Faye found Heinrich Koenig in the morgue. The room was empty of live people except for him, sitting the wrong way on a chair with his arms folded on the backrest, though there were plenty of dead people lying around. She was a little taken back by the number of shapes under white sheets.
Heinrich had heard the boots hit the floor when she'd Traveled in. He turned to regard her. The young man appeared very tired, with dark circles under his eyes. 'Hello, Faye.'
'Everybody else is getting patched up… I…' She hadn't wanted to be alone with a bunch of strangers, so she'd found the man who'd shot her in the heart instead, because at least she kind of knew him, but saying that out loud seemed silly. 'Whatdoing?' she blurted.
Heinrich turned back to the sheet-covered body. Long dark hair hung loose from one end. 'One last vigil, I suppose… I promised Sullivan I would see to her.' He gestured at Delilah. 'I know that there are more pressing matters, but there is something I must do.'
Faye was confused. 'Like what? We've got to start looking for Jane, so we don't really have time for a funeral or nothing.' The arrangements for Grandpa's funeral had seemed to take forever, and that was even after he'd been burned to near nothing with the haystack.
He gave a sad little shake of his head. 'Nothing like that. We must see to the living first, though I'm afraid that it is too late for Jane. No, afterward, I will dig Delilah's grave myself. I have much practice at digging graves.'
She leaned on a big porcelain sink and waited for him to continue. There was a rusty drain hole in the floor and the idea of what it was for made her uncomfortable. Heinrich rubbed one hand over his face and she saw that he had his Luger sitting in his lap. 'Why the gun?'
'Because sometimes when a Lazarus creates undead the effect can linger for awhile. Sometimes if the Active is strong enough, it can last for hours, and anyone who dies in that place could have their spirit trapped… When I followed the orderlies down here with her body, I thought that I felt a tingle of magic.'
'You think Delilah could be a… zombie?' she asked, incredulous.
He shrugged. 'Probably not, but if she is, I will deal with it on my own and spare her dignity. It is a terrible fate, and one that I would never willingly have fall on another. I have known of people waking up as much as twenty-four hours after their death, and they do not even realize it.'
He sure does know a lot about zombies. 'I heard that you grew up in Dead City.'
The silence was long and uncomfortable. A sink was dripping. 'I do not wish to speak of it…' he said.
'Okay,' Faye answered, not really knowing what else to say. 'Would you mind if I helped you… keep watch?'
Heinrich didn't answer then. Seconds passed into minutes and he had a faraway look in his eyes. Faye grew bored, and started counting the drips coming from the faucet, but Lance and Francis were busy, Mr. Browning was medicated asleep, and Mr. Rawls had had to leave to place a telephone call.
'It wasn't always Dead City. It used to be called Berlin,' he said finally, sighed, and then it was like a ditch had broken and memories spilled out. 'It seemed like a magical place to a young boy. My family lived on the outskirts. Father fixed pianos, and he would often bring me along with him into the city. Many of the pianos were in old churches and schools, and while he worked, I would play. I would climb the towers, find the crawl spaces in the walls. Those places became my kingdom, and I was the valiant knight that defended them. There were so many people, always moving about, and then the war came, and all of the men went to fight, including my father.'
'In the Great War?' she asked.
'Ja. We did not know to call it that then. To a little boy, I only knew that I missed my papa very much, and there was not so much happiness anymore. Many of the other boys received letters, saying that their fathers had died, but I knew that mine would come home. Food was scarce, and we were often hungry. It got worse, but I got older. I took care of my family, even if it meant stealing the food we ate. Finally so many of our soldiers had died that the government could not keep up with the letters, and all of us wondered if the war would ever end.'
'But it did end…' Faye said. She was no student of history, but she listened to the radio. Everyone knew the brave Allies had beat the dastardly Kaiser.
'Ah, yes, it ended in a flash of light. When I woke up, my home, my town, was rubble. Berlin was ruined, all of the old places crumbled, and in the center was nothing but a smoking hole. I spent days searching for my family, but they were all dead.'
'I'm sorry,' she said.
He chuckled. 'Do not be sorry. They were the lucky ones. Were you ever taught in school what happened next?'
'I never went to school.'
'Good, you're not missing anything… History is mostly lies. The Kaiser had grown so desperate that he had used his wizards to keep his soldiers alive. As they were killed, he had their spirits chained to their bodies, so that they could continue to defend the Fatherland. When the war was over, there were still nearly a million of these poor wretches. They could not die, but the process of this false resurrection had left most of them too dangerous to send back to their homes. The treaty left us bankrupt and unable to care for them. But the Kaiser had a perfect solution. He had a dead city, so why not fill it with his dead subjects? A great wall was raised around the ruins, and the undead were herded inside.'
'What about the alive people, like you?'
'The survivors were supposed to rebuild. It was our duty. We were to be caretakers for these poor soldiers. When the wall went up, there were several thousand of us… at first.'
Faye was aghast. 'That's terrible. They just left you?'
Heinrich fingered the Luger. 'Do you know what happens to the untotten? The undead? The pain of death is upon them still. They never heal from the wounds that sent them there. The pain never lessens. It only grows as does their hunger. Most of them keep their wits, for a time, but soon it becomes too much to bear. They lash out in a rage at anything available, including each other… We were caretakers at first, then we were merely… food.'
She covered her mouth, but a little yelp slipped out anyway.
'Koenig is not my real name. It means King. That's what they called me after a while, because I was the last man alive in Dead City. I was the King of the Living. I survived by my Power, by my cunning, by my stealth. The old places where I'd hid and played as a child became my sanctuaries. I spent my days in the walls, in the tunnels, hunting for food, killing the undead that tried to hurt me and my friends. Then after several years, I couldn't take it anymore, and I Faded through the Berlin Wall and never looked back. I was fifteen years old.'
And I thought that I'd had it rough… An Oklahoma shack might as well have been Francis's mansion in comparison. Faye reached over and touched Heinrich gently on the shoulder. 'Why'd you stay so long?'
He watched Delilah's sheet for movement, but there was nothing moving there except bad dreams. 'Because not all of them were mad. Many of the dead remained true to who they were in life. My family never got a letter from the front, but… he did come home, most of him. Together, we found a working piano in an old school. He played it every day. The sound gave the other sane ones hope. Finally, I made him stop, because the sound attracted the hungered. After that… he had nothing to survive for… but I stayed with papa until the end.'
'Son of a bitch…' Harkeness said, peering through the corner of the window into the hospital room. 'What's he doing here?'
If he links us to Pershing's death, it could ruin everything.
The Pale Horse watched Cornelius Stuyvesant as he followed his grandson, still shouting useless orders at his functionaries. He had come as soon as he had heard Isaiah's panicked voice inside his head.
Stuyvesant brought a fast blimp. Francis intends to go after the Tokugawa with it. It must not be delayed.
'I will not let him ruin everything,' he muttered under his breath. Harkeness awoke his Power. To him it was a dark, malevolent cloud that swam in his lungs. He could still feel the connection to Stuyvesant, lips under poison fingertips, the beating of his heart, the electrical firings of his brain, the pumping of blood. They were inevitably connected by death magic. He'd never thought that he would need to do this to the pathetic old man, but they could not afford the interruption. Not now. The Healer might slow him, but nobody could stop the full focus of his Power at this range. 'Reap the whirlwind, you bloated fool.'
Dan Garrett moaned as the hole in his arm hissed and steamed. Visible bone was coated by rolling muscle and sprouting veins, then finally by bright pink skin. The Healer's hands were glowing as he took them away. He paused to wipe his sweating brow on his shirt. 'Next?'
