Secret of the Corpse Eater

by Ty Drago

  The Stranger exclaimed, “You’ll jeopardize this entire operation!”

  “Surely Birmelin has already told the Undertakers everything. What difference does it make now?”

  “It’s more than that … and you know it!”

  The Third said, “I don’t care how many other so-called Seers might be out there, I won’t be ruled by trifles. Nor by you. Not anymore.”

  “You’ll pay for this, Lindsay!”

  “This conversation is over. Good-bye, sister.”

  “No! Wait!” The Stranger paused yet again. “There’s something you need to know.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “She’s devolved.”

  Now it was the Third who paused. “What did you say?”

  “Last night, about the same time Jillian Birmelin fled Washington, DC, the source creature apparently metamorphosed.”

  “That’s impossible! It’s too soon!”

  “Perhaps she’s stronger than you anticipated. In any event, she consumed every minion guarding her. Six of them. Do you still wish to appear before cameras?”

  “I … of course! I’m not afraid of that abomination!” But the First could sense the lie.

  So, it seemed, could the Stranger. “No? How courageous of you. Still, perhaps you should inform your underlings of the risk. Surely their loyalty is such that they’ll throw down their existences for you when the time comes. That might buy you a few precious minutes.”

  “I will order them to hunt it down. Recapture it.”

  “Recapture! Not kill? It would be safer to simply end its life.”

  “And end this operation with it?” the Third sneered. “No, sister. Lindsay Micha must continue, and so the abomination must continue. But … I insist you send more minions to help in the search!”

  “You insist?”

  A final pause, proud but fearful. “Please.”

  “I’ll consider it, Lindsay. In the meantime, I believe the human cliché would be: ‘Sleep well.’ But, as our people don’t sleep, I’ll replace that with one of our own: ‘Enjoy your terror.’”

  “Sister …”

  “Now this conversation is over.”

  The Szash was broken. The Third grew quiet.

  The First thought, I’m going to find you. But the third head did not react. She could not hear the others. She did not know.

  Then a noise intruded, footsteps far below. Nothing to be seen yet, but the scent told all. Prey had arrived, and it wasn’t alone. There was another with it. A human.

  That complicated things.

  The creature went still—waiting.

  Two figures, both dressed in black police uniforms, emerged from the northern entrance of the Rotunda, their shoes tapping across the tile floor. Each was male. One was alive, human.

  The other wasn’t.

  The other was food.

  The two were speaking to one another. While the First could hear the words, it paid them no mind. Instead, it waited until the prey’s path took him directly below.

  Then the creature dropped from its great height, falling upon its quarry. The human was knocked aside, firmly but not unkindly. He crashed to the Rotunda floor, his eyes wide with shock and disbelief.

  The prey screamed as the First opened its jaws.

  And, as it fed, the creature was grateful that its second head remained asleep.

  The Second always made such a fuss at feeding time.

  Helene

  Helene Boettcher thought, Now I’m gonna hear it.

  While Chuck Binelli and Jillian unloaded Will’s gurney from the back of the “ambulance,” Tom took Helene aside. Around them, the lowest level of this Center City underground parking garage stood silent and empty. Leading her out of earshot from the rest, he leaned close, his six-foot-plus frame towering over her.

  This wasn’t intimidation. The chief didn’t intimidate. He just didn’t want the others to hear their conversation.

  “We gotta get Will to the infirmary,” he said. “That means you got two minutes. Start talking.”

  So Helene started talking. She told him about the sneaking out to the comic book store, about Will following her there, about the Corpse march, about Jillian, the rooftops, and even about the money the Undertakers now owed Doug for the lost skateboards.

  The Chief listened without comment until she’d finished. Then he nodded and said, “Okay. We’ll talk ’bout you breakin’ the Rules ’n Regs later. For now, I’m just glad you got Will and Jillian outta there safe.”

  “Will got us out,” Helene said, glancing at the van. Will’s limp form was strapped to a gurney, while Chuck was giving Jillian instructions for lowering it. Seeing the redheaded boy lying there—pale and unconscious —stabbed at her, inspiring feelings that she didn’t want to deal with right now.

  So instead she focused on Jillian.

  Helene liked the new girl, who’d somehow wrapped her head around her scary new reality faster than anyone Helene had ever met. The hints they’d gotten that Jillian somehow knew Tom had been confirmed the moment the chief had ridden to their rescue. He’d taken one look at their newest Seer and an expression had hit his face unlike anything Helene had ever seen. Well, that wasn’t quite true, was it? Dave Burger sometimes wore it when he looked at Sharyn, but only if he thought no one was watching.

  For now, she pushed aside her curiosity. She’d find out what it all meant soon enough.

  Secrets, as she’d learned this morning, didn’t last long in Haven.

  Tom offered up a thin smile. “So Will steps in it and, once again, his shoe smells like roses.”

  Except for his broken leg, Helene thought.

  She replied, “It’s his mutant power.”

  “Straight up.”

  “Gurney’s down, Chief!” Chuck yelled from behind the van.

  “Hold up a sec,” Tom told him. Then his manner turned serious. “Helene, do something for me.”

  “Sure.”

  “I want you to stay mostly in Haven for a while.”

  “Oh,” she said, her heart sinking. She’d figured on some kind of punishment. Looked like it’d be a good old-fashioned grounding. Beats scrubbing the Porta-Pottys, she supposed. “But what about Sundays? They’re my night for making the funeral run with Dave.”

  “You can stay on that rotation,” he said. “This ain’t a punishment. I … want you to stick close to Will’s mom.”

  Helene blinked. “Huh?”

  “’Case you ain’t noticed … she’s not handlin’ living with us all that well.”

  It was true. Since Susan Ritter and her daughter, Emily, had taken sanctuary with the Undertakers, having Will’s mother around had become a mixed bag. She was nice enough, on the surface. But underneath, you could read the resentment and, sometimes, downright disgust in her eyes. She hated Haven, hated the whole notion of children running their own lives without what she called “adult supervision.”

  And she hated Helene.

  This became clear every time the woman and girl found themselves in the same place at the same time. Helene would catch Mrs. Ritter staring at her—maybe glaring was a better word—and she could almost hear her thoughts: “You stole my son.”

  Of course, it hadn’t gone down like that, and Helene often considered saying so. But she didn’t, for a bunch of reasons. One: this was Will’s mom, which was intimidating enough all by itself. Two: getting between Will and his mother seemed like a seriously stupid idea. Three: Susan Ritter was a grown-up.

  And grown-ups didn’t listen. Ever.

  “What do you mean by ‘stick close to her’?” she asked the chief.

  “Hang around her. Try talking to her. See if you can get her to open up.”

  The very idea knotted Helene’s guts. “She hates me, Tom.”

  “She don’t hate you,” the Chief replied. “She’s just scared and angry and confused. But she’s also here and we gotta live with her. So I’m askin’ you to do this.”

  She studied h
im, but his face remained unreadable. He’d been like that all of the time she’d known him. Nobody ever got anything from Tom that he didn’t want you to have. Helene, on the other hand, wore every emotion like a neon sign. It was one of the million things she didn’t like about herself.

  “Why me?” she moaned.

  “I got my reasons,” he said cryptically.

  Helene swallowed. “Okay. Fine. I’ll do it.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Now come on. We gotta get Will to the infirmary ’fore the stuff I gave him wears off … and somethin’ tells me Ian’s newest ‘assistant’ ain’t gonna be too happy to see us.”

  That was the chief: a master of the understatement.

  The infirmary was the biggest room in Haven. Like the rest of this forgotten sub-basement deep below Philly’s gargantuan City Hall, its walls were crumbling brick and its floor hard-packed dirt. The makeshift hospital consisted of a half-dozen beds, two lab tables loaded with used equipment, and one medic.

  Ian McDonald, whose father was a big-shot Philly surgeon, was fifteen and as serious a dude as Helene had ever met. She’d seen him handle everything from setting broken bones to major surgery and, as far as she was concerned, the Undertakers couldn’t have asked for a better doctor.

  Of course, not everybody felt that way.

  As they rolled Will’s gurney through the infirmary entrance, there were already three people there: Ian and two girls.

  Well, one girl and one woman.

  The girl was Amy Filewicz, a small, quiet twelve-year-old who’d come to Haven by a harder road than most, having been brainwashed by the Corpses into betraying and then killing an Undertaker. Later on, Will had rescued her. Since then, Ian had taken Amy under his wing, making her his assistant.

  While half of the Undertakers still didn’t completely trust the wounded girl, she seemed to have found a welcome place at the medic’s side.

  The woman, however, was a different story.

  At the sight of the gurney, Susan Ritter rushed over, her blond hair framing her head in curls. Seeing Will’s unconscious form, she exclaimed, “What happened?”

  Tom met her halfway. “He’s okay, Mrs. Ritter. He broke his leg in a … fall. But we were able to get him out of there safe.”

  Impatiently, Will’s mother sidestepped the chief and hurried to her son’s side. What she saw there made her face go pale. Will’s eyes remained closed and his face shone with sweat. Both his arms were bandaged, though blood had already leaked through the white field dressings.

  As Helene watched, Susan Ritter snapped into nurse mode, feeling her son’s cheeks and neck with steady hands. “His skin’s clammy,” she reported. “His pulse is slow but steady. But his arms!” She glared at Tom. “This is more than a broken leg!”

  “Looks worse than it is,” the chief replied. “Seems he jumped through a window.” Then, before Mrs. Ritter could respond to that, Ian appeared beside her. Without a word, the medic peeled back both of Will’s eyelids and flashed a penlight into them.

  “Sedated,” he said at last.

  Mrs. Ritter’s glare turned to daggers. “He’s been drugged?”

  “He was in a lot of pain,” Tom explained. “I gave him morphine.”

  “Morphine!” The woman blanched. “You gave my son morphine?”

  Remembering her new mission, Helene stepped up and tentatively touched her arm. “Um … it’s okay …”

  But Will’s mom shook her off, her eyes still locked on the chief. “What right do you have to give anyone morphine?”

  Tom said nothing.

  Ian checked Will’s vitals. “How much?” he asked.

  “One Syrette,” the Chief replied. “Had to do something. We needed to splint his leg and get him ready for transport.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it!” Will’s mother exclaimed.

  Tom regarded her. “What should I have done, Mrs. Ritter?”

  Helene watched the woman struggle for a response. She probably wanted to scream: “Call an ambulance!” But, of course, that hadn’t been possible. Undertakers died in hospitals. The Corpses saw to that.

  Looking defeated, she asked, “How did it happen?”

  Tom nodded to Helene, who told the story again. All the while, she didn’t look at either Tom or Mrs. Ritter, but instead kept her eyes fixed on Will—though, if asked, she couldn’t have said why.

  “You all jumped,” his mother exclaimed when Helene had finished, “from the roof of a restaurant into a passing car?”

  “It was Will’s idea,” Jillian answered.

  She whirled on the new girl. “Are you saying this is my son’s fault?”

  “No,” Jillian replied. “I’m saying your son saved our lives.”

  Mrs. Ritter’s mouth opened. Then it closed again.

  “Tell ’em the rest,” Tom said.

  So Helene did. “Will didn’t stick the landing too good, but he got up and went straight to the driver, who was all ready to stop the car and call the cops …”

  “I don’t blame him,” his mother muttered.

  “… and then Will Tased him.”

  “He what?”

  “Had to,” Jillian offered. “The streets were filled with those … things. If the car had stopped, even for a few seconds, they’d have swamped us.”

  Helene nodded. “And they tried anyway, closing in from all sides, but Will pulled the guy out of his seat, climbed behind the wheel, and gunned it. Almost knocked Jillian and me off of our feet. The passengers started screaming. Good thing there wasn’t much traffic, because he ran two red lights before we’d left the deaders far enough behind to give us some breathing room.”

  Mrs. Ritter asked, “When did he break his leg?”

  “In the jump,” Jillian replied. “But we didn’t know that … until later.”

  Will’s mother pulled back the blanket. Will’s jeans had been cut away and his left leg splinted. But the limb looked swollen and bruised. Ugly.

  She gasped. “Are you saying he assaulted the driver and drove a car … with this leg?”

  Helene and Jillian both nodded.

  “That sounds like our William the Conqueror,” Ian remarked. “Adrenaline, probably.”

  Helene knew what he meant. In tight spots, the human body produced a hormone called adrenaline. It juiced you up, sometimes letting you ignore pain or giving you tremendous strength. These superhuman abilities didn’t last long—sometimes just long enough to save a life.

  Or, in this case, three.

  Will. You can be such an amazing idiot!

  “Ian,” Tom said. “Where’s the crystal?”

  “Steve’s got it in the Brain Factory,” the boy medic replied, referring to that special chamber in Haven where Steve and his team of science geeks worked their magic “He’s been running experiments. I’ll ask Amy to fetch it back.”

  “Thanks,” Tom said. “He’s gonna be fine, Mrs. Ritter.”

  “Fine? He needs an X-ray! There could be multiple fractures, a nicked artery, internal bleeding!”

  “It won’t matter,” Ian said. “Not once we use the crystal on him.”

  The crystal. Just picturing that bizarre alien artifact made Helene’s skin crawl.

  Mrs. Ritter said, “I don’t know if I want you using that … thing … on my son!”

  Helene knew how she felt.

  But before anyone could reply to that, Sharyn Jefferson, Tom’s twin sister, appeared in the doorway. She looked down at Will and then at each of them in turn. When she spotted Jillian, her expression morphed from concern to anger.

  “What’s she doing here?” Sharyn demanded.

  “William.”

  Even before I opened my eyes, I knew what I’d see: a white, featureless room and a beautiful blond woman—younger than my mother, but somehow familiar.

  One of these days, I’m gonna figure out who you are.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She smiled. She had a sweet, sad smile.

  “Guess you’re gon
na heal me again,” I said. Every time I’d come here, it was because I’d been hurt. The last time I’d been shot in the back, so I supposed a broken leg wouldn’t be too big a deal.

  “No need. The Anchor Shard will take care of that.”

  I blinked. “Anchor Shard?”

  Her smile withered. Her cheeks flushed. God, she looked familiar! “That … was a mistake. I mean the crystal of course, the one you took from that Corpse at Eastern State Penitentiary.”

  The crystal, sure.

  It had some kind of weird power, totally alien. It had once healed Sharyn. But the idea of somebody using it on me sent a serious chill down my spine.

  But this was the first time I’d ever heard it called the Anchor Shard.

  “So … if I’m not here to get fixed up, why am I here?”

  “Sharyn’s going to Washington”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ll find out what that means very soon.”

  “Okay.”

  “And it’s vital that you go with her.”

  “Me? Washington?”

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  The smile returned. Knowing. Familiar. “I can’t tell you that.”

  It was an old song between us. Any info revealed to me during one of these—meetings? sessions?—was always sketchy. Mostly hints.

  “Who are you?” I demanded. “’Cause all this ‘magic angel’ stuff is getting old.”

  “Magic angel?” She laughed out loud. Then she caught herself. “I’m sorry, William. Someday, I’ll tell you everything. I promise. But right now that wouldn’t help anybody. Just make sure you go to Washington, DC with Sharyn. Nobody else. Just you. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah.” Then, after a pause, I asked, “Do I get a question?” Always before, I’d been allowed one question. Only one. So I needed to think carefully before I asked.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why not?”

  But instead of an answer, all I got was a flash of white light so bright that I had to squeeze my eyes shut.

  When I opened them again, the white room was gone, as I knew it would be. It’s funny the things you can get used to.