by Ty Drago
She grinned and nodded. Then, without sparing even a look at Jillian—the two of them had never gotten along all that great—she, too, hurried off. Sharyn was the Boss of the Angels crew, the same crew that Will, Helene and Dave belonged to. She’d find Will and Julie and bring them both safely back to Haven. What’s more, she’d do it smart and detached, without the desperate urgency that the elder Boettcher girl would have brought to the mission.
“Why’d you lie to Helene?” Jillian asked him, once the two of them were alone.
“I didn’t.” Tom replied. “I never said I wasn’t sending a rescue team.”
“So you are worried about Will.”
“I’m always worried about Will.”
The satellite phone on his belt chirped.
Tom unclipped and opened it. These were new—gadgets donated courtesy of F.B.I. Special Agent Hugo Ramirez, the Undertakers’ “inside man” in the U.S. Government. Ramirez was one of the few adults who knew that Corpses even existed, much less about the hidden war they waged against humanity. Convincing the F.B.I agent had been difficult, and painful in more ways than one. But Tom secretly considered it one of his best moves as chief.
“Yeah,” he said into the phone.
“Got time to come down to the Factory?” Steve Moscova asked.
The Brain Factory was Haven’s scientific chop shop. Steve, the Brain Boss, ran the crew responsible for the majority of Undertakers’ combat and tactical arsenal—fancy encrypted satellite phones notwithstanding. Lately, however, most of Steve’s attention had been focused on a single project. And when Steve Moscova focused, he focused like a laser beam. This was the first time Tom had heard from him in more than a month, having relied on Steve’s younger brother Burt to keep the chief updated on the Brain Boss’ progress—and state of health.
It worried Tom. Obsession, even for a good cause, was still obsession.
“On my way,” he replied. Then he shut the phone and said to Jillian, “Steve’s poking his head out of his shell.”
“Want company?” Jill asked.
“Sure.” Tom took three calculated steps along the corridor. Then he stopped, squared his shoulders, and turned back. “Actually … how ‘bout you go make sure Helene’s cool, instead.”
“You’re afraid she might leave Haven without permission?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time. But it ain’t just that. She’s scared. Scared for Will. Scared for Julie. Scared for her parents, who just lost their second daughter. I know you two’ve gotten tight. Go to her.”
She studied him with those amazing eyes. “What’s going on?”
He faked just the right amount of ignorance—he hoped. “‘Bout what?”
“I dunno. I guess …” She shrugged. Her gaze remained rock steady. “You’ve been weird toward me.”
“I have?”
Jillian frowned. “Feels like it.”
“I’m tired, Jill.” His shoulders slumped. “Something’s coming. I ain’t sure what it is yet, but my gut tells me it’s big. A game-changer. I guess it’s got me … distracted.”
She seemed to consider this. “So … I haven’t done anything wrong?”
“You? Course not.”
The girl nodded, apparently satisfied. “Okay, Chief. I’ll go babysit Will’s significant other.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. Just make sure Steve doesn’t blow the place up.”
She went the same way the other two girls had, disappearing around the corner. Tom stood where he was for a few moments, looking after her, his thoughts churning.
The walk to the Brain Factory was a short one. But, as usual, he got stopped along the way.
Somebody always needed something.
“Hold up, Chief!” Alex Bobson called to him.
Tom faced the boy. Alex was the Monkey Boss, head of the Undertakers crew that built and maintained machinery and equipment. Alex’s people kept the lights on, the water running, and the heat going. But lately, that wasn’t all they’d been up to.
“Yeah, Alex?” Tom tried not to sound as weary as he felt. Alex was good at his job. No, check that, great at his job. But he could be—abrasive.
“I wanna talk about those new security improvements you asked for,” the Monkey Boss said, barked really.
Dude, I’m kinda surprised it took you this long.
“What about ‘em?”
“Sixty feet of piping at the northern entrance, camouflaged openings at the southern entrance, piped-in music and … I don’t know what they are … cages? In the ceiling of the western entrance. It’s been a lot of work, and we still don’t got any real idea why we’re doin’ it!”
Tom said, “Beefing up security, like I told you.”
“Chief, those pipes ain’t for water. And what’s with the air cannons?”
“Alex—”
But the boy rolled right over him. “And those cages! What’ve you got in mind? Why won’t you tell me?”
To anyone else, Tom might have been able to say, “I ain’t ready yet. I’ll tell you when I am.” And anyone else might have taken that as enough. But not Alex. Or Will, either, now that he thought about it. Those two had more in common than either one of them would ever admit.
“Okay.” Tom took the boy’s arm and led him into the nearest unoccupied room.
Then he told him.
Alex’s eyes went wide. “Jeez. Are you sure?”
“I’m nothin’ like sure. Which is why I ain’t told nobody. I’m tellin’ you ‘cause your crew’s the one doin’ most of the work. So, you got a right to know.”
“Yeah.” The Monkey Boss sounded stunned. “Okay.”
“Don’t share it, Alex. Not yet. Soon, maybe. But not yet.”
“I won’t. I swear it. Jeez, I hope you’re wrong.”
“So do I, dude,” Tom told him, meaning it. “So … we’re good?”
“We’re good,” Alex replied.
And Tom went on his way.
The Brain Factory was a long narrow room near the center of Haven, one of the few rooms with a door, a big heavy custom-made wooden barrier. This always stood closed—a pretty recent addition to the Rules and Regs that Tom had implemented after something had, as Jillian put it, “blown up.”
Tom opened the door.
The room was, as usual, a hive of activity. Brains, members of Steve’s crew, moved from table to table, doing this or that, taking notes or conferring. All were busy. All were serious. All were focused on their tasks. These were kids, yet none of them ever discussed video games, or the Phillies, or Game of Thrones.
The Undertakers.
Sometimes, and always privately, Tom thought of these children as his children. It was a tendency he’d picked up, as with so many things, from Karl Ritter, the founder of Haven. Every single Undertaker came into this life confused and terrified. Every single one had cried, or screamed, or sunk into a sullen depression at having to give up everything they’d known and loved—all because one day they’d started Seeing things that didn’t want to be Seen.
But then every single one, with very few exceptions, had come around. Every one had found their place—some way that they could aid the war effort. Not all of them were soldiers. Some were scientists or spies, craftsmen or hackers. Some were even cooks or janitors.
But all of them were Undertakers.
I’ll get you home, he silently promised them for the thousandth time. I swear it.
And, as always, he wondered if it was a promise he’d be able to keep.
Today, however, wasn’t a typical day in the Factory. Today, instead of doing their own separate work, the crew’s collective attention seemed focused on the goings-on at the far end of the long room. Tom caught snippets of conversation from kids who hadn’t noticed him yet.
They were buzzing about a “hole,” whatever that meant.
“Steve!” Tom called.
“Chief!” The Brain Boss waved h
im over.
As he approached, Tom noticed that the brightly-painted sawhorses set up around “ground zero” had been pulled back several feet.
“Ground zero” was what some of the kids had started calling the empty spot at the far end of the Factory—the place where one of Steve’s experiments had gone wrong, and where Ian MacDonald, Haven’s former medic, had lost his life. The sawhorses had been placed to mark the limits of the blast radius.
If what had happened that day, now almost two months ago, could really be called a “blast.”
“Whatcha got?” he asked Steve, who stood with Burt, his younger brother.
“I’m about to test a theory,” Steve said. He looked a little giddy. It always worried Tom whenever Steve Moscova looked giddy.
“And I’m about to try to keep him from killing us all,” Burt added.
Tom looked from one to the other. “Okay. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Steve announced, “Brains! Clear the room!”
As his crew complied, grumbling about “missing out on the action,” their boss handed Tom a heavy smock.
“This is lead-lined.” Steve pulled one just like it over his head. “This stuff’s probably safe enough, but there’s nothing wrong with taking precautions. And this,” he said, holding up a strange, full-face visor, “is a welder’s mask. The light can hurt your eyes.”
Once just the three of them remained in the Factory, Steve and Burt donned their own masks. Then the elder brother stepped into the barren circle at the rear of the room, where a heavy metal screen had been set up. Struggling a little with the weight, he moved it aside, revealing a rolling metal table, maybe a foot across.
Mounted atop the table was a car battery. And, beside that, held in place with steel clamps, lay the Anchor Shard.
Captured during a raid on a Corpse stronghold, the shard was a jagged piece of green crystal, maybe seven inches long. It was alien in origin—a rare piece of Malum technology that had some pretty bizarre properties. For one, just touching it to an injury healed that injury, whether it was a broken bone or internal bleeding. For another, running an electrical current through it seemed to do freakish, and deadly, things to organic matter.
Right now the Anchor Shard was glowing, and casting that glow toward the back of the room, a bit like pointing a flashlight.
Just looking at it made Tom’s skin crawl.
“You sure about this?” he asked them both.
Steve nodded. Burt shrugged.
“I’ve done the math,” the Brain Boss insisted. “Everything’s fine. The stand’s grounded and the shard’s clamped down tight. No more accidents.”
He sounded sure. But Tom’s skin kept crawling anyway.
Steve added, “As far as I can tell, it’s completely stable.”
“What’s completely stable?” Tom asked.
“Shard Energy … that’s what I’m calling it … is only dangerous at two different times: when you first run an electrical current through it, and when you disconnect that current. But, once the current is running, it stabilizes.”
Tom looked at Burt who said, “Yeah, I don’t get it, either.”
His older brother groaned. “Think of it like a lamp, only the switch is broken, so just touching the switch can electrocute you. That means turning the lamp on can kill you, and turning it off can kill you. But once it’s either on or off, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
He said this confidently. Yet, to Tom’s ears, it sounded like playing with matches.
“But, once you do turn the lamp on,” Steve continued, grinning. “Something really interesting happens. Watch.”
Steve picked up a rusty old horseshoe that had a length of clothesline tied to it. He handed the other end of the clothesline to Tom. Then he turned and tossed the horseshoe out over the Anchor Shard, toward the Factory’s rear wall.
It vanished.
Tom gasped as the clothesline in his hands went taut.
Startled, he studied the rear wall. He could see where the rope just stopped, as if cut by a laser beam, except that the sliced off end remained somehow suspended in mid-air.
Tom Jefferson took pride in rarely being surprised. This surprised him.
“What am I lookin’ at?” he exclaimed.
“It’s just Steve, wasting another horseshoe.” Burt replied with a sigh.
“In the name of science!” his brother snapped.
Tom, still clutching one end of a clothesline that didn’t have another end, said, “Listen, I dig the whole drama thing. But will one of you please tell me what happened to the horseshoe?”
“Nothing.” The Brain Boss flashed another look at Burt before grinning from ear to ear. “It’s just not on Earth anymore! It’s in the Ether between worlds!”
Tom said, “I don’t even know what that means!”
“Neither does he,” remarked Burt.
Steve’s glare should have melted the other boy’s shoes and, despite the weirdness of the situation, Tom spared a moment to worry over it. Since Ian’s death, the elder Moscova brother had become moody. Will’s mom, Susan Ritter, a registered nurse who had taken over Haven’s Infirmary, suggested that the Brain Boss might be bipolar, an unfamiliar term that Tom had researched on the internet.
What he’d found there had made him really hope his main science dude was not bipolar!
Steve took a deep breath. Then he said to Tom, “Remember when Ian … um … when we first ran an electrical current through the shard? Remember the hole in the floor I almost fell through?”
Tom nodded.
“Well, my legs were in the Ether! I’ll admit it’s not a scientific term. For this, I don’t think there is a scientific term. But it’s definitely a place outside our universe.”
“How can anything be outside the universe?” Tom asked.
Burt threw up his hands. “That’s what I’ve been saying!”
“Hold up,” Tom said. “Are you tellin’ me the horseshoe is still at the other end of this rope?”
“Sure!” said Steve. “You just can’t see it because it’s … elsewhere.”
“The Ether between worlds,” Tom echoed.
“Exactly! When you run electricity through the Anchor Shard, it opens a hole to someplace else, kind of like a tear in the fabric of spacetime. Matter can pass through this hole without damage. Go ahead, pull on the rope.”
Tom hesitated. Then he pulled. It came easily enough, lengths of it appearing from out of the nothing at the back of the room.
Then, suddenly, it stopped.
He tugged. “I think it’s stuck.”
Frowning, Steve helped him. The clothesline wouldn’t budge.
“Looks like we’re out another horseshoe,” Burt remarked.
“Shut up!” Steve snapped. Then, to Tom, sounding annoyed: “It must be … caught on something.”
“Yeah? What kinda something?”
The Brain Boss shrugged. “I’ve tried putting a webcam through there, but the event horizon fries electronics.”
“Event horizon?” Tom asked.
“The limit of the singularity.”
“English, Steve,” Tom said, still pulling on the clothesline. He wasn’t sure why, but not being able to retrieve that piece-of-junk horseshoe really bothered him.
“The limit of the tear,” the Brain Boss explained. “The spot where our world ends and whatever is in there begins. That’s the event horizon. Tom … why don’t you let go of the rope.”
“You sure?”
“It’s just a horseshoe. Besides, I want to see what happens.”
Tom loosened his grip.
The clothesline danced away between his fingers, the end of it darting free and flying the length of the room, before vanishing into Steve’s “tear.”
“Gravity,” the Brain Boss said, marveling. “Whatever’s beyond that horizon … it has gravity.”
“Fantastic,” Burt muttered. “So, who
ever steps through there is going to plummet to his death.”
“Hold up!” Tom snapped. “Whoever does what?”
Steve lifted his chin. It was his way of looking defiant. “We need to find out what’s through that tear, Chief!”
The hell we do!
Out loud, Tom asked, “Why?”
The question seemed to take the Brain Boss by surprise. “Well … because we do! Science demands it!”
His brother groaned, “Oh, Jeez …”
Tom shook his head. “Sorry, Steve. Right now, I ain’t worried about whatever science ‘demands.’ Nobody … get this … nobody is goin’ through that whatever-it-is. I won’t risk an Undertaker’s life to satisfy your curiosity.”
“But, Chief —”
“I mean it! Gimme your word or gimme that crystal. Your call.”
The boy’s face turned all kinds of red. As Tom watched, Steve glared Burt’s way, as if his younger brother had ratted him out. Finally, his thin shoulders fell and he nodded. “You got my word.”
Tom nodded back. “Good.”
He stepped back and studied the rear of the Factory. Now that he knew where to look, he could clearly see the “tear.”
Except it looked more like a hole. A black hole. A round spot of nothing, maybe six feet across, floating in mid-air and faintly shimmering.
His skin crawled.
“Steve … you said you could use this … thing … to help the war effort?”
The Brain Boss looked like he’d bitten into something sour, but he answered, “Yeah.”
“How?”
“I’ll show you.”
Steve went up and replaced the metal screen around the Anchor Shard.
“Now step well back,” he told them, pulling down his visor.
They all stepped well back.
“On three,” the Brain Boss announced, his finger on a small switch mounted to a worktable. “One … two … three!”
Behind the metal screen there was a blinding flash of light. Tom got the crazy, unsettling feeling that, if the screens hadn’t been in place, that light might have swallowed the room.
Then it was gone.
“Okay, we’re good,” Steve announced.
Tentatively, Tom lifted his visor.
“Last time that happened,” he said, “this whole room looked like a twister had trashed it.”