Secret of the Corpse Eater

by Ty Drago

  This hadn’t worried me when I’d put this plan together. I had my pocketknife, and my pocketknife had a mini-telescope with a night-vision feature. Looking around for clues about the murder of a Corpse—weird, saying that—would have been easy enough.

  But pulling my pocketknife out now, in front of Charles O’Mally, would raise all kinds of questions.

  “Something wrong, Ging?” he asked me. The words were light, though his expression looked stern.

  I swallowed. “Could I … um … maybe have a few minutes in here alone?”

  “What for? Don’t you need to make your video?”

  I felt my face flush. “Well … yeah.”

  “So let’s get to it.” He took a step closer. “Unless there some other reason you came tonight.”

  I was in trouble.

  “Yes, Will,” a voice said. Raspy. Mocking. Horribly familiar. “Is there another reason?”

  Senator Lindsay Micha stepped through the Rotunda’s north entrance. And she wasn’t alone.

  Big trouble.

  Now, I’d had plans go south before—plenty of them. But this was the first time it had happened in under a minute.

  Suddenly, I faced a half-dozen hostile grown-ups, only one of whom had a pulse.

  Micha was accompanied by the two Corpse policemen from the Visitor’s Center, with two more deaders—both wearing suits—behind them. I recognized one of the suits, and my heart sank so low it sloshed in my shoes.

  Greg Gardner.

  The Dead Cops split up, spreading out into what I recognized as a tactical pattern—positioning themselves between me and the Rotunda’s eastern and western exits.

  “Evening, Charlie,” Micha said. She wore a late Type One or early Type Two, relatively fresh. Her skin was a mottled purple and her gums had receded, revealing teeth that were visibly loose. Now, Undertakers see lots of cadavers—call it an occupational hazard—and, after a while, you turn into a kind of closet medical examiner. This body appeared intact. No obvious signs of damage. But the eyes were swollen and its skin seemed looser than normal.

  A drowning victim. Looks like she might have been pretty.

  The things you think of when you’re totally screwed.

  “Hello, Senator,” Mr. O’Mally said.

  I looked at the Sergeant at Arms and he looked back at me. I could tell I was busted. He was clearly pissed. But, more than that, he seemed disappointed—maybe even a little hurt.

  “Mr. O’Mally …” I stammered. “I’m …”

  “You’re what, Andy?” he asked. “You’re sorry? You’re sorry your name isn’t Andy Forbes, but Will Ritter. You’re sorry that you lied to everyone, including me? That you falsified your program application? That you somehow deceived a smart and important man like Senator Mitchum? And why? That’s the part I don’t get. Why’d you even do it? Senator Micha here explained to me about that Philadelphia street gang you belong to. But what does that have to do with the page program? Was this some kind of domestic terrorism thing? Is that why you wanted to come to the Capitol tonight?”

  “No!” I exclaimed. “It’s not like that!”

  “Then what is it like, Ging?” he asked. “I could have had you taken into custody at the Visitor Center. But I honestly don’t think I’m that bad a judge of character. So what’s really going on here?”

  We heard footsteps behind us and turned to see another three deaders emerge through the northern entrance. More Capitol cops.

  Eight Corpses in all.

  A pincer movement. Well executed.

  “Time to go, Will,” Gardner said. He wore the same smile as in the Webster hallway, as grotesque now as it had been then.

  I didn’t move.

  Beside me, O’Mally’s eyes narrowed. I could almost read his mind. He wasn’t a Seer; no adult was. But he wasn’t stupid, either, and he sensed something was wrong—wronger than a kid pretending to be someone he wasn’t. If he knew my real name, then he had to know my real age. Just how many thirteen-year-old domestic terrorists were there? And why had Micha pulled in so many cops, just to nab little ol’ me? For that matter, how had she done it? These cops worked for him after all, not the senator. Except it didn’t seem that way right now, did it?

  This whole thing felt heavy-handed. Corpses were usually more subtle than this.

  Then I remembered South Street, and wondered if the rules had changed.

  Still smiling, Micha explained, “This is Gregory Gardner, a proctor at Webster Hall. He’s the one who discovered the boy’s deception.”

  “Did he?” O’Mally said. Then he looked at me. “So … whoever you are. What’s your side of the story?”

  Lies bounced around in my head—everything from flat-out denial to a claim of amnesia. At least they weren’t onto Sharyn. Or were they? Maybe, right now, another batch of deader cops was closing in on Webster Hall. That, more than anything else, settled the matter for me.

  “My name’s Will Ritter,” I told him, meeting his gaze. “And I’m an Undertaker. That’s what we call ourselves. But we’re not a street gang, and we’re not terrorists. We’re kind of an underground resistance movement.”

  “Resisting what, Ging?”

  “Authority,” Lindsay Micha said, still smiling.

  “No!” I exclaimed again, still holding the man’s eyes. “Not real authority, anyway. Mr. O’Mally, I know this looks bad. And, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry I had to lie to you. But the truth has never been my friend where this stuff is concerned. So, let’s make a deal. Take me to your office, just the two of us. Let me tell you all of it, from the beginning. It’s pretty wild, and you probably won’t believe me. But I know a man I can call. A man you might believe. He’s an FBI agent.”

  “FBI,” the Sergeant at Arms echoed. “Andy … Will … this is completely crazy!”

  I could read his inner conflict. He was a grown-up, and every grown-up’s first impulse is to dismiss a child’s word. Sounds harsh, but it’s a sad reality that Undertakers live with every day. But balancing that impulse was the presence of Micha and Gardner and all these cops.

  Here to trap a single thirteen-year-old boy.

  O’Mally said, “Okay. Let’s do that.”

  “No!” Gardner snapped.

  “Charlie,” Micha said, her smile seeming pasted on. “I must insist that this boy be placed in my custody.”

  “Senator,” the Sergeant at Arms replied, and this time his suspicion wasn’t pointed at me. “I don’t know what’s going on here. You called to tell me that this boy isn’t who he claims, and that you’d meet us here. I didn’t expect you to arrive with a squad from Capitol Police … officers who supposedly report to me and not you. Given the circumstances, my best option is to personally try to get to the bottom of this.”

  “That kid’s not going anywhere!” Gardner growled. He looked like a Doberman tensed to attack.

  They all do.

  Charles O’Mally’s face darkened. Then he rested a protective hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Ging,” he said. “Let’s go figure this out somewhere more private.”

  I knew it was coming before it came. Tom might have called it “soldier’s instincts.”

  Lindsay Micha faked a sigh. Corpses don’t breathe, so they can’t sigh for real, but they’re good at faking it.

  Then she said, “Kill them both.”

  “With pleasure,” Gardner replied. Then he and another Corpse lunged at us—fast.

  I pulled out my water pistol and shot the closest one in the face. In an instant, the deader’s expression went blank and he pitched forward—

  —right into my waiting knee.

  The sound his nose made as it shattered was totally satisfying.

  “Run!” I yelled at O’Mally, whose anger had changed to astonishment as his own men closed around him. But he wised up fast because, just as Greg Gardner grabbed at him, he hauled off and clocked the dead proctor hard in the jaw. The blow would have laid out pretty much any living human. But Gardner’s head s
imply snapped back and then forward.

  He grinned.

  O’Mally stared at him in astonishment.

  I started to turn, my pocketknife’s Taser ready—one hundred fifty thousand volts aimed at Gardner’s chest. But I was just a little too slow.

  Greg Gardner drove his fist into the Sergeant at Arms’ chest and pulled out his heart.

  “No!” someone screamed. I guess it was me. I mean, who else would it have been?

  Then Charles O’Mally, as good as guy as I’ve ever met, dropped to the floor, dead.

  The rest of the Corpses encircled me, moving in cautiously, aware of my Taser and water gun. But these hung at my sides, my battle instincts drained away. All I could do was stand in the middle of the Rotunda, looking down at the man on the floor.

  I’m sorry, Ginger.

  “That’s your fault,” Gardner said. “You shouldn’t have resisted.”

  Micha added, “Let’s get this over with, shall we? I have big plans coming up and don’t have time for delays.”

  The dead closed in.

  “Stop!”

  The voice boomed through the huge domed chamber, as loud as a lion’s roar. Everybody jumped a little. Then every head turned.

  Oh great…

  Dead Giant Guy filled the southern archway. The Rotunda entrances weren’t exactly small, but this one looked a lot smaller with him standing there. His eyes scanned the room as if counting heads. More recon. Then, like twin black lasers, they targeted me. His huge fists opened and closed. Then he started forward.

  Lindsay Micha still hadn’t moved, apparently trusting her thugs to do the tearing and biting and ripping for her. Now, however, her smug confidence wavered. “Who are you?”

  “John Tall,” the giant replied. “I serve the Queen.”

  “Then you’re a fool, John Tall.”

  The giant hesitated, his attention shifting between me and Dead Senator Lady. His lifeless face tried to frown thoughtfully; it didn’t quite pull it off.

  Then, as if reaching some decision, he changed direction, bearing down on Micha like an impending storm. Seeing this, she staggered back, raising her hands defensively. In Deadspeak, she exclaimed, “What. You. Doing?”

  Dead Giant Guy responded in the same weird, soundless language, “Ending. Your Existence. Traitor. In. Queen’s. Name.”

  “To. Me!” Micha called out in silent alarm. “Protect!”

  Three of the Corpses surrounding me turned and leaped at the giant. Shaken out of my shock at O’Mally’s death, I finally moved, firing saltwater into the faces of two of my remaining attackers and Tasing a third, before throwing myself into the hole I’d just made in their ranks. From there, it looked like a clear shot to the northern entrance.

  But then Gardner stepped in my way.

  He slapped the gun from my grasp and backhanded me—a ferocious blow that knocked me several feet across the Rotunda. I hit the tile floor hard, pain lancing through the entire right side of my body.

  Sprawled on my back with the wind knocked out of me, I watched in a haze as three Corpses latched onto Tall, trying to keep him away from Micha. Dead Giant Guy seemed to regard these attackers more with annoyance than fear, shrugging them off, one at a time, before closing in on the cringing senator.

  He grabbed Micha by her shoulders and lifted her right off her feet, shaking the dead woman like a rag doll.

  “Traitor!” he roared again, this time in English. Then, as two more Corpses launched themselves onto his broad back, clawing and biting, Tall hurtled the dead woman across the chamber and into the statue of Abraham Lincoln.

  Micha hit the edge of the Emancipation Proclamation, hard. I heard her spine snap as the marble cut right through her. There she hung, her stolen body broken and helpless.

  I wheezed and tried to sit up. As I did, a fancy tasseled loafer landed on my chest. Gardner put all his weight behind that foot, until I thought my ribs would cave in. Then, leaning down, he grinned savagely at me.

  As sometimes happens when they bend over, maggots dribbled out of his mouth and nose, raining down on me.

  “Know something, Ritter?” he asked. “I really want to kill you!”

  “Yeah?” I gasped. “Get in line.” My hand scrambled for my pocketknife, which I was pretty sure had come to rest beside me…somewhere.

  But then Tall blindsided him.

  It was something to see: this monstrous animated dead dude with two dead dudes riding him like a bucking bronco, slamming his meaty shoulder into a smaller, leaner dead dude. The look of surprise on Gardner’s dead face as he went flying was—well, I wished I’d had a camera.

  “Child. Mine!” the giant roared in Deadspeak. Then, almost absently, he yanked one of Micha’s minions off his back and, grabbing the Corpse in both of his snow shovel–sized hands, snapped him in half like a pretzel stick. Corpse juice went everywhere, splashing me like a putrid shower.

  Maggots and body fluids.

  I’ve got a pretty strong stomach. But that combo almost made me toss my cookies.

  Then, with the other deader still scratching and clawing at his shoulder blade, Tall glared down at me. “Boy,” he growled.

  I tried to reply, “Dead guy,” but it came out as a retch.

  He lifted me off the floor by my foot. As he did, I made a final, desperate scramble and—lo and behold—came up with my pocketknife, its Taser still open.

  There were three Corpses still standing, not including Tall, who clearly wasn’t on their side, and the guy on his back who wasn’t, strictly speaking, standing. Gardner had found his feet and was gesturing wildly at the others. “Cover the exits! Destroy them both!”

  Tall faced them, holding me upside down by one leg. At the same time his other hand found the deader who was still gnawing on him, grabbed the dude’s face, and yanked him off.

  Then, closing his fist, he crushed that face—caving it in like a raw egg.

  Okay, I admit it: that did make me toss my cookies. But, in my defense, being upside down didn’t help.

  “The Queen wants him alive!” the giant declared, dropping the crushed deader. The Corpse collapsed in a heap, helpless and too brain damaged to do anything but twitch.

  “My sister gives no orders here!” Micha hissed as she hung, impaled, against Lincoln’s statue.

  I couldn’t Tase the big dude, not while he was holding me. Doing so would zap me along with him, and that’d pretty much be that. Blinking and retching and wondering just how things had gone this sour, I spotted my water pistol. It lay broken at the base of one of the paintings.

  Those things break a lot. Seriously. A lot.

  Okay, what I’m going to say next may sound peculiar, given that I was currently hanging wrong-side up from a gargantuan dead man’s fist while he argued my fate with a bunch of other dead men and one dead woman who was currently pinned to Abe Lincoln.

  But that’s when things got weird.

  Something fell from high in the dome and landed with a thump on the Rotunda floor, right in the midst of the Corpse confrontation.

  I couldn’t see it clearly. The blood was rushing to my head and I knew with sick certainty that if I didn’t get myself righted soon I’d pass out.

  The reaction it had on the Corpses was both immediate and hardcore. All of them, including Gardner and the giant, froze in place. If they’d breathed, they’d have gasped in horror.

  “Abomination!” the proctor called out in Deadspeak. “Attack!”

  Only two of the Corpses seemed inclined to follow that order, and they did so reluctantly, flanking the indistinct, inhuman shape. I blinked my eyes, trying to see it more clearly, but the thing seemed almost made of shadow.

  Then it jumped and spun, the movement too fast to follow. One of its legs—ten legs, I felt pretty sure—slammed into the nearest deader, sending him flying. He flipped end over end like a rag doll before hitting the Rotunda wall with enough force to smash half of his bones to powder. He dropped, broken, to the floor.

 
At the same instant, the thing used two more of its legs to grab the other dead man around his torso, lifting him off his feet.

  Then it swallowed him.

  Whole.

  My head was pounding, my vision super blurry, and my consciousness slipping away—but I saw what I saw. In one instant, the Corpse was struggling wildly, and the next he just kind of “disappeared” into a huge orifice that opened on a lump on the creature’s back. A mouth?

  It was so quick that it took my mind a few moments to process, but it left no doubt that this was the monster Ramirez had described.

  The Corpse Eater.

  Nearby, still helpless in her shattered, stolen body, Micha screamed in terror. For the first time, the thing seemed to notice her, its entire shape somehow stiffening—as if in recognition.

  Then it spoke. Not Deadspeak. But not English, either. A tickle between my ears. A whisper without words.

  “Third.”

  The thing’s attention seemed to move between Tall and Micha. It visibly hesitated.

  Then it pounced on Tall.

  As the two of them went down, the giant reflexively released me. I dropped in a heap on the floor tiles.

  An instant later, something landed beside me—heavy and vaguely roundish. I blinked blearily at it.

  John Tall’s sightless, decapitated head gazed back at me.

  “Holy crap!” I yelped.

  Then, just as I managed to struggle to my feet, I was seized from behind. Two long, multi-jointed, scaly limbs locked around my chest and legs. In an instant, I was firmly pinned. I struggled, but it was crazy strong.

  Over my shoulder, I heard the “something” hiss at the Corpses—a warning or a challenge—either way, the sound was utterly inhuman.

  “No!” Gardner yelled.

  Across the room, Micha wailed in Deadspeak, “Keep. It. Away. From. Me!”

  Then I was borne upward, and I mean straight upward. The creature had somehow lunched itself toward the ceiling of the Rotunda, 180 feet overhead.

  It didn’t get quite that far, but instead angled its jump, catching the edge of the gallery of windows that circled the lower half of the dome, before shifting direction and jumping again, this time vaulting off some of the ornate molding that lined the sloping ceiling.