by Ty Drago
“Parking lot fires,” Cavanaugh echoed. “The Undertakers know where you are now, Steiger. There’s no other explanation. I’ve been able to keep the authorities away, but I guarantee your building is already being watched by those miserable whelps. So, yes, make sure Ritter’s dead. But in the meantime ... show it to me.”
The deader mad scientist nodded, reached one dead arm across to the lab table and picked up the same stand that I'd just been looking at. Putting this down on the desk in front of him, he took the whatever-it-was from the stand and held it up for the Queen to see. By the laptop light, I saw it too.
It was a corked test tube.
“Lot Forty-Two, Mistress,” he announced proudly. “Positive results.”
For the first time, Cavanaugh looked pleased. “And you're sure it works?”
“It was tested yesterday morning on one-third of the subject pool and was found to be one hundred percent successful. I will be administering it to the second third tomorrow morning in an effort to identify minimum effective dose. The final group is scheduled for the morning after that. If all goes as I hope, we'll be able to conclude this experiment within the week.”
“A cure for their Sight, Steiger,” Cavanaugh mused. “Despite tonight's ... problems, I compliment you.”
“Thank you, Mistress. It's been an honor.”
“Steiger?”
“Yes, Mistress?”
“How many times have I told you to address me as Ms. Cavanaugh?”
Steiger shifted uncomfortably. It's really weird to watch an animated cadaver shift uncomfortably. “Mistress ... er ... Ms. Cavanaugh, I apologize.”
“I appreciate your skills and accomplishments, but if I hear you do it again, I'll feed you to your mutant pets. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Ms. Cavanaugh.”
“Good. Now, how much of this marvelous concoction do you have left?”
The scientist seemed to relax. “This is all that remains after yesterday's dosing. But never fear, the formula resides safe in my head. As soon as the power comes back on and the parking lot fires are extinguished, I intend to set my staff to the task of making more.”
“Very well. And what happens once you're convinced of success and the experiment concludes?”
“We will eliminate both the active and the control subjects in the disposal tank. Then we'll begin mass production of Lot Forty Two. Distribution should be a simple matter. All we need do is add it to the city's water supply.”
And just like that, I thought. The Undertakers lose. Without our Eyes, we won't stand a chance.
“Steiger,” the Queen of the Dead said. “You have done well.”
I stood up and pulled out Dave's Ritter.
On the laptop, Cavanaugh's dead eyes went suddenly wide. “You fool!” she shrieked. “Behind you!”
Steiger jumped to his feet and spun around.
I drove the business end of the syringe deep into his chest and, with my thumb, slammed the plunger home.
He shoved me reflexively, with enough force to knock me off my feet. I hit the floor hard. For a second, he stared down at the now empty syringe protruding from his chest. Then his eyes met mine. He actually looked — I don't know — offended?
“Really, Mr. Ritter,” he said. “How crude a weapon. As a scientist, I can only —”
Then he exploded.
Gore went everywhere. Steiger's body had been fresh, no more than a week dead, and hadn't been embalmed, so the mess he made was truly epic. Blood and other stuff I won't go into hit the walls and ceiling and slathered the laptop, obscuring Lilith Cavanaugh's scowling face.
I'd instinctively covered my own face with my arm. Even so, I had to wipe away deader juice as I sat up and looked at the spot where the deader mad scientist had been a moment before.
In his place stood his true self, a man-size lump of red energy that seemed to literarily radiate evil.
Then, even more quickly than I'd expected, the energy vanished.
“That was for Michael and Robert,” I said.
“You're going to pay for that William Ritter!” exclaimed a voice.
I glanced over at the laptop. The Queen's rotting face was still visible through a thin coat of truly gross fluid. She didn't look happy.
“My minions will hunt you'd down and flay the skin from —”
Normally, I might have come up with some snarky comment to toss at her. But it had been a long, bad night, and I just didn't have it in me.
“Whatever,” I said.
Then I shut the laptop.
I picked up the vial from where it had landed on the floor when I'd stuck Steiger. For just a moment, I looked at the thick purple liquid inside. The cure to the Sight, and the only one in existence. The smart thing would probably be to smash it right now. But something told me Steve, Haven's science guy, would want to see it.
So, instead, I pocketed the scary stuff. And that's what it was: scary stuff.
It was almost enough to make you believe in fate! I mean, Steiger could have won the war right here, tonight, if Helene, Dave and I hadn’t run into Michael and Robert — literally — on the streets of Philly. If we'd walked a little slower coming back from the funeral parlor, we'd have missed them. Or if we'd walked a little faster they'd have missed us. Heck, we could have all walked at just the right speed, but decided to take slightly different routes!
So many little things could have happened to keep us away from that particular alley at that particular moment. Freaky.
But you can go crazy thinking like that.
Somewhere beyond the wall, a horn blared twice.
Dave.
I headed out the door at a run.
As I charged back into the big garage, having retraced my steps down the long dark hallway, my eyes immediately went to the kids in the pen. It looked like they’d all stayed put — a minor miracle. In fact, they didn’t seem to be moving at all, their collective attention fixed on what was happening at the front of the garage.
So I looked, too.
Holy crap!
The school bus roared through the open doors, flattening half-a-dozen deaders and tossing another half-dozen around like bowling pins. But, cool as that was, it wasn’t what had earned my “holy crap”, and it wasn’t what had the kids so awestruck.
The front of the bus was on fire.
Flames engulfed its grill and headlights, rising up on either side of the windshield and blowing back along the sides and roof in quick orange spears. Orange on yellow. From where I stood, I could just see Dave behind the wheel, his broad face a mask of concentration as he slammed the bus through another gaggle of Corpses, squashing most of them flat, while others bounced away, their bodies ablaze.
How on Earth did he pull that off?
Then, as a second figure emerged through a broken side window of the bus, I got my answer.
Helene held a glass bottle in her hands — its neck stopped up not with a cap or cork but with what look like an old rag. As I watched, she lit the rag with a small lighter and then hurtled the bottle at the deaders, who were all retreating from this fiery tank that had shown up out of nowhere and ruined their evening.
The bottle hit the cement floor and exploded. Instantly, a group of them were engulfed in fresh flames.
Corpses on fire are — weird. Even weirder than usual, I mean. They don’t feel pain, and the fire can’t actually kill them, not unless it burns them completely to ash. But they don’t like it. Not one bit. And it tends to make them panic.
Suddenly, the front of the garage turned into a game of deader pinball, with flaming cadavers running every which way, bouncing off each other and spreading the fire. At the same time, Helene lit and threw another fire bottle. This one hit a Corpse in medical scrubs, catching her right in the side of her head, sending her staggering. Then it hit the floor and went the way of the first, throwing more flames in every direction.
The smell of gasoline was strong and, as the bus neared us and squealed to a stop,
the heat radiating off it made my eyes water.
The scissor doors snapped open and Helene stood there, partially obscured by a curtain of orange fire. “Will!” she yelled above the crackle of the flames. “Here!”
She threw something my way that I, wiping the tears from my eyes, hastily caught. The weight of it almost knocked me over.
A fire extinguisher.
I pulled the tab and pointed it at the bus, lathering it in white foam. At first, the flames fought me, rising up again and again, and even snapping at me with long hot whips of heat and color. But metal buses don’t burn well and the gasoline that Helene and the Burgermeister had evidently splashed across its front had been mostly burned up.
Nevertheless, I kept at it, really soaking the big vehicle, clearing a path for Helene, who jumped out and started yelling for the kids in the pen to come on. They obeyed, tentatively at first, but then with more gusto. Dozens of them poured through the slit I’d made, many cutting their hands and faces on the jagged bits of chicken wire, injuries that I didn’t think they even noticed.
Fortunately, they didn’t need to be told what to do after that. For a kid in America, climbing onto a school bus and finding a seat is the most natural thing in the world. But there were so many of them! The whole thing took way longer than I would have liked, especially when a glance at the front of the garage showed me that the deaders had managed to put each other out and were now regrouping.
“Will!” Helene called.
So I dropped the now empty extinguisher and leapt onto the bus.
“Go!” she told the Burgermeister who, throwing me a crooked grin, closed the scissor doors at my back and gunned the engine.
The big vehicle lurched forward, lumbering around into a clumsy turn. Then, while Helene made her way to the back of the bus, throwing orders at everyone to keep their heads down and stay quiet, I balanced myself near the front. The bus was loaded, three kids to a seat. Ninety-six Seers. Plus the three of us — Helene, Dave and me — made ninety-nine. If I added on Michael and Robert, who were with us, if only in sprit, that made it a hundred and one.
A hundred and one Seers.
I thought maybe there was a joke in there somewhere, but I drew a blank.
Facing forward and standing at Dave’s shoulder, I watched as the remaining Corpses formed themselves into a hasty, uneven barricade at the mouth of the garage, trying to block our escape. For a second, I was afraid they might decide to shut the big doors. But then I remembered my last EMP pulse. Doors that big had to be electric, which meant they were as dead as the monsters ahead of us. That, at least, was good news.
The bad news was this: Getting through that wall of deaders would be harder this time, as the bus was overloaded and needed time to come up to speed — time we didn’t have.
One way or another, we had to make it through those huge open doors and onto the Philly streets. Then we might have a chance.
But this garage, big as it might be, was a killing box.
Next time your parents gripe about rush hour traffic, tell them to try driving an old yellow school bus through a roadblock of animated cadavers in the middle of the night.
Seriously, tell them.
I won’t repeat what happened in the next few minutes. Read Part One if you've forgotten the details. Suffice it to say that it got pretty clear pretty fast that we weren’t going to make it. The deaders had all mashed up against one side of the bus, using their collective weight to tip us over.
And there didn’t seem to be anything we could do to stop them.
That’s when I spotted the window, the one Helene had kicked out so that she could throw her fire bottles.
I won’t call what I had in that moment an “idea.” It wasn’t well enough formed for that. It was more like a “notion,” or maybe an “impulse.”
“Hit the brakes!” I yelled to Dave. Then, to the bus as a whole, “Everybody hold onto something!”
Dave hit the brakes just as I wrapped my arm around a thick metal pole that stood near the driver’s seat. Running on two wheels at it was, the bus shook dangerously as it screeched to a halt. But it worked. We stopped so suddenly that the Corpses latched onto us tumbled forward, spilling over each other across the garage floor in tangle of dead arms and legs. With their weight now off the bus, it dropped back onto all its wheels, if only for a few moments.
“Hit it!” I cried.
The Burgermeister hit it.
As he started forward again, I felt one of the wheels roll over at least two Corpses, crushing them flat. But the others managed to find their feet and come after us again as we surged, painfully slowly, toward the open doors and the night beyond them.
I went for the broken window, climbing over a row of screaming kids.
“What are you doing?” Helene called to me.
“Just keep going!” I yelled. “I’ve got something they’re going to want. I’ll get out the back way!”
“Will!” Dave snapped. “No!”
“Do it!” I told him.
“No way!” Helene said, coming forward. I knew she’d tackle me, if necessary, to keep me on this bus.
I locked my eyes on hers. “Trust me,” I said, throwing everything I had behind those words.
She stopped in the aisle, her face twisted with terror. But she nodded.
And I threw myself out the broken window.
Going head first through a window is never a good idea. The floor of the garage came up at me fast, but I managed to take the impact on my shoulders and kind of roll into it, so that I didn’t break my neck. Nevertheless, pain shot up my back, momentarily stunning me. The bus was like a rumbling furnace. It smelled of gasoline and burnt rubber as it rolled by and I struggled to regain my senses — and my feet.
My head swam a little, but I didn’t have time for that, so I told it to stop. And it obeyed.
Sort of.
I headed toward the rear of the garage, toward the now empty pen. When I’d gone maybe a dozen steps, I turned back in time to see the bus nearing the open doors. But, just as it got close, the Corpses hurtled themselves on it again. Their bodies crushed against the metal and glass flank of the big, lumbering vehicle, lifting it off its wheels a second time.
“Hey!” I called to them.
They ignored me.
“Hey!” I yelled again. “Look what I’ve got!”
I held up the vial of purple liquid.
Lot Forty-Two. The cure to the Sight. The only bit of it that still existed, and ever could exist now that Steiger was zombie paste.
A few of them looked my way. Then a few more. Within moments, almost all of them were staring at me and at what I carried.
“Steiger's destroyed,” I said, mustering up what I hoped was a cocky grin. “I wasted him a few minutes ago, right after I took this off him. Now, you wouldn’t want me to drop it or anything ... would you?”
Apparently, they wouldn’t.
As if of one mind, the Corpses abandoned the bus and came after me. All of them. I gave myself just enough time to see the school bus waddle through the open doors and out into the parking lot.
Then I turned and ran.
I skirted past the pen, through the first door, and into the little room behind the garage. Then I slammed the door shut, pulled off my jacket, and stuffed one of its sleeves behind the thick horizontal bar and the door itself. If the bar couldn’t move, the door couldn’t open. That’s how you lock a fire door.
An instant later, dozens of deaders slammed into the door’s opposite side, rattling its frame. But this wasn’t a thin, hollow wooden quarter panel. This was a heavy steel fire door. It would hold — at least for a while.
My plan, such as it was, involved getting to the Super Maggot pit. The lights were still out, which meant the worms were still sleeping. I hoped. The Burgermeister would have left the ladder on the opposite side. Again — I hoped.
That meant all I'd have to do was to jump in and wade over to it.
The very notion
of swimming through that mass of bodies, even sleeping, skeeved me down to my toes. But what choice did I have? I had fifty or so pissed off deaders at my back and a million or so sleeping Super Maggots at my front.
I’d take the Super Maggots.
Then, as my plans often did, this one went south in a big hurry.
Halfway across the little room, a figure exploded out of the other door, the third door, the one that led to the dark hallway and Steiger’s office. I barely more than glimpsed it as it blindsided me, knocking me right off my feet and slamming me into the far wall. I hit hard but somehow managed to stay conscious, though the wind was knocked out of me.
I slumped to the floor, still clutching the vial, and gazed up at my attacker in bleary agony.
The Corpse was monstrous — and totally different from any I’d ever seen before.
Ever see one of those Visible Man science models? You know, the ones that show all of the guy’s organs and you can take them out and put them back in?
Now imagine that, only six feet tall and flesh and blood.
This dead dude looked like he’d climbed off an autopsy table. His torso had been opened up in a big “Y” cut, the flaps peeled back like banana skins and stapled to the chest. I could see his lungs — gray and motionless, his heart — gray and unbeating, as well as his stomach, intestines and other lumps of tissue that were probably his liver, pancreas, etc.
But his head was the worst! One eye was gone, leaving behind just the empty socket, and the top of his skull had been cut away, so that I could see his brain.
“Mr. Ritter,” he growled.
I tried to reply, but I still hadn’t caught my wind. Instead, as he reached for me, I scrambled between his legs and rolled across the room. Getting to my feet was tough — my ankle felt badly twisted — but I managed it, pulling out my pocket knife. This I brandished in one hand, while clutching the vial of Lot Forty-Two in the other.
Dead Autopsy Reject turned slowly to face me. I didn’t have to look at his Mask to know who it was.
Steiger.
I thought his essence — that man-sized something that had been left behind after I’d Ritter-ed him — had disappeared a little too quickly. He must have had this poor jerk’s body lying nearby, behind one of the other hallways doors maybe, and had jumped into it after I popped his old one.