by Ty Drago
But this Deader stayed dark, which suggested that he didn’t want us falling into “official” police custody.
He just wanted to kill us.
Helene clearly saw what I saw. More than anything else, it convinced her.
“I’ll cut around the next corner,” she said, sounding very unhappy about it. “You jump off!”
“Okay!”
If she’d cut the corner of Wallace Street any closer, we’d have both ended up splattered against the brick wall of the neighborhood bar. But her move was a good one—so sudden and perfectly timed that the dead cop overshot the intersection altogether, buying us precious seconds that were punctuated by the squeal of breaks.
“Take the wallet!” I told Helene as she stopped the bike in the tavern’s shadowed doorway.
“You keep it,” she replied.
“Take it!” I said again, shoving the small black square of leather at her. “In case they catch me!”
“Just make sure they don’t!” she snapped. Then, before I could argue further, she kicked off and headed down the street in the direction of Center City. Glancing the other way, I saw the cop car right itself and come after us. His lights were still off.
I slipped the wallet into my coat pocket and stepped back in the shadows of the entrance to the bar, pressing myself against its heavy wood door. Light shone faintly from within, and I could hear music playing. But I didn’t dare go inside. For one, I’d get thrown out immediately for being underage. For another, if a dead cop followed me, the bartenders and customers would hand me over without a second thought.
Because, of course, to them he wouldn’t be a dead cop. The Corpse’s Mask would show them a perfectly normal police officer just out doing his duty. Their noses wouldn’t burn with the reek of his putrefying flesh. Their ears wouldn’t hear the squish of his decomposing feet inside his shoes. And their eyes—well, they just wouldn’t see the truth.
It was the Corpses’ greatest weapon.
The cruiser rolled noisily past me, chasing after Helene. His lights stayed off, and he didn’t slow. He hadn’t seen me. The trick had worked—so far.
I raised my wrist to my lips and whispered, “Haven. This is Angel Four.”
For a few seconds, there was no reply, and I felt a sudden stab of panic. Had I broken the makeshift gadget during the fight with the Corpse? It wouldn’t have been the first time.
“This is Haven, Angel Four. That you, Will?”
“Hey, Justin. Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “Listen, we ran into trouble. I’m on foot, and Helene’s coming in hot.”
“What? Oh, barnacles! Hold on…”
I thought, Barnacles? SpongeBob? Really?
The wait felt like hours but was probably half a minute.
“Will, I’m showing you at Nineteenth and Wallace. Helene’s a block away. She’s moving fast.”
You just gotta love GPS.
“She’d better be,” I said. “There’s a Deader in a cop car on her butt.”
“Barnacles!” he said again. “One sec…”
I rolled my eyes.
It was more like fifteen “secs,” but who was counting?
“Marlee’s already talking to her on another line,” Justin told me. “We’re setting something up. I’ve also radioed Sharyn. She’s on her way. Stay put.”
And as he said that—I mean right as he said that—another Corpse came around the corner of the building and bumped right into me.
Chapter 4
The Deader and the Barfly
Like the one in the car, this Deader wore a cop uniform. Seeing him clearly by the light of an overhead streetlamp, I realized this early Type Three was big, solid—and familiar.
He was the Corpse I’d zapped back in the prison entrance.
“Undertaker,” he snarled.
“Dead guy,” I replied.
I went for my pocketknife, but he was faster. Corpses are often a lot faster than they look. His first swipe knocked the golden gadget from my hand, sending it flying across Wallace Street. His second swipe sent me flying. I slammed into the side of a mailbox, the impact knocking the wind out of me. Worse, I actually heard the crunch of plastic as my water pistol shattered. I’d shoved it into the rear waistband of my pants, and now it was leaking cold saltwater into my underwear.
This Deader had just disarmed me in the space of maybe two seconds. And he knew it.
He grinned. I always hated it when they grinned.
“My. Turn. Boy.”
Behind him, the bar door suddenly opened and a man—a nice, human-looking man—staggered out. He looked blearily at the Corpse. “’Scuse me, Ocifer,” he said in a slurred voice. Then he noticed me in a heap on the sidewalk with my back against a mailbox. He blinked. “There some poblem here?”
The Deader glared at him, and for one horrible moment, I thought he might go for the guy’s throat. But Corpses are smarter than that, and their Masks are important to them, usually more important than the condition and safety of whatever body they’re wearing.
“No problem, sir,” he said in English. “Just caught a vandal.”
Ever get the wind knocked out of you? It isn’t painful so much as scary. Apparently, your diaphragm—that’s the big muscle in your chest that helps your lungs expand and contract—gets hit and kind of seizes up, making it very, very hard to breathe. You can’t talk. You can’t get air.
Scary.
Well, that was happening to me, and while I knew from bitter experience that it wouldn’t last, I simply didn’t have time for it. I needed to shout something right now, or this drunken dude was going to wander off, and then Dead Cop would kill me.
With my chest heaving, I slammed my elbow into the side of the mailbox. It made a loud, low, metallic thump like a drum beat.
The Corpse’s glare turned my way. The other guy looked skyward, as if he’d heard thunder.
I did it again.
This time, the bar dude looked at me.
“What’s ee doin’?” the man slurred.
“Ignore him,” Dead Cop said. “Just go about your business, sir. I have this covered.”
I did it a third time.
“He’s gonna wake the neighbers,” the drunken guy observed.
“I’ll stop him,” the Deader said. Then he took a step toward me, his decaying feet making squishy noises inside his Philly police-issue shoes. I wasn’t sure exactly what “stop him” meant, but I figured it couldn’t be good.
Fortunately, I’d just caught my breath.
“Help!” I screamed. “This guy isn’t a cop! He’s crazy, and he wants to kill me!”
The Corpse hesitated. Then he made a bad mistake. He turned and glanced back at the drunken bystander in a way that even from my vantage point looked really guilty.
The guy in the bar doorway narrowed his eyes.
“’Ang on a second…” he said. “Lezzee some ID…‘officer’…”
“Of course, sir,” the Corpse said. And why wouldn’t he? After all, he had ID. He was a cop!
But his back was to me, his attention fixed entirely on the suspicious bar dude, and that was all I’d wanted.
In one reasonably smooth motion, I found my feet, stepped up, and punched Dead Cop in the back of his neck right at the base of the skull. Corpses have a vulnerable spot there, the place where the spinal cord meets the base of the brain, and a good shot paralyzes them. It doesn’t last long.
But it lasts long enough.
Dead Cop went stiff—no pun intended. Then he fell forward, right into the drunken dude, and they both went down in a heap against the door of the bar. Though he couldn’t see it or smell it, the poor human guy got himself lathered up pretty good in cadaver juice. I wondered if, tomorrow morning, his wife would notice that he smelled like
roadkill.
Time to disappear. The drunken guy was struggling under the weight of the fallen cop and at the same time staring at me in bleary confusion. Wherever I ran now, he’d report to the cop. Worse, the Corpse atop him was already twitching. This Deader was a strong one and would be back on his feet in a minute, maybe less.
Fortunately, while I’d been flopping around on the sidewalk beside the mailbox, trying to catch my breath, I’d also picked out my hiding place. Well, the building anyhow.
Empty buildings come in two flavors in Philly: boarded up and not boarded up. How many of each you find depends on the neighborhood. This particular street was mostly row homes and small corner shops. While I had been fighting to breathe, I’d managed to spot one house in particular that looked like nobody lived there.
How could I tell? It wasn’t a lack of lights on in the house; it was after midnight after all, and the whole neighborhood was dark. But something else was missing from its windows.
Curtains.
In Center City, Philadelphia, everybody lived on top of everybody else. Privacy was hard to come by. So curtains and blinds were usually kept closed, especially after dark.
And a house that didn’t even have curtains pretty much had to be empty. Or so I hoped.
I leaned over the Deader and yanked the baton from his belt. Like his shoes, it was a Philly police-issue weapon. Wood on the outside and lead on the inside. He had a gun too, but those were pretty useless against Corpses. This, however, might do some damage—if it came to that.
Then I made for my target building, crossing Wallace Street at a run.
“Hey!” the drunken man slurred after me. “Come back eere!”
Right, I thought. I wondered if, in all the history of the world, any fugitive had ever obeyed that command.
I wanted to look for my pocketknife, but I hadn’t seen where the Corpse’s blow had sent it. It might have been under a car, buried in a clump of sparse shrubbery, or down the sewer for all I knew. But I just couldn’t risk the time. Instead I made right for the first-floor window and smashed it with the baton, keeping my face averted. Then, mindful of the jagged glass in the frame, I climbed inside.
The living room was dark and empty. No furniture. No carpets. It smelled of mold and rat poop. Yep, definitely empty.
It looked like a pretty standard Philly layout. Living room leading to dining room leading to kitchen, with a staircase on the left. Upstairs, there were likely three bedrooms: a front, middle, and back. It would be the back bedroom I wanted.
I headed that way, taking the stairs two at a time and almost kicking the door in. The bedroom, like the rest of the place, was empty and deserted. Two dark, rectangular windows filled the rear wall. Beyond them would be a twelve-foot drop into an alley or, if I was lucky, a fire escape.
I was lucky.
From downstairs came a heavy crash. Evidently, the Corpse had recovered. He’d be searching the house for me, not skipping a room. Time to be a little quieter.
On tiptoe, I crossed the bedroom’s hard wooden floor to the windows and pulled one of them open. It was old and creaky, but at least it wasn’t painted shut. Then, glancing back toward the hallway door, I listened furiously.
Nothing. No footfalls. He was being quiet down there, probably hoping to surprise me.
Swallowing, I climbed out onto the fire escape. A quick look up showed that there was no roof access. A quick look down revealed the expected alley. A retractable ladder hung at the far end of the iron scaffold. Before I went to it, however, I took a moment to peer—one last time—back into the darkened house.
Dead Cop was there.
I mean right there—grinning at me.
“Hello. Boy.”
Chapter 5
Good Will Hunted
Corpses were like that, lumbering one minute and cat quick the next. How this wormbag had come up the stairs and into the bedroom so fast and quiet was a puzzle I had no time to solve. Before I could react, before the chill that ran down my spine even had time to freeze my backside solid, he bent at the waist and lunged his upper body through the open window, his big purple-gray hands like claws.
I think maybe I screamed. To this day, I’m not sure.
I recoiled, catching myself just before I upended over the fire escape railing and went tumbling down to the alley floor the hard way. The Deader was all over me in a heartbeat, his fingers smearing stinking fluid all over the front of my coat as they scrambled their way up toward my neck.
Undertaker training kicked in. Rather than retreating, I leaned forward over his shoulders and slammed the window closed, pinning him at the waist. He felt nothing, of course, but the pressure held him in place, and the angle kept his rotting paws away from my throat. Better still, the move earned me a few spare seconds—long enough to raise the baton.
I brought it down with all my strength, slamming it across the side of the Corpse’s head. He grunted. Then he bared his blackened teeth and surged forward again. I hit him a second time. Then a third. And all the while, I was making noises—either warrior cries or terrified sobs—again, I’m not sure. My mind felt fogged over by fear, desperation, and more than a little rage.
I hated these things.
With the fourth hit, I thought I heard something—like a dull crack. Had I broken the Corpse’s neck? If so, he’d go limp immediately.
He did, his heavy arms flopping to the latticed floor of the fire escape. His kicking feet, still inside the bedroom, dropped like twin bags of sand.
Panting and sweating despite the winter’s cold, I stepped back. My eyes felt as wide as dinner plates as I stared at him, still clutching the baton, ready to use it again if I had to.
I spared a moment to cross my eyes and take a quick peek at Dead Cop’s Mask. It was a Seer’s trick, something that most Undertakers picked up pretty fast. If you held your eyes a certain way, you could sort of see a Corpse the way the rest of the world—the adult world—saw him.
Not surprisingly, this Deader’s illusion was of a pretty big guy, with dark skin and dark hair. He hung motionless, pinned by the window sash, his Mask hovering almost ghostlike over his true worm-food body. I switched off this trick of vision almost at once, partly because it tended to give me a headache and partly because doing it was a little depressing. It seemed to drive home—at least for me—just how alone the Undertakers were in this war.
This dude wasn’t dead, of course. You couldn’t kill a Corpse with a gun or a knife, much less a lead baton. Stakes through the heart were useless. So were silver bullets, sunlight, garlic cloves, and wishes.
But you could damage their stolen bodies badly enough that they became useless to the entity inhabiting them. With his spine crushed, this Corpse was down for the count. He wouldn’t be able to move until another body became available to him. And that wouldn’t happen until his undead buddies found him and were able to discreetly move him to a more secure location.
Thing was, Corpses had this weird link that let their friends know when one of them was in this kind of trouble.
Which meant there’d be more on the way.
Time to go.
I staggered over to the retractable ladder and wasted half a minute trying to figure out the release mechanism in the dark. Finally, with the jerk of a lever, the metal ladder crashed downward, stopping three feet from the alley floor. The noise of it made me jump—nerves.
I descended as fast as I could and dropped onto the concrete. The alley was a blind one, and on three sides of me, the darkened backs of row homes rose like canyon walls. The fourth side was the only obvious exit, and it opened onto a lit city street.
I blew out a sigh. It steadied my pounding heart—a little. Then I raised my wrist and said into my radio, “Haven? This is Angel Four.”
Nothing.
I peered at the watch,
but it was too dark to see if its LCD screen was working. Chances were I’d busted it either climbing into or out of the empty house. Stupid things were always breaking.
With another sigh, I turned toward the mouth of the alley—
Just as a figure leaped down from the fire escape to block my path.
“Hello. Boy.”
My heart nearly exploded in my chest—I swear.
The Corpse towered over me like a pillar made of rotting flesh, once again wearing his black-gummed grin. His head was bent at a slightly odd angle. But as I watched, horrified, he reached up with one hand and shoved it roughly back into alignment. There was a sound like chalk breaking. His grin widened.
“Fooled you,” he sneered in English.
And he had. He’d known I’d effectively trapped him in the window, so he’d faked going limp. And I’d been just scared enough and desperate enough to buy it.
And now I was going to die for it.
Standing there, rooted by fear and exhaustion—frozen in place despite all my training—I whispered a silent good-bye to the mom I hadn’t seen in four months.
Happy birthday, I thought.
Then the Corpse’s left arm came off.
One minute, it was there, attached to his beefy shoulder, and the next, it was on the ground at his feet, a useless lump of dead flesh. Together, we both looked down at it. Then we both looked up at each other, and I could see he was every bit as perplexed as I felt.
“Hey, big dude!” a voice called. “You dropped somethin’!”
Dead Cop whirled around.
Sharyn Jefferson, boss of the Angels, stood right behind him.
In her hands, poised to strike, was Vader, her Japanese wakizashi sword. “Hi, Red!” she said to me, once again using the nickname I was sure all redheaded people despised. Her lips wore a wry smile, but her dark eyes were as hard as granite.
The Corpse growled—actually growled—and then it went for her, reaching out with his remaining hand.
