The Undertakers: End of the World

by Ty Drago

  I’ll never get the adult world.

  He continued. “Then they’d pull Will and Sharyn, as the ‘subject participants’ into a room somewhere and interrogate them, run tests on them, and then interrogate them some more, all in the name of national security. That, by itself, could take months … or maybe years.”

  Hearing this, my mother went even paler than she already was. There she’d been, lecturing us about how it was time to turn over what we knew to the “proper authorities,” only to have Ramirez explain, in detail, what such a thing would mean for her son’s future.

  She ended up leaving the meeting the way she had the Infirmary, without saying a word to anybody.

  Later on, Tom and I went over to the Factory to have a talk with Steve. I had things to tell the Brain Boss, sciencey stuff that I’d left out of my Infirmary debrief.

  “Can’t do it,” Steve complained, turning toward us as we entered the long, skinny chamber. He and his brother had a car battery set up on a small metal stand, complete with a directional brace that was obviously meant to hold the Anchor Shard in position and focus its energy.

  Basically, he’d constructed a really primitive Rift Projector, but one that did more than break the time barrier. This one would let us travel between dimensions.

  Or would it?

  “Can’t do what?” I asked.

  “I’m really sorry,” the Brain Boss replied. “But this isn’t going to work.”

  “Why not?” Tom asked him. “You’ve opened Rifts before now.”

  “Sure. Small ones. Experimental ones. And each time the release of energy has been hard to control. Remember Ian?”

  “We can set up shields,” the chief said. “Like before.”

  But Steve was shaking his head before Tom even finished the sentence. “That was enough protection when the Rift was open for a minute or two. But we don’t know how long this mission will take. Hours, most likely. A Rift open that long would release enough energy to flatten a city block!”

  I thought back to the long lecture Professor Moscova had given me about what he called “shard science.” There’d been a lot of info and I’d done my best to remember it. But now I kinda wished I’d taken notes.

  I said, “Not if you ground the Anchor Shard.”

  They all looked at me.

  “Ground it?” Burt asked.

  “Ground it,” I said.

  Steve’s expression turned thoughtful. “How?”

  “Well, your future self told me it could be done by wrapping the shard in copper wire and then connecting the other end to a pipe or something else that goes down into the earth.”

  “Sure,” the Brain Boss said. “That’s how you ground anything. But it never occurred to me that it would work on this sort of energy!”

  I shrugged. “He told me he’d done the math and that it all checked out.”

  Burt asked, “But did he ever actually try it?”

  “He couldn’t,” I replied. “His shard was shattered.”

  “Right,” Steve said. He looked from me to the Anchor Shard and back again. “It might work, I guess. I’ve got plenty of copper wire. I can wrap the crystal the way Will suggests and then put up the shields and run some current through it. Not a lot. Just enough to make sure it’s grounding.”

  Tom nodded. “Do it.” He turned to me. “What else did the professor dude tell you that might help us?”

  I considered.

  “Well,” I said. “He told me that the space between worlds is solid.” Again, they all looked at me. It made me squirm a little. “I mean … you know how outer space, the space between stars and planets, is empty?”

  “It’s not,” corrected Steve. “There are cosmic rays, trace gases like hydrogen and helium, minute—”

  “Yeah,” Burt remarked, cutting his brother off. “We know.”

  I said, “Well, the space between dimensions is full of this solid stuff that Professor Moscova called Ether.”

  “That’s the word I use, too,” the professor’s younger self replied. “But only because it’s what the ancient Greeks called the ‘ocean’ through which they believed the planets ‘floated.’ I never thought it could be … real.”

  “It’s real,” I told him. “And the stuff is harder than anything we have on Earth. In fact, it’s what our pocketknives and Sharyn’s sword blade are made of. Professor Moscova found a way to mine a little of the stuff and work it like metal. The Malum call it nagganum.”

  Tom smiled. “So he’s the one my sis and I have to thank for our gifts!”

  I nodded. “Steve made them and Amy delivered them to my dad in a dream. Then Dad gave them to you and Sharyn for your birthday. Later, on my first visit to Future CHOP, she gave me mine.”

  “But what for?” Burt asked. “I mean, they’re cool and all. But why two pocketknives and a sword? Why not a whole arsenal?”

  I replied, “Phase One and Two of their plan was about making sure history went along the way it was supposed to. Future Will and Future Sharyn remembered two pocketknives and a sword, and so we got two pocketknives and a sword. Get it?”

  “Makes my head hurt,” the younger Moscova brother complained.

  “I hear ya,” I told him.

  Steve asked. “So … if the Ether is that dense and impregnable, then how did my future self manage to mine and work it to create such amazing devices?”

  “He used slivers from the shattered Anchor Shard. Shard energy … energy that comes from the Eternity Stone … is one of the only things that can cut through Ether. And it looks like it cuts through it like a hot knife through butter.”

  “So … what do they do?” Burt asked. “The Malum, I mean. Do they open a Rift on their end and then use Anchor Shards to punch holes into other worlds, like Earth?”

  I nodded. “Except they don’t have to open a Rift into the Ether. They’re already in the Ether.”

  Again, they all looked at me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That part threw me for a while, too. But, according to Future Steve, the Malum actually live in the Ether. They always have. They’re ‘native’ to it … that was the way he put it.”

  “How?” Steve asked. “If the Ether is solid … then how do they live there?”

  “They tunnel,” I told him. “For thousands of years before finding the Eternity Stone, the Malum lived in dens or warrens that they dug through the stuff between dimensions. And, crammed in together like that, they formed clans that fought each other over space and food.”

  “What do they eat?” Tom asked. “What is there to eat, where they’re at?”

  “Selves,” I replied. “They eat Selves. Each other’s Selves.”

  “Ugh,” Burt said, turning a little green. “Cannibals. I wish I could say I was surprised.”

  I said, “But then, according to Professor Moscova, they stumbled across the Eternity Stone. At first, they didn’t know what it was. Really, they still don’t know. But, eventually, they found out what it could do. They started sacrificing Selves to it, thousands of them, noticing that the crystal got stronger the more lives it … consumed. Then, finally, a long time ago, it started spewing out energy. And the energy opened up a huge Void in the Ether, giving the Malum more space than they’d ever had before, even thought they could have. It basically made their modern world.”

  “How’d he figure all this out?” Steve asked. “My older self.”

  So I told them about Enigma.

  They listened as I’d listened, first with disbelief, then distrust, and finally a kind of wary acceptance.

  “What else did this Fifth Column dude tell the prof?” Tom asked. “Where’s the Eternity Stone now?”

  “It guards the Malum homeworld,” I replied. “It sits right at the border of that huge open Void where they all live. And it’s big. Bigger than most buildings. But it still floats. According to Enigma, the crystal hovers above the ground. The Malum keep feeding it, maintaining it. It’s anc
ient, powerful, and very, very strong. But, with Enigma’s help, Professor Moscova was able to figure out the … structure … of the thing, and work out a way to destroy it.”

  “Almost sounds like magic,” Burt remarked.

  “‘Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic,’” Steve quoted.

  “Albert Einstein?” Tom asked.

  The Brain Boss shook his head. “Arthur C. Clarke. Even so, what this … Professor Moscova … managed to accomplish is amazing!”

  Burt laughed. “Finally! Somebody who’s smarter than my brother. Too bad it turns out to be him!”

  Steve, as usual, ignored the jibe. “So, if Ether is the solid matter between dimensions, then it must occupy space. There must be actual distance to travel from one dimension to another, just as there’s distance to travel between planets.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, dredging my memory for more details of Professor Moscova’s lecture. “Your future self said to think of Ether as a mountain, with Earth as a ‘village’ on one side and the Malum homeworld as a ‘village’ on the other. Eternity Stone energy digs a tunnel between the villages.”

  “But how long a tunnel?” Tom asked. “And can you walk it? Or do you gotta … fly or something?”

  “The professor never made the actual trip,” I said. “He couldn’t. He didn’t have a full and working Anchor Shard. The best he could do was open tiny Rifts with a Rift Projector powered by a big sliver. But that was enough to let him study the way the tunnel works. And he told me about it. I mean, all about it. A big time lecture. It was like being back in school!”

  “Sounds like my bro,” Burt said with a grin.

  “Shut it,” Steve told him, almost off-handedly. Then to me: “So? What did I … he … I … whatever … find out?”

  “That any tunnel created by shard energy is called a Void and that it always runs straight from the Anchor Shard to the Eternity Stone, almost as if the Eternity Stone is calling the smaller piece of it home.”

  “More magic,” Tom remarked.

  “More science,” Steve corrected. “Maybe some sort of natural magnetism.”

  I shrugged. “He said the … perceived reality, whatever that means … of the tunnel wasn’t all that long. Maybe no more than half a mile, at least the way we measure stuff like that. But you couldn’t walk it easily because the tunnel’s walls and floor were all ‘scooped out.’ I didn’t quite get that part.”

  “Scooped out?” Burt echoed.

  Again, I shrugged.

  “We’ll find out what it means later,” Tom said. “Go on, Will.”

  “But he didn’t think we’d have to walk it because he detected a … what’d he call it? … regular power fluctuation. A kind of something that moved back and forth along the tunnel, from the Anchor Shard side to the Eternity Stone side. It wasn’t fast, but it seemed to be solid. He even gave it a name: Energy Ferry.”

  “A natural means of transport between dimensions,” Steve said, as if such a thing made perfect sense to him. “Something to allow matter and energy to cross from one dimension to the other.”

  “That’s nuts!” his brother complained.

  “So’s an army of walking, talking cadavers,” Tom pointed out. “But that happened. Thing I don’t get is this: If solid stuff … like us … can move between the worlds, then why’d the Corpses have to come the way they did, as body-stealing Selves. Why not just bring their real Malum bodies?”

  I replied, “The professor wasn’t sure. But he was sure that we could go safely through the Rift and into the tunnel. He’d done the tests and he knew there was air to breathe. In fact, the way he figured it, every tunnel takes on the atmosphere and temperature of whatever digs it.”

  “That part actually makes some sense,” said Steve. “Remember the first time we tried running an electrical charge through the Anchor Shard?” His face fell momentarily. “The day Ian died. I fell through a hole in the floor that the crystal made when it fell off its stool. That hole was our first Rift. I remember my feet dangling through it. I remember air brushing past my legs. I remember that it wasn’t hot or cold, but seemed to be the same temperature as the rest of the Brain Factory. I even remember it having gravity, since my feet felt like they were being pulled in a particular direction. Whatever this tunnel is, it has a ‘down,’ just like Earth does.”

  “My head hurts again,” his brother groaned.

  “But as for how it works,” Steve went on. “I don’t have a clue. And, even if … somehow … there’s air and gravity in the tunnel, what about the environment on the Malum homeworld?”

  “Your future self wasn’t sure about that either,” I replied. “He said that, as far as he could tell, their end of the Void was a lot different than ours. But he thought the same rules would apply there as in the tunnel.”

  “‘He …thought,’” Burt echoed. “So we might get there and suffocate?”

  Steve went quiet.

  We all did.

  Finally, Tom said, “Sounds to me like we gotta just do it and see what’s what.”

  The Brain Boss nodded. “Except we can’t do it here, in Haven. We need at least fifty feet to open a Rift big enough to let people through. Not even the Factory’s got room for that.”

  “Straight up,” the chief agreed. “But I got an idea. Y’all might even like it.”

  “Like it?” I asked.

  He nodded, a sly grin on his face. “Yeah. It’ll be like goin’ home!”

  Chapter 31

  Past and Future

  Tom and I met with Ramirez in the Infirmary, where Amy was busily collecting the medical supplies that we’d bring to wherever it was the chief had decided to open the Rift.

  The FBI Guy was on his cell phone when we came in, apparently arguing with somebody. Finally, he ended the call and rubbed at the back of his neck, looking as if he’d just tasted something sour. “That was the on-site SAIC,” he said.

  “SAIC?” I asked.

  “Special Agent in Charge. She’s the one the Bureau picked to head the investigation into all the sudden ‘deaths’ around the city.”

  The deaths he referred to were actually the abandoned bodies of Corpses—thousands of them—that all just suddenly collapsed when the monsters inhabiting them were destroyed. To the grown-up world, those without the Sight, these “living and breathing people” had just all dropped dead at once. More than that: They’d all dropped dead and decomposed at once, turning into week or even month-old cadavers.

  To say the event had freaked everyone out was the understatement of the year.

  I had to keep reminding myself that, so far, the world didn’t know anything about what the Future Undertakers called the First Corpse War. They didn’t know it had happened, or that it had been won. All they knew was that they suddenly had tons of inexplicable, “instant” dead bodies on their hands, with the biggest number of them being right here—piled up outside all three of Haven’s main entrances.

  Eventually, the truth would come out. But, for now, the whole thing was a scary mystery. And most adults had only one way of dealing with a scary mystery. They’d surround it, analyze it, and try to squeeze it into their narrow, grown-up view of the world.

  “What’s the deal?” Tom asked the man. “What do the authorities think happened?”

  Ramirez replied, “The working theory right now is that some kind of biological contagion was, or maybe is at work. Some terrorist thing that turns people into rotting dead bodies in a single second.”

  “They’re gropin’ for a ‘rational explanation,’” Tom said. “And I can’t blame ‘em. They ain’t got Eyes.”

  “True enough. Right now they’ve managed to determine that the epicenter … the source of the ‘event’ … was down at Fort Mifflin.”

  And this was completely right. That was where the Burgermeister had pulled the plug on the Anchor Shard. Apparently, the effects of the Rift closing spread out from there, u
ntil every single Corpse on Earth was destroyed.

  The FBI Guy went on. “Thing is, the largest concentration of the ‘infected dead,’ as the SAIC calls them, is right here … in and around City Hall. The remains of Cavanaugh’s attack.”

  “Why ain’t the SAIC sent her people in here yet?” Tom asked.

  Ramirez replied, “I’ve managed to convince her to delay sending agents down into the sub-basement to investigate. For obvious reasons, I don’t call it ‘Haven.’ I told her it’s a confined space and that the ‘contagion’ might still be active. So she’s agreed to hold off until a Hazardous Materials team can be brought in from the Center for Disease Control down in Atlanta. I sold the idea to her by pointing out that there’s no real hurry, since there’s no reason to think there are any survivors down here. Just dead bodies. They don’t even know I’m on site. As far as the outside world is concerned, this place is empty of life.”

  “Smart,” Tom told him.

  “One thing working with the Undertakers teaches you is how to think on your feet,” Ramirez replied. “City Hall above us, and everything for two blocks around, has been declared a quarantine zone. It’s already being evacuated and, within the hour, barriers will have been set up to prevent anyone and anything from entering or exiting the area. But there are still a few holes in the net. I mean, I could get the rest of you out of here, if we do it quickly. But pretty soon, those holes will close. I’m just glad we were able to evacuate most of the Undertakers a couple of hours ago, before the Bureau arrived in force.”

  True enough. The first thing Tom and Sharyn had done after our Infirmary meeting was get ninety percent of the Undertakers out of their beds and into a bunch of buses that Ramirez had chartered. Then they were all carted to a series of hotels and put up for the night on the Undertakers’ dime.