The Undertakers: End of the World (40 page)

“Ready?” Tom called to me.

“Ready!” I called back, wondering if it was true.

Then the two of us dropped into the last half-pipe. Down, across and up.

And up.

And up.

At the top of my arc, as that moment of zero G hit, I jumped for all I was worth, both my hands reaching for the edge of the ferry. Beside me, no more than three or four feet to my right, Tom did the same. But he was taller than me, stronger than me, and a better skater.

I could tell right away that he would make it and I wouldn’t.

I tried to think of something to say. To tell him it was all right, to go ahead and be safe. To tell him that I was glad for what I’d done, but that he should apologize to everyone for me. Especially my mom. Especially Helene.

For an instant, just the barest fraction of a second, I understood what Tom had said about it being a question of necessity, not bravery.

I’d traded my life for my chief’s.

And that was okay.

Which is why I was glad when I saw Tom’s big hand grab the lip of the ferry.

And astonished when his other hand reached down and caught my wrist.

“Gotcha, bro!” he said through gritted teeth.

“Tom!” I called. “There’s no time! You have to—”

But that was as far as I got. The muscles in his arm bunched up and he bent his elbow and, in a feat of strength beyond anything I’d ever seen, lifted me up. No, not lifted,
threw.
He threw me up past him, past the edge the ferry, and all the way onto the lighted platform, where I landed hard enough to knock the wind out of me.

Instantly, other hands were on me. Helene’s. She was pulling me up by my armpits and, at the same time, screaming in my ear, “Get up! Don’t you die, William Karl Ritter! You stay alive so I can kick your ass!”

Then I was on my feet and moving, stumbling beside her toward the Rift. At the same time, I looked back at Tom. Jillian was there, yanking on his wrist, dragging him up onto the Energy Ferry. And behind them, the Ether was coming, roaring toward us.

The Void between the universes was closing shut!

Suddenly, I was through the portal and on my back on the dusty floor of the Big Room. Others were closing in around me. Burt and Steve and even Alex. Sharyn was there too, sitting against the wall with her arm splinted. Amy knelt beside her, looking fearfully in our direction.

Helene asked if I was all right. I barely heard her. Rolling over, I stared back at the doorway but, of course, could see nothing through it.

Seconds passed. A lot of them. Too many.

Then Jillian appeared, jumping through, pulling on an arm. Tom’s head popped into view a second later, followed by his shoulders. The chief’s face was awash with sweat, but he was grinning, because he’d made it. We’d both made it. Except he hadn’t made it, not yet. He still had to get the rest of his body through the Rift. And there was no time left.

Zero. Zilch. Nada.

But Tom Jefferson was fast. Strong and fast and, with Jillian all the way through, he came right after her, fairly diving head first from that world into ours.

He almost made it.

As the Rift slammed shut with sudden, brutal finality, Sharyn started
screaming
.

The Statue

Six months.

Six whole months later.

So much had happened.

The Undertakers were famous now. World famous. News of the war had spread like wildfire. And the attention paid was overwhelming. Agent Ramirez and Senator James Mitchum, two of the few adults who had known about the Corpse War, had taken point on managing the public reaction. Some people, politicians mostly, were still calling it all a hoax. But they were getting fewer and further between. There was too much evidence, too many bodies that couldn’t be explained.

To most of humanity, we were heroes.

Of course, we never told anyone about our last mission, about the trip across the Void. As far as the world knew, and ever would know, the war had ended the night before and the Corpses were gone for good.

Like I said: Why muddy the waters?

Everyone went home.

That part was weird. Helene and Julie were picked up by their father, who was introduced around but seemed too stunned by the reunion to really grasp everything that was happening. Steve and Burt went home, too. So did Amy. Jillian’s sister came up from D.C. to collect her, but she refused to go. A
few
of the kids refused to go. It was a problem for a while, but eventually it got sorted out.

Then there were the kids like Alex, who had no home to go back to.

Family Services stepped in, offering foster care. But Ramirez and Mitchum came through again, setting up a special program that allowed those Undertakers without next of kin to stay together in a pretty cool Center City apartment complex, all of them declared to be special wards of Uncle Sam. The whole thing took a few weeks to set up and, until it was, chaos seemed to be the order of the day. But, eventually, everyone’s lives began to settle down.

My mom and my sister and I went home.

Of course, the press wouldn’t leave us be. Not right away. They wanted statements, interviews, photos. The local cops in Manayunk, many of them friends of my dad, kept them away for a while. But the reporters didn’t give up. And I heard it was the same for many of the other kids, too. We were just too big a story, and no way were the news hounds going to drop it just because we were “minors” and had “been through enough already.”

Once again, Senator Mitchum stepped up to the plate. He got a federal judge to issue an injunction prohibiting any journalist from so much as approaching an Undertaker without first petitioning the court for permission. Nevertheless, more than a dozen T.V. guys, some of them from Kenny Booth’s station, got themselves arrested for trying.

Finally, just to calm things down, a bunch of us did a live interview with that guy from
Meet the Press
. I found out later that it was the most watched television show in history, even bigger than the Super Bowl.

Okay,
that
was pretty cool.

Gradually, things began to die down. It seemed to take forever, but it happened.

The phone calls stopped. The emails stopped. Stuff started happening in the Middle East and Africa that pulled the public’s interest in other directions.

Even having saved the world, it turns out, can get old.

Just as well.

Meanwhile, Mom and Hugo Ramirez started dating. Lately, it had gotten pretty serious. Emily liked him.

And so did I.

Which brings us to today.

Helene and I met up in Philly. We hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks. She lived with her dad and I lived with my mom. We went to different middle schools, but that might be changing. Helene’s father, who worked for a defense contractor, had been offered a position in Center City, with Helene practically begging him to get a house in Manayunk. If everything worked out, we might—fingers crossed—
might
find ourselves attending the same high school next September.

Time’s a river, right? And rivers have currents.

But on this particular Saturday, a special Saturday, we’d agreed to go together to City Hall. Not down into Haven, which I’d heard was being cleaned out and turned into a museum/memorial, but up here on the street, in the shadow of the massive building.

The courtyard had been gated off, blocking any access. So we stood there, Helene and I, just outside that padlocked gate, looking in at what occupied the middle of the courtyard.

A statue.

The
statue.

His
statue.

We couldn’t see it. No one had
.
Not yet, not officially. It had been erected only that morning and wouldn’t be publicly unveiled until three o’clock. Both of us had been invited to the ceremony, about which we had … “mixed feelings” I guess is the best way to put it.

Right now, though, the statue was covered with a heavy canvas tarp.

“What do you think it looks like?” Helene asked me.

“Dunno,” I said. The sculptor who’d made it had used photographs for some of the work, and sketches he’d drawn from descriptions for the rest. Both Helene and I had contributed ideas. So had others. But we’d seen nothing that hinted at what the final version had turned out to be.

It was nine in the morning.

Three o’clock felt like a long way away. Too long, truth be told.

“Stand aside!” a voice called.

Immediately, the two of us stepped back to let Sharyn through. The girl’s broken arm had long since healed, though it had happened the slower, natural way, since the last Anchor Shard had turned to dust when the Eternity Stone had been destroyed and the Void forever filled.

No more magic. No more inter-dimensional travel. No more war.

At least, not with the dead.

In Sharyn’s arms was a big bolt-cutter. Back in the day, I could have made short work of the padlock with my pocketknife. But that was gone too.

I missed it.

Working with practiced ease, she fitted the cutter around the shank of the lock and squeezed it, snapping the steel. Then, with a satisfied grunt, she unceremoniously dropped the tool, unwound the chain, and pulled the gates open.

We followed her into the courtyard.

For several seconds, the three of us stared up at the covered statue.

“It’s big,” Sharyn said, her voice catching.

“So was he,” Helene remarked. The comment made me smile.

“Wanna take a peek?” I asked.

But Sharyn, a little to my surprise, shook her head. “Promised I’d wait ‘til he gets here,” she replied.

Then she turned and called at the top of her voice, “Hurry up, slowpoke!”

“I’m coming!” someone said.

And Tom Jefferson appeared at the open gate.

He was walking with the help of a fancy ebony cane with a silver knob. Jillian had bought it for him, telling him that the stupid aluminum stick with the tennis ball at the end had to go.

Seeing it for the first time, I silently decided that it worked for him.

The chief looked
cool
.

“How’s the new foot?” I asked as he limped toward us.

In way of an answer, he paused and, with his free hand, lifted one pant leg. There, inside a tailor-made sneaker, I could see the prosthetic gadget he now walked on.

As Sharyn liked to say, he’d missed making it through that Rift by a “foot.”

Hey, there are no “good” puns!

“Gettin’ used to it,” he said with a smile. “Won’t be skateboardin’ or runnin’ marathons anytime soon. But I can live with that.”

“Bro’s gettin’ his GED,” Sharyn announced.

GED stands for “General Educational Development,” and it’s a test that high school dropouts can take to prove they’ve got the skills to deserve a high school equivalency diploma.

“We
both
are,” Tom corrected.

“And you’ll both ace ‘em!” Helene said brightly. “Hands down.”

“Totally!” I added.

“Thanks, dudes,” Tom said.

“And after that!” his sister crowed, “he’s goin’ to the University of Pennsylvania.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

Tom actually looked bashful. I hadn’t thought he could pull off bashful, but he did. “Political Science. Uncle Sam’s covering the bill.”

“He’s got his eye on Congress in a few years!” Sharyn announced.

“You’ll do great,” I said.

He waved off the compliment. “Yeah. Thanks. How’s school going?”

Helene and I shared a shrug. Really, when you’re talking about middle school, is there anything to say that can’t be said with a shrug?

The chief grinned. “Sharyn’s thinking of becoming a teacher.”

“Yeah?” I replied.

The girl nodded. “Think I’d make a good one. Phys Ed maybe.”

“I’d take that class,” Helene said.

“Not me,” I added snarkily. “The teacher would be too scary.”

Sharyn laughed her musical laugh.

“Okay,” Tom said. “Enough with the catch-up. We ain’t supposed to be here, remember? How’s the statue look?”

Sharyn whirled around and exclaimed, “Let’s find out!” Then she stepped up, grabbed one edge of the tarp, and gave it a hard pull.

It slid away, landing in a heavy pile at our feet.

“Wow,” Helene whispered.

There, atop a marble pedestal, stood a life-size image of a kid with a mop of hair atop his head. Rendered in shining bronze, his face was broad and he wore a determined expression. Both his hands were over one shoulder, clutching the handle of a long shovel, the blade of which rose more than a yard past his head. He looked a little like a batter at the plate—except that what
he
would be swinging at wasn’t any baseball.

And at his feet, propped up against one of his thick legs, leaned a pickaxe, or the head of one anyway, set into a bronze rendition of a leather handle. He’d hated that thing, I knew. So it had seemed proper to depict him as not wearing it, not needing it.

“Hot Dog,” Sharyn whispered, and the emotion behind those words made a lump form in my throat.

At the same time, Helene knelt down and read what was inscribed in the marble pedestal.

“Dave ‘The Burgermeister’ Burger,” she said, her voice catching. “Undertaker.” Then she read the words engraved below. “He saved us all.”

Straightening up, she gazed into that familiar face. “I really miss him,” she said.

She turned and fell against me. I put my arms around her. Then, looking up at my friend, gone but never forgotten, I heard myself add in a voice that felt firmer and stronger than I thought it would be, “It was an honor serving with
you
, too.”

For more than a minute, the four us stood there in respectful silence. It was a good moment. Sad but
real
, if you know what I mean.

But then a new voice shouted out, ruining it. “Hey, you kids!”

We all turned to see a man in some kind of uniform. Not a cop. Maybe a City Hall janitor or maintenance guy. He’d emerged from one of the doors that opened onto the empty courtyard.

And he looked pissed.

“That wasn’t supposed to be unveiled until three!” he exclaimed, pointing at the statue. “How’d you all even get in here?” Then, as his eyes moved toward the gate, with its broken padlock, and the instrument of the crime—Sharyn’s bolt-cutter—lying on the ground, his face turned beet red. Whirling back on us, he demanded, “Who do you think you
are
?”