All That Lives Must Die

They went over a hill, and there were lawns and fields and a clear river running alongside them. Many mausoleums here had their walls torn down, and the stones used for barbecues and playgrounds and handball courts. People tossed Frisbees and ran and laughed and ate and drank and looked like they were having the time of their lives.

Fiona shuddered. But that wasn’t right: no one here was having the “time of their lives”. . because they were all dead.

The honored dead, Uncle Kino had called them, resting here before they went somewhere else. “The dead are restless,” he’d said. “No one living, not even I, understands what moves them.”

The van’s rear wheels slipped on a patch of grass. Dallas leaned over the steering wheel, concentrating.

Fiona checked her seat belt. “What’s the rush? We want to get there in one piece, right?”

“Exactly why we need speed,” Dallas said.

They slid around a curve. The van bounced, rocked, almost tipping.

“Kino has alarms that go off when anything alive enters his domain,” Dallas said. “His guards will investigate, and then they’ll fink us out.”

She swerved around a tree growing in the middle of the road. The side mirror hit and shattered.

“Why should Kino care who comes here?” Eliot asked, hanging on with both hands to a ceiling strap.

“He protects Elysium Fields,” Dallas replied. “Infernals, Outsiders, and Older Things always try and muck up the natural order. They collect souls.”

Eliot looked at Fiona and shrugged.

Jeremy, though, nodded. He apparently had more experience with the dead, having spent centuries in the Valley of the New Year in Purgatory.

“I can get you to the edge of the Borderlands,” Dallas said. “If I cross that, then Kino himself will notice and personally come. That would put an end to everyone’s trip.”

Fiona remembered how mean her Uncle Kino was. Worse even than Mr. Ma.

“So how are we supposed to find the gate?” Fiona asked. “You said you’d take us there.”

“I said ‘I’d get you there.’ There’s a big difference.”

The road’s paving stones became a broken jumble. The trees looked dry and sickly and the grass was dead. Wind buffeted the unaerodynamic van. Iron gray clouds covered the sky.

“We’re almost there.” Dallas looked right and left, squinting.

“What are we looking for?” Eliot asked.

“Your guide. Someone dead always shows up for a true hero. They never get top billing in the stories, but Dante had Virgil, and Ulysses had Old One-Eye Farius who figured everything out for him.”

“But we don’t know anyone like that who’d help us,” Fiona told her. “I mean, no one that’s dead.”

Dallas perked up in her seat. “Then who’s that?”

She pointed to a clump of twisted trees and the person-shaped shadow standing there. It stepped out and waved at Dallas’s van.

69 BETRAYAL AT THE GATES OF PERDITION

Fiona squinted. She couldn’t see who this “spirit guide” was supposed to be.

Aunt Dallas eased the van to a halt and flicked on the headlights.

The person waiting outside was a man.

Robert jumped up, banging his head on the roof, but that didn’t slow him as he opened the side door, jumped out, and ran to the man.

It was Marcus Welmann-the middle-aged man who’d come to their old Del Sombra apartment on their fifteenth birthdays-the man who had taught Robert to be a League Driver-and the person who’d been killed by their mother. He’d also been nice enough to help them escape the Borderlands the first time they came here.

Mr. Welmann opened his arms and embraced Robert.

The two stayed like that as Fiona and the others climbed out of the van, and then Mr. Welmann released Robert and looked into his eyes.

Tears streaked Robert’s cheeks, something Fiona thought she’d never see. She wanted to look away; it was such an intensely personal moment, but Robert then turned to face them, smiling (and quickly wiping away any traces of those tears).

Mr. Welmann wore the same AC/DC T-shirt, camouflage pants, and sneakers they’d last seen him in. Did the dead ever change clothes?

“Marcus says he can get us to the Gates of Perdition,” Robert told them. “Open the thing, even, if we want.”

“Mr. Welmann,” Fiona said with a nod of greeting. “How’d you know we were coming?”

“Hi, kids.” Mr. Welmann bowed toward Dallas, and he added, “M’Lady.” He cleared his throat and straightened his shirt. “Remember how I said last time the dead are restless and get an itch to move on? Well, I got that feeling right after we parted ways.”

Robert shot Fiona an accusatory glance that could have melted cast iron.

She’d never told Robert about Uncle Kino’s kidnapping them and bringing them here, or about Mr. Welmann. But what was she supposed to say? Oh, Robert-by the way, Eliot and I were in the Land of the Dead yesterday and we bumped into your old teacher, the one our mother killed. That would’ve gone over well.

But Mr. Welmann had also asked her to pass along a warning to Robert: that whatever he was doing at Paxington, he was in over his head. That he should just ride away.

Between the relief at surviving that trip to the Borderlands, homework, and the dramas of gym class, though, it’d slipped her mind (Eliot’s too apparently).

That, and she and Robert hadn’t exactly been speaking to each other all year.

How had they ended up so far apart? What had started as her trying to protect him from the League by putting a little distance between them. . had become a huge rift. She wasn’t sure if they were even friends at this point.

“I felt pulled here.” Mr. Welmann looked toward the darkening skies farther into the Borderlands. “It’s not exactly the direction I had thought I’d be going.” He shrugged. “But I figured it couldn’t hurt too much to take a look-see.”

He clapped Robert on the shoulder. “When you guys showed up, I knew it was right. Like fate or something?” His gaze drifted to Dallas, and he raised an eyebrow.

Dallas shook her head. “I wouldn’t say that exactly. Hang on a sec.” She rummaged under the driver’s seat and got a purple day pack with a stenciled peace sign. She tossed it to Mr. Welmann. “A few things I’d packed for emergencies: granola bars, water, first aid kit-stuff like that.”

Mr. Welmann hefted the tiny pack (which seemed heavy). “Thanks.”

It was odd that Mr. Welmann got a “feeling” and came here just when they needed him. Coincidence? Aunt Dallas trusted him. . but Fiona didn’t know.

Dallas looked back to Elysium Fields and cocked her head. “If you’re going to do this, you better move. I hear him coming.”

“Kino,” Mr. Welmann muttered. “Not someone to tangle with.”

Fiona strained to hear, but heard only the wind.

“Go-” Dallas made little shooing motions. “I’ll drive around and leave false tracks for that old sourpuss.”

“Oh, Eliot, wait.” Dallas leaned close to him and whispered. Eliot nodded, and then she kissed him on the forehead.

“This way,” Mr. Welmann said, hefting the pack over his shoulder. “I know a shortcut.” He bowed once more to Dallas (she curtsied back this time) and then he marched toward a forest of dead trees.

Robert followed, and so did Eliot.

Fiona looked back to Dallas for some encouragement or parting words of wisdom, but her aunt’s attention