Queen of the Dead (29 page)

Dashiell stared at Tom's closed fist and at the blood that had already begun to ooze from between his fingers. He tugged at the knife handle, but it didn't budge.

Tom's eyes were stone. If he felt any pain, he offered no sign of it. Instead, he slammed his fist into the killer's face with devastating force. I actually heard the crunch as the man's nose broke.

Dashiell released the knife and staggered back, blood pouring over his mouth and jaw. Tom stayed with him, hitting him again, a haymaker that spun the killer around and drove him into the observation deck railing. There he floundered, visibly stunned.

Tom advanced, opening his left fist and letting the switchblade fall to his feet. I could see the deep gash that crossed his palm. Blood dripped steadily down to the deck's metal floor.

Ramirez was already coming forward. “Tom…that's enough. Stand down.”

But the Chief ignored him.

As we watched: me, my mom, the angel, and the FBI guy, Tom grabbed Dashiell's collar and twisted him around until they were face-to-face again.

“You missed your target,” Tom repeated, his voice like ice.

Then he reached one hand down, grabbed Dashiell's leg, and heaved the smaller man right off his feet, holding him aloft as if he weighed no more than a child.

Through his gritted teeth, I heard Tom say, “But you killed my
brother
.”

Then Tom Jefferson, the Chief of the Undertakers, threw the struggling assassin out the open window, over the railing, and into empty air.

Dashiell screamed. He seemed to scream for a long time, until, finally, very abruptly, he stopped.

So…that's how long it takes to fall five hundred feet.

Ramirez arrived at Tom's side a second later. He looked over the railing. Then he looked at the Chief, who met his eyes with challenge and not an ounce of remorse. “You gonna arrest me, agent?”

The FBI guy looked shaken to his core.

That made two of us.

“I don't think I could if I wanted to,” he replied.

But Tom shook his head. “That ain't no answer.”

Ramirez's shook
his
head. “No, I'm not going to arrest you.”

“Why not? I just killed a man.”

“Yes, you did,” the agent told him. “But this is war…and you're a soldier.”

Tom nodded. Then it was as if the fury that had been driving him suddenly bled away. His shoulders slumped, and the cold mask he'd been wearing disappeared.

“Will's dead,” he whispered in so soft a voice that I almost didn't hear it. “And now I gotta tell his mom.”

The world changed again, turned white. I barely noticed. What Tom had said—what he'd
done
—rang in my ears and burned in my memory like fire. A hundred feelings roiled around in my head, wrestling for control. Shock. Horror. Guilt.

And pride. Oh yeah, that was there too.

The Chief of the Undertakers, the best man aside from my father I'd ever known, had just killed someone. And he'd done it for
me.

What an impossible, incredible, terrible thing!

“William?”

We were in the white room again. No walls. No ceiling. Just the angel, her gentle voice and her strangely familiar face.

“William? Are you all right?”

“No,” I said.

She nodded, as if this were the right answer.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“Now you go back.”

“But…I'm dead.”

She smiled, and I was surprised by the warmth and affection I saw in that smile. “No, you're not…though it was a close call.”

“Who are you?” I begged.

“I wish I could tell you,” she said, and from her tone, it was clear that she meant it. “And one day, I will.”

“Well,” I said, feeling suddenly impatient. All this mystery, especially in the wake of my own shooting, my mother's near murder, and the awful spectacle of Tom's revenge, was getting tiresome. “Is there anything you
can
tell me?”

“The rules are the same as last time,” she replied. “You may ask one question.”

“Except ‘Who are you?' Right?”

“I'm sorry.”

I sighed. I was still tired, very tired. But I suddenly noticed that I wasn't in any pain. Hadn't I been shot like ten minutes ago? Shot by a big rifle that used big bullets? It was one thing to have survived that but to not even
feel
it?

I remembered the first time this angel had paid me a visit. I'd just botched a rescue attempt at Fort Mifflin, outside Philly. I'd been body slammed by a Corpse and come away with a concussion and a broken arm. Except I hadn't. Instead, I'd had a dream like this one and woken up completely healed.

If this angel could do that, then what else could she do?

And just like that, I knew my question.

“Can you save Sharyn like you saved me?”

The woman smiled gently. “No, I can't. But you can.”

“What does that mean?”

“At the prison, you picked up something. When you wake up, you'll find it under your pillow. Take it to Sharyn Jefferson. Touch it to her head.”

“And that'll fix her?”

She nodded.

“What is it?”

“I'm sorry, William. No more questions. But you'll learn the answer to that one in time.” Then she leaned closer, her tone more grave. “But William, listen to me. After you were injured, the Queen acted quickly. She had her people arrive on scene almost at once with an ambulance. Then she had you declared ‘dead' while on your way to Jefferson Hospital.”

“So…everybody thinks I'm dead?

For a second, I thought she'd fall back on the one-question rule again. To my surprise, she didn't. “Yes. What you did was witnessed by thousands of people in Love Park and has been replayed on television many times. The official story is that your body was rerouted to the medical examiner's office. But that's a lie.”

“Where am I then?” What can I say? I love pushing my luck.

“Chang's Funeral Parlor. The Queen has given her subjects orders to treat you, to keep you alive. Then, later, once you're stable and conscious, she intends to torture you for information.”

My throat went dry. “Fantastic,” I muttered. “Any chance you might help me out?”

“I've helped you all I can,” she replied. “But I have faith in you. When you awaken, more than twelve hours will have passed since the shooting, and you're going to be in far better condition that the Corpses imagine. You can escape on your own.”

Nice words—except that for the first time, I thought I read real worry in the woman's eyes. It didn't make me feel all warm and fuzzy.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You're welcome,” she replied. “Until next time…”

And then she and the white place we shared faded away, returning to whatever dream world they'd come from.

I opened my eyes.

Chang's Funeral Home. The basement morgue room.

Only this time,
I
was the one stretched out on the metal table. The lights were dim, and the door to the outer room stood closed. I was alone. The only sound was my own ragged breathing mixed with the steady beep of a nearby machine.

I still had my pants and shoes, though my coat and shirt were gone.

I tried to sit up but got myself tangled in a web of tubes. One was sticking into the back of my hand—an IV drip running from a hanging bag of who knew what. Two more went up my nose. But the worst one was the one down my throat. It was
wide
and held in place by several strips of tape.

Gagging a little and fighting a sudden panic, I ripped off the tape (which hurt) and then pulled out the tube (which
really
hurt). Then I sat there, gulping air. Oddly, whatever they were shooting up my nose helped with this; I could already feel my heart steadying. Nevertheless, I also yanked out the nostril tubes before I went to work on the IV. That came out easier than I'd have thought, though it stung something awful when I pulled the needle from my vein.

I winced but didn't dare cry out. Quiet was the name of the game right now. There were bound to be Corpses nearby, maybe monitoring my condition.

There was a bandage around my chest. A big one. It ran from just under my armpits to just above my navel and had been wrapped around me a half dozen times. This wasn't surprising because I'd been shot. Maybe they'd done emergency surgery or something to get out Dashiell's bullet.

I decided to leave it alone—for now.

That left the sensors. These were stuck to my chest in a half dozen places and plugged into a machine that monitored my heart rate with a display of tiny spikes and the
beep
beep
sound I heard earlier. Would I trigger an alarm if I peeled these things off? Would the Corpses figure I'd had a heart attack and come running with one of those paddle things that zaps you back to life?

Not
good.

I looked around for my shirt and coat, but they were nowhere to be seen. That made me panic all over again, afraid my pocketknife would be gone. But then I remembered tossing it to Helene back at the prison. She had it, which meant it was safe.

Thinking of my pocketknife sparked another memory, and I reached under my pillow. It took me a few seconds to find it: a jagged piece of what looked like quartz less than a foot long.

Touching it had a strange effect. I felt suddenly stronger—more focused.

There's some kind of power in this thing!

I would have liked to keep holding it. It felt strangely
good
to have it in my hand. But there were things to do. So I shoved it in my pocket and slid gingerly off the table. There I stood, thinking furiously. I was tethered by the sensor wires to the heart monitor, so I couldn't go far without removing them. And removing them would almost certainly alert the Deaders.

Now
what?

I worked my way around to the IV stand and read the label in the dim light: “B Braun Saline 0.9% Sodium Chloride Injection 1000ml IV.” As I unhooked it from its pole and tugged the tube out of the bottom of it, I could only hope the big words meant what I thought they meant.

Finally, I checked out the beeping machine. It seemed to have a thousand controls, most of which—if they had labels at all—were marked with meaningless initials.

Well, I can't stay here all night!

So I just yanked out the electrical plug.

The moment the machine went dark, I listened for some kind of alarm to sound. None did. I hurried over to the door and took a spot behind it. Then I went to work peeling off the sensors.

I'd just finished when the door pushed open. A voice said in English, “The mistress will tear us limb from limb if we've allowed him to die!”

Two dead men, both wearing funeral director suits—very formal—stepped into the room. A couple of Type Threes but the kind who liked to take care of their host bodies. These were clean and surprisingly well groomed. They still squished inside their shoes when they walked, but they didn't smell half as bad as most of the Threes I'd met, and there wasn't a beetle or maggot on them.

As they stared at the empty bed and the tubes and wires strewn about, I slipped around behind them and darted out the door. The smaller outer room stood empty. I crossed it at a run and climbed the basement stairs two at a time, pushing the heavy door at the top wide open—and running right into a third dead guy.

This Corpse wore a cop uniform, and he scooped me up in his arms like a favorite uncle or something. The stench of him hit me first; I felt my stomach roll over. He was a ripe Type Two, not yet dripping fluids but layered in them, as if he'd slathered his purple skin with
Lotion
du
Putrid.

“
Got. You. Boy
,” he said in Deadspeak, grinning a triumphant, decaying grin.

I suddenly wished I were Dave—strong enough to grab the guy's head and twist it all the way around as he had done to the Queen back in Chang's Funeral Parlor. Sadly, I just didn't have that kind of muscle.

Instead, I squirted the bag of IV juice right into his face.

And yes, the words meant what I'd thought they'd meant.

He went down, taking me with him. With some effort, I squirmed free of his flailing arms, struggled to my feet, slipped in the saltwater, fell, and then struggled to my feet again. Behind me, I could hear wet footsteps on the basement stairs.

Dead Mortician One and Dead Mortician Two were ascending, coming fast.

I took off for the back of the house. The front was probably closer, but it was also uncharted territory, and I couldn't afford to make a wrong turn and find myself cornered. So I dashed past the kitchen, through the mud room—still with its yellow slickers on their pegs—and tore open the funeral parlor's back door.

The winter air hit me like a wall.

Ignoring a biting wind that seemed to blow right through me, I barreled down the stoop stairs and turned into the narrow alley, squeezing my way along to the street. I made it just as Chang's front door opened and Dead Mortician One appeared.

He saw me. I saw him.

Then he started down the steps.

I sprayed him with the rest of the IV bag. It wasn't much. But it was enough. The well-groomed Type Three walked right into a lamppost and seemed to get stuck there, stepping back, walking into it again, stepping back, walking into it again. You get the idea.

It might have been funny if I hadn't been freezing to death.

But because I was, I turned and bolted up the street in the direction of City Hall.

They looked for me.

Not just the funeral director Deaders but others. Over the next few minutes, it seemed like every Corpse in town had shown up for the party. They scoured the streets, shining flashlights in every nook and cranny. They even banged on a few doors, waking the neighbors and telling them God knew what.

But call it skill or luck, I managed to stay one step ahead of them. Maybe I'd just gotten used to being hunted and, like any city rat, knew how to go unseen.

That said, it was a pretty miserable journey.

The cold was like a swarm of wasps, everywhere at once, attacking and stinging me from all directions. The bandage around my chest helped a little but not much—and by the time I squeezed through the fence beside the abandoned printing house, the top half of my body felt like a side of frozen beef. My face had gone numb, and my ears burned as if held over a charcoal grill.

Getting through the unlocked cellar window by myself proved painfully awkward, and I ended up overbalancing and tumbling into the building's basement. I landed hard on my back. For a few minutes, I just lay there, panting and groaning. Then, steeling myself, I rolled over and climbed to my feet on exhausted, trembling legs.

I stumbled down the stairs to the subbasement and from there to the sewer. By the time I reached the maintenance door, what little strength I had left seemed to have drained away. I fell heavily against the cold metal, grasping the knob and trying to work up the energy to turn it.

But then it turned by itself.

Before I could react, the door yanked open so abruptly I nearly tumbled in. But instead, I caught myself and looked up into the broad, expressive face of Dave Burger.

“I
knew
it!” he shouted, pumping the air with one huge fist.

Then he hugged me.

Usually, I hated this. Usually, I squirmed like an eel to escape his hugs as quickly as I could. But this time, I didn't. I wish I could say it was friendship that kept me in his arms. I wish I could say it was relief to be back in Haven.

But if you want the truth, it was the body heat.

When he finally let go and looked at me, his smile flipped over. “You look like crap!”

I smiled thinly. “Nice to see you too.”

“I
told
them you weren't dead! No way is Will Ritter dead, I said. I don't care what thousands of people saw on television! There was just no way! Helene kept calling it denial.”

“Burgermeister—”

“I think she's mad at me,” he rambled on. “I think she's ticked off at me for not accepting. But I couldn't. I just couldn't! That's why I'm here instead of going to their stupid memorial.”

“Dave!” I snapped.

He jumped a little, as if my outburst had startled him. “What?”

“Emily and my mom…where are they?”

“Here, of course! Helene and I brought your sister in, and Tom and Ramirez showed up with your mom a few minutes later. Hey, dude, I've been meaning to ask you: where'd you get that red hair? I mean, your mom's blond, and your sister—”

“Do you know where they are now?”

“Who?”

I sighed. “My mom and my sister.”

“They're at the memorial! Where else would they be?”

“And where's that?”

“In the rec room.” Then his grin returned, wider than ever. “Come on! I'll take you!”

As we ran, I was surprised at how empty the corridors seemed. Dave explained to me that every Undertaker—all of them—had come to my memorial, even the Schoolers who were out on assignment. Nobody had been saying much since it all went down, and between Sharyn, who still hovered on the edge of death, and me taking that bullet—well, Haven just hadn't felt much like a haven lately.

“Who told you all I was dead?”

For a moment, the Burgermeister looked taken aback. “Who told us? It's all over the news, dude! They don't know your name, of course. You're just this mysterious kid who took a bullet for the governor's wife. They're calling you a hero!”

“Great,” I muttered.

Dave didn't seem to have heard me. “Then Tom and Ramirez came back. Tom saw you get shot. The look on his face. The look on your
mom's
face. Nobody had any doubt that you were gone…except me, that is!” Then he stopped in his tracks and looked me over, really looked me over, for the first time. “Um…didn't you get shot?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It's…complicated.”

He sighed heavily. “With you, it always is.”

We went back to running, my head flooding with images of my mom. I hadn't seen her in more than four months, unless you counted that whole top of City Hall Tower thing, which had already begun taking on the fuzzy, unreal quality of a dream.

On the other hand, hugging Emily back at Eastern State had been like taking that first drink after crossing a desert. Not that I've ever crossed a desert, but you get the idea. What would it feel like to have my mother's arms around me after all this time, especially because both of us had just come so close to dying?

It sounds sappy, but I couldn't wait to find out.

But then I remembered Sharyn and realized that I
had
to wait—if only for a little while.

I mean, what if she
died
while my mom was hugging me.

“Hold up,” I said, screeching to a halt in one of the empty corridors.

Dave overshot me by about ten feet, his size thirteen shoes kicking up dust as they hammered to a stop. “What?” he demanded.

“How's Sharyn doing?”

At the mention of her name, Dave's enthusiasm melted like fried ice. “The same,” he replied unhappily. Then he seemed to rouse himself. He gestured down the hallway in the direction of the rec room. “Dude…your mom! She thinks you're
dead
!”

“I know. Believe me, I know. But we gotta stop at the infirmary first.”

“What for?” His smile faded a little. “You hurt?”

Well, yeah, I was. In fact, I was hurting all over. But right now, that wasn't even a blip on my radar screen. “I'm fine. There's just something I have to do.”

The infirmary was empty accept for Ian, who had apparently skipped my memorial to watch over Sharyn. At the sight of me, he visibly paled, and I saw him grab at the brick wall to steady himself.

I went over to the gurney and looked down at Sharyn's comatose form.

Slowly, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the quartz—and felt instantly better.

All pain seemed to melt away, taking all exhaustion with it. My face and ears no longer felt numb.

What
is
this
thing?

“Will?” Ian asked. The medic looked at me as if I were a ghost. “How?”

“Wish I knew,” I said. “But…for what it's worth…I'm back from the dead bearing gifts!”

Then, as he and Dave watched, I touched the quartz gently to Sharyn's forehead.

“What's that?” both boys asked at once.

“No idea,” I replied.

“Where'd you get it?” Dave asked.

“An angel gave it to me.”

They both gawked.

Finally, Ian replied, “Cool.”

I kept the quartz in full contact with Sharyn's skin. She didn't move. “Come on,” I heard myself say. “Come on, Sharyn. We need you!”

Dave said, “Maybe it needs batteries. I could—”

“Hey!” a voice demanded. “What the heck happened to my hair?”

Sharyn sat up, pushing me and the strange quartz aside. She rubbed one hand over her bald head. Her fingers found the tube that Alex had inserted in her skull, and before any of us could protest, she pulled it out and tossed it casually across the room.

“Ow,” she muttered.

Then, as she touched the small round hole in her head, I watched it close. Completely close. No scar.

“That's…impossible,” Ian whispered.

“Hey, little bro!” the Boss Angel said to me, smiling. “You been keeping out of trouble?”

I tried to reply, but no words came. That had been happening to me a lot lately.

Dave cleared his throat.

Sharyn looked at him. He looked back at her.

“Hot Dog?” she whispered, and I was surprised to hear her voice crack a little.

Without a word, Dave came forward and hugged her fiercely.

Ian and I stood rooted to the floor, side by side, watching in astonishment.

A minute later, the four of us hurried down the rec room corridor. Sharyn was moving on her own power, though she still seemed a little bit weak. On the way, I'd given her the SparkNotes version of the events during her “absence.” She'd seemed disoriented at first, then incredulous, and finally
really
annoyed.

“You mean I missed all
that
?” the Boss Angel had exclaimed.

As we neared the rec room entrance, I started hearing a voice. I knew it at once, though it had an unfamiliar quality. Gone was the quiet confidence, the calm leadership that I'd come to rely on. The owner of this voice sounded grief-stricken, world-weary—defeated.

“He didn't always do the smart thing,” Tom intoned. “But he always did the
right
thing. Sometimes, it didn't seem that way at first, but every time, that was how it worked out…every single time. Amy here is with us today because of Will's recklessness and courage, and yesterday, that same recklessness and courage saved the life of another person, the first lady of our state.

“In both situations, Will never hesitated. He never stopped to worry over his own skin. He just acted. That's a virtue that I've ever only seen in two other people. One is my sister, Sharyn.” His voice choked a little. “And the other was Karl Ritter, the founder of the Undertakers…and Will's dad.”

We reached the doorway. Inside, the rec room was packed. Rows of chairs had been set up facing the room's far wall, where an old school picture of me had been blown up, framed, and somehow mounted to the crumbling bricks. The chairs were full, and there were kids lining the walls and crowding every aisle.

Most were sitting in stoic silence. A few were crying. And all had their collective attention fixed entirely on Tom.

The Chief said, “Sitting right here in the front row, we got Susan and Emily Ritter, Will's mom and sister. Both of them are trying…like we all are trying…to deal with the grief and pain. And as much as my heart goes out to his family…and believe me, Undertakers, it does…at the same time, I gotta keep reminding myself that he's really and truly gone.”

Sharyn and I stopped in the threshold, side by side, with Ian and the Burgermeister behind us. We looked at each other. I opened my mouth to say something. I'm not sure what—announce our presence maybe. But Sharyn put a finger to her lips. Then she winked at me.

Yep. She's back.

“I went through the same thing with Karl. One minute, he was there, and the next, he wasn't, and it just didn't seem possible that such a man could be so completely gone. Like his son, he seemed too…alive…to ever die. I once told Will that, even weeks after he'd been killed, I kept expecting Karl to come strollin' back into Haven, wearing a big smile and quotin' Mark Twain…”

I looked at Sharyn.

She nodded sagely.

My
cue.

Then I stepped through the doorway and into the back of the room and said at the top of my voice, “News of my death has been greatly exaggerated.”

Silence didn't fall; it
hammered
down—so suddenly and so completely that I thought I'd gone deaf. Every head—and I mean
every
head—turned my way as if pulled by a common string. At the front of the room, Tom actually staggered back a step, his eyes wide. His tear-streaked face was a mask of utter and absolute shock.

Suddenly, I sort of
got
Sharyn's sense of drama.

Then, into this thundering silence, Dave “the Burgermeister” Burger declared, “Told ya so!”

A figure stepped in front of me. Helene's face was pale, and her eyes were red from crying. She seemed a little shorter than she had been twelve hours go, which was weird but unimportant. The girl stared at me as if I'd just slapped her, and for a horrible moment, I thought she meant to slap
me.

But instead, she threw her arms around my neck.

And for the first time, I let her. If fact, for the whole of that hug, I gave as good as I got.

At the same time, I saw Tom come forward. His face crumpled as he looked first to Sharyn, then to me, then back to Sharyn. His strong arms opened—one hand, I noticed, was bandaged and probably stitched—and closed around his sister, pulling her into a tight, wordless, desperate embrace.

“Whoa, bro!” Sharyn gasped. “Get a grip!”

“How?” I heard him whisper.

“Ask Will,” Ian said. “He did it.”

Helene pulled back and looked me over. I took the crystal out of my pocket and held it up for everyone to see. “A present from Lilith Cavanaugh,” I said. “Something I bet Steve would love to sink his teeth into.”

Tom, Helene, and the others absorbed this. By now, the rest of the Undertakers had abandoned their chairs. They crowded around us, pushing close. FBI special agent Hugo Ramirez stood among them. He was regarding me with an odd expression, shaking his head and smiling thinly.

“His father's son,” I heard him mutter. It was maybe the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me.

I grinned at him, at all of them, though at the same time, I was scanning their ranks, looking for—

“Will?”

A slim figure came forward, pushing kids aside as if they weren't there. As she emerged into the open and stopped in front of me, I noticed that, like Helene, she looked somehow shorter than I remembered. Older too. Her blond hair had a few strands of gray mixed in.