The Undertakers: End of the World (30 page)

“Jeez,” I heard Alex mutter.

Strange, alien light filled the warehouse. It was emitting from the Anchor Shard, which glowed almost like a miniature sun. From its pointed end a beam had emerged, splashing against the cinderblock wall.

Only the cinderblocks were gone.

In their place was a Rift, a circle of black, weirdly shimmering energy about five feet across that seemed to have been drilled into the wall starting at just about knee height. Seeing it, Steve got to his feet and brushed off.

“Huh,” he said. “I expected a larger tear. Perhaps if I’d set up the Anchor Shard further back. Must’ve gotten the math wrong.”

“Should’ve carried the two,” his brother suggested snarkily.

“It’s big enough,” Tom replied. Then, without even a trace of worry, he marched past Steve and poked his head in the hole.

“Bro!” Sharyn yelped.

“Tom!” Jillian called at exactly the same instant.

Both girls glowered at each other.

Tom pulled his head back out. “It’s the same temp as out here. And there’s air.”

Steve nodded. “The tunnel’s taken on the properties of the environment that created it, just as my older self predicted.”

“Now, if we just knew about the
other
end,” his brother added.

“Can I have a look?” the Brain Boss asked.

“Everyone should look,” Tom replied. “We all gotta understand what we’re dealing with.”

So Steve went first, leaning so far into the hole that the entire upper half of his body disappeared. For most of a minute he didn’t move, and I was suddenly, alarmingly reminded of when his
lower
half had fallen into a Rift.

Finally, he came back out, looking none the worse for wear. “I was talking,” he said. “Did any of you hear me?”

“Not a thing,” said Jillian. “My turn.”

After her, Burt took his peek. Then Sharyn, Alex, Helene, and me. For some reason, I was totally okay with being last. In fact, I offered to let Amy go ahead of me, but she refused. “I don’t want to look,” was all she’d say. Maybe the uneasy expressions on everyone’s faces had freaked her out.

And when I finally did poke my head through the Rift, I totally got why.

It
looked
like a tunnel, but one that was
way
bigger than the five-foot hole I was leaning into. It was also rectangular, not round like the Rift, the four edges as square and sharply defined as any man-made room.

The ceiling—yes, it had a ceiling—had to be twenty feet above my head, with the floor—yes, it had a floor—the same distance below. Except neither the ceiling nor floor was smooth. Instead, they seemed
rippled
, forming a weirdly uniform series of horizontal ridges and valleys that ran away into the distance. Each ridge rose ten or twelve feet into the air, only to cut suddenly downward on the far side into another curved valley. Then that valley rolled smoothly upward, forming a new ridge, and then another valley, and so on. One after the next, after the next, until they disappeared from sight.

Picture lazy waves on the ocean—never breaking, but only rising and falling, rising and falling, over and over.

Got it?

Now imagine that same ocean—
frozen
in an instant of time.

That might give you an idea of what I was looking at.

Thing is: those trenches and ridges reminded me of something—I mean, besides the time-frozen ocean. But I couldn’t quite think of what.

The tunnel was long, but I could see the end of it, or thought I could. There was
something
in the far distance, small and glowing. I didn’t think it was the Eternity Stone.

For one thing, whatever it was seemed to be getting closer.

“Uh … guys?”

But then I remembered the Rift’s soundproofing and realized they couldn’t hear me.

Pulling myself back out through the hole in the wall, away from the huge tunnel and the weird advancing light, I turned to find them huddled around me. Each wore a similar expression of wonder. But no one was really afraid.

Except me.

I had time for one word, and I screamed it at the top of my lungs. “Down!”

So-called “normal” kids living so-called “normal” lives would have balked. They’d have said something like “what’s up?” or “what’s going on?” But these were Undertakers, and all of them—every last one—dropped to their bellies in the dust without a moment’s pause.

So did I.

A second later, something came through the Rift.

It was like a spear of red energy that shook and shimmered as it moved to and fro above our heads. I got the impression that it was looking for something, its search becoming more and more frantic with each passing second. The energy hovered over each of us in turn, drawing little cries of fearful alarm from Amy, Steve, and even Alex.

Then I realized what it was.

A
Malum
Self.

Somewhere on the far side of the tunnel we’d just created, the
Malum
had recognized a newly-opened Rift and had sent one of their own across, probably assuming that another of their kind had just made contact. This—
thing
—had come here expecting to find a nice, handy cadaver to inhabit.

“Sorry,” I told it. “Nobody home.”

The red energy shuddered in desperation. The creature had no face, not in this form. Nevertheless, rage and terror seemed to radiate off of it in waves.

Then it died, just popped out of existence.

The way they always do.

Tom was the first to recover. “Well, so much for the element of surprise.”

“Thanks for the heads up, little bro,” his sister added.

I climbed unsteadily to my feet and then helped Helene and Steve to theirs. The Brain Boss hurried to the Rift and poked his head inside. A few seconds later, he pulled it back out and said, “Have a look at
this
!”

Two at a time, we looked, pairs of us squeezing into the strange opening.

Just beyond the Rift, utterly motionless, was what looked like a shining white slab. Nothing below it. Nothing above it. Nothing around it. Whatever-it-was simply hovered, as still as a block of concrete maybe six feet wide and ten feet long.

“What
is
that?” Helene asked, jammed beside me in the round opening.

“Not a clue,” I replied.

We pulled our heads out, turned and, along with the rest, looked expectantly at Steve.

“I think it’s the Energy Ferry the older
me
described,” he said. “That
Malum
who came through just now … his Self must have somehow ridden it here.”

We all absorbed this.

“Think we can … ride it over
there
?” I asked.

“
He
didn’t,” Helene pointed out.

“He who?” Alex asked.

“Who?” said Alex.

“The
Malum
. Once he got here and found no host body, why didn’t he just ride the Energy Ferry back home?”

“That’s a scary question,” Jillian remarked.

“It is,” Steve admitted. “Look, there’s no manual for any of this. We don’t know how that ‘ferry’ out there even operates. Yes, it
looks
solid, but looks can be deceiving. You might step on it, only to have it vanish and drop you all the way to that rippled floor. Then, even if you survived the fall, those Ethereal ridges are too high and too steep to climb.”

“One way to find out,” Tom said. He stepped past me and leaned into the Rift. Then, before anyone could stop him, the chief climbed through the opening entirely and disappeared from view.

Both Sharyn and Jillian rushed forward, almost knocking Helene and me over in their hurry to reach the portal. As the rest of us gathered around, the girls poked their heads through the hole, and stayed there.

And stayed there.

And stayed there.

“What’s happening?” Amy asked, sounding frightened.

“How the heck should I know?” Burt exclaimed.

Then, without warning, Sharyn climbed through the impossible doorway as well. She just raised one leg and stepped out of the world. An instant later, her second leg followed.

“Oh jeez …” I heard Alex mutter.

I went forward and took Jillian’s arm, pulling her out of the hole. She fought against me, but just for a second. After that, she came willingly enough, though her face looked pale with worry. “Are they okay?” I asked.

“They’re fine,” she replied in a small voice. “They want you and Helene to join them.”

“They do?”

“Yeah.”

“Right now?”

“Yeah.”

Helene and I swapped worried looks. We both knew what the other was thinking: It’s one thing to announce you’re going to cross the Void, destroy the Eternity Stone, and salvage the future. But it’s another thing entirely when
doing
it means actually stepping through a tear in spacetime and climbing onto a ferry made of what you
hope
is really really really hard light.

Know what? Add one more “really” to that.

“You don’t have to do this,” I told her.

“Neither do you.”

“Yeah, I do,” I said.

She smiled, but without a trace of humor. “I know. Me, too.”

“I’ll go first.”

“Okay,” she said.

I looked at the others—the Undertakers. My friends, all of them. Even Alex, maybe. “Six hours,” I said. “After that, assume we blew it and send in the next team to try again.”

“Don’t forget this, then,” Burt called, holding up the Binelli gun.

“Right,” I said, accepting the heavy weapon.

“And these,” Steve said, handing Helene a backpack weighed down with extra liquid nitrogen tanks. “Don’t drop them. If one of them punctures … well, you don’t want to be around if that happens.”

“Got it,” she said.

Amy came forward and hugged us both. She seemed so small, so completely sweet. Why then did my mind flashback to a rainy Observation Deck and a woman with water-soaked hair and a knife in her hand?

I can’t let that happen.

I won’t.

“Be careful,” she whispered to me.

“Aren’t I always?” It was a lame attempt at a lame joke.

“No,” she said, very seriously. “You’re not.”

She stepped back and, to my surprise, Alex came forward and offered his hand. “Good luck, Ritter.”

“Thanks.”

“I still don’t like you,” he said.

“I don’t like you, either.”

He almost grinned. Almost.

After that, Steve and Burt hugged Helene and patted my shoulder.

Jillian grabbed my hand, looked searchingly into my eyes, and said, “Bring him back to me.”

I remembered a statue standing in City Hall’s courtyard.
That
Tom Jefferson had been much older than this one, killed while fighting the dead in the Second Corpse War, rather than wasted on some otherworldly battlefield.

But dead was dead.

“I will,” I replied, trying to put as much certainty as I could behind those words.

Later on, I would regret them.

A lot.

Elsewhere

So
…
third doorway in spacetime in the last thirty-six hours.

Gotta be worth a footnote in somebody’s book!

Jill had been dead on. The ferry was a solid lighted rectangle, ten by six and maybe a foot deep. All around us, the tunnel’s walls seemed to glow, as if the Anchor Shard’s energy had
melted
its way through the Ether, and the surfaces were still hot from it.

As I stepped gingerly through the Rift and onto the Energy Ferry, I expected to feel
something.
A tingling? Maybe an electrical charge?

But there was nothing. In this strange place between dimensions it didn’t feel particularly hot or cold. The air was breathable, though it had funny a texture to it that’s hard to put into words. Behind me, the round portal through which I’d just stepped was burned into the face of a smooth wall. I touched its surface with my fingertips and found it to be rock hard and as black as midnight.

Ether.

The mountain between dimensions.

The mortar between the bricks of the universe.

The stuff that
elsewhere
was made of.

“I don’t get how there’s gravity,” Sharyn said. Then she hopped up and down experimentally on the ferry’s surface. Her doing that made me twitch.

A voice replied, “As far as I can tell, the direction of gravity is dependent on the Anchor Shard’s placement relative to the floor.”

Startled, the four of us turned to find Steve poking his head through the Rift. It was crazy weird to see him like that.

“English,” Helene told him.

“The crystal’s jagged,” he said. “That makes it heavier on one end than the other. The difference isn’t much, but it’s measurable. Before we left, I
did
measure it and marked the heavier side with some masking tape. Then I made sure that side was resting downward when I ran the current from the car battery through it. If I hadn’t, you all might be standing sideways right now, or maybe even upside down.”

“Would we have noticed?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Probably not. Gravity’s gravity. Down is where down says it is.”

Tom remarked, “But it makes an already messed up situation just a little bit less messed up. Nice work, Steve.”

“Thanks.”

Helene asked, “But how can we even be standing here? The
Malum
can’t bring their bodies. They gotta ride the ferry as lumps of red energy, right? So how is it that we can be here in the flesh?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “Just like I don’t know what kind of environment’s going to be waiting for you on the other end of this ride. We’re off the map here, guys … outside of science and reason. But listen. There
is
one thing I
can
tell you.”

“We’re listening,” Tom told him.

The Brain Boss said, “It’s the connection between the Anchor Shard and the Eternity Stone that made this tunnel. Both connections are equally important, kind of the same way a bridge has to be attached to both sides of a gorge. If one side or other gets destroyed, the whole thing collapses.”

“What’s that mean?” Helene asked.

“It means,” the chief replied. “That when we waste the Eternity Stone, we’d better get back across the tunnel quick.” He gestured at the strangely rippled walls. “Because all
this
is gonna close up tight around us.”