The Undertakers: End of the World (38 page)

He laughed. “Funny. I was thinkin’ the same thing ‘bout you.”

Then he let go of me, turned, and hopped from the ferry to the black slab that butted up against it. Once there, he stood on the landing for a moment, hunched over a little, as if the knowledge of what he must now do was like a thousand pound weight. But then he straightened, squared his shoulders, and looked back at us.

“I’ll give y’all a full fifteen minutes ‘fore I make my throw. Just to be sure you’re back home safe.”

I nodded.

“Goodbye, Chief,” I said.

“Goodbye, bro,” he said.

Screwing up my threadbare courage, I went to the front of ferry, pointed toward Earth, and said, “Take us there!”

Half of me didn’t think it would work. In fact, half of me kind of hoped it wouldn’t. But it did. The Energy Ferry started moving.

I returned to Helene’s side and, together, we watched the boy—the man—standing on the Ether slowly recede. He was facing us now, the Chief of the Undertakers, with Professor Moscova’s electric javelin held in his sure, strong grip.

Helene saluted.

It might sound cheesy, but at the time it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. She raised her right hand, fingers straight and stiff, and pressed it to her forehead. After a moment, I did the same thing.

Tom didn’t move. He didn’t have to. We knew he could see us, and we knew that
he
knew what it meant.

We held our salutes for more than a minute, until Tom became too small to recognize. Helene lowered her head and fell against me, her body shaking as she wept.

And, again, I didn’t blame her.

No

It took us seven-and-a-half minutes, by my watch, to make it back to Earth. As we got close, I spotted Jillian and Steve looking out through the shimmering portal, both of them grinning with relief—

—until they did a headcount.

“Where’s Tom?” Jillian asked as the ferry came to a stop within arm’s reach of the Rift.

“Help us with Sharyn,” Helene said.

“Where’s
Tom
?” Jillian demanded, panic in her voice this time.

“He stayed behind,” I replied, the words catching in my throat. Then, as briefly as possible, I told them about Fore and about what the chief had decided he had to do.

Jillian seemed to wither before my eyes.

Together, we managed to get Sharyn to her feet and through the shimmering doorway. She was groggy but coming around. Steve made some comment about using the Anchor Shard to heal her broken arm, once we were ready to close the doorway.

But then, as we laid her down on the floor of the great room, her head resting on Burt’s rolled up jacket, her eyes snapped open and she sat up.

“Where’s my brother?” she screamed.

We all looked at her. None of us seemed able to answer. But I knew we didn’t need to. She put it together all by herself.

“No!” she cried. She tried to stand, but wobbled and started to fall. Alex and Burt grabbed her one good arm and lowered her back down. She wailed piteously, her face more torn with pain and loss than any I’d ever seen. And, believe me, that’s saying something.

Helene went to her, knelt beside her, and took her hand. She tried to explain, tried to say how brave Tom was and how much he’d loved her. But the girl wasn’t having it, not a word of it. She pushed Helene away and struggled again to find her feet, only to collapse once more into a heap of sobs.

“No!” she screamed, beating the dusty concrete floor with her fist. “No! No! No!”

And I got it. I understood exactly what she was feeling. This was Tom Jefferson we were talking about. He couldn’t be gone. He just
couldn’t
be!

I had to look away, had to
get
away. So, for a lack of anything else, I went to the Rift, which still shimmered darkly against the inside wall of the Undertakers’ original HQ. Without any hesitation, I poked my head through.

The tunnel looked just the same, with the Energy Ferry still floating just below the lip of the Rift. I stared into the distance, but try as I might, I couldn’t see the other side, couldn’t see the Eternity Stone. Its light was still there, however, like the glow left behind after a sunset, visible now that I knew what to look for.

And the fact that it
was
still there seemed proof enough that Tom hadn’t made his throw yet.

I checked my watch.

He’d said he’d give us fifteen minutes, just to be sure.

There were four-and-a-half minutes left. Even if I jumped onto the ferry now, I wouldn’t make it across the Void in time to stop him. It was too late. We’d passed the point of no return. Tom was gone—lost, like so many others before him.

My friend.

My teacher.

My brother.

No.

That was it. Just—no.

I couldn’t accept it. More than that, I
wouldn’t
accept it. Yes, this was an impossible, no-win situation.

Well, guess what? I eat them for breakfast.

Almost without consciously deciding to do it, I lowered my eyes to the floor of the tunnel, some twenty feet below the ferry. As I’ve described before, it wasn’t smooth like on the
Malum
homeworld. Instead, it was rippled, like a frozen ocean, an effect—Steve thought—of the Anchor Shard’s energy scooping its way through the solid Ether.

As it had the first time I’d seen it, it reminded me of
something
. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something important. Only now the feeling was stronger, way stronger.

And then it hit me.

I yanked myself back out of the portal and spun around.

None of the others were paying any attention to me. They’d all gathered around Helene and Sharyn, who were wrapped in each other’s arms on the floor, sobbing. Somebody was saying something, probably Amy, about setting Sharyn’s broken arm. But the words didn’t quite reach me. Maybe my heartbeat had gotten too loud.

Thunderingly loud.

“I can get him,” I said.

No one responded. No one had heard me. So I said it again, louder this time, letting the words ring off the distant ceiling. “I can get him!”

That
caught their attention. They all looked my way. Sharyn’s face was ashen, her cheeks streaked with tears.

I ran over to the door that Burt had found earlier. Inside, I spotted a small collection of bikes—and two skateboards. They were both pretty old and worn, any paint or varnish having rubbed off years ago. But they looked like they were in pretty good shape. Better still, I found a canvas harness that would let me carry one of the boards on my back.

We use such things, sometimes, when we want to move on boards, but also need to keep our hands free for fighting.

Or at least we
did
, back before we’d won the war.

As quickly as I could, I slipped the harness over my shoulders and buckled it at my waist. Then I slid one of the two boards into it and snatched up the other one before heading back out into the Big Room.

Most of them were still looking at me.

Helene was on her feet. Alarm flashed in her eyes. “What are you doing?”

“I can get him. I’ve got four minutes. I can do it!”

“What are you talking about?” Alex snapped.

Ignoring him, I headed straight for the Rift, but Helene cut me off, grabbing my arm in a vice grip. “You’re crazy! You’ll never get there!”

“You just watch me!” I shot back. Then, when she didn’t let me go, I said, “It’s not bravery. It’s not sacrifice. I’m just doing what needs to be done!”

“No, you’re
not
!” Helene exclaimed.

“Sharyn!” I called.

The girl on the floor looked up at me, not comprehending.

But she was chief now. Chief of the Undertakers. That meant it was her call.

“I can get him!” I told her.

Helene protested desperately, “No! You can’t let him do this!”

“Sharyn, look at me,” I exclaimed. The clock was ticking.

She looked. Her eyes were puffy and red.

I put everything I had behind my words. “I … can … get … him!”

Sharyn stared at me for a few more precious seconds. Then she said in a voice so faint that I’d never have heard it if the others hadn’t been so completely quiet—quiet as
Malum
. “Get him, little bro.”

Helene’s hand was still on my bicep. I took it in mine and gave it a hard twist. Shocked, she let out of cry of pain as I pried her fingers off my arm. “I’m sorry,” I told her, shoving her hard enough to drop her onto her butt. “I love you.”

Then I ran for the Rift and leapt right through it. My feet hit the Energy Ferry, but I didn’t break stride. With one skateboard on my back and another in my hands, I jumped off the ferry’s far end, down toward the peaks and sloping valleys of the carved-out Ether that filled the tunnel from one end to the other.

Except, to my eyes, they weren’t peaks and valleys anymore.

They were half-pipes.

A year ago, my skills on a skateboard had been … questionable, and that was on a good day. But since joining the Angels crew, Sharyn had pushed me to learn the board. Her lessons hadn’t been about being “cool.” Like all things Undertaker, they’d been about staying alive. And a kid on a skateboard, if he knew what he was doing, was agile, fast, and seriously hard to catch.

So my training hadn’t focused on tricks or stunts, but instead on precision—and speed.

I dropped into the closest half-pipe right where I wanted to, my wheels catching its slope and my feet hitting the board at just the right angle to give me the most roll time down, across the floor and then up the other side. Once there, I leaned forward slightly, catching air. But I wasn’t going for height. I was going for distance.

I had three-and-a-half minutes to get to the other side of the tunnel. Tops.

Down the next half-pipe, across and up again. More air. More speed. After a half-dozen of these, I tried jumping a pipe and managed it—barely, my back wheels almost catching the lip of the peak. If I’d let
that
happen, I’d have wiped out for sure, hitting the bottom of the pipe hard, my broken board tumbling after me.

But I
didn’t
let it happen.

Instead, I performed an almost instinctive ollie, jumping up at just the right moment to “lift” my board clear of the peak, before landing back on it and riding all the way down and up again.

Pipe after pipe, long after I lost count.

Two-and-a-half minutes left.

Ahead of me, the tunnel seemed to stretch forever. I still couldn’t see the lip of the
Malum’s
Void. At any moment I expected to hear—something. Maybe the shattering of crystal or some other sound that would tell me that Tom had taken his throw early. But seconds passed, and more half-pipes passed, and nothing happened.

During my two ferry trips, I’d noticed that the pattern of the “ripples” in the floor changed at one point, about a third of the way along the tunnel. Without warning, the flow of half pipes turned almost ninety degrees, maybe due to some backwash as the Anchor Shard’s energy bounced off the
Malum
homeworld and returned the way it had come. Anyway, I felt pretty confident, if I could make it that far, I could improve my time.

Sure enough, no sooner had I thought it than I cleared a final half-pipe and saw that the next had been turned almost perpendicular to this one—forming a clear, curved road that ran, unbroken, into the far distance.

So I hit that road—hard, using the slopes on either side to feed my ride. I rolled up on the left, and down again, then up on the right and down again, gaining speed and distance as I went, until the walls were a blur and the wind in my face dried my half-panicked sweat.

A minute and a half left.

Of course, that assumed Tom and I had “synchronized our watches”—which we hadn’t.

The pipe I was riding continued on for about five hundred yards before turning so abruptly that I barely had time to react. With only a few seconds’ worth of warning, I banked up onto the left-hand slope, executed a quick 180, and then rolled back down to build some speed. Then I skated across the bottom of the pipe and straight up the right hand slope, heading for the peak, hoping desperately that I still had the momentum to clear it.

I did.

Just.

Then, as I went briefly airborne, shifting my weight forward and readying to drop into the next half-pipe, I craned my neck and spotted the Eternity Stone. It was still in one piece, ahead and to my left, looking huge and brilliant. I tried to spot Tom, but there just wasn’t time before I was swallowed by the next pipe.

Down, across, and up.

I looked again.

And there he was. From this distance, and with the whole of the enormous crystal hanging above him, he looked small.
Very
small.

“Tom!” I called. But before I could see if he’d heard me, I dropped into the next pipe. Down, across, and up again. And again I called his name.

I was getting close to the far side now, with less than sixty seconds before—by my watch—the chief’s fifteen minute window would close. And I still couldn’t tell if my yells were reaching his ears.

So, I skipped that and focused on covering the distance, leaning forward and squeezing every last bit of speed I could out of this crazy mode of travel.

Thirty seconds.

The last half-pipe’s far slope ran all the way up to the underside of the lip that marked the border of the
Malum
homeworld. There, the climb was high, almost twice as high as the others had been. So I threw everything I had behind my final drop, my wheels catching the hard Ether just right, reducing friction, increasing momentum. I couldn’t miss that final peak. And I couldn’t lose my board reaching for it.

I’d have to do this just right.

As I crossed the pipe I plotted my last move. I’d wait until the very top of the climb and then do another ollie, jumping the board off the Ether and then grabbing it with one hand. Meanwhile, my other hand would be reaching for the lip of the landing.

Timing, as they say, was everything.

The first part of it went okay. I felt the quick moment of zero G that indicated I’d gone as far up the last slope as I was going to. At that instant, I bent my knees and kicked off my board in just the right way to bounce its wheels and lift it up after me. Three inches. Six inches.