The Undertakers

by Ty Drago

  “Corpse?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I started Seeing them about six months ago. Not many. Just a few around Collegetown. That’s where I’m from. At first I thought they were wearing Halloween costumes—like it was some kind of goofy joke. Then I realized that they weren’t and that I was the only one who saw them. Jeez, what a mindblower!”

  “And you kept going like that for six months?”

  Dave shrugged. “What else could I do? I live—lived—with my grandma, and if I’d told her, she’d have just made me go to church or something. No way was I going to the cops—not after finding out that a couple of them were Corpses! And I couldn’t tell my buds because, well, they’d figure I was nuts. Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I do.” And I did.

  “So I just kind of tried to stay away from them. Whenever I had to talk to them, I’d keep it short and wouldn’t look them in the eyes—those weird milky eyes of theirs that seem to see you and not see you at the same time. You know?”

  “I know.”

  He continued, “Then five nights ago, I bumped into one of them on the street while I was coming back from the arcade. A real slimy one. You know what I mean by that? Slimy?”

  I thought of spotting Kenny Booth on City Line Avenue. “Yeah,” I said.

  “I still don’t know who he was or was pretending to be—just a guy in jeans and a flannel shirt. I guess I was feeling tough that night because I finally mouthed off and called him a zombie.”

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said.

  “Do what?”

  “Call them zombies.”

  Dave looked at me. “Why not? Ain’t they zombies?”

  I remembered what Helene had told me. “Zombies are stupid and slow in the movies. You don’t want to make the mistake of thinking these things are.”

  He considered that. “Guess I can’t argue with that—not after what he did.”

  “Tried to kill you?” I asked.

  “Hell yeah!” Dave raised his shirt. I gasped. Bruises covered most of his muscled chest and washboard belly. Some of them were new—probably Sharyn’s work. But others had already turned yellow, which meant they were more than a few days old.

  “That zombie—sorry, Corpse—hit me like a freight train. Sent me flying!”

  “Well, no wonder it hurts so bad when Sharyn hits you!” I exclaimed.

  “Yeah!” Dave’s expression brightened. “Maybe that’s what it is!”

  “So what happened? With the Corpse, I mean.”

  “We fought. I hit him with everything I had—went at him until huge clumps of rotted flesh were coming off in my hands. But nothing I did seemed to faze him. Finally he picked me up—right off my feet, lifting me up over his head. And he did it quick! So quick that I could hardly see it!

  “Don’t remember too much after that. He threw me right off the road and down a gully that emptied into a creek. The Corpse must’ve figured I was dead because he didn’t come down to finish the job.”

  “Wow…” I muttered.

  “Yeah.” The Burgermeister forced out a shaky laugh. “Woke up the next morning and headed home. Cops were already there on the porch, talking to my grandma. Watched them from the bushes. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I knew right away that I had to get outta town.”

  “How come?”

  Dave’s face darkened. “Both of them were Corpses.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “After they left, my grandma went over to our neighbor’s, probably to tell her what happened. I sneaked inside the house just long enough to grab some dough and leave behind a note. You know, so she wouldn’t worry. ’Course, she’ll worry anyway.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, thinking of my mom. She hadn’t even gotten a note.

  “Then I caught a train into Center City. I figured I’d lie about my age and join the navy or something.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Except the jerks wanted a birth certificate! Can you believe that?”

  I supposed that I could believe it. Adults always had ways of locking kids out of places they thought they shouldn’t go.

  “So I just kind of wandered around. That night I had to sleep in a Dumpster. I was in big trouble. My money wouldn’t last long, and even worse, it turns out there are even more Corpses in Philly than in Collegetown!”

  “You should see Manayunk,” I told him.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dave actually shuddered.

  “How’d you end up here?” I asked.

  “Got lucky for a change. I was on Market Street on Wednesday when I spotted a bunch of these kids on majorly cool bikes hiding behind a bus. All of a sudden, they peeled away—right through a crowd of people crossing the street—snatched up a couple of other kids and then took off down Tenth. The thing is, there were three Corpses there, and these guys shot them in the face with squirt guns! One of them even had a sword. I think maybe it was Sharyn, although I didn’t know it at the time.”

  I smiled but said nothing.

  Dave continued, “So I figured anybody who could do that to those walking fly bags was who I wanted to hang with. So I started asking everybody who was there—all the ‘bystanders’—and I finally ran into this kid named Jonathan who turned out to be with the guys on the bikes. Some kind of spotter. Once I told him I could See the Corpses, he offered to bring me here. Got to admit though,” he concluded, looking around, “I expected better.”

  For a moment I considered telling him about the field trip this afternoon. Then I changed my mind. Tom and Sharyn thought this dude might be a mole, and if he was, it probably wouldn’t be smart to make him think I knew more about the Undertakers than I’d let on.

  Except…he doesn’t seem like a mole.

  I said, “You wanna grab some lunch, Burgermeister?”

  “Sure.”

  I looked at him. He looked back at me.

  “Um…you kind of have to move,” I added.

  He blinked. “Oh! Sorry.” Then he stepped aside, and to my surprise, he made a funny after you gesture with a swing of one of his huge arms.

  I smiled.

  And realized with some surprise that I kind of liked Dave “the Burgermeister” Burger.

  CHAPTER 17

  Field Trip

  That afternoon the six First Stop recruits were once again herded into the main room—fresh from a hearty lunch of nuked hot dogs, nuked macaroni and cheese, and apple juice. Instead of taking chairs, however, we were lined up near the dry cleaner’s rear door and each handed a black sack.

  “Today,” Sharyn announced, “we’re all gonna go out for a few hours. Now, y’all want to pull those bags over your heads. Then I’ll lead you, one at a time, through the door and into the back of a van. The van’s got bench seats on both sides with ropes for seat belts. Once you’re in there and tied down, we’ll split.”

  “Where are we going?” Amy asked.

  “That’s a surprise. But don’t worry. Y’all will be back here by dinnertime. Cool?”

  Harleen and Maria nodded. The Burgermeister frowned. Amy and Ethan looked nervous.

  “Good,” Sharyn said. “Not…you don’t take off those bags until I tell you it’s okay. Got it? I’ll be sitting in the back with y’all, and if one of you tries breakin’ that rule—well, let’s just say you’ll be getting a personal training session first thing we get back. Everybody down with that?”

  Dave, who knew all about personal training sessions with Sharyn, was the first to don his black sack, pulling it over his big head so quickly that I had to suppress a smile. The rest followed suit. Finally, with a grin and nod from Sharyn, I did the same.

  It was stuffy inside—and dark. I couldn’t see a thing, which I supposed was the point.

  Ten minutes later, we were all in the back of a creaky metal van, perched on hard benches. “Just sit tight,” Sharyn told us as the doors shut loudly. “This’ll take about half an hour.”

  And maybe it did, but
it was a long half an hour.

  First of all, I was uncomfortable, although it was easy enough to breathe in the sack. Second, whoever was driving this thing wasn’t particularly good at it. Tires seemed to squeal with every turn, tossing us to and fro on the benches and knocking us into one another time and time again. And there were a lot of turns. Whatever complicated route Tom had worked out for taking us from First Stop to Haven, it involved a lot of twists and doubling back. I didn’t think the best spy in the world could have tracked us.

  By the time the van rolled to an abrupt halt, I’d lost all sense of direction. We could have been anywhere from the art museum to the Philly airport.

  “Jeez,” Ethan muttered from beside me. “I feel sick.”

  Frankly so did I—probably had something to do with riding around in a bouncy van with a bag over my head.

  “Chill out, y’all,” Sharyn said, sounding as cheerful as ever. “We’re here!”

  The doors opened, and out we came. Sharyn helped each of us out in turn, lining us up and then marching us—still bagged—down a short hall and into an open area that, by the echo, could only be Haven’s cavernous Big Room.

  No ramp. No brick wall. Apparently there was more than one way into the Undertakers’ secret headquarters.

  A door shut, and Sharyn pronounced, “Okay, dudes. Lose the bags!”

  Gratefully we obeyed.

  I did my best to mimic the amazement the other recruits clearly felt at witnessing the beehive of activity around us. It wasn’t hard. Seeing it now without some of the shock and fear that I’d been drowning in the first time, the operation was impressive. The high ceiling; the corral of muscle bikes; the rows of sectioned-off rooms and offices that lined the walls—they made the whole Undertakers concept seem somehow more reliable.

  More real.

  And I started to see the point of this field trip.

  “Welcome to Haven,” Tom said, stepping through the same door that we’d all just used. “Hope y’all enjoyed the ride. You’re the first recruits to ever get this chance before graduating First Stop, so make the most of it.”

  I looked at him, my stomach only now settling down, and thought, Was he the driver?

  Did any of the Undertakers have a license? And where had the van even come from?

  Questions for another day, I decided. For now I needed to play the newbie and go along with everybody else.

  “Listen up,” Sharyn said. “We’re gonna spend some time taking y’all around this room to show you how the Undertakers are set up and how we roll. Maybe some of you’ll get a feel for what you might want to do after First Stop. After that comes a little break, and then a bit about the Deaders that we like to call Corpses 101.”

  Grinning, she marched across the expansive floor, waggling a finger for us to follow.

  The Undertakers, it turned out, were arranged into crews, with each crewer reporting to a boss who either answered to Tom or to Sharyn as Deputy Chief. Most crews maintained a station in the Big Room from where they did their job. And that afternoon the First Stop recruits spent anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour at every single one of them.

  First came the Chatters, who occupied a square of tables set up at what their boss—a short, dark-haired boy named Sammy Li—defined as “the exact geographic center of Haven.” Apparently that made the building-wide Wi-Fi work better. The kids on this crew were the communicators. They remained in constant contact with the Schoolers—Sharyn’s Undercover Undertakers. They also monitored Corpse activity in the newspapers and on local television.

  During our visit, Sammy let a few of us take turns flipping through the Philadelphia Inquirer, looking for photos of cadavers mugging for some journalist’s camera. Ethan actually found one and seemed really jazzed about it.

  The Hackers manned three banks of computers set up against Haven’s rear wall. They spent their days worming into all kinds of systems, securing false identities for Schoolers, researching known Corpses, and keeping track of the Undertakers’ finances. Their boss was a sixteen-year-old girl named Elisha Beardsley. “Work for me,” she announced with the enthusiasm of a candidate for class president, “and we’ll show you how to break into every system on the East Coast! It doesn’t get better than that.”

  I thought that maybe it did, but some of the others looked excited—especially Maria.

  After that came the Monkeys, Haven’s mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, and electricians. They were bossed by Tara Monroe, the short, slightly heavy girl who’d been nice to me during my first confusing minutes in Haven. “My crew keeps the bikes running,” she explained as we gathered together near the Stingray corral. “We also take care of the building itself, making regular improvements. So if you got a way with tools, we could definitely use you.”

  “Cool,” I heard the Burgermeister mutter from beside me.

  Toward the end of her talk, Tara’s eyes briefly found mine. She offered me a small smile of recognition. I managed to smile back. It was nice to have a friend.

  I wonder where Helene is.

  “Schoolers and Angels are different kinds of crews,” Tom told us a few minutes later. We’d left the corral and were now standing near the cafeteria. “For starters, Schoolers don’t have a station in Haven because—well, most of the time, they’re not here. They’re out in the world, hiding in the local middle schools, playing normal. They have a tough job: to keep an eye out for Seers and, when they find one, get to them before the Corpses do. Schoolers are trained to fight, to fend for themselves, and to keep cool no matter how hairy things get. It’s a high-power, high-risk gig—which is why they’re the only crew I boss personally.

  “Angels, on the other hand, are our search and rescue team. Most of the time, they’re the ones goin’ toe to toe with the Corpses. When a Schooler needs backup, Angels ride in. When some Deader is up to something, it’s the Angels who tail ’em and get the 411. Sharyn bosses that crew, and getting on it ain’t easy. You get trained in combat, weapons, and how to handle yourself on a bike and a skateboard, and you keep funny hours. It ain’t easy, and it ain’t for the timid.

  “So—if any y’all think you might be Schooler or Angel material, let Sharyn or Kyle know, and we’ll see what’s what.”

  There didn’t seem to be any immediate takers, and Tom didn’t seem to expect there would be. So he nodded to Sharyn, who stepped up, rubbed her hands together, and announced, “Okay, break time! There’s candy and popcorn, and I think Nick’s even whipped us up some pie. Go seat yourselves down in the caf, and I’ll check the back.”

  This we did, with the Burgermeister dropping heavily into the chair beside me. He tried one of the homemade candies. “These ain’t bad,” he said after a half-dozen disappeared into his huge maw. “But I was hopin’ for some real food.”

  “We had lunch before we left First Stop,” I told him.

  “Yeah, I know. But I’m hungry!” Another handful of colored candies met their maker.

  Sharyn reappeared a moment later, tugging along a tall, skinny blond kid of about sixteen. “Dudes, this here’s Nick Rooney. He’s our Mom Boss.”

  Harleen and Maria giggled as Dave whispered into my ear, “He don’t like no Mom I ever saw.” Then he noticed that the blond kid was carrying a steaming apple pie in his oven mitt–covered hands. “Hey, dude!” he suddenly exclaimed to Nick. “Get me some of that!”

  The Moms, it turned out, kind of sat at the bottom of the Undertakers’ unofficial crew totem pole, and it was with them that most new recruits started out. These kids did the thankless drudgery jobs: shopping, emptying trash, doing laundry, and generally picking up after everyone else. Nobody liked being a Mom, and most kids rotated off the crew as soon as newer recruits came in to take their places.

  Nick Rooney seemed to be the only exception; he’d been a Mom since joining up almost two and a half years ago, and he apparently showed no interest in doing anything else. Nick was also the baker wannabe who personally made, in addition to pies, the candie
s that everyone around me—especially Dave—was currently inhaling.

  But I didn’t have too much of an appetite. Instead I found a quick moment during the break to lure Sharyn aside.

  “Where’s Helene?” I asked her.

  “Helene?” the Deputy Chief replied. “The girls’ dorm, I think. Said she was tired.”

  “Oh.” I tried to hide my disappointment. “I was afraid she might be back out on a new Schooler assignment.”

  Sharyn shook her head. “Nope. Not yet anyhow.”

  “Okay. Well—tell her I said hi.”

  She treated me to a thin, knowing smile. “Tell her yourself, Red—the next time you see her.” Then she turned and addressed the rest of the recruits. “One more stop, dudes! We’re off to the Brain Factory, where y’all will be hearing from Steve Moscova, who runs that crew with an iron pocket protector! So line up! This one’s going to be a blast!”

  CHAPTER 18

  Corpses 101

  Ahem,” Steve said loudly. “My name’s Steven Moscova, and I’m the Brain Boss for the Undertakers. I’ve dedicated myself to understanding these invaders because only through understanding them can we hope to defeat them.”

  We were gathered outside the Brain Factory, occupying chairs that had been set up just out of reach of the half-circle of long tables that marked the boundary of Steve’s domain. His crew was nowhere to be seen, although a big cracked blackboard had been set up beside the nearest table. On this blackboard, Steve had taped up an assortment of photographs—each one showing a different Corpse in a different stage of rot.

  I felt my stomach roll over. It was the bumpy van ride all over again.

  Beside me, Dave groaned, “I shouldn’t have eaten so much candy!”

  Steve said, “It’s okay to ask questions—just please raise your hand. Let’s get started.” He tapped the first picture on the blackboard. It looked like Old Man Pratt—at least, the way he’d been the morning I’d left home. Dried up. Almost a husk. Beetle food. “This is a long shot of a Corpse inhabiting a Type Five cadaver. Because of its advanced state of decomposition, it is nearing the end of its usefulness. This particular body has probably been dead for more than two months. All the fluids are gone, leaving behind brittle bones and skin like old parchment. These cadavers are pretty worthless in combat. They break too easily. Soon the Corpse inside this body will be looking for something fresher. We call this Transferring, and it brings me to the first point I need to make today.