Read Online The Undertakers: End of the World by Ty Drago - Free Book Online

Billy’s hat. That admittedly stupid idea had finally been abandoned and major skyscrapers had quickly surrounded the tower, dwarfing it.
    Now, however, all of those skyscrapers had either been burned down or collapsed. So, once again, the “gentleman’s agreement” held sway.
    I supposed there was a little irony in that somewhere.
    A minute later, the elevator reached its final stop. As Amy pushed the door aside, I smelled fresh air; I hadn’t realized how rank it was in that dorm. Unfortunately, it quickly became obvious that the air wasn’t really all that fresh—that, carried on the wind, was a stench. A familiar one.
    The dead.
    Amy led me through the small iron enclosure housing the elevator and out onto the narrow circular walkway that surrounded it. It was sometime in the early afternoon. I must have slept for longer than I’d thought. Then I looked past the railing and all thoughts of time went right out of my head.
    I’d been up here before, both during the daytime and nighttime. But never when the only view was of a shattered city.
    From this height, the ruin of Philadelphia was like a knife to my gut. The toppled skyscrapers were bad enough. But the rest of the city, nearly everything from City Hall east to the Delaware River, had been burned to ashes. Independence Hall still stood—I could see its steeple rising in the distance. But the Liberty Bell’s glass pavilion was gone. So were the National Constitution Center and every square inch of the park called Independence Mall. Left behind was a wasteland of scorched concrete and debris that reached to the limits of my vision. On the other side of the tower, looking west, Love Park was still there, though the buildings around it were nothing but shattered husks.
    Yet that silly “LOVE” sculpture, in front of which I’d once taken a sniper’s bullet, had somehow survived. Something about the way its four colorful letters peeked up out of the rubble made me think the “oversight” had been deliberate.
    Corpses were sometimes known to have a nasty sense of humor.
    “Over here,” said a voice.
    Maxi Me stood at the railing, beckoning my way.
    I went, looking back at Amy, who had wordlessly returned to the elevator. Evidently, this was supposed to be another private audience.
    William said, “I’m sorry. I’d hoped we’d have some time to prepare you for this, but they showed up sooner than expected.”
    “What’s happening?” I asked him.
    In answer, he pointed over the railing. In my day, there’d been a wall of windows running all the way around the deck, so that you couldn’t really look straight down. Those had been removed, a fact made clear by the chill wind that sliced through my shirt and blew my hair around.
    I suddenly wondered what month it was. It had been June when I’d left my time.
    I filed the question away for letter and stepped up to the railing, peering over it.
    Deaders filled what was left of the streets, thousands of them. They surrounded the entire building, clamoring and snarling and clawing at the hundred-year-old masonry walls. More of them than I’d ever seen. More of them than I’d ever imagined.
    And I found myself thinking miserably, I’m sorry, Burgermeister.
    As I watched, a wave of them perhaps a hundred strong threw themselves at City Hall’s brick façade, finding handholds and climbing. A second wave followed, until deaders lined the outer walls, scaling the huge building the way an army of spiders might scale a stack of bricks.
    “Does this happen a lot?” I asked.
    “Two or three times a month,” he replied.
    “What do we do?”
    He glanced at me, perhaps amused at my ready use of the word “we.” Then he raised his radio to his lips and said, “Make it rain.”
    Looking down over the railing, I spotted at least a dozen of those small-wheeled sprinklers, like the kind that hang from middle school ceilings. Each was mounted onto the end of a pipe that jutted out from the tower walls. A few