The Undertakers: End of the World (11 page)

“We couldn’t take the chance,” William said, looking actually sick about it. “The decision not to warn you was hard, very hard. Believe me, I know
exactly
what you’re feeling. But history
had
to be preserved. The Undertakers
had
to win.”

I felt suddenly as sick as Maxi Me looked. But, confusing as it seemed to be, it wasn’t all this time travel talk that was getting to me. Or, at least, not
just
that.

In my memory, I kept hearing the Burgermeister’s last words, spoken through a heavy steel door moments before he pulled the wires from the Corpses’ Anchor Shard, closing the Rift and dying in the process.

“It was an honor serving with you.”

I refused to let my eyes well up.

Emily said carefully, “But once the war
was
won, the time came to move onto Phase Three.”

“Phase Three,” I repeated dully.

She nodded. “Phase Three was … is … to bring you here and show you the future.” Her voice broke a little. “Show you this …
horror
. So that you can go back to your own time with the power to prevent it.”

“Prevent it? How am I supposed to do that?”

It was William who answered. “We’re going to give you a
boulder
, to use Steve’s ‘river’ analogy. And, with it, you’re going to forever alter the flow of time’s river.”

“What ‘boulder?’” I asked, though I thought maybe I knew.

And I was right. “Corpse Helene’s Anchor Shard,” he replied. “Tonight, we’re going to go get it.”

Sure. Piece of cake.

“Okay …” I said warily. I didn’t like where this was going. “And once I’m back to my own time with this Anchor Shard from the future. What then?”

Maxi Me put his hands on my shoulders. It was weird.

He replied, “We need you to use it to reboot the world … to make sure that the Second Corpse War, all of
this
, never happens.”

“How?” I asked. “How on Earth am I supposed to do that?”

“
Not
on Earth,” my older self told me. “We need you to use the Anchor Shard to open a Rift to the
Malum
homeworld, go there, and take away their ability to threaten another race ever again.”

Emily added, “By destroying the Eternity Stone.”

Project Reboot

It was about this time that Maxi Me’s radio chirped.

As the three of us watched, he snatched it from his belt and spoke into it. Then he listened. And listened. Finally, his face going pale again, he lowered the radio and said in a rock-steady voice, “That was Control. We’ve lost contact with the Paris and Los Angeles survivors.”

“Lost contact?” Emily asked.

“They’ve … been overrun by deaders.”

We all fell silent. Apparently, Corpse Helene was already making good on her threat.

The new chief took a deep breath and let it out in a long slow sigh. “Well,” he said at last. “We knew this day would come. Control will keep monitoring the other survivor sites. No point telling the refugees about any of this. That’ll only lead to panic. If today really is
it
, then our
only
priority is to make sure Project Reboot goes into effect before the final attack comes.”

Everyone nodded their agreement.

Steve cleared his throat and said, “Shouldn’t we—”

“Yes,” William replied. “Go ahead. Tell Will what he has to know.”

So, over the next hour, Professor Steven Moscova lectured to his classroom of one.

He described something that he called the “Ether,” the stuff between dimensions. He told me things about the
Malum
that I never would have guessed—or even imagined. He explained to me how the Eternity Stone and the Anchor Shards were connected to each other, and how they could be used to create Rifts, and much more.

Trust me when I say that the dude
talked
. He talked a lot.

And by the end of it, I wanted to crawl into a hole and hide.

Would you believe me if I said it was too much, just too damned much? These desperate people, all that remained of the human race, were asking me to do something completely crazy and utterly suicidal. Oh, Steve assured me that I
could
survive it, that there would be an “escape window.” But that felt like smoke and mirrors.

My odds of living past this final—mission—felt like next to nil.

I was thirteen years old. Okay, maybe fourteen.

Was I
really
ready to trade my life to save the world?

But I said none of this. In fact, I said pretty much nothing at all. I just let the professor talk. I let the others watch me
while
he talked. And all through it, I stood there, listening and trying to stay sane.

Then, just before sunset, the lecture ended.

“Any questions?” the professor asked.

I must have stared at him for—like—a half-minute. The stuff he’d told me was so totally out there, so completely beyond my comfort zone, that I still couldn’t quite process it. Suddenly, I knew more about the Corpses, the
Malum
, than I ever had before. Way more.

Do you have any idea what it’s like to have all your questions answered, questions that you’ve worried and sweated over for longer than you can really remember anymore? To have them addressed, completely and in detail, one by one, like they were items on a to-do list?

You’d think it would be satisfying. And it is, sort of.

But it’s also weirdly unsettling.

Still, I
did
have one question. Well, a bunch of questions that were all really just one.

“How can you know all this?” I asked him. “You can’t have gone over there yourself. So how can you know so much about the
Malum
homeworld? How can you know for sure that we’ll be able to breathe, or how the gravity works, or what the Eternity Stone looks like?”

Future Steve smiled at little, as if he liked the question. Then he said, “Ah, yes. Well, as it happens, I made contact with someone over there.”

I blinked. “Someone on the
Malum
homeworld?”

He nodded.

“A
Malum
?” I asked.

He nodded again. “Or, more accurately, he made contact with me … reaching out through a tiny Void that I’d created using one of the larger slivers, a Rift far too small for either of us to pass through, but large enough for communication. Telepathic, of course.”

I was horrified. “And you
trusted
him?”

“Not right away. No, the first time it happened, I closed the Rift at once. The first ten times, in fact. But you need to remember that by the time I began my experiments with the slivers, the First Corpse War had ended and the second hadn’t yet begun. After a while, my curiosity overcame my fear and started answering him. Talking with him.

“I called him Enigma. He didn’t have a name, of course. None of the
Malum
do. But he didn’t seem to mind the one I gave him. He was a member of the Fifth Column.”

“The Fifth Column,” I echoed.

Of course, I knew about the Fifth Column. These were a small number of
Malum
who disagreed with their people’s culture of “world unmaking” and did what they could to work against it. They were few in number and, from what I’d heard, didn’t tend to live very long. But they tried. They’d actually borrowed the name of their organization, or movement, or whatever from Earth. It was a term that meant a small group working from the inside to sabotage a larger group.

And that was exactly what the Fifth Column were.

I’d even met one, briefly. His name had been Robert Dillin, a Corpse—the only Fifth Column to ever make it to Earth. He was also a member of the
Malum
royal caste and had, in fact, been
married
to Lilith Cavanaugh, the Queen of the Dead. Our paths had crossed on the last day of the war, and he’d gradually earned my trust.

Then he’d died, saving my life.

So, if this Enigma really
was
a member of that small group of “good guy”
Malum
, then I could see why Steve had come to trust him.

“And this dude told you stuff?”

“Told me,” the professor replied. “And showed me. Pictures in my mind. Really quite fascinating. It’s because of him that I know and, to a point, understand the physics of his world. We became … friends after a while. Good friends. I don’t know if you can understand that.”

William said, “There can be beauty even in monsters. If one knows how to look. Isn’t that right, Will?”

I nodded, because it
was
right. I knew it firsthand.

Steve said, “Eventually, we lost contact. I simply ran out of slivers large enough to open even tiny Rifts between our dimensions. A pity. We could use his insights, now that his people have attacked us again.”

Maxi Me glanced at his watch. “Getting close to sunset,” he announced. “Time to go. Anymore questions, Will?”

I shook my head. It felt heavy.

Too full of scary knowledge, I supposed.

As I watched, feeling helpless and useless, the three of them began suiting up for their mission to Independence Hall. It was an exercise that I’d gone through myself more times than I could count. Weapons. Comm gear. Other tools of the trade.

One such tool was a thick leather belt that each of them fitted around their waist. Each belt sported ten little loops, into which the Undertakers slid
Maankhs
. I had to admit, it was a solid set up, and would make the tiny one-shot cylinders quick and easy to access in combat.

Cool. Smart.

Still, I hated watching them all, knowing I wasn’t going with them, knowing the risks they were taking.

I
really
hated it.

A few minutes later, after the four of us had ridden the elevator down to the ninth floor and had made our way through the mass of refuges to Haven’s only exit, I stepped between them and the door and said, “Let me go with you.”

“No,” William replied.

“I can help.”

“You certainly could,” he said. “But, no.”

“I’m going!”

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

I got pissed at him. He didn’t care. I practically threw a tantrum—yeah, I still remember how—but he didn’t blink an eye. I even threatened to dump their Project Reboot, to forget all about the future once I got home, and use the Anchor Shard to, I dunno, get rich or something.

But he knew I was bluffing.

Well, of course he did.

Finally, I gave up. These dudes were going without me, heading off on what I thought they all knew would be their last mission, win or lose. Each carried a radio, though Steve told me that the range was limited. “The only chance of contacting us would be from up on the Observation Deck.”

“But don’t try,” William said. “Not unless there’s an emergency.”

I nodded miserably. Then, looking him over, I asked, “Where’s your pocketknife?” To underline the point, I held up my own.

“Dead,” he said.

I blinked. “What?”

“I carried it around for twenty years, long after the first war ended. Eventually, it got old. Stopped working. It’s funny, I still miss it.”

I blinked again. “Then how did I get
this
one?”

He laughed. “The professor here says time is a river. Well, sometimes it’s a circle, too. After the second war started and Project Reboot began, I asked Steve to make the pocketknife exactly as I remembered it. He did the same thing with Tom’s knife and Sharyn’s sword. Then, when Phase Two started, I made sure Amy delivered all three of them back in time at the right moments, so that they could be used properly to win the first war. You see? A circle.”

Time’s a river? Time’s a circle? What the heck else is it?

Could time be a roll of toilet paper? How about a rainbow trout? Or maybe time is a wreath of pretty flowers that smell bad.

I turned to Professor Moscova, still holding up my pocketknife. “You made this?”

He nodded. “It’s powered by an Anchor Sliver. Both knives are. That’s what each of them has instead of a battery, and that’s what will eventually wear out.”

“
How
did you make it?” I asked.

“Out of Ether. The same is true of Sharyn’s wakizashi sword. Enigma called the material
nagganum.
”

Nagganum.

I’d heard the term only once before. Robert Dillin, the good-guy Corpse, had mentioned it when he’d seen my pocketknife. But, at the time, I’d had a lot on my plate and hadn’t bothered asking him for an explanation.

Now I did. “
Nagganum
is Ether?”

Steve nodded.

“The solid stuff that you told me fills the spaces between dimensions?”

He nodded again, looking as if people made incredible tools and weapons from inter-dimensional materials all the time. “While communicating with Enigma, he instructed me on ways to mine small amounts of Ether …
nagganum
… by creating tiny, shallow Rifts. After a good deal of trial and error, I developed techniques for working with the material, cutting and shaping it into whatever I wanted.
Nagganum
is lighter and far denser than any Earth metal. That’s why Sharyn’s sword never dulls, and why your pocketknife blade can cut through anything.”

“Whatever happened to Tom’s?” I asked.

“Went the same way as mine,” Maxi Me replied. “Stopped working when the sliver inside it could no longer hold a charge.”

“So this is the only one left,” I said.

“So to speak,” he replied.

I offered the pocketknife to him. “Take it with you.”

“No,” he said.

“I don’t need it,” I pressed, wondering if that was true. Had there ever been a time, since the morning I’d found the amazing gadget under my pillow, that I hadn’t felt a need for it? “I’m staying here. Safe. But it might come in handy for you.”

“No,” he said again. “I appreciate the offer. But … no.”

“I
really
wish you’d let me come along,” I said. One last gambit.

Emily came up and hugged me. It was still strange when she did that, but it helped. “Let us handle this, okay? We’ll get the Anchor Shard. Your part comes later and that’s enough for you to worry about.”

“Believe me,” I told her, “I’m plenty worried.”