The Undertakers: End of the World (26 page)

Like my mother and Agent Ramirez, Senator James Mitchum was one of a
very
small number of grown-ups who knew about the deaders. The guy had shown himself to be a hardcore jerk, using trickery and deception to try to exert some influence over Tom and the Undertakers. As a result of his poking his nose in where it didn’t belong, Lilith Cavanaugh found out where Haven was—and kids ended up dead.

It was nice to hear that the jerk had decided to come clean. And publicly, too.

Even so—

My mother went on, “I know what you’re all going to say. Earth’s in danger again. In thirty years, those monsters are going to come back and kill everybody. End the world. And I believe that.” She looked right at me. “I absolutely do. I’ve seen way too much to start doubting now.” Then she turned in a circle, meeting everyone’s eyes. “But
you
don’t have to stop them! The Undertakers have done enough. You’ve already saved the world once, for God’s sake! And that has cost you all dearly.

“We’ve lost people … kids. Good brave kids who shouldn’t have died, but did. Still others have been terribly injured. I can’t even imagine how most of you are going to be able to grow up and live normal lives after the misery and terror you’ve experienced. But there’s nothing anyone can do about that. What I
can
do is make sure none of you have to go through all that again!

“This mission Will’s describing … it doesn’t need to be
you
who carries it out. The United States government has soldiers! Army Rangers. Navy Seals. Whatever.
They’re
the professionals. Let
them
open this hole, or Rift, or whatever you want to call it, and cross over and nuke that awful crystal if that’s what it takes! Don’t you get it, kids? Your part in this is over … finally, blessedly over. It’s time to return to your families, your schools, your lives.

“It’s time to go
home.
”

She fell silent then—and, with a weary sigh, sat back down.

I wondered if she was right.

Could
I chuck it all and leave this to the guys with the muscles and the guns? Could my family just go back to our house in Manayunk? Could I just return to school like nothing happened? I’d already missed the rest of the last school year.

Jeez. I’ll probably have to redo the eighth grade!

That thought twisted my stomach almost as bad as a horde of Corpses.

I glanced over at Helene, who sat beside me. She’d been holding my hand throughout most of the meeting, almost as if afraid that, if she let go, I might suddenly vanish. And, given my recent history, I couldn’t blame her.

Her
parents had split up. Her mom still lived in Allentown. I wasn’t sure where her father was. What would “going home” look like for her—or her little sister Julie for that matter, who was a very recent recruit? Could she somehow mend her broken family?

Besides, Allentown was more than an hour west of Philly.

Would I ever see her again?

Then I looked at Tom and Sharyn. The Jefferson twins, whose courage and conviction had defined the Undertakers from the very beginning,
had
no home outside of Haven. Both were still minors, if only for a couple more months. Would the city take charge of them? Try to force them back into foster care?

Steve and Burt had a home to return to. So did Amy. But Jillian was orphaned, like Tom and Sharyn. Where would
she
go? In the future I’d glimpsed, Jill and Tom had gotten married. I wondered if that would still happen.

And Alex? His parents had been killed right in front of him by the Corpses. Where would
he
end up?

Once Mitchum told the world about us, the genie would be out of the bottle. There’d be reporters and investigators and questions and more questions. Everyone would know who we were and what we’d been doing. That kind of notoriety, I’d heard, could be like a spotlight on you all the time—twenty-four/seven.

Could
any of us ever again have a “normal” life?

And what did that even
mean
?

The silence in our little circle went on for another half minute.

Finally, Tom said, “Susan, I disagree with just about all o’ that.”

My mom gaped at him as if he’d sprouted horns and a spaded tail.

Slowly, the chief rose from his chair. “These future Undertakers didn’t reach back in time and grab any Army Ranger or Navy Seal,” he explained. “They grabbed Will. Now why would they do that, given that they were, themselves, all adults? Since when do grown-ups ask kids for help with something like this, even if the kids they’re asking used to be
them?
The answer is they did it because Chief Ritter and his people got what you’re not gettin’, Susan.”

“And what’s that?” my mom asked, more than a little bitterly.

“Where the Corpses are concerned, we
are
the pros. Ain’t nobody on this planet understands the
Malum
like we do. How they fight. How they act. How they think. We got ways of dealing with ‘em that the Rangers and Seals don’t. And, outta all of us, the best is probably Will.”

I stared disbelievingly at him as he said this, and then looked on in horror as the rest—all but Alex and my mother—silently nodded in agreement. Even Helene, who gave my hand a little squeeze.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Hold up. I’m not—”

But Tom quieted me with a hand gesture, his eyes locked on my mom’s. “We’re soldiers. Young soldiers, but soldiers in every sense of the word. And soldiers don’t stop fighting just ‘cause we ‘done enough.’ In fact, when you get right down to it, the
only
argument you can really make for why someone else oughta do this ‘stead of us is the fact that we’re minors. Ain’t that so?”

My mother didn’t reply, but she didn’t have to. The truth of it was all over her face.

Tom saw what I saw and slowly nodded. Then he addressed the room as a whole. “Will’s right,” he said. “Our best chance of pulling this off is to hit ‘em now, while we got ‘em on the ropes. Haven’s done. As for the rest of the Undertakers, the ones we sent off to bed, the Hackers and Chatters, Moms and Schoolers … well, I say we do just what Susan suggests and let ‘em go home. And any o’ you who ain’t up for this should do the same. No pressure. No judgment. Like she said, y’all done enough.”

Then the Chief of the Undertakers squared his not inconsiderable shoulders and announced, “But me? I’m headin’ through the Rift. And I’m gonna see this thing finished, for good and all.”

“So am I,” said Sharyn, standing up.

“And me,” said Jillian, ignoring the glare that Sharyn gave her.

“And us,” said Steve and Burt.

“And me,” said Amy in her feather-soft voice.

“Me, too,” said Alex. Then, with a sour shrug, he added, “What else I got to do?”

“And me,” said Helene. Letting go of my hand, she dropped onto her sneakered feet, standing tall like the rest.

I looked over at my mom, who sat in her chair, looking small and pale and frightened. Her eyes found mine, and I read the plea in them. It was the same plea, I’d have bet, that soldiers always see in their mother’s eyes.
Please. Not you. Anyone but you.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said. Then I jumped off the gurney and declared, “Me, too!”

I watched in quiet misery as my mother leaped to her feet and fled from the room in tears.

As she did, a man—a grown man—appeared in the Infirmary doorway. He called to my mother as she rushed past him, but she ignored him, disappearing down the hallway. Then, perplexed, he turned toward us, all of us, standing in a loose circle, empty chairs at our backs.

“Okay,” FBI Special Agent Hugo Ramirez asked warily. “What’d I miss?”

Ether

Naturally, there was a lot to do.

Since his crew had either left or was leaving Haven, Steve grabbed Burt and, together, the Moscova Brothers headed into the Brain Factory to start preparing for the Rift opening.

Meanwhile, Tom and Ramirez contacted Senator Mitchum, hoping to somehow save the Fort Mifflin crystal. But Mitchum responded with the news that it had fallen apart the instant the government science guys had tried to retrieve it.

Just as Professor Moscova had said.

Neither the chief nor the FBI Guy revealed to the senator anything about the future
Malum
threat.

“It would start a whole
thing
,” Ramirez told us later, when a bunch of us met in Tom’s office. The chief, Sharyn, Helene, and I were all there. So were Amy and my mother who, as of now, wouldn’t meet my eyes. “First, there’d be a major effort to keep this new threat quiet, out of the news. They’d be worried about general panic, a stock market crash, mass suicides, whatever.”

I’ll never get the adult world.

He continued. “Then they’d pull Will and Sharyn, as the ‘subject participants’ into a room somewhere and interrogate them, run tests on them, and then interrogate them some more, all in the name of national security. That, by itself, could take months … or maybe years.”

Hearing this, my mother went even paler than she already was. There she’d been, lecturing us about how it was time to turn over what we knew to the “proper authorities,” only to have Ramirez explain, in detail, what such a thing would mean for her son’s future.

She ended up leaving the meeting the way she had the Infirmary, without saying a word to anybody.

Later on, Tom and I went over to the Factory to have a talk with Steve. I had things to tell the Brain Boss, sciencey stuff that I’d left out of my Infirmary debrief.

“Can’t do it,” Steve complained, turning toward us as we entered the long, skinny chamber. He and his brother had a car battery set up on a small metal stand, complete with a directional brace that was obviously meant to hold the Anchor Shard in position and focus its energy.

Basically, he’d constructed a really primitive Rift Projector, but one that did more than break the time barrier. This one would let us travel between dimensions.

Or
would
it?

“Can’t do what?” I asked.

“I’m really sorry,” the Brain Boss replied. “But this isn’t going to work.”

“Why not?” Tom asked him. “You’ve opened Rifts before now.”

“Sure. Small ones. Experimental ones. And each time the release of energy has been hard to control. Remember Ian?”

“We can set up shields,” the chief said. “Like before.”

But Steve was shaking his head before Tom even finished the sentence. “That was enough protection when the Rift was open for a minute or two. But we don’t know how long this mission will take. Hours, most likely. A Rift open that long would release enough energy to flatten a city block!”

I thought back to the long lecture Professor Moscova had given me about what he called “shard science.” There’d been a lot of info and I’d done my best to remember it. But now I kinda wished I’d taken notes.

I said, “Not if you ground the Anchor Shard.”

They all looked at me.

“Ground it?” Burt asked.

“Ground it,” I said.

Steve’s expression turned thoughtful. “How?”

“Well, your future self told me it could be done by wrapping the shard in copper wire and then connecting the other end to a pipe or something else that goes down into the earth.”

“Sure,” the Brain Boss said. “That’s how you ground anything. But it never occurred to me that it would work on this sort of energy!”

I shrugged. “He told me he’d done the math and that it all checked out.”

Burt asked, “But did he ever actually
try
it?”

“He couldn’t,” I replied. “His shard was shattered.”

“Right,” Steve said. He looked from me to the Anchor Shard and back again. “It
might
work, I guess. I’ve got plenty of copper wire. I can wrap the crystal the way Will suggests and then put up the shields and run some current through it. Not a lot. Just enough to make sure it’s grounding.”

Tom nodded. “Do it.” He turned to me. “What else did the professor dude tell you that might help us?”

I considered.

“Well,” I said. “He told me that the space between worlds is solid.” Again, they all looked at me. It made me squirm a little. “I mean … you know how outer space, the space between stars and planets, is empty?”

“It’s not,” corrected Steve. “There are cosmic rays, trace gases like hydrogen and helium, minute—”

“Yeah,” Burt remarked, cutting his brother off. “We know.”

I said, “Well, the space between
dimensions
is full of this solid stuff that Professor Moscova called Ether.”

“That’s the word I use, too,” the professor’s younger self replied. “But only because it’s what the ancient Greeks called the ‘ocean’ through which they believed the planets ‘floated.’ I never thought it could be … real.”

“It’s real,” I told him. “And the stuff is harder than anything we have on Earth. In fact, it’s what our pocketknives and Sharyn’s sword blade are made of. Professor Moscova found a way to mine a little of the stuff and work it like metal. The
Malum
call it
nagganum.
”

Tom smiled. “So
he’s
the one my sis and I have to thank for our gifts!”

I nodded. “Steve made them and Amy delivered them to my dad in a dream. Then Dad gave them to you and Sharyn for your birthday. Later, on my first visit to Future CHOP, she gave me mine.”

“But what for?” Burt asked. “I mean, they’re cool and all. But why two pocketknives and a sword? Why not a whole arsenal?”

I replied, “Phase One and Two of their plan was about making sure history went along the way it was supposed to. Future Will and Future Sharyn remembered two pocketknives and a sword, and so we got two pocketknives and a sword. Get it?”

“Makes my head hurt,” the younger Moscova brother complained.

“I hear ya,” I told him.

Steve asked. “So … if the Ether is that dense and impregnable, then how did my future self manage to mine and work it to create such amazing devices?”

“He used slivers from the shattered Anchor Shard. Shard energy … energy that comes from the Eternity Stone … is one of the only things that can cut through Ether. And it looks like it cuts through it like a hot knife through butter.”