Chief
Back into the sewers again, though not back into the canoe.
Instead, we returned to the 15th Street subway platform, where the Undertakers led me to a niche set into one wall that was so dark as to be barely there at all. In it stood a service door that clearly hadn’t been opened in years.
My sister stepped up to it and, ignoring the knob, ran two fingers along the outer edge of the door frame. I heard a faint click. The door remained closed, as solid looking as ever, but the entire door frame, including bits of camouflaged masonry around it, swung outward.
“Cool,” I said, maybe a little unenthusiastically; I was still shaken by what I’d seen in the courtyard. Even so, the illusion was impressive. It reminded me of the fake brickwork that had hidden the entrance to the original Haven, back when I’d first joined the Undertakers.
“The chief’s idea,” Professor Moscova told me.
“Who is chief?” I asked. “Now that Tom’s … you know.”
None of them replied.
Behind the door, we found a small room with nothing at all inside it except a spiral staircase, leading up into darkness.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“The base of the tower,” Amy replied. “We installed the staircase ourselves, after the rest of City Hall was bricked up and closed off. Right now we’re standing in the old sub-basement. Right behind there …” She pointed to a dusty brick wall. “… is the rear wall of the cafeteria in our Haven, the one you and I were in together. It’s all flooded out now.”
Emily added, “This staircase goes up nine stories. Hope you’re ready for a climb.”
And a climb it was. I stopped counting steps at around two hundred. Amy went first, then Emily, then me, and then Steve. There were lights along the way, all battery-powered electric lanterns, hanging on hooks mounted into the iron railings that guarded the stairwell. By them, I could see the floor beneath us gradually fall away into blackness. At the same time, the roof overhead—always assuming there was one—stayed buried in shadow.
It was a weird effect, kind of dizzying.
So, if only to distract my mind from the climb, I asked my sister, “So, you’re … what? A Brain now?”
“We don’t use the old crew names,” she replied without breaking stride.
“But you’re a gadget girl,” I said. “Those magnets you invented rock!”
“Steve’s taught me a lot. After the first war ended, he went on to become a full professor of applied sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” I said.
“He’s a genius,” she replied.
“I know,” I told her, though there was something in her tone that surprised me. Something that maybe went a little further than simple “respect.”
“I call them Hugos,” she remarked suddenly.
“Huh?”
“My magnetic field generators. I call them Hugos.”
“Hugos?”
“After our step-dad.” Then she abruptly stopped and looked back at me. “Sorry. I forgot … all that happens later for you.”
My brain tried to process what she’d just told me, but all I got was the mental version of the “blue screen of death.” My mouth tried to make words, failed, and tried again. “Um, Hugo … like in Hugo Ramirez?”
She nodded.
“He’s our step-dad?”
“He was,” she replied. Then, turning away, she started climbing again.
For a few moments, I just stood there—while Steve waited patiently behind me.
Hugo Ramirez was an FBI special agent, and one of the few adults we were able to convince about the Corpse War. I knew he and my mom had become—friendly. But step-dad? The very idea made me a little sick to my stomach.
“Wait a minute!” I exclaimed, running up the metal stairs after her. “Whatdya mean, ‘he was?’”
“He’s gone,” she replied sadly. “Like so many others. But he was a terrific guy. To be honest, he’s the only dad I really remember. I was a lot younger than you when our father died. He was good to us both, and he was great for mom. They loved each other.”
More processing.
Then Emily said, “… and, when the war got bad, he helped us set up this new Haven.”
“This?” I asked. “This is where Haven is now?”
She nodded. “For the past fifteen months, we’ve occupied the whole of City Hall Tower.”
“What about the rest of the building?”
“Abandoned shortly after Last Halloween,” she replied. “We considered reclaiming all of it, but it’s just too hard to defend. So the chief had us seal off the lower eight floors.”
The mention of “chief” made me go quiet. It was thirty or forty steps later before I mustered the courage to ask the question that had been drilling into my brain since I’d seen the statue in the courtyard. “What exactly happened to Tom?”
Now it was Emily’s turn to go quiet. In fact, it was twenty more steps before I got an answer—and that answer came from Steve, who walked behind me. “He died about six months into the Second Corpse War. By then, of course, the Undertakers were history. Literally. They taught about us in schools. Then, after the Last Halloween, when everything went to hell, Tom … he was a U.S. senator by then … returned to Philly and tried to rally us back together. And he managed it, to a point.
“But by then the city was falling apart. Governments had collapsed everywhere. The police and all the city officials were dead. Tom, Jillian and their three teenage kids were holed up in their Society Hill home. A lot of people tried to do that back then. But the Corpses got in and …” He swallowed. “Tom was the only one who escaped.”
“Oh jeez …” I muttered.
Ahead of me, Emily nodded and took up the thread. “There was so much death back in those days. It was everywhere, all the time. Anyway, Tom radioed a few of us … the phones were all fried by then … and asked us to meet him at City Hall. But when we arrived, he wasn’t here. Instead, we found a sealed letter from him at the deserted guard’s station on the ninth floor, right at the base of the tower. But, try as we might, he couldn’t find him.
“Then … about a week later, we did. It turns out he’d died, along with hundreds of others, during a battle that had broken out on Market Street. There were maybe a dozen deaders around him. Tom had a shotgun. It looked like he’d been shooting Corpses in the head … you know, to destroy the brain and trap them in their hosts. But when he was overwhelmed, he … shot himself.”
It felt like a hand was squeezing my heart.
Future Steve added dismally, “He didn’t want the Corpses to … use … his body. So he made sure they couldn’t.”
Practical to the end. That was Tom.
But I’d just seen him, only a couple of hours ago, in Haven. My Haven.
Thirty years.
How had it all come to this?
I touched Emily’s shoulder—my sister’s shoulder, though I was only beginning to accept the fact that this woman and the little girl I’d left behind in Haven were one and the same. Steve and Amy were proving a little easier, probably because I hadn’t grown up with them—hadn’t helped change their diapers!
“Em?” I asked hesitantly.
“Yes, Will?”
“What about … Helene?”
Her heart-shaped face, already rendered pale by the uneven lamplight, turned almost ghostly white. With a long, measured sigh, she said, “The chief’ll want to tell you about that personally.”
“Is Helene the new chief?” I pressed.
She didn’t answer.
“What about Sharyn? At least tell me if she’s still alive.”
Emily nodded, but there was something behind that nod. Something I didn’t like.
“And our mom?”
At that, my sister stopped between steps and took my hand in hers. “Mom and Hugo died together, about a year ago. The Corpses killed them. It was right after we’d all moved into the new Haven. I’m … sorry.”
So was I, though a part of me weirdly dismissed the idea.
In fact, I found myself dismissing a lot of what I’d seen and learned since following Amy through the Rift. This future was just too—dark, too utterly different from anything I’d ever imagined. So empty. So bleak. Tom couldn’t be dead. My mother couldn’t be dead. The world couldn’t be dead!
It couldn’t.
Finally, we reached a landing at the top of the staircase.
“That’s a tough climb,” I remarked, breathing hard. The rest of them, I noticed with some annoyance, barely seen winded.
“We’re used to it,” Amy said.
Then she went up to a single heavy steel door that looked newer than the surrounding brickwork, and knocked. Instantly, a panel slid aside and a camera lens, like a large dark eye, peered out at her. No one said anything. No passwords were asked for or given. Instead, after a few seconds, the camera lens withdrew and the door clicked.
Amy pushed it open.
“Welcome to Haven, Will,” she said without even a trace of joy or pride.
Beyond the door was a bare room, roughly octagonal and about forty feet wide. The floor looked to be made mostly of concrete and cracked tile—a lot of cracked tile in the future—surrounded by walls of crumbling plaster intermixed with tall, recessed windows, all of which had long ago been bricked up. A narrow elevator shaft occupied the center of the room.
Bare bulbs that hung on wires from the high ceiling offered the only light.
By that light, I saw that there were people here. Dozens of them. Men, women and children in rags, all huddled in small circles. Many were sleeping on old cots or thread-worn blankets. Others ate from cold cans of beans or vegetables, some with bent spoons but most with their fingers. Their eyes were dull with exhaustion and fear. Most of them barely registered us as we stepped in among them.
“Who are they all?” I asked.
“Refugees,” Emily replied. “People we’ve rescued from around the city. There aren’t many survivors in Philly. But those we find we bring back here, give them food and a safe place to sleep. It’s all we can really do at this point.”
“This place,” I said, looking back at the elevator. “It’s … familiar.” Then it dawned on me. “This is the Tower Museum!”
She nodded.
“I’m going up to the lab,” Steve said. “I want to initiate Maankh production.”
Amy added, “And I want to check on my patients in the Infirmary. I’m worried we might have another round of typhoid to deal with.”
“Okay,” Emily said. “We’ll ride with you. I’m supposed to take Will straight up the chief.”
I’d ridden the tower elevator before, both as a kid and as an Undertaker. I’d always found the ride slow but interesting, as the old elevator clattered its way up through the empty interior of the huge, cast-iron pinnacle of the tower, past the backside of the four antique clocks that faced each compass point, counting off the minutes and tolling the hour. I wondered vaguely if they still did that.
Probably not.
To my surprise, the interior wasn’t empty anymore. Where once the tiny elevator had been an express from the ninth floor museum to the Observation Deck at the top, this one now made several stops along the way.
“The tower has thirteen floors,” Emily explained as the old elevator car clattered upward. “Back when we were kids, these floors were all empty. Some were even open to the elements. Now, we’ve sealed everything up, partly for warmth and partly for security.”
“Where are you getting the power?” I asked. “I mean, the whole city’s dark. So where’s the electricity for the lights, and for running this elevator, come from?”
It was Steve who answered. “Gas-powered generators. We have ten of them set up, and we’ve scavenged enough gasoline to keep them running, non-stop, for up to two weeks, if necessary. They’re all on the eighteenth floor.”
Emily added, “Each floor in Haven is dedicated to a specific purpose. The lowest floors, the ninth and tenth, are for the caring of refugees.
“And the eleventh,” Amy added, “is the Infirmary. My stop.”
“See you later,” I told her as the elevator clunked to a halt and Amy slid its latticed iron doors aside.
She looked back at me, blond and pretty as always. I expected her to give me that “angelic” smile of hers, the one she’d offered up so many times before when I’d been injured or desperate. But she didn’t. She simply nodded, stepped off the elevator, and disappeared from view.
“My lab’s on the thirteenth floor,” Professor Moscova said. “So I’m next.” Then he turned to me and put a hand on my shoulder. The gesture was very grown-up. I wasn’t sure I liked it. “I know none of this is what you expected, Will. But, for whatever it’s worth, there is a plan.”
“What plan?” I asked Emily, once Steve exited the elevator and it was just the two of us, brother and sister, heading up to meet the new chief. “What plan could possibly fix this?” After all, the world lay in ruins, Corpses stalked the streets, and mankind had become an endangered species.
She replied after a pause, “The chief will explain.”
We passed eight more floors, each one—as Emily had said—serving a different role: kitchen, armory, sleeping dormitories, storage rooms, mechanics, and so on.
The whole arrangement was very Haven.
We stopped at the second to last floor, number twenty-one, just below the tower’s Observation Deck. Being so close to the top, it was the smallest space yet, just a tapering octagonal area with workstations and computers set up around the central elevator. A number of grown-ups occupied them, manning what looked like old ham radios.
“We call this Command,” said a voice. “Capital ‘C’.”
I turned to my right, honestly expecting to find some older version of Helene standing there. I could almost picture her light brown hair and those amazing hazel eyes, perhaps now wrapped up in a face that had witnessed too much suffering.
It would have been bizarre. But, after everything else, I thought I could have handled it.
But this.
It was a man, not a woman. He stood maybe five foot ten and was totally bald. A scar ran from the top of his head all the way down one side of his face, vanishing into a bushy red beard that covered everything below his nose. As his piercing eyes studied me, I could almost feel their energy.
For my part, however, all I could do was stare—open-mouthed.
“Will,” Emily said, trying to be dramatic about it but coming off as simply weary. “Let me introduce the Chief of the Undertakers, William Karl Ritter.”