The Undertakers: End of the World

by Ty Drago

  Tom didn’t move. He didn’t have to. We knew he could see us, and we knew that he knew what it meant.

  We held our salutes for more than a minute, until Tom became too small to recognize. Helene lowered her head and fell against me, her body shaking as she wept.

  And, again, I didn’t blame her.

  Chapter 42

  No

  It took us seven-and-a-half minutes, by my watch, to make it back to Earth. As we got close, I spotted Jillian and Steve looking out through the shimmering portal, both of them grinning with relief—

  —until they did a headcount.

  “Where’s Tom?” Jillian asked as the ferry came to a stop within arm’s reach of the Rift.

  “Help us with Sharyn,” Helene said.

  “Where’s Tom?” Jillian demanded, panic in her voice this time.

  “He stayed behind,” I replied, the words catching in my throat. Then, as briefly as possible, I told them about Fore and about what the chief had decided he had to do.

  Jillian seemed to wither before my eyes.

  Together, we managed to get Sharyn to her feet and through the shimmering doorway. She was groggy but coming around. Steve made some comment about using the Anchor Shard to heal her broken arm, once we were ready to close the doorway.

  But then, as we laid her down on the floor of the great room, her head resting on Burt’s rolled up jacket, her eyes snapped open and she sat up.

  “Where’s my brother?” she screamed.

  We all looked at her. None of us seemed able to answer. But I knew we didn’t need to. She put it together all by herself.

  “No!” she cried. She tried to stand, but wobbled and started to fall. Alex and Burt grabbed her one good arm and lowered her back down. She wailed piteously, her face more torn with pain and loss than any I’d ever seen. And, believe me, that’s saying something.

  Helene went to her, knelt beside her, and took her hand. She tried to explain, tried to say how brave Tom was and how much he’d loved her. But the girl wasn’t having it, not a word of it. She pushed Helene away and struggled again to find her feet, only to collapse once more into a heap of sobs.

  “No!” she screamed, beating the dusty concrete floor with her fist. “No! No! No!”

  And I got it. I understood exactly what she was feeling. This was Tom Jefferson we were talking about. He couldn’t be gone. He just couldn’t be!

  I had to look away, had to get away. So, for a lack of anything else, I went to the Rift, which still shimmered darkly against the inside wall of the Undertakers’ original HQ. Without any hesitation, I poked my head through.

  The tunnel looked just the same, with the Energy Ferry still floating just below the lip of the Rift. I stared into the distance, but try as I might, I couldn’t see the other side, couldn’t see the Eternity Stone. Its light was still there, however, like the glow left behind after a sunset, visible now that I knew what to look for.

  And the fact that it was still there seemed proof enough that Tom hadn’t made his throw yet.

  I checked my watch.

  He’d said he’d give us fifteen minutes, just to be sure.

  There were four-and-a-half minutes left. Even if I jumped onto the ferry now, I wouldn’t make it across the Void in time to stop him. It was too late. We’d passed the point of no return. Tom was gone—lost, like so many others before him.

  My friend.

  My teacher.

  My brother.

  No.

  That was it. Just—no.

  I couldn’t accept it. More than that, I wouldn’t accept it. Yes, this was an impossible, no-win situation.

  Well, guess what? I eat them for breakfast.

  Almost without consciously deciding to do it, I lowered my eyes to the floor of the tunnel, some twenty feet below the ferry. As I’ve described before, it wasn’t smooth like on the Malum homeworld. Instead, it was rippled, like a frozen ocean, an effect—Steve thought—of the Anchor Shard’s energy scooping its way through the solid Ether.

  As it had the first time I’d seen it, it reminded me of something. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something important. Only now the feeling was stronger, way stronger.

  And then it hit me.

  I yanked myself back out of the portal and spun around.

  None of the others were paying any attention to me. They’d all gathered around Helene and Sharyn, who were wrapped in each other’s arms on the floor, sobbing. Somebody was saying something, probably Amy, about setting Sharyn’s broken arm. But the words didn’t quite reach me. Maybe my heartbeat had gotten too loud.

  Thunderingly loud.

  “I can get him,” I said.

  No one responded. No one had heard me. So I said it again, louder this time, letting the words ring off the distant ceiling. “I can get him!”

  That caught their attention. They all looked my way. Sharyn’s face was ashen, her cheeks streaked with tears.

  I ran over to the door that Burt had found earlier. Inside, I spotted a small collection of bikes—and two skateboards. They were both pretty old and worn, any paint or varnish having rubbed off years ago. But they looked like they were in pretty good shape. Better still, I found a canvas harness that would let me carry one of the boards on my back.

  We use such things, sometimes, when we want to move on boards, but also need to keep our hands free for fighting.

  Or at least we did, back before we’d won the war.

  As quickly as I could, I slipped the harness over my shoulders and buckled it at my waist. Then I slid one of the two boards into it and snatched up the other one before heading back out into the Big Room.

  Most of them were still looking at me.

  Helene was on her feet. Alarm flashed in her eyes. “What are you doing?”

  “I can get him. I’ve got four minutes. I can do it!”

  “What are you talking about?” Alex snapped.

  Ignoring him, I headed straight for the Rift, but Helene cut me off, grabbing my arm in a vice grip. “You’re crazy! You’ll never get there!”

  “You just watch me!” I shot back. Then, when she didn’t let me go, I said, “It’s not bravery. It’s not sacrifice. I’m just doing what needs to be done!”

  “No, you’re not!” Helene exclaimed.

  “Sharyn!” I called.

  The girl on the floor looked up at me, not comprehending.

  But she was chief now. Chief of the Undertakers. That meant it was her call.

  “I can get him!” I told her.

  Helene protested desperately, “No! You can’t let him do this!”

  “Sharyn, look at me,” I exclaimed. The clock was ticking.

  She looked. Her eyes were puffy and red.

  I put everything I had behind my words. “I … can … get … him!”

  Sharyn stared at me for a few more precious seconds. Then she said in a voice so faint that I’d never have heard it if the others hadn’t been so completely quiet—quiet as Malum. “Get him, little bro.”

  Helene’s hand was still on my bicep. I took it in mine and gave it a hard twist. Shocked, she let out of cry of pain as I pried her fingers off my arm. “I’m sorry,” I told her, shoving her hard enough to drop her onto her butt. “I love you.”

  Then I ran for the Rift and leapt right through it. My feet hit the Energy Ferry, but I didn’t break stride. With one skateboard on my back and another in my hands, I jumped off the ferry’s far end, down toward the peaks and sloping valleys of the carved-out Ether that filled the tunnel from one end to the other.

  Except, to my eyes, they weren’t peaks and valleys anymore.

  They were half-pipes.

  A year ago, my skills on a skateboard had been … questionable, and that was on a good day. But since joining the Angels crew, Sharyn had pushed me to learn the board. Her lessons hadn’t been about being “cool.” Like all things Undertaker, they’d been about staying alive.
And a kid on a skateboard, if he knew what he was doing, was agile, fast, and seriously hard to catch.

  So my training hadn’t focused on tricks or stunts, but instead on precision—and speed.

  I dropped into the closest half-pipe right where I wanted to, my wheels catching its slope and my feet hitting the board at just the right angle to give me the most roll time down, across the floor and then up the other side. Once there, I leaned forward slightly, catching air. But I wasn’t going for height. I was going for distance.

  I had three-and-a-half minutes to get to the other side of the tunnel. Tops.

  Down the next half-pipe, across and up again. More air. More speed. After a half-dozen of these, I tried jumping a pipe and managed it—barely, my back wheels almost catching the lip of the peak. If I’d let that happen, I’d have wiped out for sure, hitting the bottom of the pipe hard, my broken board tumbling after me.

  But I didn’t let it happen.

  Instead, I performed an almost instinctive ollie, jumping up at just the right moment to “lift” my board clear of the peak, before landing back on it and riding all the way down and up again.

  Pipe after pipe, long after I lost count.

  Two-and-a-half minutes left.

  Ahead of me, the tunnel seemed to stretch forever. I still couldn’t see the lip of the Malum’s Void. At any moment I expected to hear—something. Maybe the shattering of crystal or some other sound that would tell me that Tom had taken his throw early. But seconds passed, and more half-pipes passed, and nothing happened.

  During my two ferry trips, I’d noticed that the pattern of the “ripples” in the floor changed at one point, about a third of the way along the tunnel. Without warning, the flow of half pipes turned almost ninety degrees, maybe due to some backwash as the Anchor Shard’s energy bounced off the Malum homeworld and returned the way it had come. Anyway, I felt pretty confident, if I could make it that far, I could improve my time.

  Sure enough, no sooner had I thought it than I cleared a final half-pipe and saw that the next had been turned almost perpendicular to this one—forming a clear, curved road that ran, unbroken, into the far distance.

  So I hit that road—hard, using the slopes on either side to feed my ride. I rolled up on the left, and down again, then up on the right and down again, gaining speed and distance as I went, until the walls were a blur and the wind in my face dried my half-panicked sweat.

  A minute and a half left.

  Of course, that assumed Tom and I had “synchronized our watches”—which we hadn’t.

  The pipe I was riding continued on for about five hundred yards before turning so abruptly that I barely had time to react. With only a few seconds’ worth of warning, I banked up onto the left-hand slope, executed a quick 180, and then rolled back down to build some speed. Then I skated across the bottom of the pipe and straight up the right hand slope, heading for the peak, hoping desperately that I still had the momentum to clear it.

  I did.

  Just.

  Then, as I went briefly airborne, shifting my weight forward and readying to drop into the next half-pipe, I craned my neck and spotted the Eternity Stone. It was still in one piece, ahead and to my left, looking huge and brilliant. I tried to spot Tom, but there just wasn’t time before I was swallowed by the next pipe.

  Down, across, and up.

  I looked again.

  And there he was. From this distance, and with the whole of the enormous crystal hanging above him, he looked small. Very small.

  “Tom!” I called. But before I could see if he’d heard me, I dropped into the next pipe. Down, across, and up again. And again I called his name.

  I was getting close to the far side now, with less than sixty seconds before—by my watch—the chief’s fifteen minute window would close. And I still couldn’t tell if my yells were reaching his ears.

  So, I skipped that and focused on covering the distance, leaning forward and squeezing every last bit of speed I could out of this crazy mode of travel.

  Thirty seconds.

  The last half-pipe’s far slope ran all the way up to the underside of the lip that marked the border of the Malum homeworld. There, the climb was high, almost twice as high as the others had been. So I threw everything I had behind my final drop, my wheels catching the hard Ether just right, reducing friction, increasing momentum. I couldn’t miss that final peak. And I couldn’t lose my board reaching for it.

  I’d have to do this just right.

  As I crossed the pipe I plotted my last move. I’d wait until the very top of the climb and then do another ollie, jumping the board off the Ether and then grabbing it with one hand. Meanwhile, my other hand would be reaching for the lip of the landing.

  Timing, as they say, was everything.

  The first part of it went okay. I felt the quick moment of zero G that indicated I’d gone as far up the last slope as I was going to. At that instant, I bent my knees and kicked off my board in just the right way to bounce its wheels and lift it up after me. Three inches. Six inches.

  I grabbed the board’s front wheels with my left hand and strained upward with my right.

  But, as my fingertips neared it, I knew with sick certainty that I was falling short. In another half-second, my momentum would fail me, and my board and I would go tumbling back down into the pipe, with zero hope of recovering fast enough to stop what was about to happen.

  Sorry, Helene, I remember thinking. I blew it.

  Then a hand, dark skinned and incredibly strong, grabbed mine.

  In a single powerful motion, Tom pulled me up out of the pipe and dropped me in a heap onto the hard flat slab that marked the limits of Malumtown.

  He didn’t look happy to see me.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he exclaimed. “And how on Earth did you—”

  I jumped to my feet, sore and exhausted but not caring. “Did you do it?” I asked desperately. “Did you throw Fore?”

  Then I saw that he still held the javelin in his free hand, and felt kind of stupid.

  He glared at me, maybe madder than I’d ever seen him. “I was about to! I had my head on straight and I’d made my peace and I was ready to take the throw. But then I heard my name being called and spotted Will friggin’ Ritter … skateboarding through the nothing between dimensions. Skateboarding!”

  “Yeah,” I said, still trying to catch my breath. “Well, let’s throw it. Because I just got here in under four minutes, which means we can get back … both of us … while that javelin is doing its resonance thing.”

  He stared at me, still angry, but confused too. “I don’t get it.”

  “I got a board for me and one for you!” I exclaimed. “This is what we in the hero biz call a ‘rescue.’” I actually added the air quotes; I was feeling that snarky.

  His face hardened. “No.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “I appreciate what you tried to do, bro. But no. I’m not going to risk your life. You go back. I’ll give it another ten minutes.”

  I stared at him, not believing. “That’s nuts! Why’re you so determined to kill yourself?”

  “I’m determined to make sure you survive. I owe it to Karl, not to mention your mom and sister. You’ve been through too much, Will. Seen too much. Suffered too much. It ends now. You go back. Grow up and do amazing things.”

  I stared at him as if he’d started speaking Martian. Desperately, I wracked my brain for some way to make him understand what I’d just done and why I’d done it. But I knew that look, the one he wore on his face right now. Tom Jefferson had set himself on a course of action. And when he did that, nothing and nobody was going to turn him from it.

  So I did the only thing I could.

  I punched him in the face.

  Chapter 43

  The Sons of Ritter

  Or tried to.

  He caught my fist in his, which was easily twice the size.

 
“Whoa!” he exclaimed, taking a step back. “Seems I ain’t the only one pissed off! Been a while since you took a swing at me, little brother.”

  I yanked my hand back, feeling my face flush.

  I should’ve known I could never take him by surprise, at least not in combat. “I’m pissed because I’ve got a job to do. I promised Future Sharyn that I’d keep this from happening again! I promised that I’d save you … and all I’ve managed to do is set things up so that you die even sooner than you would have!”

  “Ease up, Captain World-Revolves-Around-Me,” he said, not smiling. “This was my call, not yours.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard that kind of crap before. I bust my hump to save people and they just shrug and say ‘I gotta do this’ and go off and get themselves killed anyhow. Well, that’s done! You hear me? It’s done! Tom Jefferson, I deny you the right to sacrifice yourself!”

  He chuckled a little at that, which pissed me off even further—until I realized his reaction was more astonishment than humor. “I told ya,” he said. “It ain’t sacrifice. It’s—”

  I shoved the skateboard at him hard enough to cut him off mid-sentence. “This is what doing what you gotta do looks like. You throw that damned spear and then you and I skate home. That’s what’s gonna happen!”

  Tom looked from me, to the skateboard, to the Sea of Ripples. Then he shook his head, as if still not quite believing what I’d done to get here. Heck, I didn’t believe it either.

  Then he said, “I love you for this, bro. I really do. But my conscience can’t handle it. Go back. Please.”

  I threw my hands up and turned away, thinking furiously.

  That’s when I saw them.

  Malum.

  A horde appeared in the distance. They were still a ways off, but close enough that I could tell there were a lot of them. A whole lot of them. They were watching us, maybe trying to figure out what was going to happen and whether or not they could—or should—stop it. After all, we’d won bavarak.