by Ty Drago
As plans went, it entirely sucked.
Cautiously, Helene peaked through the curtains beside the front door.
Jeez …
A half-dozen deaders filled the sidewalk beyond the front stoop. They were Type Twos, strong-looking and as fresh as Cavanaugh could muster. All wore cop uniforms. The one nearest the window found her eyes and held them. Then he smiled wide—too wide—showing yellowed, crooked teeth. His tongue was black.
Helene pulled away with a gasp.
“I count six,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “But there’re probably more out back.”
“I wish Will was here,” Dave said.
So do I. He’d come up with something … some screwball plan that would be completely crazy and yet would somehow actually get us outta this.
She needed to do that. She needed to be Will. Think like he thought.
“What do we do?” Jillian asked, her voice surprisingly steady. “Sooner or later they’re going to storm the place, aren’t they?”
Yeah, they are, Helene thought. Once they’re convinced we’re not coming out, they’ll come in through every possible exit. Six from the front. Maybe six more from the back. And maybe another six from the playground next door.
Playground next door …
“Helene,” the Burgermeister said, sounding wary. “Why’re you grinnin’?”
“Because,” she told them both. “I just had a really bad idea.”
The upstairs of the Francis X. Urcott Funeral Home was devoted to office space. A quick exploration took them to a window with a good view of the neighboring park. This being the city, the park and the converted house almost butted up against each other, separated only by a narrow alley.
There were Corpses there, in the playground, amidst the swings and jungle gyms. But only three.
Helene felt her smile widen.
Jillian saw what she saw. “Yep. A really bad idea.”
“You up for it?” Helene asked her.
“I can get there,” the new girl said, clutching her borrowed water pistol. “But they’ll be on me the second I hit the ground. I don’t know how to handle your weapons.”
Helene shook her head. “Jill, you are a weapon. You just don’t know it yet.”
She handed her Super Soaker to Dave, who was looking from one to the other as if the girls were speaking Greek. “Here’s how this is going to go down,” she said.
And then she told him all of it.
A minute later, Helene stepped through the window and onto a fire escape that overlooked the alley and the playground beyond. Then, as Jillian followed, she climbed up on the railing, steadied herself—and jumped.
The alley flashed below her, all smells and shadows. Then, scary fast, the top bar of the nearest swing set rushed up to meet her.
As Jillian had been showing her all week in their parkour lessons, Helene didn’t cover up—which was what her instincts told her to do. Instead she spread her arms and caught the cold, steel bar with both hands. Then she let her momentum carry her under it, between two of the hanging, empty swings, and feet first into the face of the nearest deader.
He never saw it coming. The two of them collided and crashed down onto the brown mulch that carpeted the playground. Before his scrambling hands could grab her, Helene planted her Ritter in the dead dude’s chest, slamming its plunger home. Then she rolled off of him an instant before he exploded.
One down, she thought, regaining her feet just in time to see the other two Corpses whirl on her.
Now, Dave! she thought.
And, as he always did, the Burgermeister came through.
A laser-thin stream of water caught one deader in the side of his face. A second later, a second stream nailed the other one in the small of his back. The first guy went into convulsions, staggered a bit, and then slammed face first into one of the diagonal swing struts. The second one fell and started spinning in crazy circles like Curly in the Three Stooges.
The saltwater wouldn’t keep these guys down long. Worse, the rest of the deaders were already looking their way, alerted by their exploding buddy. As Helene watched, they started toward her at a run.
She rushed to the first Corpse, the one twitching and hugging the swing set strut, and punched him hard in the back of the neck. It wasn’t enough to crush his spine, but it did drop him to the ground, buying her a few more precious seconds.
A hiss behind her made her spin around in time to see the second deader, having more or less recovered, lunging at her. The hands jutting out from the cuffs of his cop shirt were black and gnarled, the nails long. In moments, he would tear her throat out with them.
Jillian appeared in a flash of movement, swinging under the overhead bar as Helene had, but then riding her momentum all the way to the adjacent jungle gym. There she somehow slipped, feet first, between two horizontal bars and caught an adjacent vertical strut with one hand, all without touching the ground. Finally, still riding the force of her original leap, she whirled her body around the strut, high and straight and as graceful as a vision in a dream.
The dream ended when she met the hesitant Corpse, who didn’t even jazz to her being there until the new girl’s legs clamped around his skinny dead neck. Then, before he could react, Jillian barrel-rolled in mid-air and dropped to the mulch-covered ground, bringing the dead dude with her—neck first.
Crack.
Job done, she scrambled away from the limp cadaver and stood up, her eyes finding Helene’s in the gloom.
“See?” Helene told her, smiling. “You are a weapon!”
Footsteps rattled nearby. Corpses crowded into the playground through the open gate. As they did, Dave sprayed them with the Super Soaker until a pile of twitching bodies blocked any easy exit from the park.
Good, Helene thought. But not enough.
She leaned over the cop she’d downed by the swings—and pulled the service revolver out of his holster.
Deaders didn’t use guns. Not ever. No one knew why. But, being dressed as cops, they had to carry them. When she’d explained this part of her “bad idea,” the Burgermeister had objected, saying, “Will don’t use guns.”
“I know,” Helene had told him. “But I’m not Will.”
As Jillian watched, Helene shot the fallen Corpse in the back of his head. The sound was like a cannon blast.
Then she turned and started shooting cars.
The first two shots did nothing, but the third—as she’d hoped—kicked off a car alarm. It wailed like a newborn, flooding the street with shrill sound. Seconds later, Helene got lucky again and another alarm went off. Then a third. That left her out of bullets.
But the damage had been done. Lights switched on in the surrounding windows as an angry Germantown woke up.
“Dave!” she yelled. “Come on!”
The Burgermeister was a good fighter and, as it turned out, a pretty decent shot with the Super Soaker. Who knew? But parkour was a little out of his area. So he had to step out onto the fire escape and make his way over to a ladder. It took maybe a minute for him to join them and, by then, most of the Corpses he’d squirted were up and looking at them.
But so were about a dozen others, all normal people awakened by the screaming alarms.
As she’d hoped, their presence made the deaders hesitate.
How Helene wished she could call to them, tell them what was going on, make them see. Or, more to the point, make them See. But she couldn’t. Grown-ups didn’t believe. Not ever. A bitter lesson, bitterly learned a long time ago.
Instead, she dropped the useless gun while Dave continued to hose the Corpses, who were still too bunched up together in the playground entrance to escape the crippling water. Then the three of them backed up to the rear of the park, which stood bathed in shadows. There, Jillian went over the fence first, followed by Helene and finally the Burgermeister.
They had maybe thirty seconds to disappear before Cavanaugh’s pets regrouped and came after them.
But they were Undertakers, and thirty seconds was more than enough.
“Is this how it always is?” Jillian asked once they were reasonably safe.
“Better night than most,” Dave replied with a grin. Then to Helene: “I think I know why Tom picked you to buddy up to Will’s mom.”
“You’re bringing this up now?” Helene shot back.
“Yeah.”
She sighed. “Okay. Why?”
His grin widened, his teeth looking white and straight in the darkness. “’Cause, you kinda are Will. Girl Will. And he figures Mrs. Ritter’ll start seein’ that, too.”
He’d meant it as a compliment. So that was how she took it.
I watched as the biggest American flag I’d ever seen was hoisted into the late-morning sky. The size of a bedsheet, it caught the wind and whipped out to its full glory over the roof of the Capitol building, symbolizing the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave—and, more specifically, that the United States Senate was now in session.
The guy doing the hoisting was a short, stocky man in his fifties named Charles O’Mally. O’Mally was the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms. Having that title didn’t mean that he went around the Capitol armed, or even in uniform. His responsibilities centered around making sure everything went smoothly for the one hundred senators in the fancy chamber downstairs. He had a staff, called Doorkeepers and, of course, he had thirty Senate pages to do his grunt work.
But none of them was here, running Old Glory up its flagpole. The Sergeant at Arms preferred to handle this duty himself.
And me? Well, I was here because I’m a redhead.
O’Mally was very Irish-American. He wore an American flag pin on one lapel and a shamrock on the other. His hair was as red as mine, and that’s saying something—a fact he noticed the moment Sharyn and I reported to his office on Monday morning.
After six months of jeans and T-shirts, the page uniform felt confining. I disliked it, but Sharyn hated it. Nevertheless, we’d passed Lex’s appraisal—barely—before leaving with the other pages for the short walk to the Capitol. One of my roommates, Devon, had told me that on rainy days the Sergeant at Arms’s office sometimes sent a car. “But usually we use our feet in this job.”
“He’s right, Red.” Patrick, my other roommate had laughed. “Better get used to it.” I’d only just met these two. But Mark had been right: they were good guys.
Still …
“Do me a favor?” I’d asked Patrick.
“Sure.”
“Stop calling me Red?”
“You don’t like Red?”
“You like Blondie?” Devon asked. Patrick had hair the color of straw.
Patrick looked horror-stricken. “Point taken. No more Red.”
When we reached the Capitol, most of the pages already knew where to go, while Sharyn and I were escorted to the Sergeant at Arms’ office for introductions and assignments. That’s where we encountered Charles O’Mally, who took one look at me and lit up like a Christmas tree.
“Well, now! There’s a genuine Irish Ginger if ever I saw one! What’s your name, boy?”
“Andy Forbes.”
“Forbes, is it?” he asked, scowling. “That’s an English name, by God!”
“Sorry,” I said.
He grinned. “No worries. I’ll just call you Red.”
I sighed.
O’Mally went on, “Besides, I’d wager there’s more than a little good Irish blood in your veins … eh, Mr. Forbes.” Then he turned to Sharyn. “Ms. Baker, is it? I want you to report yourself to Mr. Stanz. You’ll find him in the hall, waiting for you.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Should I go, too?” I asked.
O’Mally shook his head. “Not just yet, Ginger.”
Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me!
The Sergeant at Arms waggled a finger at me. “You’ll be joining your friend shortly. But first, you and I have a very special duty to perform.”
And that’s how I ended up on the roof of the Capitol, watching O’Mally raise the Stars and Stripes. There are two such flags, one for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives, the chambers of which occupy the north and south wings of the Capitol building, respectively.
Ever seen the Capitol? Not pictures of it, I mean, but in person?
The first thing that strikes you is how big it is, with a central dome that rises more than fifteen stories high. From a distance, it’s impressive. Up close, it’s breathtaking.
“Something else, isn’t it?” O’Mally remarked, as if reading my mind.
I nodded.
“Know what it’s made of?”
“The dome? I dunno. Marble?”
He laughed. “Cast iron.”
“Yeah?”
“Almost nine million tons of it.”
“It looks like marble.”
“It’s painted to look that way. You’re from Philly, right?”
I nodded.
“The top of your City Hall tower’s the same: cast iron painted to look like stone. A common technique.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Not a lot of folks do. Here’s another tidbit: that dome you see’s actually the second one. The first was built by Charles Bulfinch back in 1823. It was a lot smaller and made of copper. Turned green after a few years. Nobody liked it much. So, around 1860, the new Architect of the Capitol, Thomas Walter, designed the one you see now. Big improvement, if you ask me.”
“It’s cool,” I said. And it was. “Think they’ll ever build a third one?”
The guy laughed like Santa Claus. “You never know what’s going to happen in this town. The current Architect of the Capitol’s a woman, first one ever. Maybe she’ll decide to paint the whole thing pink.”
That sounded pretty sexist to me; Sharyn would’ve glared at him hot enough to melt his shoes. I decided to skip it. “There’s still an Architect of the Capitol?”
“Always has been. The first one was appointed by George Washington. Since then there’ve been more than a dozen, mostly voted in by Congress. The Architect sits on the Capitol Police Board, along with the Sergeant at Arms of the House of Representatives, and … well … me.”
“You’re the chief of the Capitol Police?” I asked.
“Nope. That’s a very able gentleman named Bob Mittenzwei. I’m more like the commissioner of police—one of them, anyway.” He gazed up at the raised flag. “Never get tired of looking at that.” Then he saluted smartly, something I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone who wasn’t wearing a uniform do. “Marine,” he told me. “Twelve years.”
“Cool,” I said. “But don’t you mean ex-Marine?”
“No such thing, Ginger,” he replied. “Come on. Right about now, your friend Kim’s getting an earful from one of my Doorkeepers about protocol and expected conduct in the Senate chamber. Let’s go rescue her.”
And “rescue” was a pretty good word for it.
Sharyn fidgeted in the third-floor hallway as some guy talked at her, listing things she had to do—and the things she’d better not do, while working in the Capitol. Sharyn was trying to stay in character, but lectures had never been her favorite pastime.
“Remember, young lady,” the guy instructed, “being here is one of the easiest privileges in the world to lose. Ah, here’s Mr. O’Mally. Mr. O’Mally, I believe you’ve met Ms. Baker?”
“I have indeed, Mr. Stanz. In fact, this here’s Andy Forbes, the other new page. Ginger, this is Jerry Stanz, my good right arm.”
Stanz eyed me as if I was something he’d stepped in. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Forbes.”
“You, too,” I said.
O’Mally faced Sharyn. “Ms. Baker, have you been advised of the do’s and dont’s?”
“Yes, sir,” Sharyn replied, courageously suppressing an eye roll.
“You’ll have to forgive us. Normally, a page goes through an orientation that does a slower and more thorough job of it. But given your unique circumstances …”
>
“I understand, sir,” she said.
“Good.”
Stanz asked, “Should I be orienting Mr. Forbes as well?”
O’Mally waved him off. “Ms. Baker can fill him in on the details. For now, Ginger, here’s the bottom line: You do whatever you’re told. You don’t speak unless spoken to and, when in doubt, come to me or Mr. Stanz here. You’ll never get in trouble for asking a question. Clear?”
“Clear,” I said.
He eyed me carefully. “Good. Now let me ask you a question.”
“Okay.”
“You mind me calling you Ginger?”
I looked him right in the eye and replied, “I hate it.”
He burst out laughing. “Finally! A little honesty in this godforsaken building! Andy, my boy, you and I’ll get along just fine. Mr. Stanz, these two will spend the next hour watching our favorite lawmakers in glorious action. Escort them there and make sure they understand the protocols.”
“Of course, Mr. O’Mally.”
The Sergeant at Arms of the United States Senate slapped us both on the back—hard. “Welcome to the Capitol, kids!”
Know how they tell you never to talk in libraries? Well that’s nothing compared to the gag order in the Senate chamber.
You so much as cough and a guy with a gun glares at you. Shuffle your feet too loud and a hand lands on your shoulder like a twenty-pound weight. And laugh? Well, trust me, don’t laugh.
The chamber is rectangular, two stories high, and windowless, being located in the center of the Capitol’s north wing. On the floor, a hundred polished wooden desks, one for each senator, are set up in a precise semi-circle, all facing a raised platform—called a rostrum, where the president of the Senate, who’s also the vice president of the United States, presides.
Except he wasn’t there today.
Later on, while eating lunch with the other pages, we learned that the vice president is almost never in the Senate chamber. Presiding over the Senate, which means keeping arguments from getting too nasty, is usually assigned to new—or “freshman”—senators.