by Ty Drago
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t,” he replied.
“What day is it?”
He frowned and studied me. “It’s Thursday.”
“No. I mean the date.”
Understanding dawned. “Oh! No one told you? It’s October 31st. Happy Halloween.”
“Coincidence?”
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Nope.”
Then I climbed up onto the railing, took a deep breath, and threw one leg over it. I looked down and saw the faces of the dead who clung to the tower’s countless nooks and crannies. Thousands of pairs of milky eyes blazed up at me. Glaring. Hungry. Savage.
“The wind’s going to try to blow you east,” William said. “Let it. In the meantime, I’ll keep them busy so that they don’t notice you. Stay as high as you can for as long as you can. You need to find a building, any building, so long as it has a smooth vertical wall and has at least fifty feet of open space around it. That may not be easy. You’ve seen what this city looks like.”
I nodded. Philly was a mess. Most of the buildings weren’t even standing anymore.
“All this death,” I said miserably. “Did you know it would be like this? Did you know it when you started Project Reboot?”
It took him a few seconds to answer. “You mean did I know we’d all have to die to make it happen?” he replied. “Yes, I think I did. If the Burgermeister’s death taught me anything, it’s this: Victory is a commodity. It has a price. Always. I’m guessing you know that as well as I do.”
And I did.
“I’ll get it done,” I promised him with more confidence than I felt.
“I know you will,” he replied.
Then I readied myself, threw my other leg over the railing, and leaned forward, so that my hands gripped the top rail with my feet wedged against its base. The world in front of me, burnt and blasted and dark, looked imposingly big, the space beneath me, impossibly deep. If Steve’s invention didn’t work, then at least I’d die in the fall before the Corpses got me.
My mouth felt desert dry.
“Will!” the man behind me called.
Breathing hard, my heart hammering in my chest, I glanced over my shoulder at him. Sweat shone on his face in the lamplight, and on the top of his pale, barren head. His cheeks looked almost as red as his beard.
He said, grinning, “It was a pleasure to meet me.”
And, despite everything—and, trust me, there was a lot of everything—I somehow managed to grin back. “It was a pleasure to meet me, too.”
I didn’t count to three. Counting to three, I’ve found, never helps.
Instead, I turned away from him and jumped, kicking off from the base of the railing to put as much distance between myself and the tower wall as possible. That had been another of Steve’s instructions.
As I began to fall, my heart no longer hammering but actively trying to crawl up my throat and get the heck out of Dodge, I spread my arms, yet another instruction. For the first half-second, nothing happened and I thought bitterly, Yep. Steve Moscova and his cockamamie inventions finally managed to kill me.
But then in the next half second the bundle strapped across my shoulders came to life. Its motion sensors reacted to my rapid descent, confirmed that I was far enough away from the tower wall, and deployed. Twin parachutes opened. Both were made of lightweight “rip-stop” black nylon, with cords that anchored them to my shoulders and wrists.
Each one reached five feet to either side of me, looking almost like bat wings.
Part parachute. Part glider.
My descent stopped. An instant later, the wind grabbed hold of me, and I was pushed and lifted. The whole thing felt nauseating. My feet dangled beneath me, swinging back and forth with each new gust of air until I managed to tuck them up as best I could.
Below, just as I cleared the tower, several of the nearest deaders made crazy lunges for me. Most missed by a good margin and tumbled down hundreds of feet onto their buds’ heads. But one or two almost managed to grab one of my sneakers.
Then a stream of saltwater nailed each of them, and they followed the rest.
I wished I could have offered Maxi Me a wave, or at least looked back at him one final time. But it wasn’t in the cards. With these “wings” holding my arms fully extended away from my body, I could barely turn my head.
Most of the deaders ignored me soaring silently above them. They were too busy trying to scale City Hall. And those few who did notice my flight just seemed to shrug it off, probably guessing that the real prizes were still in the building and that I could be hunted down later.
I’d gotten away.
Now all I had to do was get far enough away, land without breaking my neck, and then—well—time travel.
No problem.
Jeez.
As one block after another passed below me, I scanned the surrounding city. Rubble choked the streets. The larger buildings had mostly collapsed, crushing the smaller ones, creating an unbroken landscape of ruin as far as the eye could see. William had been right. Finding a vertical wall with at least fifty feet of open space around it was going to be tough.
Below me, the ground rose closer. I was just passing 11th Street. For every yard of forward advancement, I was losing a foot of altitude. Five hundred feet became four hundred. Then three hundred.
10th. 9th. 8th.
Two hundred.
One hundred.
I scoured the surrounding neighborhood with desperate eyes. Nothing moved. The Corpses, it seemed, were all attacking City Hall, leaving this part of the city empty and forgotten. That should have been good news, except that there was nothing left standing, no buildings or even parts of buildings that looked big enough or open enough to work with the Rift Projector.
My heart sank.
Then I looked ahead and to my left.
Independence Hall.
It stood on Chestnut Street, the only intact structure in sight. Two stories tall, and with the blasted, empty expanse of the park across the street from it. Plenty of height. Plenty of room.
It could work.
But would it be guarded? Or was the whole of the dead Queen’s army up at City Hall?
I supposed I’d have to find out. There didn’t seem to be another option.
I flew over 7th Street, now just fifty feet above the ground. Below me, I could see rats scurrying along the fractured gutters.
6th Street. The piles of bodies that the Corpse Eater had left behind lay just ahead. In fact, if I wasn’t careful, I was going to land right in the middle of them.
I did.
Suddenly, it seemed as if the roadway was coming up at me fast—very fast. My knees were already bent when my sneakered feet hit the ground. My chutes, still catching air, pushed past me, and sent me crashing down face first. I’d have smashed my nose to pulp on the street if I hadn’t landed instead atop the cold body of a decapitated deader.
Of course, he couldn’t move. And I fleetingly wondered if the Malum Self was still in there, or if it had Transferred to a fresh host before the attack had begun.
Something else that didn’t matter.
I climbed unsteadily to my feet.
Then, as Steve had instructed via V-blog, I found the chute-release levers and pulled hard. The entire contraption fell away from me, caught the wind, and immediately took to the air again, continuing east. It looked almost like a living thing, some bizarre black bird, as it soared off into the night.
Thanks, Steve. I’m alive!
Then I turned and looked back the way I’d come. In the distance, standing like a mountain against the gray, starless sky, stood City Hall. At its pinnacle, just below the silhouette of Billy Penn’s statue, I spotted the light of William Ritter’s lantern. It was just a pinprick. But it reminded me that there was a man up there, a man who was fighting a battle he couldn’t win, a man who—
The light winked out.
&nb
sp; For a long moment, I just stood there, surrounded by the fallen dead.
I heard nothing except the wind and the distant moan and cries of Corpses as they poured into Haven, the last Haven.
And I knew, down to the very bottom of my soul, that I was alone.
Chapter 27
The Time Door
Totally alone.
They were gone. William and Emily and Sharyn and Alex. All that was left of the Undertakers, gone. And those refugees, too. Those poor people, whose only crime had been being born into this miserable, awful, unsurvivable future.
I was, quite literally, the last living person on Earth.
I’m so sorry.
I wasn’t even sure exactly who I was apologizing to, or for what. But it needed to be said.
Moving slowly, as if in a dream, I checked the small satchel that was tied to my belt. The Rift Projector was there. I could only pray it hadn’t been broken or damaged when I’d hit the street. Then I patted my pocket.
The Anchor Shard was there, too.
I was suddenly very conscious of my breathing, very aware of every heartbeat. Loneliness, unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, ever imagined before, crashed down around me, freezing me in place.
I can’t stay here. Sooner or later, a stray deader’s gonna spot me. I don’t have any weapons, except for my pocketknife. All the Maankhs are gone. Vader’s broken.
But I’m alone … in the whole world. Alone.
This place is finished. Over. A lost battlefield. A planet of the dead. The Corpses have won.
Unless I turn it around.
And I won’t be able to even try to do that if I can’t get my freakin’ feet to move!
I got my freakin’ feet to move.
I crossed Market Street and entered the ruins of Independence Mall. To my right, the Liberty Bell Pavilion was a pile of useless bricks. To my left, the old Bourse Building was burnt rubble. The only way out of here, the only way home, lay ahead, on the far side of the park, looking more like a steepled church in the darkness than a governmental building.
I didn’t run. I didn’t want to risk drawing attention. Instead, I kept scanning the darkness, looking for any sign of activity. But there was nothing. I could almost convince myself that, somehow, the Corpses were gone too—that I truly was alone here, without even a mortal enemy for company.
The only thinking being left on this entire planet.
Would you believe that idea left me even more shaken than I already was?
As I neared Chestnut Street, I paused and gave Independence Hall a careful examination. No guards at the front doors, which stood closed. No footsteps or flashlight beams. Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Swallowing dryly, I approached a section of blank wall that stood right beside the steps leading up to the door. Once there, I turned and carefully counted off fifty feet. Then I found some loose bricks and stacked them up to make a small stand for the Rift Projector. Through it all, my every sense felt heightened, and I was more aware of everything around me and every move I made than ever before.
Hyper-awareness, Steve might have called it.
Well, whatever its name, it was totally freaking me out.
I’d asked Emily if she needed to program the Rift Projector to close behind me. After all, the last thing I wanted was to let a few thousand future Corpses through the portal into my time. But she and William had assured me that it wouldn’t matter. According to Professor Steve Moscova, whose genius had gotten me this far, the instant I crossed the temporal barrier, the future I’d left behind—this future—would be changed. The Rift Projector, they’d said, wouldn’t need to be shut off because it never would have been there in the first place.
It sounded completely nuts.
But I liked the idea. Somehow, the notion that this terrible future, with all its death and destruction, would get erased the minute I left it was weirdly comforting.
Some worlds have no business existing.
I flipped the switch on the Rift Projector.
I got treated to a moment of sheer, heart-pounding, stomach-churning, butt-clenching terror when, for a second, nothing happened.
Then a beam of light shot out the opposite end of the small white cube, crossed Chestnut Street, and hit the brick frontage of Independence Hall. Almost instantly, a rectangle of shimmering blackness appeared there, tall enough and wide enough to let a person walk through it.
A Rift.
A door between now and then.
It was one thing to be told it was going to happen, even to expect it to happen—and another thing to actually see it happening.
Nervously, I looked around. In this darkened city of the dead, even the Rift’s faint shimmering might as well have been a beacon, one that screamed, Hey Corpses, you missed one! Come get me!
But there was nothing.
So, steadying myself, I crossed the street and approached that weird doorway. As I walked, I counted my footsteps for some reason, keenly aware of every breath I took. When I reached that weird threshold, which seemed to ripple slightly like the vertical surface of a pond, I felt one last time for the Anchor Shard in my pocket.
All of it. All this terror and loss … just to get me to this spot.
“Boy!” a voice called in English.
I turned to see a single deader. He stood about fifty feet away, up near the corner of Chestnut and 6th Street. He wasn’t anything special. Not a Royal. Not even leader caste, by the look of him. He was a Type Four, rotted and weak. In single combat, I could probably take him barehanded.
But all that was over now.
I looked at him.
He looked back at me.
Then, with a snarl that seemed more silly than scary, he raised his hands and staggered toward me.
Seeing this, I felt—nothing. No fear. No anger. Just a bizarre awareness that I was looking at the last Corpse I would ever see.
I closed my eyes and stepped through the Rift.
And, as promised, it snapped shut behind me.
When I opened my eyes again and glanced behind me, there was only a wall of dusty bricks at my back. Well, that and a dead, withered arm that had fallen to the floor at my feet. Apparently, the Corpse had managed to reach through the portal just as it closed and, for his trouble, had gotten his limb sliced off. The cut looked as clean and smooth as if made by a guillotine blade.
A part of my mind, the part that could somehow still think, wondered, But how can that arm be here, if the deader it belonged to never existed at all?
I swear, you can go crazy trying to figure out this time stuff.
“Will?” a voice asked.
It wasn’t until I turned forward again, toward the sound of my name, that I registered where I was. My room in Haven. My Haven. There was my cot, still rumpled from when I’d stretched out on it earlier, trying and failing to sleep in the hours after the First Corpse War ended.
And there was Dave’s cot, unused. Never to be used again.
“Will?” the voice repeated.
My eyes found Helene’s. She stood in the curtained doorway, the lighted corridor at her back. Not Helene Ritter, of course, but Helene Boettcher. Fourteen years old and tall for her age. Slender and dark haired and beautiful. Her eyes glittered in the light from the candle that glowed beside my cot as they moved from my face to the severed limb at my feet and then back to my face again.
She blinked.
Then she frowned.
“William Karl Ritter,” she said. “What did you do?”
I laughed and went to her and pulled her into a hug. I didn’t kiss her. This didn’t feel like a “kiss her” moment. I just wanted—
—I guess I just wanted to make sure she was real.
She hugged me back, confused and maybe a little frightened. “What’s going on?” she asked.
I answered her question with one of my own. “How long was I gone?”
She pulled away from me, her hands on my forearms. Her eyes searched my face, and I wondered what she was looking for. “Gone?” she asked. “Gone where? You only walked outta my room like two minutes ago.”
I’d returned to almost the same moment I’d left, just as Amy had promised.
Helene said, “Will … please tell me what’s happened!”
“Okay,” I replied. That weird hyper-awareness was going away. I was home. After everything that had happened to me, I was back where I belonged.
And I had a job to do.
I added, “But it’s a long story and not a fun one. So I’d like to tell it just once. Can we go find Tom?”
Helene looked at me.
“She never left my side. Not through high school. Not through college. Never.”
His words. My words. Spoken in a future that, if I had anything to say about it, would never come to pass.
Except for that part. Except for the Helene part.
Finally, the love of my life shrugged and replied, “Okay. Let’s go find Tom.”
Chapter 28
The Doomsayer
Tom Jefferson, the seventeen-year-old Chief of the Undertakers was in the Infirmary, and he wasn’t alone. My mother, Susan Ritter, was there too. So were Sharyn and Jillian and Steve and Burt and Amy. Even Alex Bobson, looking sullen as always, was on hand. The Undertakers who’d been hurt when Lilith Cavanaugh, the first Queen of the Dead, had attacked Haven—this Haven—were gone. Evacuated probably. But where to?
Mom waved to me, smiling. Then she read my expression and her smile died. “Are you all right?” she asked, concern on her face. She hurried over and hugged me. “You’re pale as a ghost!”
I tried to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. Mainly, I was enjoying having her arms around me. Think your mom’s a pain in the butt? Try feeling sick to your very soul and then see if a mom hug doesn’t help.
Tom came forward. “Bro?”
Slowly, reluctantly, I pulled myself away from my mother and asked for a glass of water. Amy, as silently helpful as usual, ran and fetched it. While she was handing me the plastic cup, I couldn’t help but see the woman she would become—and remember what had happened to her.
