by Ty Drago
“Thanks,” I told him.
“It’s what I live for,” he replied cheerfully.
“Mr. Ritter!”
The voice was laced with such rage that I felt a fresh chill dance down my spine. Despite my every instinct, I turned and looked.
Kenny Booth stood beside the Dumpster, out of range of the Soakers. He was still wearing Kyle’s body and was pointing one of Kyle’s index fingers directly at me.
“This isn’t over, boy! Do you hear me? This isn’t over!”
“I know,” I whispered.
Then the Undertakers fled the scene, leaving its terror and chaos behind us.
CHAPTER 28
Casualties of War
No one spoke during the long ride to Haven—except when Sharyn ordered us all to stop so she could check that we weren’t being followed. When the Stingrays slipped down the spiraling tunnel and made the jump through the brick wall, no one uttered so much as a yahoo.
I was off the back of Chuck’s ride the moment we stopped. Ignoring the stares and questions everyone was throwing at me, I went looking for Tom.
I found him at the Chatters station, hastily debriefing Sharyn.
Sharyn was saying, “…straight up. It’s a miracle any of them are alive! Hot Dog rode with me and wouldn’t stop talking about how Will kept them together and risked his own butt to save them.”
Tom considered this. “Any sign of Amy?”
“Nothing. Deaders probably snatched her.” She sighed wearily. “We’ve got to get these kids some grub and then beds for the night.”
“Nick’ll handle that,” Tom told her. “You promised to let her know how it went.”
Sharyn nodded. “I know.” Then she walked off, her dreadlocked head lowered.
“What happened to Tara?” I demanded.
Tom actually gasped in surprise. “Didn’t know you were there!” He laughed nervously.
“The Corpses,” I pressed. I could feel bile rising in my throat. “Did they kill her?”
He gave me a long look. “No…” he replied hesitantly. “She’s the one who called us and told us what went down.”
“And then the Angels tracked us with the GPS in the wrist radio.”
“Yeah,” Tom said.
“Where is she?”
“The Infirmary.”
I hadn’t known there was such a place, although I guess it didn’t really surprise me. The Will Ritter from a week ago might’ve said something stupid, like: “Is she hurt?” Instead I asked quietly, “How bad?”
Tom grimaced. “Bad.”
“I want to see her.”
“Will—that probably ain’t such a good idea.”
“I want to see her,” I repeated.
Tom studied me. “Come on.”
He led me across the Big Room toward a large sectioned-off area with a heavy curtain stretched across its only entrance.
“What do you think happened to Amy?” I asked.
Tom shrugged. “She’s probably dead by now.”
I frowned, confused. “Why would the Corpses kill her? She was working for them!”
“We’ve run into this before,” he explained, sounding miserable. “Once a mole fails, the Corpses take them out. Amy’s job was to find Haven, and she blew it.”
I shook my head. “Maybe that was her original mission, but I overheard some of what she was saying to them right before the attack. Booth didn’t want Haven anymore. He wanted—me.”
I glanced at Tom, who replied, “Yeah, I figured that.”
“You did?”
He nodded. We’d reached the curtain.
“What’s so special about me?” I asked.
Before Tom could answer, Sharyn appeared. She looked from one to the other of us, tears in her eyes. Slowly, meaningfully, she shook her head.
“Will wants to see her,” Tom said.
“She…uh—ain’t in good shape, Red. The Deaders, they…well, she’s messed up pretty bad.”
I recalled Steve’s lectures.
Suddenly I didn’t want to go in there.
But then I remembered the girl’s sacrifice. Had that really been less than an hour ago?
“I kind of have to do this,” I said quietly.
Sharyn regarded me. Then she stood aside and drew back the curtain. Swallowing, I stepped through it.
When I was eight, I fell off my bike and broke my arm. My parents rushed me to the local emergency room—the only time I’d ever set foot in a hospital. I remembered the place as being bright and noisy and incredibly clean.
Haven’s Infirmary was nothing like that.
There were a dozen cots, a table, a sink, and a bunch of medical books. A short thin boy moved about with an almost desperate urgency. He wore surgical garb: green linen pants and a matching short-sleeve shirt. The front of the shirt was bloodied. So were his latex gloves.
Then I saw why.
Tara lay on the farthest cot, looking pale and terribly small. She’d been horribly beaten, and it was all I could do not to retch at the sight of her. Instead, mustering every ounce of my nerve, I approached the bed and looked down at this girl who had risked everything to give First Stop’s recruits a fighting chance.
The Corpses had done their work savagely well.
“Who are you?” the short boy snapped.
“He’s Will Ritter,” Tom replied from the doorway.
The stranger blinked. “Oh,” he said, his anger vanishing. “Hi. I’m Ian McDonald.”
Tom explained, “Ian’s our medic. His old man’s a doctor.”
“A surgeon,” Ian added. “A great one. He works at the University of Pennsylvania.”
So why isn’t your dad here?
I just kept looking at Tara. “We have to get her to a hospital.”
Ian looked helplessly over at Tom, who approached me and said, “Will—if we drop her at an ER, the Corpses’ll find her inside of an hour. Then they’ll either quietly ice her or…”
“Or what?” I demanded.
A small voice whispered hoarsely, “Or make…me talk.”
I gaped down at the cot. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might be conscious!
Tara met my gaze with her one remaining eye. When she spoke she winced in obvious pain. “I…hear you got…everyone out. I knew…you could.”
“Don’t talk,” Ian scolded gently—like a doctor.
I had no idea what to say. My mind locked on a dreadful fact that no one seemed willing to openly admit. Tara was dying, and there wasn’t anything that anyone could do about it.
Perhaps for the first time, I think I truly understood the evil that had come into my life. Until then the Corpses—while terrifying—had been almost like childhood monsters, like the imagined “things” that once lived under my bed. Only children could see them. Run or they might grab you!
Well, Tara had been grabbed.
And my childhood was over.
Trembling, I knelt beside the cot. It was all I could do to look her in the eye.
“Thank you,” I said. It sounded completely lame.
“No problem,” she replied, actually managing to smile. The Burgermeister had said the same thing back on the street, when things had been their most desperate. It had been a lie then, and it was a lie now—courage in the face of tragic certainty.
Valor.
Before now that word had meant almost nothing to me. Suddenly I understood it with awful clarity.
“Do me…a favor.…” Tara whispered.
“Anything,” I replied. Tears poured down my face. The familiar knot in my belly now felt as cold as the moon.
“When all this is over…tell my pop…I was brave.”
Sobs exploded from my throat. Burying my face in my hands, I cried for most of a minute. Around me, no one spoke.
Some of my tears were for Tara and her awful sacrifice. But the rest of them—I’m ashamed to say, maybe most of them—were for myself, for everything I’d lost, for everything that had been taken away from me.
I cried because I couldn’t keep it inside any longer, and I went on crying until I felt empty—wrung dry like an old sponge.
Finally I looked back at the girl on the cot and whispered, “I will.”
But Tara’s eyes were closed, and she’d gone very quiet.
And that gentle, valorous smile was still on her lips.
CHAPTER 29
Aftermath
Kenny Booth’s an even bigger deal in the Corpse world than in ours,” Tom explained. “Seems the others call him Master. He’s got a hold of Kyle’s body. And worse—it looks like he’s hunting Will.”
Held in a secluded corner of the Big Room, the meeting consisted of nothing more than a loose circle of folding chairs occupied by the crew bosses—plus me. I was easily the youngest one there, and I could feel the weight of all their eyes on me.
“Now, we ain’t sure why they’re so interested in him,” Tom continued. “But a good guess’d be that they’re trying to figure out why his dad was the only adult who ever got the Sight.”
“That makes sense,” Steve remarked. “The Corpses’ biggest weakness is our ability to See them. If that ability spread to everyone—well, they’d be exposed.”
“They’d be history!” Sharyn amended.
Her brother nodded. “So they might be looking to snatch Will alive—for study.”
I supposed that the idea of becoming a lab rat for some Corpse mad scientist ought to frighten me. Oddly, it didn’t.
I felt too numb.
Last night’s events had pretty much trashed Haven’s morale. There was less enthusiasm, and absolutely nobody smiled. I felt it too. In fact, sadness seemed to have moved into my heart to stay.
After catching a few hours of sleep in the boys’ dorm, I’d been awakened around midmorning by an uncharacteristically subdued Sharyn. Following a hasty breakfast, she’d escorted me directly to this meeting.
Dragged along by events as always.
“So how’d they even get in to First Stop?” demanded Alex Bobson, the irritating kid I’d met back on my first day. He’d been named the new Monkey Boss, replacing Tara. “I mean, they tried twice before, and both times we saw them coming a mile away.” He glared at Steve. “What happened to all those cameras of yours? The motion sensors?”
Steve blanched. “The cameras were all working fine. But the motion sensors had been disabled. I’m not sure how.”
“Rats,” said Elisha Beardsley, the Hacker Boss. She was a pretty, slightly overweight girl who now reminded me painfully of Tara. “Rats kept setting the alarm off, especially at night.” She swallowed. “So Kyle started turning the sensors off. Tara told me. It’s been more than a year since the hit on our last First Stop. I guess he figured by now it was safe.”
Steve groaned.
Alex glowered. “Jeez, Elisha! Why didn’t you tell somebody Kyle was doing this?”
The girl looked nervously around. “Tara asked me not to. They—liked each other. She was my friend.”
“Your friend!” Alex exclaimed. “Some friend! You should’ve—”
“Enough,” Tom said. To my surprise, Alex obeyed immediately, looking like a mean dog suddenly put on a short leash. “Throwing blame around gets us nowhere,” the Chief continued. “If nothing else, this tragedy should teach us about following the rules and regs. Elisha, you should’ve reported what Tara and Kyle were doing. Alex, it ain’t your place to kick her butt over this. It’s mine.”
“Sorry,” muttered the new Monkey Boss.
“Look,” Tom said, “yesterday we got hit harder than we’ve ever been. It’s one thing to know that war’s dangerous but another when two of our own get killed on the same night. Losing Tara and Kyle makes me sick. But they were both Undertakers, and they wouldn’t want grief blinding us to what’s important.”
“He’s right,” said Sammy Li, the Chatter Boss.
Sharyn managed a smile. “Of course he is. He’s my brother, ain’t he?” Everyone laughed halfheartedly.
Then I said, “It was my fault.”
“What?” Tom looked over at me, surprised.
“I should’ve signaled Kyle or Tara when I first followed Amy out into the training room.”
“Why didn’t you?” Alex demanded.
I shrugged. “I didn’t want to snitch on her—not until I knew what she was up to. It never occurred to me that she might be…”
“Yeah,” Tom replied gently.
“You should’ve made some noise!” Alex insisted, his eyes blazing. “You’re right! It is your fault! They’re dead because you were too stupid to—”
“Alex!” Tom snapped so sharply that the other boy actually flinched.
The Chief spoke calmly, addressing everyone. “Despite being only twelve years old and despite having been an Undertaker for less than two weeks, Will got himself and four recruits out of an active combat zone. He also managed to bring a wounded Undertaker along with him. It ain’t his fault that Kyle died. Fact is, he kept his cool under pressure—even after almost sacrificing himself for his crew.”
I made bad calls that nearly got them all killed.
Tom continued, “I won’t have nobody in Haven saying a single thing against him. Think back on your own first weeks. Could any of you have done what he did?”
“Not a chance,” Steve admitted.
“No way,” said Sammy Li.
“Pretty cool,” remarked Nick Rooney, the Mom Boss.
“You hear me, Alex?” Tom asked.
Alex Bobson’s face reddened. “I hear you.”
“Good,” the Chief said. “Now that we got that settled, looks like we need us a new First Stop. Elisha, get your crew to work hunting down foreclosures. You know the drill. Find me a condemned building with some space, running water, and a nearby fuse box that we can tap into.”
“No sweat,” the girl replied.
“Sammy,” Tom said, “keep covering the police bands. See if anything’s getting said about what all went down last night.”
“Sure, Chief.”
“And Nick, get the new recruits hooked up. Give them spots with the Moms.”
Nick Rooney nodded. Then he winked playfully at me. “Hope you can handle a mop, kid!”
But Tom shook his head. “Uh-uh. Not Will. The others.”
“Will’s not going into the Moms?” Alex asked, frowning.
“I want to start him on Angels training.”
A shocked murmur rumbled around the meeting. Only Sharyn looked unsurprised. I gaped at Tom, my grief, guilt, and general misery momentarily forgotten. The Chief met my eyes and smiled.
“Um—no offense and all,” Steve said carefully, “but isn’t he a little young?”
“A little young? He’s twelve!” Alex exclaimed. “There’s never been an Angel younger than fourteen!”
“That’s true, Tom,” Sammy added.
“It ain’t really about age,” Tom explained patiently. “It’s about—and I know how this sounds—the warrior instinct. Will’s got more natural talent than anyone I’ve ever met. Look at what he did last night!”
“He still had to be rescued, didn’t he?” Alex pointed out.
“That was from a lack of training and weapons—not a lack of talent,” Tom replied.
An unhappy silence followed. A few people glanced my way—some supportively; others resentfully.
Finally Sharyn suggested, “Why don’t we ask him?”
“What?” Alex demanded crossly.
“Well, it’s real easy to just dump him onto my crew. Me? I’d love to have him. But this is risky duty. Maybe we ought to see how Will feels about it.”
Tom nodded. “Girl’s got a point. So, Will, what do you think? Does going Angel do it for you?”
For half a minute, I didn’t reply. Then, looking up, I said flatly, “I want to fight the Corpses.”
Alex snorted. “Jeez! Who doesn’t? That’s no answer!”
I turned to him. Although not particularly big, Alex had the kind of tough, arrogant demeanor
that, once upon a time, I might have found intimidating.
Those days, however, were gone.
“You don’t get it,” I told him. “I don’t want to make little raids, the way the Angels do now—showing up in the nick of time and rescuing kids from the Corpses. I want to fight them. I want to make them pay for what they did to Kyle and Tara, what they did to Amy—what they did to all of us.” After a pause I added, “I want to kill them—every last one of them.”
Another heavy silence fell over the circle.
“We all want that,” Sharyn replied quietly.
“Yeah? So far I’m not seeing too much proof of it.”
“Will—” Tom began.
“No!” I snapped. “I know what you’re going to say. We’re Harriet Tubman. We’re on defense. We’re outnumbered and outgunned and outclassed. If we start an open war, we’ll all be killed. Right, Chief?”
Tom frowned, but he said nothing.
It was Nick Rooney who replied, “Right.”
I stood up. “Wrong! You’ve all played it that way for years now, and this morning, two Undertakers and an innocent girl are dead. You know why that is?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s because the Corpses are fighting an open war. They’ve got no problems at all attacking us. After all, what’s there to be afraid of? If they kill a few of us, all we’ll do is say how sad it is and start looking for a new hiding place!
“Well, not me! Look, I know I’m new around here. I know I’m young. Most of you probably think I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I’m done hiding! I’m going to make those worm sacks pay for what they did! And if you won’t let me do it as an Undertaker—then I’ll do it on my own!”
I fell silent then, my face burning. I didn’t sit down but instead stared straight at Tom, whose expression had turned thoughtful. Sharyn seemed like she might be fighting a smile. The rest of the bosses looked completely shocked. I wondered if anyone had ever spoken out like that at one of these meetings.
At last, wearily, Tom rose to his feet. Everyone watched him. No one spoke.
The Chief of the Undertakers met my eyes, and despite all of my bravado and righteous anger, I lowered my gaze.
“Will,” Tom said evenly. “I want you to leave this meeting. Now.”