Secret of the Corpse Eater

by Ty Drago

  I was in the infirmary with a lot of people standing around me. My leg—the leg I’d landed on when I’d jumped into the car, the leg I’d heard snap like a dry twig, the leg that had been on fire until Tom had shown up and stuck some kind of needle in the crook of my elbow—was …

  … warm.

  “You awake?” Ian asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Does your leg … feel better?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I noticed the crystal he held. “Did you put that thing on me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  My mother appeared, her warm hands cupping my face. “Sweetheart? Can you hear me?”

  I squirmed. “I hear you, Mom.”

  “Oh, thank God!”

  “Can I, um, sit up?”

  “Of course,” she said, stepping back. I pushed myself up into a sitting position. I was on a hospital gurney—not the first time.

  Chuck was here, dressed like an ambulance driver. Amy stood alongside Ian. As usual, she wore a shy smile. Then I turned my head and spotted Helene.

  “You and Jillian okay?” I asked.

  She nodded, offering me a funny kind of grin. “Your bad idea saved us.”

  Her expression made my stomach flutter, so I turned to Chuck. “Sweet uniform!”

  “Thanks,” he said. “We did a Number 31.”

  A Number 31 was one of our newest moves, inspired by stuff that had gone down a few months ago when, while trying to split a Corpse battle scene with two injured casualties before the cops showed up, Helene and I had called an ambulance and then stolen it.

  At the time, we’d been amazed by how easy it was to navigate city traffic when you had flashing lights and a siren.

  Since then, Tom had arranged for the Monkeys, the Undertakers crew responsible for construction and maintenance, to turn one of our plain white vans into an ambulance. The final result looked great: working lights, siren, even the word ecnalubma stenciled onto the front of it, above the windshield, so that it read the right way through a rearview mirror.

  Since then, whenever we needed to evacuate an injured Undertaker quickly, we used our “ambulance”—and called the operation a Number 31.

  “Want to tell me about it?” I asked Chuck.

  “Well … you weren’t kidding when you told Dan every deader in the world was after you. When Tom and I got to South Street, there had to be a thousand of them!”

  “I know. Wait … Tom came?”

  He nodded. “Insisted. Didn’t say why.”

  “Okay. …” It was rare for the chief to go out on missions. “Go on.”

  “We got to 6th Street in time to see you gunning that big car down 5th and out of their reach. It wasn’t easy keeping up. But once you’d cleared the deader mob, we turned and met you at the next corner.”

  The last thing I remembered was driving, my broken leg screaming the whole time.

  Then—nothing.

  “I passed out,” I said, feeling a flush of embarrassment.

  Chuck nodded. “You kept cool until you’d gotten everyone outta danger. Then you dropped like a stone. Good thing we were right there. While Tom calmed everybody down … the passengers were freaking out … I set the leg and bandaged your arms. Then Tom gave you morphine for the pain.”

  I glanced at my mom, who glowered at Chuck, clearly pissed.

  Chuck said, “Then we got you all outta there before the cops showed! Man, those deaders wanted you bad!”

  I said, “It was Jillian they were after.”

  They all swapped looks. “All that,” Chuck said, “for one Seer?”

  Helene and I nodded.

  He whistled.

  “Nice work,” I told him. “You saved our butts!”

  He shrugged. “You saved your own butts. We just did the cleanup.”

  “Where’s Tom?”

  Helene replied, “He was here until Sharyn showed up. Then the two of them split with Jillian back to Tom’s office. He said you should join them when you’re up to it.”

  “I’m up to it,” I announced.

  “No!” Mom snapped. “You should rest. You —”

  “I’m fine,” I told her. “I need to talk to the chief.”

  Then I swung my legs over the side of the ambulance gurney.

  That’s when I discovered I had no pants on.

  Ever dream that you’re giving a report in class, only to discover you’re in your underwear? Remember that sense of wanting to crawl into a hole and die?

  Well, you’d think after six months of battling an invasion of the living dead I’d be past that kind of embarrassment. I mean, so what if I now found myself in front of Chuck, Ian, Amy, Helene and my mother in just my tighty-whities?

  Right?

  So why did I want to crawl into a hole and die?

  I made a grab for the thin, gray ambulance blanket that, until a second ago, had been covering me. But in my panic, all I managed to do was slide it to the floor.

  Amy giggled a little. The rest of them shifted uncomfortably.

  Ian cleared his throat. “Chuck and Tom had to cut ’em off … to splint your leg.”

  Too bad the wonders of the Anchor Shard don’t include replacing lost clothing.

  My mother retrieved the blanket and fussily draped it over my lap. Again, I squirmed, snapping, “I got it, Mom!”

  She stepped back, looking a little hurt. A long, awkward silence followed.

  Then Chuck, helpful as always, remarked, “Um … dude, you’re gonna need some pants.”

  More silence.

  Helene said, “I’ll get Dave to fetch some.”

  So where, you ask, do Undertakers get their clothes?

  We have a crew called the Moms that does the cooking and the cleaning. They also buy all the clothing, mail ordering it to a post office box. Undertakers don’t generally leave Haven, except on missions—too dangerous. So hitting the local Gap isn’t usually an option. As such, our wardrobe choices are limited to jeans and hoodies, shorts and T-shirts. Not much in the way of personal fashion statements in Haven.

  But it does mean that we’ve all got plenty of pants.

  Six long minutes later, Helene returned with a huge kid in tow, one whose scowling face was half hidden beneath a mop of blond hair. Dave “the Burgermeister” Burger, my roommate and best friend, carried a pair of faded blue jeans in his ridiculously big hands. He looked tired—really tired.

  Suddenly my humiliation was sprinkled with guilt.

  Dave had been spending his nights working a very special gig. Because of it, he did his sleeping in the daytime, which meant that Helene must’ve woken him up looking for pants that I could wear.

  And, Dave being Dave, had insisted on delivering them himself.

  “Here ya go, dude,” he said sleepily, handing me the jeans. Then looking at everyone, he growled, “You guys got your tickets for this show? No? Then turn around! Oh! Sorry, Mrs. Ritter. …”

  “That’s okay, Dave,” my mom said, smiling. She liked the Burgermeister. Once you got to know him, it was hard not to.

  So, fully dressed at last, I sent a grateful Dave back to bed and headed off toward Tom’s office. Helene and my mother followed. As we navigated Haven’s cramped, crumbling corridors, Helene asked me what the big rush was.

  “Everything’s cool,” was my only answer.

  I figured explaining it once would be enough.

  In Tom’s office, we found the chief, Sharyn, and Jillian sitting around Tom’s small conference table. Their heated debate stopped when the three of us appeared.

  “Hey, Red,” Sharyn remarked, using the nickname she always forgot I hated. “Heard ’bout the leg; that’s what you get for steppin’ on the Rules n Regs.” But her smile seemed strained, and she kept glancing sideways at Jillian, who’d ditched the blue blazer in favor of the Haven “standard”: jeans and a hoodie.

  “If he hadn’t,” Tom said, “Jillian wouldn’t be here.”

  “Yeah,” his sister agreed dryl
y. “Here. Not at First Stop. How do we know she ain’t a mole?”

  Jillian asked, “What’s a mole?”

  “Ain’t that just what a mole would ask?” Sharyn pointed out.

  “Amy checked her out back in the infirmary,” Tom said. “You were there.”

  But his sister shook her head. “The Scar Test ain’t proven in all cases. That’s why we still have First Stop.”

  “What scar?” Jillian demanded.

  First Stop is a kind of secret boot camp that we keep elsewhere in the city. Its “official” use is for the training of new recruits, but its real purpose is to watch for moles, Seers who get brainwashed by the Corpses using these alien, spiderlike things called pelligog. Ian and Amy recently found out that the pelligog leave a check-shaped scar when they bore into a person’s lower back.

  I don’t have that scar, though I came close once. But Amy has it.

  And so does Helene.

  “It was my call—as chief—to bring her straight here,” Tom said.

  Sharyn groaned. “Bringin’ her here’s got nothing to do with bein’ chief an’ you know it!”

  “Enough!” Tom snapped, one of the few times I’d heard him raise his voice in anger.

  “Tom. …” Jillian said.

  Sharyn stood up so abruptly that her chair fell over. She fixed her brother with a look that, if she’d had snakes in her hair, would have turned him to stone. Then she marched around the table, pushed past us, and disappeared through the curtain.

  The chief tried hard not to show how pissed he was. “Glad you’re up and about, bro,” he said.

  “Hi, Will,” Jillian added with an awkward wave.

  “Hi, Jillian,” I replied.

  Tom offered us chairs. “When y’all came in, I was afraid we wouldn’t have enough seats. But now …” His words trailed off.

  We all sat. Helene and Mom took the two remaining empty seats, while I had to pick up Sharyn’s toppled chair.

  “What’s she so angry about?” my mother asked.

  It was Jillian who replied. “Sharyn … doesn’t like me. She never did.”

  Never did?

  “I used to live with Tom and Sharyn,” the girl continued. “A long time ago … in a foster home. That’s why I was on South Street. Our old dojo used to be there.”

  “Dojo?” Helene asked.

  The chief explained, “The second-to-last foster home Sharyn and I had was run by a dude named Terrill Perkins.”

  “Mr. P. That’s what we called him,” Jillian added.

  Tom nodded. “He ran a school that taught martial arts, Parisi and parkour.”

  “Parisi?” I asked.

  “Speed school,” Jillian explained. “I was already one of Mr. P’s foster kids when Tom and Sharyn showed up.”

  “It was our eighth or ninth gig in the system,” said Tom, “and far and away the coolest of them. Mr. P. was a widower. His wife died long before we knew him, and he’d opened his dojo to kind of help him through the grief. At least, that’s the way he told it to me.”

  Jillian nodded. “Mr. P was a former Navy SEAL. He had some wicked skills.”

  “Yeah, he did,” said the chief. “Pretty much all of his foster kids ended up participating. At first, he made us try all three disciplines: fighting, speed, and agility. Then, after a while, we could pick the discipline we liked best. But you had to pick something. No TV or videogame junkies in Mr. P’s dojo. So Sharyn and I picked fighting.”

  “By then, I was already heavy into parkour,” the girl remarked.

  Helene exclaimed, “So that’s where you and Sharyn leaned to fight! The skills you’ve been passing down to us … they’re from Mr. P!”

  Tom nodded. “He’d invented a new kind of mixed martial arts. ‘Street karate,’ he called it. Practical fighting. No fancy moves. Just speed, precision, and economy of motion.”

  “Tom’s the best mixed martial arts student Mr. P ever had!” said Jillian.

  “My sister was pretty good, too,” he added.

  “Yeah. But … Sharyn and I never got along.”

  “Why not?” my mother asked.

  Tom replied, “It’s … complicated.”

  “Anyway,” Jillian continued. “About eighteen months after Tom and his sister moved in, Mr. P’s foster home was shut down by the state.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Mr. P had … issues,” Tom said.

  But Jillian was less cagey. “He drank too much. Kind of what you’d call a ‘functional alcoholic.’”

  “We covered for him,” the chief explained. “But eventually, a social worker showed up at the wrong time and wham … the next thing we know they pull his foster license and every kid under his roof gets ‘reassigned.’”

  Jillian swallowed. “It was the saddest day of my life. I’d lived in that dojo for more than five years. It’s the closest thing to a home I ever knew.”

  “Us, too,” Tom said. “Before Haven. Anyway, Sharyn and I quit the system a couple of months later, splitting our new foster home and hitting the streets.”

  “What about you, Jillian?” my mother asked.

  The girl replied, “I had a cousin down in DC who’d just turned twenty-one and offered to take me in. I didn’t want to go, but the system didn’t ask my opinion. Actually, it’s worked out okay. I’ve been living with Julia ever since. She’s pretty cool, but she’s no Mr. P.”

  “What happened to Mr. P?” I asked. From their shared expression, I wished I hadn’t.

  “He … died,” said Tom. “About the time I met your dad. Alcohol poisoning. Drank himself to death.”

  “I never knew about that,” Jillian added miserably. “Tom just told me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” my mom said.

  Helene and I all agreed.

  Then Tom did a funny thing: he took Jillian’s hand. When he did, she gazed at him—that’s the word for it: “gazed.”

  I thought maybe I understood the bug up Sharyn’s butt.

  Then the moment passed and the chief turned all business. “Thing is, though … none of that’s why Jillian’s in Philly.”

  Helene added, “Or why, when she got here, every Corpse in town was on her heels.”

  Jillian said, “They’re after me because of what I know.”

  “And what do you know?” I asked.

  She replied without hesitation, “I know that US Senator Lindsay Micha from New Jersey … is a Corpse.”

  “That’s impossible!” I exclaimed.

  And it was. I wasn’t big on politics; I mean, what kid is? But I’d had to be living in a cave not to know about Senator Lindsay Micha. She was a really big deal in the nation’s capital, one of those people who shows up on the covers of magazines—who guests on The Colbert Report and gets more laughs than the host.

  She’d also been in the US Senate since before I was born, which was where “impossible” came into it.

  “I saw her,” Jillian insisted.

  Helene shook her head. “She’s been on TV a million times. If she was a deader, we’d know.”

  “So Tom tells me,” the girl said. “The thing is, Micha’s gone dark these last couple of months. No interviews. No public appearances. It’s caused a lot of rumors on the Hill: Why has Senator Micha fallen off the media grid?”

  “The Hill?” I asked.

  “Capitol Hill,” she replied. “It’s a nickname that the politicos use.”

  “Politicos?” I asked.

  “Politicians and the people who report on them are called ‘politicos.’”

  “How do you know all of this?” my mother asked.

  Jillian said, “Until yesterday, I was a Senate page.”

  “What’s that?” Helene asked.

  It was Tom who answered, “A federal program. High school kids apply for gigs working as gophers for the senators. That about right?”

  “More or less,” Jillian replied. “There’s thirty of us and, for one semester, we all live together and work in the Senate … r
unning errands, delivering messages, that kind of thing.”

  “So the blue suit’s … a uniform,” I guessed.

  She nodded. “I worked hard to get it … only to end up ruining it on a Philly rooftop.”

  I almost said, “I’m sorry,” but then couldn’t quite decide what I was sorry about.

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Tom suggested.

  Jillian began. “I’ve … I’d … been a page since January. You have to be recommended by a sitting senator. Grades, extracurricular stuff … they take all of that into account. After all, they pick just thirty kids nationwide. That’s not even one per senator … more like one for every three senators.” She smiled proudly. “But I got in.

  “Pages work mostly in the Capitol, but we often get sent to one of the Senate office buildings on deliveries. There are two of those: Hart and Dirksen. Senator Micha’s offices are in Hart.

  “But I never got sent there when Micha was around. None of the pages did. Since the start of the term, we were told that Senator Micha had specifically asked not to be visited by pages. Nobody understood why. But Lindsay Micha was Lindsay Micha … so we did as we were told.”

  “Then how did you manage to see her?” Helene asked.

  “I had this … friend in the program. Kevin Pearl from Nebraska. He just wouldn’t buy the Senator Micha ‘ban.’ Kept talking about conspiracies. Kept boasting he was going to find out the truth.

  “So last week, while making a delivery to Dirksen, he detoured into Hart and visited Micha’s office. That’s as much as I know … because he didn’t come back.

  “At first, the only thing anyone would tell us was that he’d disappeared and that Capitol Police were searching for him. Then three days ago … they found his body in the Potomac River. An apparent suicide. There was even a note, though I never saw it.”

  She hung her head.

  “That sucks,” Helene whispered.

  “I’m sorry, Jill,” Tom said.

  I looked at my mother, whose expression twisted with grief. She reached over and squeezed the girl’s hand.

  My mom knows what it is to lose someone you care about.

  Jillian steadied herself. “I decided to find out what had happened to Kevin. Even though the senator wasn’t showing her face, her staff members were … at least some of them. So I hung around them. One of the advantages of being a page is that you’re invisible to these people. As long as you’re wearing the uniform, they don’t notice you … until they need something.