by Ty Drago
There was a long pause. “What kind of explosives?”
Tom told him what kind of explosives.
“Yes,” the F.B.I. agent replied. “I can manage that. Just tell me when and where.”
Tom did.
“It’s a good idea.”
“It’s a stall. All of this ain’t nothing but a stall. This kind of fightin’ ain’t about beating your enemy. It’s ‘bout outlasting him. Let me know when you’re in position. I’ll call you when it’s time to push the button.”
“Chief … thanks. And good luck.”
We’ll need it, Tom thought.
Chapter 33
HAUNTED PLACES
We were in the brain factory, and Steve Moscova was showing us the impossible.
“Tell me again,” Dave said. He tried to raise his right hand to point, but ended up pointing with the blunt head of his pickaxe since, of course, his right hand was gone. He flushed and lowered his arm again. “What is that?”
The “that” was a black, faintly shimmering hole, about four feet wide, which floated in midair near the Brain Factory’s back wall. In front of it, maybe six feet away, the Anchor Shard sat clamped to a metal table and wired to a car battery. The light that pulsed inside the weird crystal seemed to be directed at the hole—like the beam of an alien flashlight.
Making the hole.
Steve looked impatient. “I told you! It’s a bi-dimensional singularity!”
“Yeah,” Helene replied. “But what the heck is that?”
The Brain Boss sighed. Steve had been more patient when I’d first met him. Ian’s death had changed the kid, hardened him, left him angrier—but no less smart.
That last part was good. We needed smart right now.
“It’s a doorway,” he explained. “A tear in the fabric of spacetime.”
“Which?” Dave asked.
“Which what?”
“Space or time?” the big kid exclaimed.
“Both, of course!” Steve snapped.
“That makes no sense!” Dave insisted.
Steve’s face darkened. “It makes perfect sense! They’re parts of the same thing!”
The Burgermeister glowered. “How can space and time be the same thing? There’re satellites in orbit and I got a wristwatch. My wristwatch ain’t in space and the satellites ain’t wrapped around my arm!”
The Brain Boss looked as if he wanted to launch himself at the much larger boy. I stepped between them, trying to be casual about it. “A doorway to the Malum homeworld?” I asked Steve.
“No. Well, I don’t know. Not for sure. This technology is way beyond us. But I think the Anchor Shard opens the door to an empty space between universes.”
“Void,” I said. “Dillin called it a ‘Void.’”
“Good name for it,” Steve replied.
“Can we go through it?” Sharyn asked.
Steve lowered his eyes. “I wanted to try that. But Tom wouldn’t let me, even though, based on some test I’ve run, there is air … and gravity … beyond the doorway.”
“Rift,” I said. “The Corpses call it the Rift.”
“Okay … Rift. But, so far, there doesn’t seem to be solid ground over there. At least none that I’ve been able to find without actually … you know … poking my head through and looking.”
“Don’t poke your head through and look,” Sharyn told him firmly.
We could all see how much the Brain Boss wanted to.
“We can’t lose you,” Helene said. “Not now.”
“Not ever,” Sharyn added.
Steve frowned. Then he nodded.
“So, what’s the bottom line?” I asked.
He said, “Bottom line: we might fall to our deaths … or fall forever … the minute we stepped through.”
“Then how do the deaders cross it?” the Angel Boss asked.
“As energy,” Helene said. “They come over as those person-sized lumps of hate we sometimes see when we kill one. That’s why they need the dead bodies.”
“But from where?” Sharyn pressed. “If all this crystal thingy does is open a Rift, then there’s gotta be another Rift, right? On their side of the … Void … in-between?”
“It’s a solid hypothesis,” Steve told her. “But I have no idea how it works.”
“Then it don’t do us no good!” Dave growled.
I expected Steve to get pissed off again, but he didn’t. “Well, that would be true … if going through the Rift was what we were after. But it’s not.”
“Yeah, I dig,” Sharyn said. “All we gotta do is find this Rift and unplug the crystal that’s juicin’ it.”
“We don’t know where it is!” Dave complained.
“Yes, we do,” I said. “The Zombie Prince told me.”
They all threw blank stares my way.
I said, “Um … Bob Dillin, the principal at Meadowlark Intermediate.”
“Oh,” Sharyn said.
But the blank stares kept coming. Most of them knew my morning’s story, parts of it, anyway. But the concept of a “friendly” Corpse just didn’t compute. It was like trying to picture Santa Claus scuba diving.
Go on: try it.
“Where’s it at, little bro?” Sharyn asked.
“Fort Mifflin,” I replied.
“Mifflin!” the Burgermeister exclaimed. He sounded as if the very idea offended him.
“Kinda where it all started,” added Helene. Of all of them, she was the only one present who’d already known; she’d been in the Infirmary when I’d told Tom.
“It is where it all started,” I said. “According to Dillin, it’s where the Corpses first punched through into our world. Every deader that’s come across the Void since then, has come through Mifflin. Every single one!”
“Why there?” Sharyn asked. “What’s so special about an old Revolutionary War Fort in a swamp? It makes no sense!”
“Actually,” replied Steve. “It does … in a weird way. You all remember where we found this Anchor Shard?”
“Eastern State Penitentiary,” Dave replied. “And ‘we’ didn’t find it. Will and Helene and me found it. You weren’t there.”
“What’s your problem?” Steve demanded. “Why are you riding me?”
“’Cause you’re doin’ what you always do! Talkin’ down to everybody!”
Steve’s face turned purple. “Is it my fault that you’ve got the intellect of a pot-bellied pig?”
The Burgermeister started forward. Steve started forward. I still stood between them, and put a hand on each of their chests.
“What’re you both doing?” I demanded. “We got a little over an hour before it gets dark.” I whirled on Dave. “I know you’re pissed at the world! I can’t even pretend to get what you’re dealing with right now. But you gotta remember who the enemy is!” I pointed at the Brain Boss. “We need this dude, alive and conscious!” The Burgermeister scowled, but he backed away. I whirled on Steve. “And you? What are you thinking? He’s twice your size and he’s got a pickaxe for a right hand!”
Steve also scowled.
But then he backed away, too.
For half-a-minute, nobody said anything. Everyone looked at the floor, except for Sharyn, who was looking at me with this strange little smile on her face. It made me uncomfortable, so I said, “Clock’s ticking, guys.”
The Burgermeister and Steve both raised their heads. They faced one another.
Dave grumbled, “I’m … in a crappy mood.”
“Yeah,” the Brain Boss replied. “Me, too.”
“At least you still got both your hands!” the bigger kid snapped.
I almost stepped forward again. But then Steve said, “Yeah. I just don’t have my best friend.”
Ian.
You know, it had never occurred to me that Steve and Ian were best friends. It had never occurred to me that either of them even had a best friend.
The Burgermeister’s face went slack wi
th surprise. Then he said in an uncharacteristically gentle voice, “Man, I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” Steve told him. “About Ian and about you.”
“Um … can we get back to it?” Helene asked, clearing her throat.
“Right,” Steve said. He blew out a long sigh. “Mifflin and Eastern State have something common.”
“What’s that?” Sharyn asked.
“They’re both associated with paranormal activity.”
Dave blinked. “Paranormal—”
“Ghosts,” Helene translated.
And they were right. Both places had been on Ghost Hunters at least once. Fort Mifflin and Eastern State Penitentiary were considered to be the two most haunted places in Philly. Both of them offered Halloween events. Mifflin led you on a tour and told you ghost stories, while Eastern State staged a huge, walk-through haunted house, complete with black lights and guys in horror makeup popping out and scaring you.
At least, they used to—before the deaders took over both landmarks and closed them to the public.
“Now, I’m not saying I believe in ghosts,” Steve remarked. “I’m just saying that the Corpses seem drawn to places that have that reputation. Maybe … well, maybe the fabric of spacetime is a little thinner there, making it easier to cross the Void. In fact, maybe that’s why we can’t actually link up with the Malum home world. Haven’s spacetime walls are too thick.”
I said, “Dillin told me the Anchor Shard at Fort Mifflin is inside something called the ‘East Magazine.’ It’s where they used to keep the gunpowder back in the old days. It’s mostly underground. I’ve been there … during a school trip. It’s like a brick cave, with a high curved ceiling. Used to be all one big room, but Dillin told me that by the time he came through the Rift, a cinderblock wall had been built, floor to ceiling, that cuts the room in two. He said the only way in or out is through a heavy steel door.”
“Cavanaugh’s locked down her crib,” Sharyn said.
“Sounds like it,” Helene agreed.
I continued, “The Corpse’s Anchor Shard is inside that new room, hooked up to … not one … but three car batteries, which Dillin told me are constantly being changed. No matter what happens, the Queen can’t let the Rift close. Ever.”
Steve said, “Because, if it does, then the Corpses all die.”
“So … we pull the plug,” I added. “And the war’s over.”
“Simple!” Sharyn said.
Then Steve remarked, “Except for one tiny problem: pulling the plug will kill you.”
We all looked at him.
“Remember what happened to Ian? He pulled the plug on our Anchor Shard and the crystal immediately released all its stored up energy. I’ve since repeated the experiment more than once, very carefully. Tom was even in here the last time. It’s always the same. The blast radius of the released energy increases exponentially based on the length of time that the crystal is hooked up to an electrical power source.”
“Exponentially?” the Burgermeister asked.
“A lot,” I told him. Honestly, it was a guess.
“Oh,” he muttered.
“So … even if we get near enough to this thing to unplug it,” Sharyn said. “We’ll get wasted doin’ it?”
The Brain Boss nodded. “The wall and door will block the energy. But you’d never get out the door and close it behind you fast enough to outrun the wave. Everything organic in the room would be vaporized.”
“And we’re all organic,” Helene muttered.
Then Steve said, “Unless, of course, you have a way to delay the unplugging …”
Sharyn’s grin was back. “What you got, genius?”
For the first time in a while, the boy smiled. Then he lifted a towel that had been draped over something on a nearby lab table. Under it stood a gadget, about a foot high, with a broad metal base and two tall metal posts with some kind of slanted blade wedged between them.
We all examined it.
“I call it a McDonald,” Steve said proudly.
After Ian McDonald, I thought. Nice.
“Looks like a guillotine,” remarked Helene.
“Basically, it is,” Steve replied. “You fit it over the positive cable closest to the shard. Then you flip this switch here and the device waits exactly ten seconds before dropping the blade. It’s spring-loaded, so it drops fast and hard enough to slice right through insulation and copper wiring. The blade is nonconductive, so cutting the cable breaks the circuit and kills all power to the crystal.”
“And closes the Rift,” I said.
“And kills the Corpses,” Helene said. “All of them.”
“We’ll spend the next half-hour practicing with it using our own Anchor Shard,” Steve said. “You’ll need to know how to assemble it and how to hit the switch and then reach a safe distance before it activates. I’ve already tried it myself a half-dozen times. It works.”
Sharyn laughed. “You’ve outdone yourself with this latest invention!”
But the Brain Boss wasn’t laughing. He was looking at the machine he’d designed, and named after his dead best friend. “I hope so,” he said in a small voice. “Because if it works … it’s my last invention.”
Chapter 34
FINAL PREP
I went to see my family before we left.
Haven was a lot more crowded now than it had been when we’d first moved here last October. The ranks of the Undertakers had doubled, and finding room for them had been keeping the Monkeys busy for months.
But now all that was over. No more shoring up unused corridors in this forgotten subbasement. No more trapping and relocating feral cats. No more worries about ceiling collapses or moldy walls.
Tonight, one way or another, would be everyone’s last night in this place.
Tonight, the Undertakers either won—or they died.
So, yeah, I went to see my family.
Their new digs weren’t far from mine, and looked pretty much the same—but they weren’t there. Instead, I headed for the Infirmary, where my mom had taken a break in her medic chores to tuck Emily into a small cot that she’d set up in one of the big room’s far corners. It was eight-thirty, which was my little sister’s bedtime.
“Now it might get noisy in here in a little bit,” my mother told her. “But I want you to try to sleep.”
“Okay, Mommy.” Then, looking past her, she cried, “Will!”
Mom offered me a weak smile. She seemed tired. Fear will do that to you.
“Leaving?” she asked.
I nodded. Then, as my mother stood, I squeezed around her and sat down on the edge of Emily’s cot.
My little sister looked up at me with those big eyes of hers.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“The bad people are coming.”
“They won’t get in. Tom’ll stop them.” Then, after a little internal debate, I added, “And tomorrow, we’ll be able to go home.”
That made her smile. “I miss my dolls.”
“I miss your dolls, too,” I said.
She giggled. “You don’t play with dolls!”
No, I don’t. I don’t “play” at all. Not anymore. Children play.
Soldiers fight.
“I miss watching you play with them,” I told her.
She nodded. Then she hugged me—hard. I hugged her back—hard.
One of three things was going to happen in the few hours. One: Sharyn, Helene, Dave, and I would get to Fort Mifflin and use Steve’s “McDonald” on the Corpses’ Anchor Shard. Two: We’d die trying, and Haven would fall. Three: We’d fail but survive, and return here to find everyone we loved dead, and the war lost.
It was the last one that really terrified me.
I left Emily and followed my mother out into the hallway. There, she stood, hugging herself in the dank corridor, silently looking at me. I understood. I had no idea what to say, eit
her.
Finally, she asked, “Are you ready?”
“As ready as I can be.”
She nodded. “I feel like telling you not to go. I feel like that’s the ‘mom’ thing to do. But, we’re past all that, aren’t we? Besides, it’s not going to be any safer here.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “Listen, I’ve talked to Tom. If things get real bad, he can try to get you and Emily out the same way we’re going. It’ll be risky, but it’s better’n nothing.”
“He told me about it. And I told him that he can get Emily out that way, if need be. But I’m staying.”
“Mom—”
“Will, we’ve all got our jobs to do tonight. I’m Haven’s medic. I’m staying.”
“Even if it means Emily ends up an orphan?”
“Even if,” she said. Her expression was determined, but her eyes were moist and I could see the way she trembled.
“I’ll end this,” I told her. “I promise.”
“I know you will,” she replied, trying a smile. “You know … I’m incredibly proud of you.”
“I’m incredibly proud of you, too.”
I opened my arms and she came to me. Not quite crying. Neither one of us was crying. That might come later. For now, there was too much to do, too much to think about. Want to know how you keep going when things are at their worst? Well, for my part, the answer’s simple: because you have to.
I hugged my mom, maybe for the last time.
Then I went to meet up with the others.
Haven was quiet. All those kids in those tight quarters, yet there was very little sound. Almost everyone was busy working on the fortifications. If I made my way to one of the three exits, I supposed I’d find things very noisy. Sawing and digging. Yelled questions and yelled answers. But here, in the empty places between those exit worksites, everything seemed still and hushed.
Tomb-like.
I poked my head into Helene’s room, expecting to see her. She wasn’t there. Instead, I found Julie sitting on her sister’s bunk, wrapped in a blanket. When she looked up at me, I saw tears in her eyes.
A lot of that going around today.
“Hey, Will,” she said, wiping her face with one hand. “Sorry.”
