“Kendra,” I say, “what’s happening?”
“It appears to be moving between sigils,” she says, voice sinking with hopelessness. “It must have been down here long enough that it has learned how to navigate around them.”
“Everyone get ready,” says Ian, dropping his bag and scrambling to find his machete. “We don’t know how tough this thing might be. They might—”
The zombie takes a quick lunging step toward us and snaps out a long, bony arm, which sends us all stepping back with a cry. For a second, its grasp looks like it has just barely missed us, and then I see the finger hooked in Kendra’s backpack strap.
Kendra yelps as the bony long-dead corpse yanks her toward it, doing its best to stay carefully standing between the magical symbols none of us can see. Her hand flies to her helmet, which is about to fall off, and by accident her headlamp clicks back on, filling my goggles with blinding light. As I yank them off, a cry leaves my throat, but it’s drowned out by the raspy hiss of the cave zombie, which recoils from the light, acrobatically lurching away from us and back toward the wall.
Suddenly, it dawns on me—its lack of eyes, its twisted body. This thing has lived in darkness for years. It must find its way around using vibration, smell, or sound. And it must not like direct light.
So let’s overexpose this sucker.
When I switch my headlamp on, I’m staring directly into the shadow where its head should be. My aim is good, and my beam strikes the thing in the face, sending the creature recoiling with another high, nails-on-chalkboard hiss.
“Aha!” shouts Kendra, her voice deafening as it bounces around the quiet, smooth stone of the cave. She points her lamp directly at the zombie. Ian follows, and the three of us slowly advance, watching its nearly translucent skin throb beneath the glare. By the time it’s back at the crevice that it sprouted from, all three of us have our lights aimed directly at its back, framing it like a prison escapee.
Hands clawing at the crack in the wall, the undead creature seizes up, going into a round of quick, twitching convulsions before it tumbles to the cave floor.
In the pool of light at our feet, the strange insectlike corpse curls up. Its legs and arms twist in close to its chest with snaps, crackles, pops. Its mouth splits into a silent, lipless scream, and it tucks its head down, as if protecting the eyes it no longer has. Finally, entirely balled up like one of those Mexican mummies, the cave zombie is barely bigger than, say, a suitcase. We could probably fit it in one of our backpacks.
The cave, once filled with the shuffling of feet, popping of bones, and shouting of terrified Gravediggers, returns to its pitch-black silence, heavy with tension. The blade of Ian’s machete appears in the light and softly taps the zombie. When nothing happens, we all exhale at once.
“I guess light kills them,” says Ian. “Maybe they’re just not used to it.” He pauses and gulps audibly. “Shoot, guys, what . . . what do we think happened to this thing?”
“Their physiology must have changed due to its extended subterranean existence,” says Kendra. “It’s common—animals lose their eyes over generations from living in total darkness for too long. And—my word, look.” She points to the zombie’s hands and feet, gnarled near its stomach. When I see them, panic and confusion shoot through me—its fingers and toes have some kind of claws at the end, white and pointed . . .
Oh. Oh, no.
Bones. The zombie has worn away the skin at the tips of its fingers and toes, leaving sharpened ends of bone to poke through and form needlelike claws.
“They must utilize those for climbing along the walls the way this one did,” mumbles Kendra. “And look. Notice the prominent spinal column. Remember, Danny determined that the zombies keep their ‘brains’ in their backbones.”
“This one must have gotten very smart,” I mumble, kneeling down next to the withered thing and poking the creature’s spine. The ridges on its back are white, spongy looking, and as I poke them I realize that they’re not made of bone as well. “I think these growths are fungus. Like those flat mushrooms that grow out of trees.”
“Shelf fungus,” confirms Kendra. “It’s actually growing shelf fungus out of its spine. This is incredible.”
“Watch it, dude,” says Ian. “Maybe I should get in with the machete—”
“I think it’s dead,” I mumble. “For good.” Hatred and disgust for the cave zombie radiate off my friends in waves, but something about its willowy body and blank, skull-like face makes it seem sad, pathetic, to me. As I get closer, my eyes find blue veins webbing through its skin and take in the deep indent beneath its rib cage. Is this what happens when zombies have nothing to eat—they just wither away? Imagine starving, every day, for hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s enough to make you climb the walls.
Which this thing learned how to do.
My eyes drift up to the crack in the cave wall where the zombie emerged. It’s a small crevice, but might be enough for us to crawl through. Switching from my headlamp back to my goggles, I peer into it, trying to see where it opens up, but its twists and turns eventually just drift out of sight. There’s nothing visible inside, just smooth rocks and the occasional piece of moss—
Not moss. My hands reach out and grab the thin, grassy follicles in front of me, and looking at them up close sends my nerve endings screaming.
“PJ, what is that?” asks Kendra.
“. . . hair,” I choke out. “It . . . could be O’Dea’s.”
“Whoa, wait a second,” says Ian. “Let’s not freak out quite yet. It could be anyone’s hair. Could be a zombie’s hair.”
“Does this thing look like it has hair?” I snap at him. My mind is trying to force my heart into Calm Down mode, but it’s not working; my deep measured breaths are slowly becoming hyperventilation. In my mind’s eye, O’Dea smiles at me, her face hard but warm and welcoming, only when she opens her mouth to give me sage Gravedigger training advice, she screams and blood pours out. “Dario, or one of these things, took her through that hole. We need to get in there.”
“PJ, I’m surprisingly inclined to agree with Ian,” says Kendra. “That passageway is a tight squeeze. It would likely be impossible for anyone other than a desiccated zombie to fit in there.”
“If it fit in there,” I say, jabbing a finger at the balled-up corpse on the ground, “then we can most likely fit in there—”
Something impossibly hard closes around my wrist, squeezing a screech out of me.
The zombie’s hand holds tight onto my arm even as I pull away. Before our horrified eyes, its body slowly unfolds, popping and crunching along the way. My meditation methods fly out the window, and my scream deafens us as it bounces around the pitch-black shadow. I tug hard against its grip, but for how skinny it is, the cave zombie is incredibly strong.
Ian raises his machete, but Kendra holds up her hands. “You could hurt PJ!” she shrieks.
For a second, I consider urging Ian to go right ahead, as any minute now I’m waiting for the corpse’s bony face to dart forward and take a chunk out of my neck. But the bite never comes—the zombie steps a bony leg into its tunnel in the wall and yanks sharply, pulling me after it. Before I know it, my arm is into the crack, and then my feet are lifted off the ground as I’m yanked hand first into the stone wall.
As my feet disappear, I feel a hand clamp around my ankle and the extra weight of my friends being dragged after me.
The tunnel is too narrow to have ever been used by people, and even in my night-vision goggles everything is a blur of jagged rock outcroppings. As the zombie drags us along, my head, hips, shoulders, knees, elbows collide with sharp pieces of stone. Bolts of pain blast through my bones. My wrist and ankle both go numb with the two weights yanking at them, and one or two pops in my back and ribs warn me that I might end up with a dislocated everything if I’m not careful.
After what feels like an eternity of jostling and slamming, a rush of cool air hits my face, and my head emerges from the tunnel and int
o another cave, the points of stalactites jabbing down at me from the ceiling. This cavern is even larger than the last, sprawling out endlessly around us like a set piece from Temple of Doom. A glance down makes my breath seize up in my chest—we’re a good fifteen feet up, being pulled out of a crack in a sheer rock wall, and the cave zombie is yanking me out of the crevice with all its might. This fall is going to end with broken legs unless we have something to cushion us—
Wait. My eyes shut. O’Dea’s advice comes back into my head, and my mind goes into my breathing, each inhale and exhale like a bow moving across a violin, creating a focused note out of my fear and panic. As the world slows down, the answer comes to me in a slow-crashing wave.
The minute I’m able to pull my foot out of the rock crevice, I plant it against the rock wall and shove, hard. My other ankle slips free of Kendra’s hand, and I fly backward. My body collides with the skeletal cave zombie, and we go tumbling off of the wall, its arms closing around me in a steely embrace, my hand coming up under its chin to keep its chattering yellowed teeth from sinking into my flesh.
The cave zombie is mostly skin and bone, so the landing isn’t comfortable per se. For a second, all I see is Kendra’s hand growing smaller in my view, and then there’s a hard slam in the back and a crunch like a million flashbulbs going off at once. Everything goes white, and my breath flies out of my lungs, but a quick mental check reveals that nothing is broken and my mouth doesn’t taste like blood. Small victories.
When I roll over, the zombie’s broken body shudders where we landed, sharp hunks of bone rending open the tough skin and showing deep gouges full of foamy black liquid. The mushrooms from its spine fizz as they melt into pools of gray muck. Its misshapen form suggests I managed to crush its spine in the fall, and it lets out a last hiss as its carcass finally goes still.
“PJ!” calls Kendra, her voice echoing through the cavern. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I mumble back, my eyes frozen on the cave zombie’s body. That’s weird. Why’s the blood bubbling and hissing like that? That’s not normal. I hear myself whisper, “I’m sorry.”
“In which case,” she calls out, her voice edged with panic, “maybe you can help us down from here?”
“Right, right!” My shoulder screams in pain as I climb to my feet, but I can’t think about that now. In the distance, I can see Kendra’s top half sticking out of the crack in the wall of the cave, arms flailing. As I run under her, the lightness on my shoulders hits me—my Melee Industries backpack must have gotten yanked off along the way.
“How do you want to do this?” I ask, staring up at what looks like part of a magic act.
Kendra opens her mouth, then freezes. “. . . unsure,” she finally says. “I take it you lost your backpack.”
“Yup.”
“Mine as well.” She frowns. “No rope. This will prove difficult.”
“I could move the zombie remains over here, for you to fall on.”
She grimaces. “While not preferable, that is a viable option. Well, perhaps if we take off our clothing, and tie it together, we could use it to rappel—”
This is quickly becoming the wrong kind of horror movie. “I’m very against getting naked in the zombie cave, Kendra.”
“As though I’m all for it?” she cries. “PJ, we’re very low on options here. Sacrifices must be—” Suddenly, her eyes go wide, and she gasps. “What—no, no, NO, IAN, DON’T—”
There’s something like a popping sound, and Kendra goes shooting out of the hole, flying through the air. Once again, I close my eyes, breathe deeply, and let the scene slow down. Her speed and distance become obvious to me, and I manage to run directly under her just in time for her to come down and make a sprawling heap of arms and goggles out of the two of us.
“Thanks,” she groans, rolling off me. “That fall might’ve killed me.”
“No problem,” I say, feeling something in my back shriek with pain.
Of course, Ian doesn’t need to be caught—one minute he’s in the hole, the next he lands on the hard rock floor with a boom, crouched perfectly to break his fall and sending up a small cloud of dust, his machete held out in terrifying Jason Voorhees fashion at his side. I can’t help but blink at him in awe—jumping fifteen feet like it was nothing. When I notice he still has his backpack, and one of ours in his hands, my breath jets from my lungs in a grateful sigh.
“You could’ve seriously injured me,” snaps Kendra.
“While you guys were talking, I was stuck in a crack like some kind of cockroach,” he says, rising and brushing rock dust from him. “I was suffocating in there.”
She says no more, just snatches the backpack from him and begins rifling through its contents. Ian hauls me to my feet and brushes me off.
“You okay?” he asks. “What’s this black stuff on you? That zombie blood?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I bodychecked him and crushed him on landing.”
Ian grins. “I would’ve never thought of that, man.”
“Perfect.” Kendra pulls a thin rod from her backpack and twists it, making it flare bright white in my night-vision goggles. “We’ll leave glow sticks at important points along the way. That way, if we need to backtrack, we’ll know where we are.” She looks into the bag. “Hrm. We have to hand it to Danny; he made sure we had everything we might possibly need.”
“Okay, this is zombie kill one,” says Ian. “Where is it?”
“Right over there—” I turn, finger pointed, to show Ian, but the words turn to a ball of ice in my throat and refuse to move further.
Crouched on its haunches at the edge of the shadows, leaning over its brother’s broken corpse, is a second cave zombie—thin, leathery, eyeless. It looks almost identical to the first, save for maybe an extra wisp of hair. Its nose, or the hole that once was its nose, hangs over the crushed remains of its buddy, taking deep sniffs of its carcass.
On my one side, Ian latches onto me, hands digging hard into my shoulder. Kendra keeps examining the supplies in her backpack. “Our map is still secure. There’s even a satellite phone in this one. Hopefully, once we discover the city of Kudus, we can find somewhere to try and call—”
“Kendra,” I stage-whisper, “stop talking.”
“What? Why—” Behind me, I hear her twist to face us, and then all noise stops and she goes deathly still.
Of course, there’s no hope of going unheard. We know very little about these zombies, as they’re nothing like the ones from the countless monster movies I’ve watched. But given the last zombie’s response to very little noise, it’s heard us.
Slowly—always slowly—the head rises, the gaping eye sockets aiming at us, its gross nose hole fluttering as it smells the air of the cave. For almost thirty seconds, we remain perfectly still, watching it take us in without any sign of hunger or hostility. The dusty air tastes dry on my tongue; the total lack of light puts a deep, resonant chill through my bones.
“It’s not moving,” whispers Ian. “Why’s it not moving?”
“Maybe . . . they’ve evolved into vegetarians,” says Kendra, “and it doesn’t want to eat us.”
“Maybe it can smell the Gravedigger on us,” I whisper, the idea sending a surge of raw power through my body. “It knows what we are, and that we pose a threat. It’s . . . scared.” I love it. Things have made a reversal. We no longer fear the dead for trying to kill us. The dead fear us for succeeding in killing them—
Suddenly, a rhythmic tapping, tak-tak-tak, echoes through the chamber, making us all jump and gasp. My eyes whip around, looking for the source of the noise, when I notice the zombie’s hands and feet twitching. Sure enough, as I focus in, I watch as the zombie taps his pointed finger and toe bones against the floor in a careful, quick way, sending sharp noise echoing throughout this abyss.
“I think it’s attempting to communicate,” says Kendra.
“Is that Morse code?” asks Ian.
“I don’t think it’s trying to talk to us, Ia
n,” says Kendra.
As if on cue.
First, one huddled shape crawls into view behind this new cave zombie, then a second, then four more, then eight more, ten, forty. In the distance behind it, the cave grows thick with slow, skeletal shapes that seem to emerge from the shadows like the night just spat them out. Not just on the floor, either—suddenly, over the walls, even along the ceiling, the cave fills with a scuttling swarm of thin, bony beings, creeping into view. As they make their way along, their own fingers and toes tap out a similar rhythm to the one being played before us.
“Kendra,” I call above the deafening tapping of bones, “tell me you see some sigils in this room that I can’t see.”
She gulps and squeaks, “I’m afraid not.”
Chapter Seven
Ian
Oh man. Oh man. Okay. Oh man. Here they come.
There are a lot of them. No, scratch that, too many of them, a bazillion, creeping slowly at us all crouched with their arms curled up at their chests like T-rexes, or moving across the ceiling and walls like a bunch of undead Spider-Mans, and it’s like my goggles go from seeing a green cave to some kind of barrel of ants, moving all over each other, each one more covered with flat mushroom scales than the last. The sounds are creepier than the other zombies we’ve fought, the ones that moaned and snarled and gurgled, ’cause with these guys all you get are these low-pitched scratchy hisses and the sound of their old skin rubbing together with this noise like bedsheets being gathered and the tap-tap-tapping thing they seem to like so much. I’m guessing that’s a cave zombie’s dinner bell. I don’t know. I’m officially back to square one when it comes to dealing with zombies, because what the heck are these things and how are there so many are pretty much all I’m dealing with here.
They fill the room, forcing us to scoot away from the front line of them like three scared poodles. Here PJ was, talking about them being afraid of us, and now we’re falling back faster than you can say “hopeless.”
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