Queen of the Dead Read Online Free PDF

them would be a twelve-foot drop into an alley or, if I was lucky, a fire escape.
    I was lucky.
    From downstairs came a heavy crash. Evidently, the Corpse had recovered. He’d be searching the house for me, not skipping a room. Time to be a little quieter.
    On tiptoe, I crossed the bedroom’s hard wooden floor to the windows and pulled one of them open. It was old and creaky, but at least it wasn’t painted shut. Then, glancing back toward the hallway door, I listened furiously.
    Nothing. No footfalls. He was being quiet down there, probably hoping to surprise me.
    Swallowing, I climbed out onto the fire escape. A quick look up showed that there was no roof access. A quick look down revealed the expected alley. A retractable ladder hung at the far end of the iron scaffold. Before I went to it, however, I took a moment to peer—one last time—back into the darkened house.
    Dead Cop was there.
    I mean right there —grinning at me.
    â€œHello. Boy.”

Chapter 5
Good Will Hunted
    Corpses were like that, lumbering one minute and cat quick the next. How this wormbag had come up the stairs and into the bedroom so fast and quiet was a puzzle I had no time to solve. Before I could react, before the chill that ran down my spine even had time to freeze my backside solid, he bent at the waist and lunged his upper body through the open window, his big purple-gray hands like claws.
    I think maybe I screamed. To this day, I’m not sure.
    I recoiled, catching myself just before I upended over the fire escape railing and went tumbling down to the alley floor the hard way. The Deader was all over me in a heartbeat, his fingers smearing stinking fluid all over the front of my coat as they scrambled their way up toward my neck.
    Undertaker training kicked in. Rather than retreating, I leaned forward over his shoulders and slammed the window closed, pinning him at the waist. He felt nothing, of course, but the pressure held him in place, and the angle kept his rotting paws away from my throat. Better still, the move earned me a few spare seconds—long enough to raise the baton.
    I brought it down with all my strength, slamming it across the side of the Corpse’s head. He grunted. Then he bared his blackened teeth and surged forward again. I hit him a second time. Then a third. And all the while, I was making noises—either warrior cries or terrified sobs—again, I’m not sure. My mind felt fogged over by fear, desperation, and more than a little rage.
    I hated these things.
    With the fourth hit, I thought I heard something—like a dull crack. Had I broken the Corpse’s neck? If so, he’d go limp immediately.
    He did, his heavy arms flopping to the latticed floor of the fire escape. His kicking feet, still inside the bedroom, dropped like twin bags of sand.
    Panting and sweating despite the winter’s cold, I stepped back. My eyes felt as wide as dinner plates as I stared at him, still clutching the baton, ready to use it again if I had to.
    I spared a moment to cross my eyes and take a quick peek at Dead Cop’s Mask. It was a Seer’s trick, something that most Undertakers picked up pretty fast. If you held your eyes a certain way, you could sort of see a Corpse the way the rest of the world—the adult world—saw him.
    Not surprisingly, this Deader’s illusion was of a pretty big guy, with dark skin and dark hair. He hung motionless, pinned by the window sash, his Mask hovering almost ghostlike over his true worm-food body. I switched off this trick of vision almost at once, partly because it tended to give me a headache and partly because doing it was a little depressing. It seemed to drive home—at least for me—just how alone the Undertakers were in this war.
    This dude wasn’t dead, of course. You couldn’t kill a Corpse with a gun or a knife, much less a lead baton. Stakes through the heart were useless. So were silver bullets, sunlight,