by Ty Drago
“Ladder in place, ma’am!” Chuck Binelli barked, saluting Sharyn. She saluted back, the action stiff and military precise, as if she saluted people all the time.
“Head on up!” the Boss Angel barked.
Chuck went first. Then Helene. Then Katie. Then Me. Then Burt.
Sharyn saluted the crowd, blowing the whistle one last time. The small audience actually applauded.
Then she followed us up.
Sharyn had parked the white van on Corinthian Avenue, a narrow side street that ran along the penitentiary’s eastern wall. The prison entrance was on Fairmount, the southern side, which meant our “ladder bit” had gone down around the corner and out of view from the gate. Hopefully, the Corpses—none of whom were in sight—wouldn’t know we were here despite all the “hup hups” and the whistle-blowing.
Making so much noise in the name of surprise was a risky tactic but a necessary one. We needed to get into that prison, and nobody figured the Deaders would just open up if we knocked.
Sharyn joined us atop the wall. This time, she didn’t blow her whistle. From here, the crowd couldn’t see us; Corinthian Avenue was too narrow.
Which meant the show was over.
Eastern State Penitentiary lay sprawled out below us like a huge, many-legged spider. The design had been pretty unique in its day: a central hub topped with a guard tower, with cell blocks radiating out from it in all directions. The wheelhouse design had been copied by a lot of other prisons around the country.
“Red,” Sharyn commanded. “Check the towers.”
I pulled out my pocketknife and tapped the 7 button, springing the telescope. Peering through it, I scanned the prison’s tall central structure. Then I turned my head and studied the smaller guard towers mounted on the outer wall at each of the four corners.
“Clear,” I reported.
“Not real big on security, are they?” Helene remarked.
“Yeah,” Sharyn admitted. “I’m surprised. After you two hit the gate last night, Tom and I kind of figured they’d have posted at least a few lookouts. Maybe they’re tryin’ to keep a low profile. But don’t trust it. If any of y’all sees a Deader pop up, signal the rest.”
“Then what?” Chuck asked.
“Then I’ll take him out before he can give the alarm.”
“How?” Burt asked.
But Sharyn only grinned and changed the subject. “Listen up. Burt, Chuck, and Katie to hit the north side of the prison. Helene, Will, and me’ll go south. With the guard towers empty, I don’t figure they got too many Deaders in here. But that might change fast if we get spotted. Keep to the rooftops of each cell block and see what you can see through the skylights. Careful, though…some of the blocks were under repair when they closed this place down. Don’t want nobody falling through a weak spot. Everybody dig?”
We all dug.
“Burt, your team gets the ladder. You can use it to bridge over to the nearest cell block. And keep your radios on. If you spot a Corpse, radio the rest of us. And if you spot Ramirez, even better. Let’s do this, Angels.”
With that, we split up. Sharyn went first, balancing her way along the crumbling, three-foot-wide battlement, with Helene and me following close behind. Below, on Corinthian, most of the spectators had moved on. The few that remained looked more bored than suspicious.
Good.
It struck me that I wasn’t scared to be doing what I was doing—well, not really. Here, I was trotting atop a wall with a three-story drop on either side of me, and the only thing running through my mind was tactics. In the four months since I’d stepped outside my family’s house in Manayunk and been hit with the Sight, most of things that used to scare me had lost their power.
When did I get so brave? I wondered.
We neared the southeast corner of the prison. The original stone watchtower had been updated with a more modern brick guardhouse that jutted outward along the wall just enough to keep us from getting around it.
We stopped, crouching low and studying the prison grounds. The courtyard remained empty.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that the gap between us and the roof of the nearest cell block looked at least fifty feet wide!
“So…how do we get over there without killing ourselves?” I asked.
“Like I told you back in Haven,” Sharyn replied, “it’s a surprise!”
Then our dreadlocked leader reached into her backpack and withdrew what looked like a small steel crossbow.
“What’s that?” Helene asked, her eyes lighting up.
Sharyn grinned. “Say hello to Aunt Sally!”
Helene looked blankly at her. I didn’t. I’d seen it before—or something like it. Steve had shown it to me during my early days with the Undertakers—a crossbow that shot grappling hooks. Back then, however, it hadn’t been called “Aunt Sally” or anything else. In fact, it hadn’t worked at all.
“She’s the first of her kind…what you call a ‘prototype,’” Sharyn explained. “Check this out.”
She pointed the crossbow toward the cell block roof—
—and fired.
With a soft twang, a steel bolt shot across the intervening space, digging deep into the hard tar that layered the roof. In its wake ran a thin black cable, barely as big around as my pinky, that Sharyn immediately pulled taut, leaning back on it with all her weight. Perched as she was atop a thirty-foot wall, if the cable snapped or the bolt came loose, she’d have likely gone tumbling down onto Corinthian Avenue.
But it didn’t, and neither did she.
“Sweet,” she muttered. “Dead-on accurate and with the power of a bow twice its size. Steve’s the man! You gotta love that little nerd. But this…” Sharyn twisted a lever on the side of the crossbow, detaching the entire crank assembly, the black cable included. Then she knelt and fastened this rig firmly into the mortar at our feet, turning the crank until the cable was as tight as a guitar string.
Finally, she stood up and pulled another crank assembly out of her backpack, fitting it onto the crossbow, bolt and all. And just that quick, she was ready to fire again.
“This bit was Alex Bobson’s idea,” she continued, referring to the Boss of the Monkeys, Haven’s construction and maintenance crew. “He improved on Steve’s design. That dude may be a jerk, but he delivers. Zip line, anyone?”
Helene chuckled. I felt my stomach knot up. Nobody’d mentioned this part of the plan to me.
“You don’t gotta get all green, little bro,” Sharyn said. “I know it’s your first zip, which is why I kept this part of the plan to myself until now. But trust me. It’s easy!”
She slid her legs over the side of the wall, heedless of the drop. Then she pulled out three more lengths of cable, these about nine inches long and capped on both ends with thick leather loops. She handed one to each of us. “I’ll go first. Do what I do. Just slip your wrists through one end, toss it over the wire, and then do the same with the other end. After that, you just push off…”
And she did.
As we watched, Sharyn dropped away from the wall, and hanging from her leather loops, she rode the tight cable all the way down to the cell block’s roof. There, she landed lightly, freed herself, and waved for us to follow.
“Me next…or you?” Helene asked.
“You ever done this before?”
She shook her head.
“Me neither.” I swallowed.
Helene eyed me. “You gonna be okay?”
“Sure,” I replied, wondering if I meant it.
“I’m willing to go next,” she said. “But not if you’re gonna freeze.”
I felt my face flush. “When did I ever freeze?”
She shrugged. “Okay.” Then, with hardly any hesitation at all, she dropped down as Shar
yn had, looped herself over the cable, and pushed off. She hit the roof seconds later, sticking the landing perfectly.
Helene always made everything look so easy.
I swallowed a second time. My turn.
I sat down, inching forward until my legs dangled over the courtyard. It was a seriously long way down. Taking a deep breath, I put one wrist through one strap and hung my cable over the zip line. Then I put my hand through the other strap.
My eyes found Helene’s. She looked expectantly at me from the rooftop. Beside her, Sharyn flashed her trademark grin.
I felt my stomach tighten further. I ignored it.
Just be brave, I told myself. That had been the motto of an Undertaker named Tara Monroe. A friend.
A dead friend.
Undertakers tended to have a lot of dead friends.
I pushed off.
It wasn’t half as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, if it hadn’t been so cold, I might have enjoyed it. Wind bit at my face as all my weight suddenly hung from my arms. The wire between my fists skittered down the cable—sounding a bit like a big zipper sliding open.
Guess that’s where the name comes from.
I hit the roof more clumsily than the girls, forcing Sharyn to scoop me up before I could stumble and break my nose on the edge of a skylight.
“Not so bad…was it, little bro?” she asked.
As she said this, our radio watches suddenly chirped.
Helene answered. “What’s up, Burt?”
“There’s a Corpse in the central guard tower!” the boy’s voice hissed. “He’s looking our way, but we ducked behind some barrels! I don’t know if he saw us!”
When she heard this, Sharyn turned all business, yanking me to my feet and then spinning around and snatching up her crossbow. “Tell ’em to stay hid,” she told Helene, who conveyed the message.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Been practicing,” Sharyn replied. “Check this out.”
She raised Aunt Sally to eye level, pressed the stock into her shoulder, and sighted the watchtower. Maybe a hundred feet away and twenty feet up, a dark figure stood motionless behind the glass windows, facing away toward the northeast corner of the prison—where Chuck, Burt, and Katie were huddled.
Sharyn’s finger found the trigger.
Twang!
She had been practicing.
Her bolt cut the air in a sweet, true arc. It broke the watchtower window with an audible crash of glass, followed an instant later by a wooden thump.
Through my wrist radio, I heard Katie exclaim, “Got him!”
Then Chuck added, “Man, what a wicked shot!”
Sharyn raised her wrist. “Meet up at the base of the watchtower!” she exclaimed. “I’m going to take ’em out!” Then she said, “Come on!” to us and took off running along the cell block, careful to avoid the skylights that dotted the roof like potholes.
Helene and I followed, struggling to keep up.
At the base of the watchtower, Sharyn seized the cable that dangled from her fired bolt, tested it for a second, and then climbed, walking up the side of the building. “Stay here,” she whispered back. “Don’t know how much weight this thing’ll handle at once.”
So, feeling frustrated, we watched as the Boss Angel scaled the watchtower, scrambled over the catwalk railing, kicked in the rest of the already broken window, and climbed inside. Then, after a long bunch of seconds, she waved for us to come up.
“She makes it look so easy,” Helene sighed.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
I was thinking the same thing about you a minute ago.
“You first this time,” she told me.
It’s pretty hard to climb a cable, even if you do have good gloves and a wall to brace your feet against. The skinny twelve-year-old I’d been even two months ago could never have managed it. But the slightly less skinny thirteen-year-old I was now could and did—with some effort. At last, winded and my arms aching, I let Sharyn help me through the broken window.
Then, as she signaled Helene to follow, I looked around the watchtower.
There wasn’t much to the place. No furniture. Just bare walls, windows on all sides, and a stairway that led down into the prison proper.
Between two of the windows, with her back to us, stood a Corpse. She was a solid Type Four. Pretty well decomposed, she’d had lost most of her bodily fluids. Any bloating was done, leaving her sunken and dried up. Her skin, gray and flaky, hung off long, thin bones, and her hair had little more than dark wisps peeking out from beneath an oversized police-issue cap.
Beetles crawled all over her. The Corpse’s body was literally being eaten away from the inside out.
I never got used to that.
Dead Lady Cop’s arms and legs twitched spastically—and with good reason: Sharyn’s crossbow bolt has caught her at the base of the skull, gone all the way through, and pinned her head to the wooden window frame.
Chuck had been right: a wicked shot.
But then that was Sharyn.
“Hey, Deader!” Sharyn chirped as Helene climbed through the window. “Having a bad day or what?”
The cadaver’s lips moved. Unfortunately, with the steel bolt sticking through its open mouth and into the wood, there wasn’t much it could say in English. So it switched to Deadspeak.
“Others. Coming. For. Me.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet they are,” Sharyn agreed. “But I think we got us a minute or two. So I’m gonna make you a one-time offer. You tell me how many Deaders you got on-site…and I just might let you live.”
The Corpse looked sideways at her. “You. No. Can. Kill. Me.”
Sharyn laughed. Then she held up her syringe. “Know what this is? Any of your buddies happen to get iced last night…maybe in ways you can’t figure?” Her smile vanished, and she leaned close. “So, one last time—you spill and maybe I leave you here to transfer when your Holmes find you. Otherwise, I stick you with this and cap your sorry dead ass.”
I suddenly saw something flash through the Corpse’s milky eyes—a look I’d I never expected: terror. She squirmed frantically against the bolt that pinned her to the wall, but it was no good. She wasn’t going anywhere, and we all knew it.
“Well?” Sharyn pressed. “I need an answer, bag o’ bones.”
“Six.”
“Six more Corpses downstairs?”
Dead Lady Cop nodded as much as the bolt through her face would allow. “Six,” she repeated. But as she said that, there was something in her expression—at least insofar as a dead body pinned through the mouth to the wall can have an expression—that I didn’t like.
She looked cagey. Not like she was lying, but—
“Six,” Helene echoed.
I knew what she was thinking: There was one of us for each of them. Not great odds but better than we’d had last night!
“Cool!” Sharyn said. “Thanks, Deader!”
Then she tossed her Ritter—oh God, that name!—to Helene, who smoothly snatched it out of the air.
The Boss Angel said flatly, “Waste her.”
Helene looked from Sharyn to me and back again. “But you said…”
“I said ‘might.’ Fact is, one less Deader is one less Deader. If we switched places, you can bet she wouldn’t be cuttin’ us no slack. Do it.”
Helene wavered.
Sharyn said, “We got no time. She’s stuck in a useless body, and that means the others have been called. Do it now.”
Helene stepped to the Corpse, who struggled desperately, making low growling sounds in her rotting throat.
I considered saying something—protesting—maybe making some comment about how keeping our word was one of the things that made us better than them. The moral
high ground, I guess you’d call it.
But I didn’t.
Helene found my eyes. I shrugged.
Then she slammed the Ritter into the small of Dead Lady Cop’s back, emptying it with one push of her thumb.
“Everybody down!” Sharyn commanded. We dropped to the dusty floor.
At first, nothing happened.
Then it did.
The Corpse exploded but not like the one in the alley had, spilling guts everywhere. This one’s guts had dried up weeks ago. Instead, it erupted in a cloud of gray dust that filled the watchtower and covered everything, including us.
Helene and I struggled to our knees, coughing and trying not to puke. But Sharyn seemed more or less unfazed, standing up and looking over at where the Corpse had been. The figure of dark energy was there but only for a second. Pop!
“Okay,” the Boss Angel said. “Let’s get into position. I’m callin’ a Number Eleven.”
Chapter 10
Number Eleven
The Angels have moves, and some of these moves have numbers.
A Number Eleven involved covering multiple exits to a building—and then hitting the Corpses inside from different directions at once. Being shaped like a big pinwheel with cell blocks sticking out from a central hub, Eastern State Penitentiary was a solid candidate for this approach.
Better still, because it was a museum these days and not a prison, its layout was easily available on the Internet. So back at the briefing, we’d all studied it. The cell blocks, some one-story and some two-story, had been built at different times during the penitentiary’s long history. Each had a number; the one Helene, Sharyn, and I had zipped to and then run along had been Cell Block One. Katie, Chuck, and Bert had spotted the watchtower Corpse from the roof of Cell Block Three.
Because there were something like fourteen cell blocks off the hub and only six of us, Sharyn modified the Number Eleven. She and I would attack from above while Helene and the rest would go down into the prison yard and pick cell blocks at each compass point. Then, on a signal, we’d hit the hub all at once.
Hopefully, the Corpses would be so busy responding to Dead Lady Cop’s call for help that they’d focus on Sharyn and me, giving the others the element of surprise.