The Undertakers: End of the World (10 page)

“Blueprint?” I asked.

“A series of steps,” Emily elaborated. “The first was to turn City Hall Tower into the new Haven, to brick up all the windows and close off all access from the rest of the building. He said it had the potential to become the most defensible place in Philly, and he was right.”

He usually is,
I thought.

Was.

“By then,” William said, “the city was overrun with Corpses and the building had been deserted for months. So we slipped in quietly, just a handful of us, and went to work, smuggling materials in through the flooded subway tunnels.”

I asked, incredulous, “How did the deaders
not
find you?”

“They weren’t looking for us in particular. They were just hunting … well … everyone. We kept our heads down and worked as quietly as we could, mostly at night. It took less than three weeks to turn City Hall Tower into a castle keep. By the time they wised up to who we were and what we were doing, we’d already hunkered down inside here.”

“That was fourteen months ago,” Emily added. “And the rest of city had already fallen. Millions were dying all around us. It was horrible! For a while, all you heard … twenty-four hours a day … was people screaming. We wanted to go out and help them, go out and fight. But we knew we couldn’t win. There were just too many Corpses.”

Beside her, Professor Moscova nodded. “It
was
terrible,” he agreed. “But sometimes I think it’s worse now. Now all you hear is
nothing
, the silence of an empty world.”

For a minute, the four of us went quiet. And not one of those comfortable, happy kinds of quiet.

More like funeral quiet.

William said, “But that wasn’t all that Tom wrote in his letter. He also laid out a plan. This second war, he knew, was already lost. We hadn’t been prepared and the dead had overrun us too completely. So he proposed a radical idea …”

“Time travel,” I guessed.

He nodded.

“Except it
wasn’t
so radical,” Steve explained. “Tom and I used to talk about the possibility … in hypothetical terms. After all, we both suspected that
you’d
done it.” He nodded to William—and then, with an oddly amused look on his face, to me. “Or, more precisely, it had been done
to
you … though we didn’t understand exactly how or who was behind it. But I’d been playing with this idea of using the Anchor Slivers to power a device that could punch a hole between the present and the past. I’d done the math and I was confident I could make it happen. I’d even worked out how to get a lock on a specific person at a specific point in history … and monitor them remotely through the Rift Projector.”

“Amy once transported me, gurney and all, to the top of City Hall Tower,” I said.

“I recall that,” the professor replied. “The temporal clean rooms at CHOP are equipped with holotechnology. We often use it … or used to use it … to project ‘live’ images captured by the Rift Projector. What you saw that day was a hologram, rather like an instant replay of events that had already happened. Amy wanted to prove to you that your mother was okay.”

I remembered how, at the time, no one on the Observation Deck had been able to see or hear me. It had been like watching a 3D movie.

“The technique has been very useful,” Steve went on. “It allowed us to pick and choose exactly the right times for Amy to step through the temporal doorway and collect you. We used one of Emily’s inventions … something called a Consciousness Wand … to put you to sleep so that you wouldn’t remember moving through the Rift. It induces instant, safe sleep.” He offered my big little sister a smile. “Quite brilliant.”

She actually blushed a little.

“White light,” I said. “It would fill my head and then I’d be somewhere else.”

He nodded. “That’s how it works.”

“You guys had it all down to a science,” I remarked, maybe a little bitterly.

“We did what needed doing,” Maxi Me said without rancor. “That’s pretty much our motto around here. But let’s get back to the real topic, okay?”

It was Emily who picked up the thread. “After the dead rose and everything fell apart, Tom’s letter suggested that Steve should build the first Rift Projector. With it, we would send someone back in time … he suggested
me
, if you can believe that … to warn the Undertakers about the coming second war.”

“What good would that do?” I asked. “Or … would that
have
done
, I guess.”

Time travel really fouls up your verb tenses.

“His hope was that, with enough forewarning, humanity could institute a policy of destroying all cadavers. Cremation instead of burial. By doing that, we’d minimize the number of bodies that the Corpses could inhabit when they eventually invaded, making the war more … manageable.”‘

I looked at them all. “So … Emily was supposed to go back to my time and, alone, try to convince
the whole world
to stop burying its dead?”

“A long shot,” Emily admitted. “And, frankly, not one of Tom’s most practical ideas. But, to be fair, he’d just lost his entire family.”

His whole family
…

“Where’s Sharyn?” I asked suddenly.

No one replied.

“Well? You’ve told me what happened to Jill and their kids. What about Tom’s sister? Is she alive?”

William said, “We can’t answer that one. I’m sorry.”

“Why not?”

“Because … of a promise.”

“A promise?” I demanded. “To who?”

He just shook his head.

I let a few long seconds pass, hoping someone would crack. No one did.

I groaned and exclaimed, “Whatever!”

Emily cleared her throat. “Um … so then Will, my Will …
this
Will …” She pointed at Maxi Me, “came up with a more workable plan.”

William protested. “It was a group effort!”

Yeah, that’s what I always say when people credit me with stuff, too.

“Lemme guess,” I suggested, facing him. “You suddenly remembered Amy’s visits when you were my age.”

He nodded. “I did. And so I sat everyone down, all the surviving Undertakers. We met upstairs, on the twenty-first floor, what would eventually become Control. And we talked. We talked about the war, and about time travel, and about Amy’s visits to me. And the more we talked, the more it became clear that … somehow … time travel had played a part in winning the First Corpse War. As children, we hadn’t known it, of course. Not for sure. But things had happened that could only have happened with future help.

“Except now,
we
were the future help.
We
had to make sure that those things happened again, exactly the way they were supposed to. It became our version, admittedly a more complicated version, of Tom’s suggestion about warning the past.”

I exclaimed, “Except Amy
didn’t
warn me! In fact, she went outta her way to
not
tell me anything about the future, not even that it was the future that she came from. I ended up figuring that out for myself … along with who she was!”

Steve said, “Time is a river.”

We all looked at him.

“Huh?” I asked.

He straightened and repeated. “Time is a bit like a river. It possesses a very strong, very steady current that’s hard to affect. Sending one person back to your time with dire warnings of a bleak future would be like dropping a stone into the river. A small stone makes a small splash. A big stone makes a bigger splash. But, ultimately, the ripples subside and the river flows along the same path as before. There’s no lasting change.”

I considered that. “Okay. I get it. So Tom’s idea of sending Emily back wasn’t a … big enough stone.”

The professor nodded. “We needed something surer, something that would alter the course of time’s river
permanently.
”

Maxi Me said, “Everyone knew about the strange visitations I’d received as a child, but in my case they ended that day on the Schuylkill River, when Helene’s little sister and I nearly drowned.”

I considered asking about Julie Boettcher—but decided against it. I figured I knew what the answer would be. Julie had been a brave girl. If she was still alive, she’d be here.

So instead, I said to William, “But you must already have
known
Amy was the angel in the white room. I mean,
I
did … and you and I have the same memories, right?”

“Right,” he replied. “But, be honest: Did you
know
it was Amy. Or did you just suspect it … up until the moment she appeared to you this last time and confirmed it for you?”

“Suspected,” I admitted.

“Me, too. And, after a while, I forgot about the whole thing. The war was over. It didn’t matter. Amy went home and I didn’t see her again. Decades passed. For the most part, the Undertakers scattered. And then the Second Corpse War started and those of us who were left alive gathered together again and … well, it made for a bizarre reunion.”

“At this reunion, you saw Amy again,” I guessed.

He laughed at the memory. “Yeah, and for the first time in almost thirty years. It was like getting slapped in the face! Here was my ‘angel,’ large as life. I think it was, right then, that the idea came into my head.”

“Okay,” I said. “
What
idea?”

“Project Reboot,” Steve replied.

“That’s what we call it,” Emily explained. “Sending Amy back in time to visit you at pivotal moments during the First Corpse War was Phase Two.”

“Phase Two,” I echoed. “What was Phase
One
?”

In way of an answer, Steve went to a small refrigerator—like the kind you find in hotel rooms—that stood atop a nearby table. From it, he took a vial of clear liquid. “
This
was Phase One.”

He handed me the vial. It was corked and unmarked. “What is it?” I asked.

It was William who replied. “It’s the Sight.”

“What?”

“What we call ‘Eyes’ or the ‘Sight’ is really a gene,” Steve explained. “Hereditary and pretty rare. It was finally identified about ten years ago, more as an academic curiosity than anything else. After all, at the time we no longer needed it.

“It’s a gene associated with puberty. It activates at age ten or eleven, sometimes later in boys than in girls. Then it shuts off, for good, somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two years old.”

I chewed on this. “Then I guess it’s a good thing that we won when we did,” I said. “Tom and Sharyn were getting close to eighteen.”

“True,” the professor agreed.

“But that still doesn’t tell me what’s in the vial,” I said.

“Technically, it’s a virus,” the professor explained. “But not like the flu or any such thing. It’s a virus that activates that specific gene and leaves it active, permanently, regardless of the subject’s age and without doing any other harm.”

“So … this stuff’ll let anyone See Corpses?”

“Yes.”

“But … why?”

Then the penny dropped. I looked sharply at Maxi Me. “Dad.”

“Dad,” William replied flatly.

“He was the exception,” Emily said. “The
only
adult who ever had the Sight. That’s because it was given to him. Someone went back in time and injected him with the virus while he was asleep.”

“Why?” I asked again.

“Because we
remembered
him having it,” Maxi Me replied. “We had to preserve the timeline. The only way to be sure that the first war would be won was to make certain that everything happened exactly the way it happened for us.”

“Who did it?” I asked.

They didn’t reply.

“Injecting him with that stuff eventually got him killed,” I said, feeling a rush of anger. “Who went back in time and did it?”

In a small voice, Emily said, “I did.”

I glared at her.

She looked back at me and, in her guilt, I recognized the shy little girl she’d once been. Almost immediately, my anger faded.

It couldn’t have been easy for her to do that.

“Okay,” I said with a sigh. “And afterwards? You said Amy’s visits were Phase Two?”

William answered. “Yes. I already knew exactly when Amy needed to appear and what she needed to tell you. But I also knew we had to be cautious. We couldn’t risk a mistake that might change history. So everything Amy said to you was carefully scripted.”

“And the ‘one question’ thing?” I asked. “A couple of times, I got the feeling that she knew what I was going to ask before I asked it.”

“She did,” William replied. “Because
I
asked the same question when it happened to me … and told her to expect it.”

That made sense.

Sort of.

But then I remarked, “Except there
were
times when I surprised her, or when she slipped and said something she hadn’t meant to say.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” remarked Emily.

“But didn’t those mistakes risk the future?”

“Tiny stones dropped into the river of time,” Steve replied. “In the end, they had no real effect.”

“Thank God,” Emily added.

“But I don’t understand!” I said to William. “If
you
sent Amy back in time to visit
me
, who sent her back in time to visit
you
?”

It was Steve who replied. “You did, of course.”

“Me?”

“You. Him. Will Ritter. Future and past, connected.”

Emily put a hand on my shoulder. “Trust me, don’t think too hard about it. It’ll make your head hurt.”

“Uh huh,” I muttered. Then I thought of something else and glared at Maxi Me. “Dave died at Fort Mifflin!”

My older self visibly paled. Whenever I pale, my freckles stand out. It was the same for him. No big surprise, I supposed.

“I know,” he replied. “I was there.”

“You could have saved him! You could have had Amy warn me!”

“No … I couldn’t have.”

Emily said, “What happened to the Burgermeister was horrible. But if he hadn’t done what he did, the first war would’ve been lost. You know that.”

“Yeah,” I told her. “But maybe—”

“Maybe if we’d warned you in advance, you could have come up with a way to save him and still close the Rift,” she replied. “Or, then again, maybe not. And Haven and everyone in it would have died and the Corpses would have destroyed the world.”