “Under my bed!”

  “What?”

  “Under my bed, little bro. Quick!”

  I went to the bed and hurriedly knelt, feeling around under it. My hand came back with a long leather sheath.

  Vader, Sharyn’s wakizashi sword.

  Like the pocketknives, Professor Moscova had made it from nagganum. But unlike the pocketknives, it had no moving parts, and so no Anchor Sliver in it to wear out over time.

  It looks as bright and sharp as ever.

  “Corpses let me have it back,” Sharyn told me. “A final insult, I guess. Been under there ever since. I wouldn’t let nobody touch it. Not until now. Take it. Use it. Now move your ass!

  Chapter 14

  Repeated History