Gravediggers

by Christopher Krovatin

  That’s when cold lumpy stone hits my back, and as hard as I push with my feet I can’t move another inch. My head whips up, and I realize we’re at the rock face we just popped out of, that the way we came in here is at least ten feet over our heads, so there’s no hope of getting to it now. We’re stuck here, in a giant stone coffin with no way out and a couple thousand flesh-eating skeletons coming at us. So, that’s awesome.

  “We need to fight them back,” I finally stutter. My hand remembers the machete in it, and I give it a toss in the air and tighten my grip on it. “It’s the only way.”

  “You’re right,” says PJ, setting his feet, holding up his arms like he’s Bruce Lee or something. “Headlamps on in three, two—”

  There’s this WHUNK and a blur, and PJ goes down screaming and scrambling, and before I can tell what’s going on, something heavy lands on my back, the WHUNK sounding through my body in this sharp blast of white, and then I feel claws on my shoulders, bony arms on my head, and I realize that they’re cave zombies that have just jumped down on top of us. They must have been crawling on the ceiling and let go directly overhead, death-from-above style. Suddenly, I go from butt-kicking Gravedigger to headless chicken, jabbing my machete into the thing on my back over and over again while trying not to stick myself.

  And then they just swallow us up. Kendra’s screams and PJ’s repeated “I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY” go muffled as a few thousand zombies leap on us in a great big pile of corpses.

  Imagine being thrown through a jungle gym, hard, for, like, fifty seconds. That’s what’s going on here, only every so often this tunnel of hard limbs has a rotten bone-tipped hand or a hissing skeleton’s face. After a second, I’m not even screaming; I’m just making that karate-chop-on-the-back motorboat noise, uh-uh-uh-uh-uh, as my green night vision reveals a mishmash of seven million hard, undead knees, elbows, knuckles, fungus-covered spines. Are they even trying to bite me?

  One of the hands snags onto my ankle and doesn’t let go. I’m ready to get pulled in half like a gory piñata, but then the hand feels kind of cold and fuzzy, like the Icy Hot that Dad has me put on my ankle when I’m hurting after a long game. Suddenly, the whole tangle of zombie hands lets go of me, and I go flopping on the floor with a little puff of dust, my body feeling something different, not normal, definitely nothing like the chalky blackness of the cave. This feels powerful and bright and . . . alive.

  Kendra’s got my ankle in one hand and PJ’s in the other, and man, whatever’s going on, she’s just burning up. Literally, there is steam coming off her in my green night vision. Sweat’s dribbling down her face and even soaking the edges of her goggles. Her teeth are gritted hard with her lips all peeled back. She looks like how I felt when I sprained my ankle two years ago.

  “What are you even doing?” I ask her.

  “NNNNGGGGI DON’T KNOOOOOW,” she shrieks.

  “She’s keeping them back,” says PJ. “Look.”

  He’s nailed it—the whole squirming wall of claw-fingered bone-thin dead people around us is keeping this nice little three- or four-foot distance. I mean, they don’t look happy about it, and their hands come out like they want to snag us and pull us to whatever dark hole they eat in, but they can’t, and instead it’s like they’re warming themselves at the fire of Kendra. When I look up, my stomach goes flat—the wall of clambering zombies continues at least ten feet up. We’ve got a few thousand hungry dead people here, minimum.

  “What do we do now?” I ask.

  “HEDLNSH,” growls Kendra.

  “What?” I ask.

  “HEADLAMPS!” she shrieks.

  Oh, yeeeeah!

  PJ and I flick on our helmet lamps, and man, do the zombies not like that. The whole mass of interconnected crawling bodies shifts and shrieks wherever we shine our lamps on them. When we climb to our feet, Kendra lets go of our ankles and sways for a second, and PJ’s there just to time to catch her, but it makes him turn away, and immediately a hissing zombie is leaning in, his sharp, skinny fingers going right for the helmet. If only I’d held onto—

  Wait. Hold on. Right hand—hey! I did hold onto my machete!

  At least today’s improving.

  A leap and a swipe later, the zombie backs away snarling, its fingers tumbling to the floor. PJ and I crowd around Kendra, keeping our lamps moving in a wide circle, me striking out with my machete, PJ doing his weird meditation-based closed-eyed zombie judo and tossing them away, but every time we turn away from one part of the horde of undead things around us, another begins to fold in toward us, hands out, mouths open.

  “There are too many of them!” shouts PJ, swerving out of the way of a swift gray hand, and I’m pretty amazed by how well he’s doing staying away from them. He dodges them like he knows where they’re coming from, like he can hear them ahead of time, and it’s cool to watch, his skinny little body twisting and lashing out over and over.

  “Kendra!” I shout. “Can you give us round two on the juju?”

  My answer is Kendra straight-up lurching forward and throwing up on the cave floor. It ain’t pretty, and the sharp pukey smell gets me coughing, so I focus on swiping out with my machete and blasting the hissing mass of shadows with light. Whatever, it was bound to happen. One thing I’ve learned, man, you fight zombies, someone’s gonna ralph.

  We try to keep the perimeter around us tight, but I can’t help but know we’re losing mad ground with every second, and I’m feeling more and more of these creepy skinny cannibals connect with me, no matter how much I slash at them. There’s a sharp-ended hand clawing at my hair, there’s a pair of jaws coming hissing out at me from the pile. It’s like they don’t have any joints, just bones in a bag, and we can’t win against something like that, no matter how ready and trained we are this time around, and I do exactly what O’Dea told me not to and start stiffening up inside, because let’s face it, O’Dea’s dead, she’s gone, there’re just too many of them for her to make it through this, no matter how tough and sage and wise and kind she is, she’s dead, we’re dead—

  And then, it stops.

  Seriously. Every shuffle of skin or pop of a bone in a socket, every gasp and shriek and hiss, they just end. The zombies freeze, all stuck in their big tangled heap. All you can hear is the sound of my, PJ’s, and Kendra’s panting.

  Then, it’s like this rumble, deep and loud, like the earth’s stomach is growling, just shakes its way down the tunnel, growing louder and louder until it fills the room, making the floor tremble beneath us. This rumbling moan sounds like some kind of angry animal, something old with a lot of scales and eyes. Suddenly, the night vision doesn’t mean a thing, the dark and cold of this place hits me, making my skin go all goosebumped.

  The zombies start crawling backward—and I mean that—they don’t turn around and leave; they back off—those black hollow eye sockets still zoned in on me, PJ, and Kendra the whole time. It’s like they’re being rewound in slow motion. They probably don’t even need to see to know where they’re going, which is the kind of idea that makes you want to cry.

  And soon, the last few of them back up into the dark and vanish. There’s a final clik- clik-clik as a final skinny one with a head of tattered gray hair crawls back along a wall. He lets out a loud, angry hiss as he disappears.

  “Where do you think they’re going?” I say.

  “It must be something about that sound,” Kendra says, standing and wiping her mouth. “Something is calling them away.”

  “Do you think it’s a Warden?” asks PJ.

  “Wardens repel zombies,” says Kendra. “Besides, this place has been out of reach for hundreds of years. Nothing could have survived down here.”

  “Maybe it didn’t,” I say. “Maybe it’s some kind of . . . super-zombie.” Kendra gives me this look like I’m being an idiot, and it stings inside. “Hey, look at those things. If the zombies can turn into some kind of skeleton-spiders, anything can happen.”

  Her eyebrows raise and she nods. “That’s ac
tually a fair point. Well said, Ian.” And the sting is gone, and I can feel my blood running through my face, like I’m full of lava or something, ’cause she said I—

  I don’t know why I’m thinking about this. Think of anything else. My shirt is ripped. Black foaming goo all over my machete. This room smells like barf. Where did the zombies go?

  “Where do you think they went?” I say, jabbing out my machete toward the deep black shadow where the dead people disappeared. “We should follow them to find out.”

  “Careful, Ian,” says PJ holding out a hand. “You don’t know what could be down there.”

  “You sound like your mom,” I say, storming fearlessly into the tunnel before me.

  Of course, I’ve taken maybe ten steps before the floor just disappears from under me, and I go falling, like, midair falling, arms and legs wheeling. It’s lame, too, because I looked so cool jumping out of that crack in the wall earlier (they can’t lie; I was awesome), so to suddenly be screaming and tumbling blind in a shower of dirt and rocks is just not a cool look.

  Fortunately, I land on my backpack, so it just feels like a giant punching me in the back and not a person actually taking a stone club to me. My breath flies out of my chest, and everything’s a cloud of dust and PJ screaming.

  “IAN!” he cries, his voice echoing all over the place and basically stabbing me in the eardrums. “Are you okay? Say something!”

  “Stop . . . yelling,” I manage to cough as I climb to my feet. Once I’m upright, I take in all the dark shapes around me in creepy green night vision and see a curving wall, a set of blocks, leading . . . wait.

  “It’s a staircase,” I call, waving my hand at the two pairs of red power lights and thick lenses shining overhead. “Throw down a rope and let’s follow it. It can probably lead us to wherever these zombies are hiding.”

  It takes some figuring out, but Kendra and PJ manage to drive a spike into the floor near us and drop one of our remaining ropes. PJ goes down first, but he’s sort of clumsy doing it and I have to help him. For a second, I think of my dad—If it weren’t for you, that kid would be dead by now, he likes to say—and I feel bad, wondering if he’s right, wondering how PJ can throw a zombie around like he’s a Shaolin monk but he still can’t climb a rope right. Then, Kendra zips down, but of course she goes all creepy and weird the minute she looks around.

  “Oh, wow,” she whispers, wandering up to a wall and running her hands across it. “Look at these hieroglyphics. Incredible.”

  “I don’t see anything,” says PJ.

  “What are you—oh,” she says. “You should get close to them with your lamp on. Then you can see them.”

  Switching my goggles for my headlamp, I see what she’s talking about—the walls are covered with these old-looking scribbled drawings of people running from other people with big sticks and skulls on their belts, all surrounded by a ton of weird, swirling sigils. But what leaves a sour taste in my mouth is that we need the light to see them, and Kendra didn’t.

  “Are they glowing or something for you?” I ask her. She doesn’t come back with anything, so I try again: “Kendra, do you see some kind of magical—”

  “I can feel them,” she says calmly. “That’s all.”

  “What do you mean, feel them?” I ask. “Are they hot? Do they give off some kind of smell or something? Work with us here.”

  “I just . . . feel them here,” says Kendra, wrapping her arms around herself. “It doesn’t matter. We should follow the staircase. If it goes to Kudus, it goes to O’Dea.”

  “Wait, hold on,” I say. “Kendra, if you’ve got some kind of crazy Warden powers now, we should use them. Like, back there, I know you lost your Danny Melee power bar afterward, but that was a clutch save. We need more of that—”

  “They don’t work that way,” she snaps. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “What? Why not?” I say. “We’re Gravediggers. Any tool we have against the zombies counts—”

  “I’m not a tool!” she yells, her face scrunching up beneath her goggles. “I’m a Gravedigger, Ian, like you. Our Warden is somewhere down here, and we need to find her. That’s all that matters.” She storms off down the stairs, shaking her head and grumbling to herself.

  “What’s her problem?” I whisper to PJ. “Not a tool? We’re all tools. Zombie-hunting tools.”

  “That’s a little creepy, man,” says PJ, and when I look at him he’s kind of shaking his head, like he can’t believe what I’m saying.

  “Isn’t that what O’Dea wants us to be? Trained zombie killers?”

  “But we’re people first,” he says. “Kendra’s your friend, not a weapon. Whatever’s going on with her, she’s having a hard time with it. You need to just let her deal with things at her own pace.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I tell him. “You’re all Zen about Gravedigger-ing these days. If you were smart, you’d be scared. You’d want to use every strategy available to you.”

  “Trust me, Ian,” he says, trotting off after Kendra, “I’m very scared.”

  Great, so now I’m the jerk, and for once I’m the guy being left behind instead of forging ahead, which is a feeling I’m not that big a fan of, let me just say. As I power walk to catch up with the two lights ahead of me bobbing in the darkness, I just keep wondering why I’m the only one having the normal reaction to this. Dad would get it. Coach would get it. Why pull punches? Why do I stay the good old-fashioned zombie fighter while Kendra gets to witch out and PJ’s some born-again mercy killer or something? What’s the big deal with wanting to do what we came here to do?

  Chapter Eight

  Kendra

  The cave is like outer space—the darkness is oppressive, all-encompassing, and carries with it a deep and lonely cold. Or so I think. As we descend farther into the cave, I cannot help but wonder what is making me feel so isolated and outcast. Is it our current situation, or Ian’s awful comments that have my cheeks burning and my fists clenching?

  It’s not as though I disliked things the way they were before.

  If I had my way, these unsettling developments—O’Dea kidnapped and dragged to a sunless crevice where she might kill herself rather than divulge the tools of her trade, a new breed of inhuman zombie that behaves like a skilled predator, my emerging talents for an energy conveyance that some might call magic—would not be happening. O’Dea would be giving us phone tutorials, the zombies would be slow and unintelligent, and I would be nothing more than a karmically destined zombie killer. And, of course, Ian wouldn’t be acting so awkwardly around me, alternating between reverent and aggressive.

  Three more years. All I needed was three years of learning, training, understanding what we are. We’d be teenagers, ready to deal with an abundance of displacement and change in our daily lives, not only in our karmic standing. Instead, we’re shoved into this our first year, belaying down a centuries-old abyss to a sunken city filled with mutated corpses.

  And don’t forget the powers, Kendra. You saved your friends’ lives earlier with that Warden trick, but you left no room for speculation. You’ve got a power beyond that of mortal human beings (be honest; somehow you always knew), and you used it to get those zombies away from you.

  Remembering the feeling of those strong, dead hands clawing at my flesh sends a chill down my spine. But it’s not simply their new forms, their new abilities . . . it’s what these cave zombies didn’t do. Everything observes a set of rules within this world of karma and curses, and one seems to be that zombies devour human flesh. Danny Melee once speculated it was to allow the fungus that reanimates them to spread, but whatever the reason, it’s consistently been the case that the zombies eat the living.

  So why didn’t these zombies bite us? They had plenty of time to do so, yet they never did. It makes no sense. None of this does. What happened down here?

  The sigils on the wall, both those carved by hand and those glowing softly in my vision that must have been enchanted through witchcraf
t (if O’Dea is still alive, ask her if that term is considered offensive or insensitive), scream at me in some kind of hidden electrical dialect that feels slightly painful. But to some extent, Ian is right—I’ve got to try and make sense of their message. If we’re going to save O’Dea, we need to do so any way we can. Whether or not we’re “tools,” as he so idiotically put it.

  My heart beating fast, my mind racing, I close my eyes and put my hand to the wall, drinking in its strange empathic—

  DOOM PAIN DEATH BLOOD CHAOS

  My hand flies back, my mind stunned by the blast of discord that swept over it. Ian and PJ stop in their tracks as my gasp bounces between the darkened walls, filling the dusty silence. “I’m fine,” I stutter, trying to blink the dots of light out of my vision. And yet, as they start walking again—PJ quicker than Ian—I feel the loss of that new and somewhat harsh power, which was both shocking and thrilling.

  Easy, Kendra. Don’t rush into this. Tiny steps. Try again.

  Mentally, I focus on O’Dea’s lessons, her calm growled words on escaping my own brain and letting go. As my hand approaches the wall, I take several deep breaths, doing my best to put all extraneous thoughts from my mind. As my hand collides with the sigils, the energy flows freely through me, filling me. But rather than clashing with my active cerebellum, it finds an empty space to burn out its dark, ancient message.

  Before the warriors came, the wall explains in a blooming of raw data, Kudus was known as a heaven on earth.

  Great thinkers, artists, and wise men from all over the island, and from many lands a great ways away, came to Kudus to learn under its many brilliant citizens. Pilgrimages to Kudus were seen as a necessary rite for any monk or mystic, and peace, harmony, and freedom were the governing principles within its walls.

  For ages, the warriors, the great headhunter tribes of the island, had a fine relationship with the city’s strange residents, trading furs and meat for medicine and spiritual guidance. Though brutal and cruel, the king of the warriors saw the good that the people of the city brought to the land and made a law that the city was to go undisturbed. But the king died during battle with a neighboring tribe, and his son, a vicious killer and inhuman monster, took over. Immediately, he demanded better trades, began to question the importance of the city, and more than once threatened the city elders during a bargain. Unlike his father, he would come in full war paint when entering the city, complete with enemy heads around his neck or on his spear. Finally, the people of Kudus cut the headhunters off, forbidding them from entering the city and forbidding its citizens to do business with the warrior tribe.