by Ty Drago
The Undertakers: Night of Monsters
By Ty Drago
An Undertakers Novelette
Complete Printed Edition
Copyright 2014 by Ty Drago
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author makes no claims to, but instead acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the word marks mentioned in this work of fiction.
Cover image by Igor Zhuravlov
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Author’s Note:
This novelette takes place in the Undertakers universe, modern day Philadelphia, in the midst of the Corpse War.
Fans of the book series will recognize the characters. But, for the sake of context, this particular tale belongs somewhere between Book 2: Queen of the Dead and Book 3: Secret of the Corpse Eater.
DEDICATION
To my nephew, Robert Michael McDevitt, for his kindness and unceasing support of his doddering old Uncle Ty. Love you, Nef.
Part One: The Twins
Next time your parents gripe about rush hour traffic, tell them to try driving an old yellow school bus through a roadblock of animated cadavers in the middle of the night.
Seriously, tell them.
“Left!” I screamed. “Go left!”
“I'm trying!” Dave “the Burgermeister” Burger yelled back as he tugged furiously at the heavy steering wheel.
The bus obeyed, though so sluggishly that he might as well have been trying to steer a humpback whale. All the times I'd been inside one of these big, ugly, yellow giants — with their high square windows, rows of hard plastic seats, and filthy, rubber center aisle mats — I'd never imagined now hard it was for the drivers to, well, drive them.
Some vague, half-conscious corner of my mind wondered if, just maybe, that was why most school bus drivers were so grouchy all the time.
I mean it couldn't be the kids, right?
Of course, none of them had ever tried steering a bus while the living dead charged your right flank, their sheer numbers as deadly and relentless as a rotting tidal wave.
Welcome to my world.
There had to be fifty or more, all grasping, decomposing hands and snapping, rotted teeth. And these weren't the slow, shuffling, empty-headed zombies of George Romero fame. No, these were Corpses — capital “C” — and they were fast on their feet and knew exactly what they meant to do.
They meant to kill us.
And this freakin' bus was too freakin' slow!
From way in the back, I heard Helene Boettcher call out at the top of her voice, “Here they come! Everybody, hold onto something! Now!”
Jammed three deep onto those molded plastic seats I mentioned earlier, ninety-six kids started screaming.
At that moment, despite the Burgermeister's best driving efforts, the tidal wave of animated dead hit us — hard. Our school bus shuddered with the impact, its windows rattling. Dave, his foot heavy on the accelerator, made a final desperate bid for the open parking lot ahead. If we could just get that far, maybe it would give us some breathing room.
Maybe.
Then the bus suddenly tilted to the left. Gasping, I grabbed onto one of the steel poles mounted just behind the driver's chair, and looked toward the rear.
Helene had fallen against the back of the seats. Around her, the kids where sobbing and hanging on for dear life — as faces appeared in the right-side windows. Dead faces. Some showed rotting skin pulled tight across decaying bones. Others were bloated from trapped gasses, their milky eyes seeming to bulge from their sockets. All sported savage, grinning expressions of pure, predatory hate. Their collective weight pressed against the bus, lifting it off its wheels. A hundred hands clawed at the windows, already breaking through the glass.
There's so many of them! Too many of them!
“I knew this was a bad idea,” Dave muttered.
At the other end of the bus, Helene screamed. “Oh my God! We're going over!”
And it was true. The mob of animated cadavers had overpowered this huge vehicle, toppling it onto its side like jackals bringing down a wildebeest.
I knew, with awful certainty, that we were all going to die here.
***
You know what? I should probably start at the beginning.
My name's Will Ritter. I'm thirteen-years-old, and I'm an Undertaker. The Undertakers are a resistance group, of sorts — kind of an underground army. Not big and not all that well equipped. But we do okay for ourselves. And what are we resisting?
Corpses.
We don't really know where they come from. They seem to be bodiless invaders, who get to Earth somehow and then, realizing they have no bodies of their own, possess human cadavers. These they wear like suits of clothing until the stolen bodies literally rot out around them. Then they discard the husks and find new “donors”.
Corpses are smart. They've got this way of hiding what they look like, so that all anyone sees are normal, upstanding, living men and women. This illusion of normalcy stays with them, carrying over into photographs, fingerprints, and even T.V. appearances. Nobody can penetrate these Masks, as we call them. Nobody can recognize the rotting, bug-filled dead things that hide behind them.
Nobody, that is, except Seers.
A Seer is a kid who develops, for reasons we don't really get, the ability to penetrate the Corpses' illusion. And an Undertaker is, simply put, a Seer who the Corpses failed to hunt down and kill. We live our lives on the run, forever stalked by monsters that are slowly infiltrating the schools, the police, even city government. We can't go home, since the Corpses would find us there and murder us — and maybe murder our families, too.
So we hang together, hide, and fight back. At least, we try to.
Tonight my friends and I had been doing just that. Helene, the Burgermeister and me had been on a late night mission on Callowhill Street here in Philadelphia, maybe half-a-mile from Haven, the Undertakers' secret HQ. Midnight missions are common things; Undertakers do most of their work at night, while the “blind” city sleeps. It's just the nature of the war we fight.
I won't bore you with the details of what we were up to on this particular night — a cold one in mid-March — especially since what happened before we got to the corner of 12th Street and Callowhill was nothing compared to what happened after.
What was happening now.
“Whoa!” the Burgermeister yelled as two kids exploded out of an alley to our right and slammed straight into him. At first, they stared up at Dave's enormous frame — Dave Burger is the biggest kid I've ever met — then they screamed and tried to cut around him. But he closed one meaty fist around each of their coats and yanked them back. “Slow down,” he snapped.
They struggled like hooked fish.
Helene and I swapped looks. “Hold up,” I said to the nearest kid. They were both boys. Both blonde. Both maybe eleven years old and, I realized with some surprise, identical twins. “What're you running from?”
“Lemme go!” one of them screamed. “They're coming!”
“Who's 'they'?” Helene pressed, though from
the way she now held her water pistol, I figured she knew.
Heck, we all knew.
“Dead people!” the other boy cried.
“Figures,” Dave muttered.
I heard footsteps in the alley, though whoever — or whatever — made them was still bathed in darkness. Oddly, they didn't seem to be running, or even walking all that fast.
Then, behind the footsteps, I caught words. But not English words. Not even human words. We call it Deadspeak, a non-verbal way that Corpses have of talking to each other. Steve, the Undertakers' science expert, says it's a kind of limited telepathy that most humans can't hear. Only Seers.
Lucky us.
“Must. Find. Children.”
The other “voice” replied, “This. Way. Down. Alley. Close. Find. Capture.”
“Number 14,” I said.
The Burgermeister immediately released the kids as he and Helene took positions on either side of the mouth of the alley. I'd hoped the boys would stay close. Having them there would help bait the trap. But they took off the instant their sneakers hit the pavement. With some dismay, I watched them tear across Callowhill Street, the traffic at this hour practically non-existent, and wondered if their panic had a destination. Panic usually didn't.
Then I rooted myself on the sidewalk and tried to look scared. It wasn't hard.
How many walking dead men had I seen? Hundreds? Thousands?
You never get used to it.
Two female Corpses, both dressed in nurse's garb melted out of the gloom that filled the alley like smoke. They were both maybe a week to ten days dead, pretty fresh, their skin blotched purple from the unpumped blood pooling in the tissues beneath it. Their eyes were wide and seemingly sightless — though I knew better — and their stringy hair had been tied back to fit under a white nurse's cap.
Strangely, both wore weird pendants around their necks — little black boxes with green blinking lights on them.
As they came forward, I noticed that their arms were extended outward, almost touching as they moved side by side, while their opposite fingertips just grazed the walls of alley. Clearly they didn't want anybody slipping past them.
And their grins were matching death masks, all yellowed teeth and rotting, receding black lips. They spoke again — English this time — and I was hammered by a chilling realization: these two things were enjoying themselves.
Enjoying the hunt.
“Little boys,” they chanted together in hideous harmony. “Little boys ... where've you gone? Come out. Come out. Wherever you are. We just want to play ...”
Jeez, I thought.
Then they spotted me. I was older than their twin prey and apparently alone on the sidewalk of a deserted street. And I looked scared. Their dead eyes narrowed. They stopped, still a dozen feet from the mouth of the alley.
Still too far.
“What's this?” one asked, her grin widening. “Another lonely child?”
But her companion's scary smile vanished and she asked, “What do you see, little boy?”
Undertakers get that question a lot. Corpses don't kill for no reason; they're too smart for that. The twins we'd run into had been Seers, which immediately marked them for death. But I was an unknown quantity. If I played it cool, pretended I didn't have my Eyes, they'd probably question me, make up some stupid story about lost children, and then leave me alone and continue their hunt. But if I went the other way, especially if I let on that I was an Undertaker, they'd pounce like hungry lions.
The smart thing was to play it cool.
So, me being me, I mustered up a smile and said, “Hey there, wormbags! Out for a stroll?”
The one on the left snarled. The one on the right hissed. Yeah, sometimes they snarl and hiss. Then they both came at me, fast, the feet inside their sensible shoes hammering the pavement. I waited until the pair was two steps from the mouth of the alley.
“Now!” I cried.
Helene stepped up and fired her water pistol point-blank into the Dead Nurse One's ear. The small plastic gun was loaded with saltwater, which immediately hosed the Corpse's control over her stolen body. She stiffened, turned, and marched straight into the lamppost a few feet to my right.
The Burgermeister had a somewhat different style. He came up on Dead Nurse Two and clamped one hand under her chin and the other around the back of her head. Then he pushed and pulled at the same time, delivering a savage twist that snapped the Corpse's neck. It sounded like popping bubble wrap. She dropped soundlessly into a heap on the sidewalk.
“Surprise,” I heard him mutter.
I turned to the other one, who had backed away from the lamppost, only to walk straight into it again, repeating this pattern over and over like one of those wind-up robots. Reaching inside my coat I pulled out a syringe, a long one. We call these “Ritters” — please don't ask why — and they're filled with the same kind of saltwater as our water pistols. Except the pistol's effects only last a minute or so.
Ritters are a bit more permanent.
I stepped up and jabbed the needle deep between the convulsing Corpse's shoulder blades, slamming the plunger home with my thumb.
“Get back!” I told the others.
We ducked and covered.
Dead Nurse One exploded.
Like I said, she was pretty fresh — what we call a Type Two on the Undertaker's one-to-five “Rate Their Rot” system. So when she popped, she popped wet. Her stolen body had been embalmed, so there wasn't much blood. But there was plenty of other stuff, and it splashed the walls of the surrounding buildings and soaked the lamppost she'd been beating herself against. Pieces of tissue, and other stuff I didn't want to guess at, slapped the pavement all around me. One such piece landed in the small of my back — sticky and cold — causing me to yelp and throw it off.
Then, feeling a little foolish, I made sure I was the first on my feet. “We're clear.”
“Nice job, Will,” Dave told me.
“You too. Both of you. Sharyn'd be proud.” Sharyn is Sharyn Jefferson, one of best fighters I'd ever seen. She'd invented the Number 14. In fact, she'd invented most of our moves. Her brother Tom, Chief of the Undertakers, had once called her a “tactical savant”. That's a genius with a hardcore talent for warfare. On the other hand, Sharyn could be a little — impulsive at times, even immature — and I sometimes wondered if her brother's compliment hadn't been just a little bit sarcastic.
But whatever.
“Now what?” Helene asked. “This Corpse that Dave just off-ed is gonna be yellin’ for help.”
I looked down at the Dead Nurse Two, who lay sprawled in the mouth of the alley, her head turned almost all the way around. The stolen body she wore was useless now, but the creature inside it — which called itself a Malum — was alive and well. At times like this, Malum sent out telepathic distress calls. More Corpses would be coming.
So I scanned the darkened streets around us. The city felt quiet and strangely empty. I could hear traffic moving along the Vine Street Expressway several blocks from here, but the only cars in sight were all empty and parked. The sidewalks stood deserted. Even the muggers had gone to bed. Few people strolled along the Philly streets at this hour, especially on a cold night —
— except for Undertakers, Corpses, and the children they hunted.
Speaking of “children they hunted.”
I figured the twin boys hadn't gone far. After all, they'd been looking for help, any kind of help, and had run into us — literally. And, while they'd been scared enough to keep running, they'd also sensed refuge and so had stopped around the next corner to see if the three of us could deliver.
And we had.
“There they are,” I said to Helene and Dave, who turned and looked.
The boys watched us with identical pairs of eyes.
“Hey!” the Burgermeister called, only to yelp as Helene punched him on the arm.
“You'll spook them!” she snapped. Then, as he grumbled something I didn't catch, the girl s
tarted walking toward the two young Seers. The boys watched her, looking way younger than eleven. Terror can do that to you. “It's okay,” she said. “We can help you. My name's Helene and that's Will and Dave. We're Undertakers.”
“Undertakers,” one of the boys echoed.
Then his brother remarked in astonishment, “You popped one of the nurses.”
“That's one word for it,” Helene told him. She'd reached the corner by now and had put a friendly hand on each of their shoulders. “We call them 'Corpses' ... with a capital 'C'. And making them 'pop' is kinda what we do.” She turned toward the Burgermeister and myself and nodded.
We joined Helene and the twins at the corner of 12th Street and Callowhill. The boys regarded us — especially Dave — with a sort of wary awe. “How old are you?” one of them asked.
The Burgermeister looked uncomfortable. “Fifteen,” he said.
“I thought you were fourteen,” Helene remarked.
“I'm fifteen,” Dave said again, sounding defensive.
“You're really big,” the other twin told him.
“No ...” He started to tack on a second word, but Helene punched his arm and it turned into “Ow!”
“What're your names?” I asked the boys.
“I'm Michael and he's Robert,” one of them replied.
“Hi, Michael and Robert,” Helene said, somehow managing to smile at them and glare at Dave at the same time. Then, to me she added, “We gotta split. More deaders'll be coming.”
“I know,” I replied. But instead of leading them away, I turned to Michael. “Why don't you tell us what happened?”
“We escaped,” Michael said. His brother nodded.
“From the Corpses?”
This time they both nodded. “They had us in the pen with the others,” Michael explained. “But this fight started and, when the dead people who were guarding us opened the gate to stop it, my brother and I managed to sneak out. We didn't get far before they spotted us. Then we just ran!”
