dark. Around it, however, the more modern skyscrapers were gone . The glass and steel Comcast Building, the tallest in Philly, had been completely demolished. Nothing remained at all. Beside it, Liberty One, with its pointed spire, had apparently collapsed against its sister building, Liberty Two. Both had since fallen into total ruin, now little more than a single, gigantic, co-mingled superstructure, kind of like a skeletal Godzilla.
Even the nearby South Street Bridge, which connected University City to downtown Philly, was missing. It now continued barely halfway across the river before ending at a jagged, uneven knot of abandoned cars and broken concrete.
I looked back at the others. They stood on the curb, watching me.
“What happened?” I demanded.
“You need to be quiet,” my sister begged.
But there was no a chance of that, not right now. “Tell me what happened !”
“The Corpses happened,” Steve said.
“But we beat them!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, you did.”
“Dave died to beat them!”
“Yes,” Emily said.
“We won the war!”
She came up and took my hand. Her fingers felt cold, bloodless. “Yes, big brother. You did win the war. But—”
I looked into her face. My sister’s face. Our mother’s face. It struck me that she was beautiful. Little Em had grown up beautiful. “But … what ?” I asked.
“They came back,” she said, and the misery on that beautiful face was like the toll of a funeral bell. “Two years ago, the Corpses came back.”
Chapter 5
The Second War
We found Amy.
Steve, Emily and I had been making our way along 34th Street, moving from shadow to shadow, trying to reach the edge of the river. That, Emily explained, was the pre-arranged rendezvous point, if things at CHOP ever went south and their team got separated.
Well, tonight, things had gone very south.
And the dead were everywhere.
Dozens of them prowled the streets, moving in and out amidst the ruins of University City, searching every alley and abandoned building. Emily and Steve, I noted to my great relief, proved better at evading them than fighting them. They both knew when to move and when not to move, when to melt into the current well of shadows and when to advance to the next.
They didn’t say anything and I didn’t ask any questions, but simply followed along, ready to shout an alarm if we were spotted.
We weren’t.
At least not until Steve noticed Amy. The blond woman was gesturing cautiously to us from the top of a deserted on-ramp to the Schuylkill Expressway, which ran alongside the river. She’d picked her moment perfectly, waiting until any nearby Corpses had moved off.
As the three of us hurried over, Emily gave the other woman a hasty hug. “We thought maybe we’d lost you!”
“You almost did,” Amy replied. She looked frightened, but she was grinning. “But here I am, and I’ve got the boat ready.”
“Good,” Steve said. “Let’s go.”
The boat turned out to be an old fiberglass canoe, about twelve feet long and with bench seats for six. As we pushed off from the riverbank, Amy paddled at the front while Emily took the rear. Steve and I sat in the middle. Above us, Corpse flashlights cut the night all along the broken South Street Bridge and surrounding neighborhood.
It may seem strange to imagine legions of the dead conducting a careful, deliberate search using flashlights. But it’s important to understand that these weren’t “zombies,” the slow, stupid creations of George Romero fame. These were Corpses, alien invaders occupying stolen cadavers. And they were fast, smart, and organized.
We stayed quiet as the women paddled, taking us upstream. Fortunately the canoe had been painted black and, with the moon having disappeared behind a thick bank of clouds, we were all but invisible in this strange and lightless city.
As we made our way north along the Schuylkill River, my mind reeled.
A few hours ago—thirty years ago—my best friend