by Ty Drago
I rushed up, Vader in hand, and cut the wormbag’s head off.
Then the Corpse Eater appeared out of nowhere and took care of the rest of them.
“It’s not here!” my sister finally declared, looking at us miserably.
“Where then?” William wondered. He climbed to his feet, pressing one hand against the side of his head.
I suddenly remembered Dead Toady Guy and looked around, but there were too many fallen Corpses and it was too dark. All of the flashlights were either broken or gone.
“We gotta get out of here,” I said.
“Not without the Anchor Shard,” Maxi Me protested. Blood ran down the side of his face from a gash at his temple. Dizzily, he glanced around before asking, “Where’s Steve?”
Both he and Emily looked at me. I met their eyes. Message sent and received.
Emily covered her face in her hands.
Moments later, I spotted the toady. Like a lot of the smarter Corpses, he’d run off when things had heated up. In this particular case, the cowardly deader had hidden on the mall, in the ruins of the Liberty Bell’s pavilion. But the pulsing light of the Anchor Shard gave him away.
“Help the chief,” I told Emily. “Get him back to Haven. I’ll get the crystal.”
“No!” Maxi Me insisted. From the direction he was looking, I could tell that he’d seen what I had. “You go back with Emily. I’ll get the Anchor Shard.”
“You’re hurt!” I protested.
“And you’re too important!” he protested back.
Then a voice said, “Just what I need. Two Will Ritters!”
We whirled to see Future Helene watching us from just a few feet away. She stood amidst a pile of broken Corpses, with many more of them running off into the darkened city around us. Her hair was stringy with sweat and rainwater, and her eyes had a wild quality to them that I didn’t much like. But at least she was awake, alive and, for the moment, human.
I noticed, with relief, that she’d managed to snatch a long shirt from one of the deaders and had thrown it around herself. The last Corpse Eater I’d met never quite jived to the fact that, when she changed back to human, she was always naked.
Trust me: I did not need to see a forty-something version of Helene with no clothes on!
Maxi Me rushed over and scooped her up in his arms, the gesture so sudden and sincere that I actually got a lump in my throat. Does that sound lame? Well, if you ever get the chance to watch your older self get reunited with the love of your life, let’s see if you shrug it off.
“Dear God …” I heard him gasp. “I don’t believe this. I thought I’d lost you.”
“You had,” Helene replied, smiling through her tears. “But then I heard your voice and … I don’t know … it woke me up.”
He pulled back and looked at her. Then, slowly, he turned his head and looked at me.
The best I could offer was a shrug.
He laughed and hugged her again.
“We can’t stay here,” I told them both.
And we really couldn’t. While the deaders immediately around us were all down for the count, the rest of the horde remained out there, somewhere in the rain shrouded darkness, probably regrouping.
“We still need the crystal,” Emily pointed out.
“I’ll get it,” the chief declared, turning toward the place where Dead Toady was still hiding.
But Helene put a hand on his arm. “You’re hurt. Start heading back to Haven. I’ll get it.”
“We’ll get it,” I corrected.
Maxi Me looked about to protest. He even took a couple of steps in the direction of the pavilion, but then his knees wobbled and both Emily and Helene had to step up and support him.
“Okay,” he said, sounding sick at heart. “I give. But we can’t risk you, Will. We just can’t.”
“I’ll protect him,” Helene replied, and something in her voice—a hard edge that didn’t sound entirely human—made William regard her nervously.
“Works for me” I said, sounding much more confident than I felt. “You and Emily get going. We’ll be right behind you!”
The chief looked like he wanted to say something more, but finally nodded and let Emily lead him away. As she did, I yelled, “Hold up!” and tossed my sister the Hugos I still had on my belt, the only bit of my arsenal that the new Queen hadn’t seen fit to confiscate.
Emily snatched them out of the air and, helping William, the two of them disappearing into the shadows across Market Street—probably in search of a nice, private manhole cover.
Meanwhile, Helene Ritter and I headed for the ruins of the Liberty Bell pavilion.
Around us, the darkened, rain-soaked streets were peppered with the moans of dozens, maybe hundreds of frustrated Corpses, all of which—so far—were too afraid of the gravveg to risk another attack.
But their cowardice wouldn’t last forever.
After about a minute of picking our way through what was left of the pavilion walls, we reached the place where I was sure Dead Toady had been. But the spot was empty. Most likely, he’d seen our approach, realized he’d been spotted, and had retreated deeper into the maze of shadows filling the block-long park.
“Now what?” I asked.
Helene didn’t answer right away. Instead, she stopped, lifted her head and flared her nostrils, as if testing the air. It was an eerie gesture, very alien, and I suddenly reminded myself what this woman could change into, and how dangerous and unpredictable that “what” could be.
At last she said, “He headed back to Independence Hall. Let’s go!” And then she started sprinting across the mall.
“Wait!” I called, but it was no good. She quickly outdistanced me, moving much faster than a human being had any right to. “Helene!”
She stopped within a few yards of Chestnut Street, surrounded by burnt tree stumps and shattered concrete. Her attention seemed fixed on something ahead of her, though it wasn’t until I caught up, panting heavily, that I realized what it was.
Dead Toady stood right at the mall’s southern edge, the gigantic silhouette of Independence Hall at his back. The Anchor Shard hung around his neck, its crystalline mystery still pulsing with eerie, otherworldly light.
And, in his arms he carried the limp body of a woman.
He looked at us—and we looked back at him.
“Gravveg,” he snarled.
“Dead man,” Helene replied.
“Stand aside,” he said, trying to lend an air of authority to the command. But I could tell by the way his stolen body shivered that he was terrified.
Helene, of course, didn’t move.
“What’s the body for?” I asked.
“My Queen needs a new host,” he said. “Now stand aside, humans!”
“Only one of us is human,” Helene remarked, her eyes beginning to flash different colors.
Red, green, yellow, blue, red, green, yellow, blue.
I knew what that meant.
She transformed in an instant, just a blur of color and motion that changed woman into Corpse Eater. For a moment, the creature now at my side glared its red eye at Dead Toady, who uttered a frightened squeak, dropped the cadaver he’d been carrying, and turned to run.
He didn’t get two steps.
The Corpse Eater landed on him, grabbed his struggling body with her two front legs, and lifted him off his feet. At the same time, her mouth, that impossibly big mouth of hers, opened wide, revealing enough teeth to turn a great white shark green with envy.
“No!” I cried. “Don’t eat him!”
She ate him.
He went down her gullet. She swallowed every bit of him in one go, including his clothes, shoes—
—and the Anchor Shard.
Fantastic.
Then the Corpse Eater turned toward me, her yellow eye showing. I expected her to change back, to transform once again into forty-something Helene Ritter. But she didn’t.
&
nbsp; Instead, a word drilled its way into my mind. Run.
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
The creature’s bizarre head tilted toward the body on the ground, the one that the Late and Unlamented Dead Toady had been carrying when we’d run into him. A new body for the fallen Queen.
“But that’s no problem,” I said. “We’re too far away from Market Street. There’s no chance that Corpse Helene could Transfer to—”
Then the dead woman’s eyes snapped open.
You know how, in the movies, newly animated cadavers sit stiffly up and then turn their heads to look malevolently at you?
Well, this one leaped to her feet like a panther and attacked.
Run! the Corpse Eater repeated, again in her telepathic voice. Then she launched herself at the newly risen Royal. But this time around, the Queen saw her coming and stepped smoothly aside, seizing one of the creature’s ten legs. With a mighty heave, she tore it from the body.
The Corpse Eater made no sound, but its voice screamed inside my head, full of rage and agony.
“No!” I cried. I still had Vader and I charged with it now, raising the sword high. I’d lopped off more than a few heads tonight, after all. One more wouldn’t—
But Corpse Helene wasn’t there anymore. She’d danced away from my slash in a blur of Royal speed and grabbed my sword hand. With a savage squeeze that made me cry out in pain, she wrenched the weapon away. Then, stepping clear of me, she took the sword in both hands and brought its blade down across her knee.
Sharyn Jefferson’s famed wakizashi, which had seen so many fights, snapped like a dry twig.
Crazy as it must sound, given everything I’d seen, I couldn’t quite believe it.
But, before I could even begin to think of what to do next, the gravveg vaulted over me—I mean right over my head—and hurled itself at the Queen. The creature, I saw with dismay, wasn’t moving quite as fast anymore, and as it passed above my head, hot black blood drizzled down on my scalp. It smelled like sulfur.
But, again, Corpse Helene was ready. Planting the feet of her fresh new body in the deepening mud, she reached up and caught the monster’s bulbous head in both her dead hands. Then, in a single vicious motion, she swung her attacker in a wide arc, slamming her against a burned-out tree stump.
The stump shattered.
The Corpse Eater’s broken body slumped to the ground, motionless.
“There,” the new Queen of the Dead remarked, sounding quite satisfied as she turned back my way. “Now … where were we?”
Chapter 23
Sacrifices
No water pistol. No pocketknife. No Maankh. No Vader.
And one seriously pissed off Royal Dead Woman intent on doing me some permanent hurt.
I’m screwed …
She was “wearing” a solid Type Two, the strong and relatively fresh body of a young woman. From the dent in her skull, which gave the whole head a weirdly tilted look, I guessed that the human being she’d once been had taken a really hard head blow, enough to kill her, but not enough to make the body useless to the Corpses. Her hair was dark and stringy, her skin a mottled gray. It was pulled tight across her limbs and skull, not yet bloating from the gases that I knew must already be forming in her muscles as the tissues decomposed.
The science of the dead, for all the help it was to me now.
“I know why you’re here,” Corpse Helene said.
“Good for you,” I replied, retreating a step for every step she took toward me.
Seeing this, she smiled. “Ms. Filewicz was very forthcoming about Project Reboot. An ill-conceived nonsense effort to prevent my glorious invasion by having you return to your own time, cross the Void, and then destroy the Eternity Stone.”
“Something like that,” I said.
“Ludicrous, of course. As if we’d ever stand for such a thing. Do you know what would happen the instant, the very moment, you set foot on the Malum homeworld?”
I noticed Sharyn’s sword, half of it anyway. Corpse Helene had hurled the broken pieces in opposite directions. The pointy end had skewered a tree stump with such force that it had gotten stuck there, looking like a jagged Excalibur. Though it wasn’t too far away, I had no illusions. Even if I did somehow get to it before this Royal deader slaughtered me, I’d probably slice my fingers off trying to pull the broken length of blade free.
Yep. Totally screwed.
“Why don’t you tell me?” I suggested, thinking furiously.
“You and anyone with you would be immediately captured,” Corpse Helene replied. “Then you’d either be killed outright or taken to an arena to die in bavarak. My people don’t suffer invaders kindly.”
“But you’re totally cool with invading others!” I snapped, though I wasn’t sure if I said this in anger or fear. The two can seem surprisingly similar when you’re completely hosed.
Her grin widened. A glob of blood, dark red and as thick as maple syrup, dribbled out one corner of her mouth.
“Yes, Mr. Ritter,” she replied. “We are, indeed, ‘totally cool’ with that.”
My butt hit something hard. Looking hastily over my shoulder, I found that she’d backed me across Chestnut Street and right up against the front of Independence Hall. Its bricks felt cold, even through my clothes.
“Before I kill you,” the Queen of the Dead purred. “I want you to know something.”
“Take your time,” I said. “No hurry.”
She stopped right in front of me, her stink assailing my nose. I really didn’t want to die with that stench in my lungs.
“He’s a failure, you know.”
“Who?”
“Your future self. Chief William Ritter of the Undertakers. Oh, he’s tried. But since losing first Tom and then his beloved Helene, he’s broken. He’s become a shadow … almost a caricature of the Will Ritter who destroyed my mother and thwarted our first invasion.”
I suddenly grinned. “Wow,” I said.
Her dead head tilted curiously. “Wow?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Wow.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, boy?” Her hands were up now, her fingers like claws. In moments, she would tear my head off.
Or not.
“Just that, when you wormbags get monologuing, you don’t notice a thing, do you?”
“What?”
The Queen’s chest exploded outward as one of the Corpse Eater’s pincers drilled through it from behind. A figure appeared at her shoulder, but it wasn’t the ten-legged monster. It was Helene Ritter in human form. Only her right arm had gone gravveg.
It was a trick I’d seen once before.
Helene’s eyes found mine, and what I saw there wiped the smile right off my face. As she pulled the struggling Royal closer, I realized that blood flowed from deep gashes in her cheek and neck, as well as from the mangled ruin of her left leg. I suddenly remembered that one of the Corpse Eater’s limbs had been ripped away, right before her whole body had been slammed against a tree stump. This was how those awful injuries had translated to her human form. It was a wonder she’d managed to stand at all, much less sneak her way over here to save my life—
—one last time.
But then, Helene Boettcher had always been a wonder.
She said dully, “Two things, Will.”
I nodded, unable to make words happen.
“Tell him I love him.”
Again, I nodded. My heart felt like a stone.
She said, “And then get back there … and make it right.”
Looking into the dying woman’s eyes, I finally found my tongue. “You got my word.”
Helene held up her left hand. In its fist was a pen-sized cylinder.
The Maankh I’d given her.
“Good enough for me,” she croaked with a pained smile.
Then she fired Professor Moscova’s one-shot super-weapon into her own chest.
Both she and the Queen, locked in
their tight, desperate embrace—exploded.
For more than a minute, I just stood there. I felt nothing, thought nothing, was nothing. I closed my eyes tight. At some point, I sank to my knees. I can’t tell you exactly when—only that, once awareness returned to me, I found myself kneeling, not standing.
I’d been battling monsters for so long that I couldn’t remember living any other way. Was there really once a Will Ritter who just went to school, did homework, joked with his friends, played soccer, and tried to get out of doing his chores?
Now my life had become war and death. This nightmare of a world into which I’d been plunged was splitting apart at its seams, collapsing into rubble. People, good people, the grown-up version of friends, were falling all around me. And I was supposed to be “okay” with this? I was supposed to somehow pick myself up and march on?
I was supposed to win?
Here’s something they never tell you in the storybooks, guys. Ready?
Being the hero sucks.
I got to my feet. At the time I wasn’t sure how I managed it, though I am now.
I did it by picturing those same friends, only younger.
Helene. Emily. Sharyn. Steve. Even Alex. And also by picturing the ones who weren’t here, like Tom and Burt, as well as the ones who weren’t anywhere, not anymore. Like Chuck and Ian and Tara and Kyle.
And the Burgermeister.
With tired eyes, I looked over at the place where, just moments ago, Helene Ritter and the Queen of the Dead had struggled. There, sitting atop a pile of ash that had already been mostly blown away in the breeze, sat the Anchor Shard. The Corpse Eater had swallowed it, only to leave it behind when her body disintegrated around it.
One last gift.
I bent down and picked it up. Then I started walking.
Even in my fog of shock and grief, I was wary. There were still Corpses nearby, though I couldn’t see them or even hear them anymore as I crossed the empty mall, heading back toward Market Street.