Project Emergency Escape
The moans of the dead were all around us as Maxi Me and I exited the cast-iron elevator house and stepped out onto the narrow curving walkway of the tower’s Observation Deck. At least it wasn’t raining anymore, though the gray clouds completely covered a sky hung so low that it almost seemed as if the night had a ceiling.
William tested the wind. “Still out of the west,” he said. “Let’s head around to the other side.”
As we followed the walkway around the base of Billy Penn’s statue, I spared a second to peer over the railing. What I saw sent a razor slash of terror right through me.
Corpses. Thousands of them.
They covered City Hall almost like an animated coat of paint, scaling the walls and spilling into the courtyard in a mad dash to reach the tower. The saltwater sprayers were running, sort of, though the stream of water was a lot less than before. Amy’s handiwork.
Amy.
She still lay where I’d left her, looking small and broken. William knelt beside the body, touching her face with trembling hands. When he looked back at me, there was a moment of recrimination in his eyes. But then his expression softened.
I heard him whisper. “Almost done.”
Then he stood, stepped over the dead woman and went straight to the tarp-covered something that was mounted a few feet along the curved railing.
Working the knots that held the canvas in place, he pulled the tarp free.
Underneath it was a gun.
A big gun.
“What’s that?” I asked, coming forward. Every fiber of my being wanted to avoid stepping around the woman I’d killed, but I did it anyway. My being’s fibers are used to being ignored.
“A saltwater cannon,” the older me replied. “I had Alex install it a couple of months ago, kind of as a last ditch defensive backup. It works on a different system than the sprinklers, so Amy’s sabotage shouldn’t have affected it. It pumps water straight up from the river and through a salt reservoir. Its range isn’t great, but it should buy us the time we need to get you ready to go.”
Around us, the moans of the dead got louder. The Corpses were coming, climbing the tower on all sides.
Even so, I took a moment to say, “That was a good speech downstairs.”
He looked at me. “Was it?”
“Yeah,” I said, doing my best to muster a smile. “Made me proud. Do you think it’s possible to be proud of yourself … when the ‘yourself’ you’re proud of isn’t exactly … well … you?”
It may have been the stupidest sentence my brain ever conjured up.
But, to my surprise, he nodded as if he understood completely. “Yes,” he replied without a moment’s hesitation. “Trust me, it is.” Then, before I could work out what he meant by that, he added, “Duck.”
I ducked.
William pointed the water cannon over my head and fired a laser-like stream at the curved railing behind me. I turned in time to see two deaders, the first of many, get blasted off the Observation Deck’s edge, their bodies disappearing into darkness.
Maxi Me whirled the gun around and fired again, this time down along the tower’s outer wall. I peered over the railing and saw a half-dozen Corpses tumble away, arms and legs akimbo. Almost immediately, more replaced them.
I wondered, with the Queen iced, who exactly was in charge down there. Had some new Malum leader caste taken command?
Then I decided it didn’t matter.
Not one bit.
I took the bundle—Project Emergency Escape—from over my shoulder and opened the flap at one end. Inside were shoulder straps and some kind of canvas harness that was meant to fit under my legs and around my waist. Just seeing them made my stomach lurch, because I knew what they were for.
Ever hear of BASE jumping?
It stands for Building Arial Span Earth, and it’s a kind of skydiving, only instead of jumping out of an airplane, you jump off something high, like a rooftop, or a cell tower, or a bridge, or a cliff—hence the name. Back in my time, it was an extreme sport, illegal in most places. But people still did it. If it’s crazy, there are always people who are willing to risk their lives to find out how crazy.
Personally, I don’t get that. Yeah, I take risks, plenty of them. But I do it because I have to—because, if I don’t, then friends die. I’m a soldier, and taking chances pretty much goes with the territory.
But I don’t play with my life.
Which was why the absolute last thing I wanted to do was strap on this “prototype” and jump off the tower and out into the Philadelphia night. In fact, every gray cell in my brain demanded that I put this bundle down and run away from it, preferably screaming.
Instead, sweat pouring from my face and hands, I climbed into the harness, found the buckles, and cinched them tight, just as Steve’s V-blog had said to do.
Meanwhile, four Corpses climbed over the railing behind me and, without needing to swap words, I dropped again and let Maxi Me nail them with the water cannon. Three more peeked over the opposite railing, and he pivoted the weapon and tagged them too.
“How much ammo you got?” I asked him, still fiddling with the straps.
“Plenty,” he replied. But I could see from his expression that he was worried. We were on the east side of an Observation Deck that circled the elevator house at the top of the tower. We couldn’t see more than maybe a third of the floor space up here, which meant that the dead might have already reached the top on the far side of the deck and we wouldn’t even know it.
Sooner, rather than later, they’d get organized and attack from both directions, overwhelming the cannon—and us.
At that moment, we heard the faint clattering sound of the elevator returning to the Observation Deck. This was followed a few seconds later by a series of muffled explosions coming from deeper inside the building.
Maxi Me and I exchanged a look. We both knew what that sound meant. Emily had just set off the bombs in the shaft, trapping the elevator—and us—on the top floor.
“You need to go now,” he said.
“I know,” I replied. Then I told him something that I’ve rarely admitted to anyone. “I’m scared.”
He nodded. “Me, too.”
“Why us?” I asked him. “Why does it always seem to come down to us?”
“I ask myself that every day … and I still don’t know.” Then, after a couple of heartbeats, he added, “Because it has to be somebody, I guess.”
“I guess. Mind if I ask you a stupid, pointless question?”
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t,” he replied.
“What day is it?”
He frowned and studied me. “It’s Thursday.”
“No. I mean the date.”
Understanding dawned. “Oh! No one told you? It’s October 31st. Happy Halloween.”
“Coincidence?”
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Nope.”
Then I climbed up onto the railing, took a deep breath, and threw one leg over it. I looked down and saw the faces of the dead who clung to the tower’s countless nooks and crannies. Thousands of pairs of milky eyes blazed up at me. Glaring. Hungry. Savage.
“The wind’s going to try to blow you east,” William said. “Let it. In the meantime, I’ll keep them busy so that they don’t notice you. Stay as high as you can for as long as you can. You need to find a building, any building, so long as it has a smooth vertical wall and has at least fifty feet of open space around it. That may not be easy. You’ve seen what this city looks like.”
I nodded. Philly was a mess. Most of the buildings weren’t even standing anymore.
“All this death,” I said miserably. “Did you know it would be like this? Did you know it when you started Project Reboot?”
It took him a few seconds to answer. “You mean did I know we’d all have to die to make it happen?” he replied. “Yes, I think I did. If the Burgermeister’s death taught me anything, it’s this: Victory is a commodity. It has a price. Always. I’m guessing you know that as well as I do.”
And I did.
“I’ll get it done,” I promised him with more confidence than I felt.
“I know you will,” he replied.
Then I readied myself, threw my other leg over the railing, and leaned forward, so that my hands gripped the top rail with my feet wedged against its base. The world in front of me, burnt and blasted and dark, looked imposingly big, the space beneath me, impossibly deep. If Steve’s invention didn’t work, then at least I’d die in the fall before the Corpses got me.
My mouth felt desert dry.
“Will!” the man behind me called.
Breathing hard, my heart hammering in my chest, I glanced over my shoulder at him. Sweat shone on his face in the lamplight, and on the top of his pale, barren head. His cheeks looked almost as red as his beard.
He said, grinning, “It was a pleasure to meet me.”
And, despite everything—and, trust me, there was a lot of everything—I somehow managed to grin back. “It was a pleasure to meet me, too.”
I didn’t count to three. Counting to three, I’ve found, never helps.
Instead, I turned away from him and jumped, kicking off from the base of the railing to put as much distance between myself and the tower wall as possible. That had been another of Steve’s instructions.
As I began to fall, my heart no longer hammering but actively trying to crawl up my throat and get the heck out of Dodge, I spread my arms, yet another instruction. For the first half-second, nothing happened and I thought bitterly, Yep. Steve Moscova and his cockamamie inventions finally managed to kill me.
But then in the next half second the bundle strapped across my shoulders came to life. Its motion sensors reacted to my rapid descent, confirmed that I was far enough away from the tower wall, and deployed. Twin parachutes opened. Both were made of lightweight “rip-stop” black nylon, with cords that anchored them to my shoulders and wrists.
Each one reached five feet to either side of me, looking almost like bat wings.
Part parachute. Part glider.
My descent stopped. An instant later, the wind grabbed hold of me, and I was pushed and lifted. The whole thing felt nauseating. My feet dangled beneath me, swinging back and forth with each new gust of air until I managed to tuck them up as best I could.
Below, just as I cleared the tower, several of the nearest deaders made crazy lunges for me. Most missed by a good margin and tumbled down hundreds of feet onto their buds’ heads. But one or two almost managed to grab one of my sneakers.
Then a stream of saltwater nailed each of them, and they followed the rest.
I wished I could have offered Maxi Me a wave, or at least looked back at him one final time. But it wasn’t in the cards. With these “wings” holding my arms fully extended away from my body, I could barely turn my head.
Most of the deaders ignored me soaring silently above them. They were too busy trying to scale City Hall. And those few who did notice my flight just seemed to shrug it off, probably guessing that the real prizes were still in the building and that I could be hunted down later.
I’d gotten away.
Now all I had to do was get far enough away, land without breaking my neck, and then—well—time travel.
No problem.
Jeez.
As one block after another passed below me, I scanned the surrounding city. Rubble choked the streets. The larger buildings had mostly collapsed, crushing the smaller ones, creating an unbroken landscape of ruin as far as the eye could see. William had been right. Finding a vertical wall with at least fifty feet of open space around it was going to be tough.
Below me, the ground rose closer. I was just passing 11th Street. For every yard of forward advancement, I was losing a foot of altitude. Five hundred feet became four hundred. Then three hundred.
10th. 9th. 8th.
Two hundred.
One hundred.
I scoured the surrounding neighborhood with desperate eyes. Nothing moved. The Corpses, it seemed, were all attacking City Hall, leaving this part of the city empty and forgotten. That should have been good news, except that there was nothing left standing, no buildings or even parts of buildings that looked big enough or open enough to work with the Rift Projector.
My heart sank.
Then I looked ahead and to my left.
Independence Hall.
It stood on Chestnut Street, the only intact structure in sight. Two stories tall, and with the blasted, empty expanse of the park across the street from it. Plenty of height. Plenty of room.
It could work.
But would it be guarded? Or was the whole of the dead Queen’s army up at City Hall?
I supposed I’d have to find out. There didn’t seem to be another option.
I flew over 7th Street, now just fifty feet above the ground. Below me, I could see rats scurrying along the fractured gutters.
6th Street. The piles of bodies that the Corpse Eater had left behind lay just ahead. In fact, if I wasn’t careful, I was going to land right in the middle of them.
I did.
Suddenly, it seemed as if the roadway was coming up at me fast—very fast. My knees were already bent when my sneakered feet hit the ground. My chutes, still catching air, pushed past me, and sent me crashing down face first. I’d have smashed my nose to pulp on the street if I hadn’t landed instead atop the cold body of a decapitated deader.
Of course, he couldn’t move. And I fleetingly wondered if the Malum Self was still in there, or if it had Transferred to a fresh host before the attack had begun.
Something else that didn’t matter.
I climbed unsteadily to my feet.
Then, as Steve had instructed via V-blog, I found the chute-release levers and pulled hard. The entire contraption fell away from me, caught the wind, and immediately took to the air again, continuing east. It looked almost like a living thing, some bizarre black bird, as it soared off into the night.
Thanks, Steve. I’m alive!
Then I turned and looked back the way I’d come. In the distance, standing like a mountain against the gray, starless sky, stood City Hall. At its pinnacle, just below the silhouette of Billy Penn’s statue, I spotted the light of William Ritter’s lantern. It was just a pinprick. But it reminded me that there was a man up there, a man who was fighting a battle he couldn’t win, a man who—
The light winked out.
For a long moment, I just stood there, surrounded by the fallen dead.
I heard nothing except the wind and the distant moan and cries of Corpses as they poured into Haven, the last Haven.
And I knew, down to the very bottom of my soul, that I was alone.