by Ty Drago
Tucked away in the shadowy ruins of what used to be a jewelry store, I waited until I was sure the two of them weren’t going to suddenly turn around. Then, making as little noise as possible, I crept up on them from behind, pulled out the first Maankh, and shot the one on the left.
He exploded. No pause. No warning. Just a whomp sound as his body turned to ash in a split second. Afterward, for a moment or two, something of what had been inside the vaporized cadaver remained, just a lump of helpless, seething energy. Then it faded into nothing.
No more poops for you, dude.
His buddy whirled on me, his lipless mouth spreading in a vicious sneer as he lunged. His teeth were black, and maggots dripped from between them.
Whatever.
I pulled out a second Maankh.
He stopped in mid-charge.
“This is what I just used on your friend,” I said. “You saw what happened to him?”
Hesitantly, he nodded, his neck muscles creaking.
“So you know what’ll happen if I shoot you with it?”
He nodded again, looking fearful.
“You got a choice,” I told him. “You can answer my questions and walk away. Or you can die right here on this alien world. Which will it be?”
“I. Kill. You. Boy!”
“English!” I snapped. Then I shot the Maankh at his right leg.
I wasn’t exactly sure if this would work the way I wanted it to, though the technique had proven effective with Aunt Sally, the saltwater-bolt-shooting crossbow that had, I supposed, been this gadget’s grandmother.
As I’d hoped, the Corpse’s leg disintegrated, pants and all.
With a moan the dead guy toppled over, hitting the street hard enough to shatter the bones in his right arm.
I pulled out a fresh Maankh. This time, when I pointed it at his head, he cowered and threw up his only remaining workable hand. “What do you want to know?” he begged.
“Better,” I said. “What time is the attack on Haven, tonight?”
“Midnight!” he exclaimed.
So, Corpse Helene had been telling the truth about that much at least.
“And how do you expect to make it past the saltwater defenses?”
He didn’t reply.
“Need another reminder?” I asked him, bringing the business end of the Maankh down until it almost touched his forehead. “I can always find another one of you wormbags and start over. Maybe the next one’ll have more to say.”
He actually yelped in alarm. Like all bullies, Corpses turn into sniveling cowards when cornered. “We have a human agent in Haven who will shut them off for us.”
Sabotage. But had Amy had the chance to do the damage before I’d confronted her?
“Guess what?” I said, “I wasted your mole.”
It really hurt to say that, and having to lend a crapload of bravado to it made the pain even worse.
But it had the desired effect. The Corpse looked genuinely stricken.
“Now,” I said, “you’re gonna tell me about Independence Hall. I wanna know how the place is laid out, how many Corpses are there right now, how I can get in unseen, and where I can find the people and things that are on my shopping list. Tell me the whole truth and I might let you live. But the first time I think you’re lying or holding back, I’m gonna waste you and start over again with the next deader. Got it?”
He nodded vigorously. “Got it.”
“Start talking.”
He started talking.
When he was finished, I shot him in the face and walked away as he vaporized.
“That was for Amy,” I muttered.
In my defense, I did say “might.”
Independence Hall, where the Declaration of the Independence and the United States Constitution had been signed, sat on Chestnut Street between 5th and 6th. It was a big colonial brick building with a tall steeple, flanked by matching two-story wings. In my day, it had been a major tourist attraction, and getting inside meant buying a ticket and standing in line for a tour.
In the future—this future, anyway—the tours were long over. The building still stood, though some of its bricks were missing and its steeple looked like it desperately needed a good coat of paint.
And something told me the dead guys guarding it weren’t selling tickets.
As I watched the place from the shadowed alcove of a marble-fronted store across the street, I gave the radio one more try. But, as Amy had predicted, Maxi Me, Emily, and Steve weren’t responding. When they’d set off, they hadn’t bothered explaining how they were going to get into Independence Hall and I hadn’t asked.
Now, I really wished I had.
There was light here, mostly flashlights held by deader patrols. Both the front and back doors were guarded. The front opened onto Chestnut Street and the back onto Independence Square, which occupied the whole city block behind the building.
Scratch a direct assault. There were way too many of them.
That left sneaking. I’m good at sneaking.
According to the gone-but-not-forgotten Corpse I’d just wasted, when they’d built this grand old place, our founding fathers had seen fit to put in a basement.
Sneakers—the people, not the shoes—love basements.
Chapter 16
Unto the Breach
I started by making my way along 6th Street, staying low and following the western edge of the square. Shadows hid my every step. Behind and to my left, Independence Hall’s steeple towered above the ruined park, its tapered sides looking gray in the gloom.
In my own time—thirty years ago—this square had been heavily treed, with brick pathways and trashcans and dog walkers and squirrels and stuff. Today, it looked like a detonated minefield, the trees nothing but blackened stumps, the green grass replaced with rain-soaked mud.
And Corpses.
I counted at least a dozen of them. They wandered the park, conducting lazy, half-hearted patrols, each carrying a flashlight. Their guard was down, which wasn’t a good sign. A high degree of alert might have given me hope that William and the others hadn’t arrived yet, that I’d somehow beaten them here. But all this easy, relaxed behavior made it painfully clear that Corpse Helene’s trap had already been sprung.
The three Undertakers had either been captured or, more likely, killed.
It’s selfish, I know, especially since one of them was my sister and another was me, but the first thing I felt was panic. My hopes of getting home might already have been shot. I could be stuck here, at the end of the world.
Come on, Ritter. You need to be better than that.
I slipped across 6th street, hopped up onto the northern edge of the square, and hunkered down behind one of the waist-high burned out tree trunks. A good spot. Here, I was safely out of sight of the patrols. Better still, by peering over the top of the trunk, I could just make out Independence Hall’s West Wing, a squat, two-story building that was attached to the main hall by an arched brick walkway.
I didn’t know what was in that building now. But, back in my time, it’d been a museum of sorts, where some pretty cool documents and other Revolutionary Era stuff had been kept. But I wasn’t interested in the main floor.
No, I was interested in the flight of stairs just inside, the one that led down into the basement.
Independence Hall, according to the Corpse I’d interrogated, had a full, original basement that ran from the West Wing, under the hall proper, all the way to the East Wing. Down there, he’d assured me, I’d find the first item on my “shopping” list.
Step One was to get past the deader guards hanging out in the square. There was only one of them directly between the West Wing and me. He stood just twenty feet away, his flashlight pointing at the ground at his feet. By its splash of light, I could tell that the dead dude was simply standing there, as motionless as any statue. They do that sometimes. When a Corpse is bored, their stolen bodies go weirdly still. No foot shuffles. No hea
d scratches. Just—nothing.
But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t spring into action if I alerted him. And if the Undertakers had radios, it seemed a fair bet that Corpse Helene’s minions would have them too.
So.
I pulled out my pocketknife, William’s pocketknife, built by Future Steve out of mined Ether and given to me because time is a circle, or a river, or a river with a circle in it.
Skip it. You don’t need the headache.
I pressed the 8 button.
I didn’t feel the electromagnetic pulse that hammered everything around me for a quarter of a mile. The deaders, I knew, wouldn’t feel it either. But any electronics they had on their person were now fried. That meant their radios wouldn’t work. Neither would mine, of course, but I didn’t mind that. It wasn’t like I’d been successfully talking to anyone, anyhow.
It also cooked their flashlights.
Every single light in Independence Square winked out.
Cool.
I pocketed the knife and selected another Maankh. After the interrogation on Chestnut Street, I only had seven left, so I needed to use them carefully. Strategically.
From my hiding place, I pointed it at the deader who still stood between me and the West Wing of Independence Hall. From the way his silhouette moved in the darkness, I sensed he was shaking his flashlight, trying to figure out why it had suddenly zonked out on him.
I fired.
The Corpse exploded in a near-silent puff of dust. For a few seconds, his man-size red energy Self lingered. Then it disappeared as well.
And, as far as I could tell, none of the others saw or heard a thing.
Cooler.
The guard’s disintegration had opened up a clear path for me, sort of. Now, I could see the door to the West Wing, but there were still too many Corpses nearby, close enough to maybe notice if I ran up and tried to force my way into the museum.
It was time to get “cute.”
Believe it or not, the dead frighten easily. So I pulled out another Maankh and aimed it at the shadowy form of a second Corpse. This one stood a little apart from the rest, like the first guy had. But unlike the first guy, this second dude was as far from Independence Hall as possible, way over by the southeastern corner of the square. I didn’t know what kind of range these little cylinders had, and I sure as heck didn’t want to waste one of them, but this was my best bet of getting inside the West Wing.
Why? Because, while the deader I’d just hosed went unnoticed, I needed this dude’s dusting to be seen.
So, holding my arm out stiffly and sighting down from my shoulder, I took aim.
And took aim.
And took aim.
I steadied my heart rate as best I could, a trick Sharyn once taught me.
Then I aimed some more.
And fired.
Dead Guy #2 popped, leaving behind nothing but a pair of dust-covered shoes. An instant later, the two Corpses standing nearest him almost jumped out of their stolen skins. They began looking frantically around, but without working flashlights, they couldn’t see much of anything. Nevertheless, I ducked behind my burned-out stump and waited, my heart rate jumping right back up to where it had been before I’d fired.
If they found me, I was dead.
But, if they didn’t—
As I’d hoped, the other Corpses guarding the square converged on the area, snarling and talking nervously, both in English and Deadspeak. One pulled out a radio, spoke into it, scowled, shook the thing, and tried again. Then he shrugged at one of his dead buds, who repeated the effort. Within moments, they were all doing it.
Now.
Keeping so low that my back hurt, I darted out from behind my stump and moved along the blasted earth until I reached the West Wing’s rear door. I didn’t think it would be locked. With so many Corpses guarding it, why bother? But I’d been wrong about stuff like that before.
This time, I was right.
I opened it.
And bumped straight into a deader.
He was a Type Three, his body bloated and purple, his eyes bulging from the trapped gasses in the tissues behind them. At the sight of me, those milky eyes widened even further. His mouth moved in a slow, predatory growl, and his hands, both the size of oven mitts, reached for me.
Boy, he said in Deadspeak.
I tried to think of a snarky reply. But he’d startled me, so I simply Tased him. His limbs stiffened and he toppled backward, falling across the width of the narrow landing and then sliding, toboggan-style, down a long flight of wooden stairs.
Nervously, I glanced back out the door, but the Corpses in the square were still busy with their radios, scanning the surrounding streets for some further sign of attack. One of them headed toward the rear door of Independence Hall proper, probably to report the attack, as well as the equipment malfunctions.
So, the good news was that I’d found my way to the basement.
The bad news was that they now knew someone was around.
I pressed the 5 button on my pocketknife, activating its own LED flashlight. After the EMP, it would be the only piece of working electronics for blocks around.
A dead giveaway if I was spotted.
But I needed the light.
Using it, I peeked into the large dark room through the doorway to my left. It stood empty. No furniture. No Corpses. In my day, this had been where a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were displayed, along with the silver inkwell used to sign them. All of that had apparently long since disappeared.
Forgotten history.
With a small shudder, I followed the still convulsing deader down the steps. Once there, and with him glaring helplessly up at me, I pulled out another Maankh and dusted him. Didn’t want to waste it, but I had no choice. If I had incapacitated him some other way, he would have telepathically started screaming for help—and, while the Corpses might know I was around, I didn’t need them finding out exactly where.
Independence Hall’s basement consisted of a chain of low brick chambers, one after the next, separated by archways. The first thing that struck me was how cold it suddenly felt; I could even see my breath. Looking around, I spotted the cause. The room I was in had some kind of freezing unit in the middle of it. The machine had, of course, been fried by the EMP, but cold vapor still fluttered up from its open pipe ends.
It seemed a strange gadget for dead people, who didn’t feel either heat or cold, to bother installing. But then I stepped through the archway into the next chamber and shone my pocketknife’s light on the reason.
Bodies. Dozens of them. All hanging from meat hooks fastened to the ceiling. All kept fresh by the cold. Good thing I’d zonked that last Corpse instead of just trapping him. He’d simply have Transferred to one of these cadavers and come after me again, this time in a newer, stronger host.
Lucky.
But then I hold the record for being lucky when I’m doing something stupid.
I really do. Ask anybody.
As I walked through the jungle of bodies, my disgust mixed with my anger. These were people! Every single one of them had been born, lived, and died. And this was where they’d ended up. Not in a grave with a tombstone announcing who they were and when they’d passed. Not as ashes in an urn placed atop someone’s mantle. But here, in Corpse Helene’s cadaver warehouse, waiting to either rot away or be possessed and used by a monster.
It was sickening.
William had told me that, earlier in the war, the deaders had actually herded human beings, like cattle, to keep the Corpses supplied with bodies to wear. Well, this late in the game, it looked like that strategy had changed. After all, with humanity only hours away from total extinction, why bother keeping and feeding prisoners when you could just kill them, hang them up, and then forget them until and unless their cadavers were needed?
Efficient. Practical. Ruthless.
And it seriously pissed me off!
>
Up until that moment, a part of me hadn’t really believed that William’s Project Reboot could succeed. And that nagging doubt had only gotten worse when three of the six remaining Undertakers had gone off to somehow snatch the Anchor Shard from around Corpse Helene’s neck, only to then find out they were walking into a deader trap. I mean, if time is like a river, then the current seemed to be pushing us hardcore toward the rocks.
But now—
Now I would see it done. Somehow, someway, I would rescue the Undertakers, retrieve the crystal, and then take it home. After that, I would open a Rift, cross the Void, and shatter the Malum’s precious Eternity Stone like a cheap mirror.
For the Burgermeister. For Amy. For the rest.
For Helene.
For me.
The next archway had been bricked up, with a modern wooden door set into the newly created wall. A door like that suggested something interesting behind it. So I went up and jiggled the knob.
It didn’t turn.
Hitting the 1 button on my pocketknife, I worked the lock. It surrendered after just fifteen seconds. Then, shutting off my flashlight, I carefully and quietly opened the door a crack.
Inside, I found a small room with two other entrances. In the center of it was a narrow cot like the ones in Haven. And lying on her back atop that cot was a woman in her forties. She was clearly unconscious, her body limp. Tubes and wires ran from her arm and temples to monitoring machines and what looked like an IV drip.
The room was lit by a single arc lamp, which told me that someone in the building had replaced the fuses my EMP had blown.
I was running out of time.
Three Corpse guards stood around the cot, somehow managing to look both bored and menacing.
Slipping silently into the room and keeping to its shadows, I spared a moment to look—to really look—at the woman on the bed.
It was Helene.
Not my Helene, of course. This woman was older than my mom. But the face was the same. The nose. The cheekbones. Even her hair looked just like my girlfriend’s, except for the strands of gray.
Rescuing her had been the first thing on my to-do list. And here she was.
