Gravediggers

by Christopher Krovatin

  One week after the decree was made, the warriors attacked. The guards of the city walls were no match for them; the weapons they bore were sold to them by the very warriors they fought, and they were not well trained in handling them, given their environment. Within minutes, the walls had been breached, and the headhunters entered the city. Though the warriors were greatly outnumbered by the citizens of Kudus, the thoughtful and generous citizens were easy pickings for the skilled soldiers. What followed was horror—slaughter in the streets, blood sacrifices, temples burned, countless heads lopped off and carried as trophies through the city. For miles in every direction, the screams of the dying could be heard filling the night.

  My feet slow, my breath catches in my chest, and tears burn the backs of my eyes. No voice speaks to me of this horrible killing—it is transmitted directly into my heart. The fear of the citizens, the bloodlust of the headhunters, the sickening smell of carnage, the agony of a city dying in one unspeakable night.

  “Kendra?” whispers PJ. His hand lands softly on my shoulder. “You all right?”

  “What’s the holdup?” asks Ian, trundling up behind us.

  “Kendra just needs a second,” says PJ, thankfully saying what I wish I wasn’t too emotionally compromised to express. “But she’s fine. Right?”

  “Right,” I manage to utter.

  “You feeling sick still?” says Ian. His hand takes mine and puts a water bottle into it. “Here, if you want it. Not too much, though; we only have a little.”

  The simple action makes me feel somewhat better about Ian. He helps when he can. The water is good, washes the taste of my post-magic regurgitation out of my mouth, centers me. “Perfect,” I whisper. “Thanks. We can continue.”

  The boys quietly walk off ahead of me. My hand attempts to touch the wall again, but it hovers an inch above the dusty surface. The cold, overwhelming darkness of the cave feels safer than the ravaged horror of Kudus.

  But I have to know. It could help us find the city . . . and O’Dea.

  Closing my eyes, I move a few inches down the line of hieroglyphics, hoping to miss any further slaughter, and press my hand to the wall. The energies fill me once more, pouring their story behind my eyes. . . .

  The sacking of Kudus was spoken of through all the land, causing much sorrow and agony. And while some cried out against the tribe that would so willingly butcher a peaceful city of freethinkers, other tribal leaders respected the viciousness of the headhunters. They had been suspicious that the people of Kudus practiced black magic and consorted with demons. Many local tribes made their way to the city, ready to ransack what loot the warriors had left behind.

  The tribesmen who made it back spoke of the dead.

  Those people of Kudus who had not lost their heads had risen and were devouring any living person, pilgrim or bandit, who made their way to the city. Soon, some of the dead began escaping and wandering the countryside, seeking warm flesh and hot blood. The warrior tribe who had destroyed the city vowed to do it a second time and marched proudly into battle with spears held high and war cries on their voices.

  That night, the people of Kudus had their revenge. The headhunters were overwhelmed by their lifeless adversaries and fell. Of the hundreds of headhunters who entered the city, only two made it out, and they were gibbering madmen for the rest of their days, haunted by visions of the living dead.

  Defeated physically, the tribesmen brought together every sorcerer and priest they could find and had them use their magic to cleanse the city. The dead came, and in a last effort to free the land of the scourge, the gathered mages used their power to cause a massive earthquake that split the mountain in a great jagged vent that swallowed up the entire city. Many lost their lives using their magic to create the quake, but when they finished, the city and its thousands of undead monsters sat a mile below the surface of the earth. In an act of bravery, a team of powerful Wardens made their way down through the caves and into Kudus to lay the final containment spells onto the city, to ensure that it could never escape. The last of the mages, a woman named Yanta, completed one last task over twenty years of sunless living and dodging the cursed. Her last act as Warden of these caves was to carve . . .

  “. . . this staircase.”

  “What was that?” asks PJ, looking back at me.

  “What?” I ask.

  “What about this staircase?”

  My stomach sinks. I’d been so good about taking in the story of the city without mumbling it out loud, and here I am revealing my bizarre magical powers at the last minute. “Nothing,” I say. “Just had a thought, about the city. I’m thinking we might be getting close.”

  PJ nods, but doesn’t say anything. No one, not even myself, is interested as to how I might know it is close.

  The answer’s the same, Kendra. Because you feel it. Because a new sense of which you were previously unaware, somehow simply knows.

  We finally turn around a new corner on the staircase, and a pile of stones blocks any further progress. Ian gives it the Buckley Test—a sharp kick—and a bit of loose rock comes crumbling off of it.

  “We might be able to break through this,” says Ian, poking at the stones with his machete. “It’ll take a bit, but I bet we can do it.”

  “Wait,” I say, approaching the wall. The sigils glowing from it speak to me of a barrier, built and enchanted to keep the undead at bay. But there’s something else, too, laid into the magic surrounding the wall. A warning, an explanation, and a series of instructions. As I close my eyes and empty my brain, a picture begins filling my mind. . . .

  “This wall is meant to keep the undead from leaving,” I tell them, “but it’s not the only way in. One of the stairs lifts up and creates an entrance into the sewers beneath Kudus. We can get through that way.”

  “You got all of that from a wall?” asks Ian, his voice high and incredulous. “How’s that work?”

  “There’s something here that’s sort of a . . . magical message,” I say, trying to choose my words carefully.

  “And you can, what, speak ancient Indonesian?” asks Ian.

  Once again, his words make me feel useless and freakish all at once. “It doesn’t matter. The sewers into the city are under a stair. I’m positive of it.”

  We backtrack the stairs one by one, checking their edges in the hopes of finding a hinge or seam. By the fourth one, I’m officially beginning to feel foolish—here we are, three minors in the dark wearing over five thousand dollars’ worth of expensive caving gear, tugging at stairs—until Ian gives the fifth one a pull, and there’s the unmistakable sound of stone against stone. He and PJ pry the heavy slab of rock out of the ground and push it aside. From beneath it comes a heavy, rank must that fills the room and stings our nostrils, and we retreat coughing. With a second glance, I see a rusted metal ladder descending into the green pixilated depth of the hole.

  “I told you,” I gag and hack. “Once the bad air clears . . . we can get down there and into the city.”

  “This is probably the most booby-trapped place on earth,” coughs Ian.

  “Forget booby traps,” gasps PJ. “These are probably crawling with zombies. The sewers are where all zombies end up in the movies.”

  “Would the Wardens have left us this message if they were unsafe?” I ask, my throat still swollen with stench.

  “Kendra, think about this,” says PJ. “Maybe these things are crazy wall-climbing freaks these days, but at one time, they were regular stupid zombies. If these people had sewers, they had entrances to them. You don’t think that over hundreds of years, zombies might have squirmed down by the dozen? Or just fallen down manholes? Zombies are bad with gravity.”

  Ian nods. PJ is our zombie expert due to spending much of his life watching movies with the plural noun Dead in their titles. To be fair, he’s normally trustworthy on these issues. But I can feel, in my very gut, the magic at work here. We can’t be afraid of some disgusting sewer if there’s a chance of finding this lost city and l
ocating our Warden while she’s still alive.

  “I can feel it,” I tell them. “It’s magic. I don’t know why, or how, but I can hear the walls. Something really bad occurred here, and that gate just informed me of this sewer entrance. It’s our only hope. Think about O’Dea.”

  “O’Dea would want us to be careful and think,” says PJ, taking what I think is a dramatically long breath.

  “Can you really feel, like . . . magic in this stairwell?” asks Ian.

  “It’s like the walls are screaming in my head,” I explain.

  “Ugh,” he grumbles. “I’m not sure you hearing voices beats PJ’s movie monster knowledge.”

  “Ian, you need to trust me here,” I tell him. “This is something you cannot understand, but I promise, I have this power. Breaking down that wall is a very bad mistake.”

  Ian nods, but doesn’t look at me. PJ sighs and throws up his hands.

  “All right,” says Ian, finally turning and stepping out a hesitant foot onto the ladder. “But if it’s all a bunch of booby traps, or zombies, or booby traps involving zombies—”

  “It won’t be,” I say. After he finally disappears down, I follow him, and PJ, shaking his head, finishes up.

  The ladder ends about five feet off the ground, so we have to jump. Ian spots me, then turns away and wipes his hands on his pants, as though I’m covered in some kind of sheen of grime.

  After PJ touches down with a splash, we stare into the tunnel. Hanging clots of filth and rot drape across the passageway like fat in a clogged artery. In my night vision, it’s all the same bright green filter, and yet somehow I can feel the lack of light, that lost change in energy that one should feel when descending into a sewer pipe. A claustrophobic shudder throttles me as I truly think about it—moving from one darkness to the next. No wonder the zombies mutated into those insectile aberrations.

  The tunnels are long, hung with huge growths of mucuslike sediment from dripping water and covered with an ankle-deep slosh of scum at the bottom that gives off the unholy smell that still assaults us. Still, I cannot help but admire the architecture. For a city over eight hundred years old, this sanitary sewer is up there with any Renaissance city in Europe.

  You’d imagine, Kendra. Luckily, this is your first trip down a sewer pipe. Maybe someday, you’ll travel the world and spend your days wading through the sewers of cities like London, Paris, even Prague. Ah, the life of a Gravedigger. Or Warden. Whatever you are.

  Up ahead, the muck becomes thicker, rising to our knees. At this point, its phlegmy texture makes it harder and harder to pull through. In my night vision, I can see the lumpy mess coating the floor, quivering and gelatinous with filth. A collection of branches or pipe parts strikes my leg, and I yank my foot up and bring it down with a wet, meaty crunch.

  Something slaps the back of my calf.

  “Hey,” I say, turning back to the boys. “Who did that?”

  They blink. “Who did what?” asks Ian.

  As if on cue, there’s a sound, deep and bubbling, as though an amphibian were gargling.

  “YAH!” shouts Ian, yanking up a foot scum-covered. He looks toward us, frantic. “There’s something down there. Oh man. There . . . there might be a zombie in all of this filth—”

  “Stop,” says PJ. His voice is calm, barely a whisper, but it has a sickened tone to it that gets our attention. “Nobody move. I think I know what’s going on here.” He sighs. “I just . . . really hope it’s not that.”

  “PJ?” I ask.

  “In three, we pull up our goggles, we turn on our lamps, and we run,” he says. “Got it?”

  Ian and I share a glance. Whatever PJ’s thinking, his demeanor suggests complete confidence in this plan. We nod, slowly, and reach for our goggles.

  “Three,” says PJ. “Two. One. Now.”

  In a single, swift motion, I yank my night-vision goggles down around my neck and flick on the lamp on my helmet.

  As the light crosses over the pale quivering muck beneath us, it contracts, pulling backward. Huge, bulbous shapes move through it and push up toward the surface as the gargling noise becomes a shuddering throaty howl.

  And that’s when I begin understanding. Before my eyes, the mounds of twisted arms tear wet, bloated skin from each other. Rib cages push up as though they were sea turtles beneath pale and veiny-marbled muck. As I survey our own footprints, each one opens a scabby hole into a solid layer of putrefaction zigzagged with bones. The first of the skulls rises free from the mass, turns its near-liquid eyeballs on me, and shrieks through thick bubbles of flesh.

  Chapter Nine

  PJ

  Unfortunately, I’m right.

  The whole thing is zombies.

  If I were making the movie of our trip down to this place, this would seem so blatant. Obviously, without sunlight and fresh air for over a century, the zombies evolved, conditioned themselves to no longer be the simple staggering monstrosities that we’ve dealt with all right. From what I know about these zombies—and believe me, I know zombies—there were two types down here in this lightless maze: those that clawed at the walls trying to get out, and those that stumbled into the sewers and wandered around in the wet and the filth for ages. The ones at the walls eventually sharpened their fingers, got skinny enough to climb, and began to communicate through vibrations.

  And from what we’ve seen, water speeds up zombie deterioration. It melts them down, if it’s too hot. But it was nice and cool down here, so they didn’t melt all the way.

  They just kind of . . . fused together.

  The whole blob of merged human corpses rises up like a garden of death, like a swelling lasagna of dead people sloshing up around us in festering waves. The basic laws of zombie nature have gone horribly wrong here, the conjoined dead deformed beyond reason—there are zombies with three arms, two torsos, four people’s worth of intestines spilling out of them. They all come pouring from the horrible pool of reanimated flesh around our feet.

  “This is the grossest thing I’ve ever seen!” yells Ian, pulling back from the writhing mass. With every second we stomp through the flesh-muck, more arms, legs, faces, teeth, come shuddering out of the mound with soggy, burbling growls. My mind races, taking in the lake of dead bodies, the whirling of my friends’ arms, the noise of our screams and their moans echoing through the tunnel—

  —no. Eyes, shut. Mind, quiet. Put everything in slow-motion, bullet time. Think about O’Dea’s advice. Know your enemy, and turn your fear into something that will outlive this repulsive scene.

  “Jump!” I scream just as a bushel of rotting claws comes snatching at me. “If they’re still moving, it means their spines are undamaged somewhere down in there! Crush them if you can find them!” My feet launch me up into the air, and when I come down I hear the wet rip of meat and a muffled crunch. Immediately, two of the zombie faces twisting my way shriek and sink back down into the depths of their own mangled forms.

  Ian and Kendra follow suit, leaping through the air and landing hard on the bloated multi-corpse. Automatically, the whole pale gray mass begins shaking hard, sending vibrations through the sewer tunnel. Every single jump fills me with a twisted mix of pity, pride, and nausea. This poor zombie-amoeba (zomoeba?) has laid down here rotting into an impassable flesh-slick for ages and ages, so I’m glad I’m putting the poor creature at least somewhat out of its misery. But every noise and stench that rises from a hole I stomp in its giant body sends stomach acid back up to burn my throat and tears to the backs of my eyes.

  As we hopscotch across the sprawling creature, my headlamp catches something rusted and green, coated with slime, but perfectly usable.

  “There’s a ladder!” I cry, pointing. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “I guess you were spot-on about the zombies,” pants Kendra as we leap toward the ladder, protruding half zombies gurgling in agony and clawing at us with melting hands.

  “Look on the bright side,” says Ian, “no booby traps.”

&n
bsp; We take the ladder rungs two at a time. I barely feel the rotten iron grate that I heave up with my shoulders, but suddenly we’re flopped out in the fresh air (fresher than the sewer, anyway—we’re still maybe a mile underground), panting and desperately wiping the black gore from our boots on the dust-piled ground. Beneath us, the sounds of melancholy gurgling and the slapping of loose meat come in a horrible stomachache chorus.

  “Okay,” I gasp, trying to keep my head clear and my breathing steady. “Glad we made it out of that. Now, let’s get moving. We have to find Kudus.”

  “Um, PJ,” says Kendra, pulling on her goggles and taking in our surroundings, “I think we’re here.”

  At first, when I switch back to my night vision, all I see are a few scattered huts and pueblos, and I can’t help but think, I expected more. Then, I rise, and turn around, and I can feel my eyes bulge painfully from my head and my heart beat faster.

  “Some city,” laughs Ian. “Isn’t our cul-de-sac bigger than—”

  “Turn around, Ian,” I whisper.

  From behind me, I hear him follow my advice, and then a long low whistle leaves his mouth that echoes deep within the cave as he surveys what is easily the greatest set piece of all time.

  The buildings start as small huts and crumbling houses, but soon there are multi-floor clay structures, huge longhouses with horned ends, one or two larger dome-topped buildings that could be anything from mansions to churches . . . but they are nothing compared to the temple. There in the distance it stands, a series of teardrop-shaped structures surrounding one main tower, the many-ledged point of its apex like a flame made out of stone, covered with leering statues of gods and demons and showing through its very size the sheer massiveness of the cave we stand in. The city of Kudus grows thicker as it nears these forgotten gates of hell, but though the buildings around it cluster together tightly, none match its height or its beauty.