And yet, seeing them this way, in green night vision surrounded by darkness and perfect quiet, makes my heart go numb in sadness and fear. Slowly, my eyes begin to take in more and more of the cave, the curtains of dust and filth that cover every hut and stone building, the piles of cracked and strewn bones jutting from the layer of cobwebs and rot that covers every inch of ground, the gaping black windows of the temple as it looms up in front of us like some kind of giant skull, staring down at the three puny humans who never should have seen it.
This isn’t a city. It’s a grave, one giant mausoleum. A hole for the murdered to wander aimlessly, never at peace, always hungry. Until three clueless morsels wandered into their domain.
I’m going to die down here.
My joints go weak; my head whirls. My eyes won’t close; my breaths won’t come. I am so tiny, the cave so huge, so endlessly dark, but so empty. There is only the temple, and all this death. My body lurches forward, and I fall to my knees. Kendra and Ian call my name and rush over to me.
“You okay?” says Ian. “You feeling sick? Need some water? We’re running low.”
“He might just be claustrophobic,” says Kendra. “Remember, PJ, keep calm. Use the fear; make it function as something different.”
Hearing her try to repeat O’Dea’s advice to me gives me a light shake, enough to let me clench my eyes shut and focus. That’s why we’re here—O’Dea. Our teacher is somewhere down here in the hands of a supervillain. If she’s still alive, we can save her.
And if she isn’t—if she’s taken her own life to protect her people—then we’ve got some revenge to take.
I’ve got to get up.
Get. Up.
As I rise to my feet and shakily dust the crud off of my knees, I manage to gulp away my dry mouth and say, “Where do we begin searching?”
Kendra opens her mouth, inhales, and then makes a squeaky noise. “It’s . . . anyone’s guess,” she says. “Maybe we should go house to house? They could be anywhere.”
“Hey, let’s not forget the zombie factor here,” says Ian. “Aren’t you worried we’ll bother them?”
“I doubt the zombies are just sitting in their homes, Ian,” says Kendra.
“Then where are they?” I ask.
The words freeze in the air as they leave my mouth, but I must strike a nerve—Kendra and Ian immediately whip around, scanning the streets. Here we are, on the outskirts of a city that should be swarming with horrible skeleton-people, and there’s nothing, not even the tap of a finger bone. The sheer number of them means that there must be one or two around, and yet there’s only deeper silence than ever.
“We need to get moving, at the very least,” says Ian. “The longer we stand here, the bigger pieces of bait we are.”
He’s got a point. We scurry our way over to a nearby hut, throwing our backs against the wall. Huge drifts of age-old dust go puffing out around us, sending a sneeze rocketing through me.
Kendra stands and glances through the hut window. “Some bones, cracked,” she says, “but no O’Dea.”
Cracked bones. Something comes back to me from our time on the island—the zombies eat everything, even the bones. Danny Melee said so. So why all the bones? Did they go bad? Did the zombies have a change of heart?
“Let’s keep at it,” I say, darting around the side of the hut.
The zombie I nearly run into doesn’t seem half as surprised to discover me as I am to find it. While I take a leap back and wheel my arms while yelping like I’ve stubbed my toe, it just turns its eyeless head with a sickening pop and then begins making its careful way toward us with its clawed hands stretched forward. It sniffs the air in great hissing gulps through its nose hole, shelf fungus bulging out of the side of its skull and shuddering lightly with every deliberate step forward.
There’s a click, and blinding light fills my vision. Flipping my goggles up, I see Kendra standing over the zombie, helmet light illuminated. The creature hunkers low, hissing. I follow her lead and turn mine on, and we back the shrieking corpse down into the floor, until it balls up into a shriveled lump the way the last one did.
This time, though, there’s no chance of it reconstituting and dragging us through some kind of chasm—the minute it finished popping and crunching down into its balled-up state, Ian darts in and begins stomping on it as hard as he can, bits of leathery skin flying and bones cracking sickeningly, until the cave zombie is a mass of foaming black muck and shard-ended bone.
“There,” whispers Ian, wiping the zombie gunk off his shoe. “Let’s see him come back now.”
As I switch back from lamp to goggles, I try to regain my composure. Deep breaths, blink hard, change the fear into drive . . . and always apologize. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“Stop saying you’re sorry, man,” says Ian. “That’s not a person. It would’ve eaten you alive—ugh, just smell it.” He waves his hand in front of his face. “That’s not a human smell.”
No kidding—the foaming black blood coming from the zombie reeks, like old vegetables and spray cleaner rolled into one. It’s the kind of smell only a dead thing that’s been around for hundreds of years could have.
Wait a second.
Oh. Yes. This—yes. This is good. This is dynamite.
“We need to put it on ourselves,” I say, pointing at the zombie. “The blood, the dust from the floor—spread it on your clothes.”
“Excuse me?” says Kendra. “PJ, that’s ridiculous. Zombie blood is probably poisonous—maybe even acidic.”
“Did you notice that these zombies have been sniffing the air?” I tell her. “Zombies are dead, Kendra. They don’t breathe. These things have evolved to use smell to detect prey. If we spread blood and cave dirt on ourselves, we’ll smell like zombies and be undetectable.”
Kendra looks from the zombie corpse to me, then back again. Finally, she huffs and says, “A layer of dirt first, then the blood. And none on our skin.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not overjoyed by this—but it needs to get done. Zombie horror is all about survival, and that requires sacrificing comfort. We all take our time with the dirt and dust from the floor, spreading it leisurely onto our arms and legs, none of us wanting to deal with the next part. Finally, though, it comes time, and I realize that since I suggested it, I have to be the one who does it first. Trying not to think about it, I grab the zombie’s broken-off foot and begin rubbing the stump up and down my arms, smearing black gore on my Melee Industries jacket.
The first test, I pass—Kendra’s thankfully wrong, and the blood doesn’t eat through my jacket with a loud acidic hiss like Alien blood. But I can’t hold my breath forever, and when I finally do inhale, the scent of it stabs at my throat. As I gag, I turn my face away, doing my best not to fill my expensive goggles with tears.
“PJ?” asks Ian. “You all right?”
“Fine,” I cough, finally letting my nose and throat get used to the burning, toxic smell of age-old zombie. “Your turn.”
Slowly, my fellow Gravediggers grab hunks of stomped zombie—Ian an arm, Kendra a cross section of ribs—and begin adorning themselves. Both dry heave at the first close-up whiff, but they, too, seem to get their acts together.
“This better work,” grumbles Ian. “This is worse than Mitchell West’s gym shorts.”
“Enough fond memories,” says Kendra. “Let’s continue.”
Slowly, we creep our way from one building to the next, peeking into windows and whispering O’Dea’s name. So far, we’ve got nothing—lots of cobwebs, furry piles of dust, outcroppings of festering mold, but no signs of people. No footprints. No O’Dea.
As we creep onto another street, two cave zombies come scuttling into view, hunched low to the ground. I throw up my hand, and my friends freeze behind me. With all my might, I try to keep my breathing slow and faint, my body absolutely still. Mentally, I urge my heart to beat quieter.
The zombies stop mid-stride, and one of them raises its skull face to the cold, dark
air and sniffs. For a moment, they are perfectly still, and their gray colors and gnarled bodies make them look like they grew out of the rot piling around their feet. Their stillness is even more disturbing than any moaning or hissing. My legs shake; my teeth chatter.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was all in vain. Maybe now, we’ll just die smelly.
After two more sniffs, the cave zombie lowers its head and turns to its companion. It puts its fingers to the floor and taps out another strange, clicking rhythm, like it did before. The other one responds in turn . . . and then another, and another. From somewhere deep in the sunken city, a whole stream of bone-claw clicks ring out through the air, traveling away from us like an echo. Like bats, the zombies use sound waves to send messages through the bottomless dark.
Maybe these ones are guards, sent to keep an eye out for us. All quiet on Dayak Headhunter Boulevard. Keep looking—they’re around here somewhere.
Neither we nor the zombies see the sewer grate until it’s too late. There’s a loud crash, and a slotted section of the floor goes flying away. One of the two zombies, the one who almost detected us, hisses and rears back a claw as though to strike, but before it can, a bouquet of putrid congealed arms snatches it up and drags it down into the sewers, its partner scuttling off with a startled hack in its throat. The cave zombie’s claws make a shrieking sound against the ground as it disappears down into the hole, and then its hisses give way to a chorus of crunches, slurps, and bubbling moans.
My face prickles with sweat and my throat swells shut. It’s not just the horror of what has happened that wells up the terror inside of me, it’s the . . . the wrongness.
“They . . . they’re not supposed to do that,” whispers Ian, pointing as though he’s caught some older kids spray-painting a wall. “Zombies only eat people and animals, right? They don’t eat other dead things.” It’s as though he’s read my mind.
“Maybe, being down here long enough . . . they’ve resorted to cannibalism,” says Kendra, trying to convince herself. “Or maybe the fused zombies in the sewers have some sort of . . . giant, single stomach.”
But she knows she’s wrong. We all do. So far, everything about them has been wrong. This evolution, or mutation, that the zombies have undergone down here in the caves breaks every rule I’ve ever learned about the undead, both on the big screen and through real-life Gravedigger-ing. Not just the rules of the zombies that O’Dea taught us to fight, but the rules of the movies, the comics, everything. Zombies are idiots—how are they communicating? And how is it the skinny zombies aren’t trying to eat us—Lord knows they had the chance—but the strange mass of liquefied dead are eating other corpses? Even Kendra. If she has some kind of newfangled Warden powers, how is it she can still hurt zombies, something Wardens are sworn never to do?
What can we possibly do against an enemy we don’t understand? What happens when our training and knowledge just aren’t enough?
Josefina’s words pound in my ears over and over.
It will happen there.
Your destiny lies in that cave.
Stop. Backpedal from the edge of the panic. Breathe. Think about O’Dea—no. Don’t even think about O’Dea.
Think about you, the Gravedigger. Fear is a part of you. It’s who you are, at your core. And if you fear this place, and these things, so much, then it is your job, your purpose, to make sure that they never leave this place.
Find your friend, and leave here forever.
“There’s a lot of city to cover,” I whisper. “Let’s keep at it.”
My friends nod, and we push deeper into the impenetrable blackout all around us.
Chapter Ten
Ian
This probably sounds weird, but I’m sort of down with how much this is freaking me out.
I mean, okay, yes, this is maybe the scariest, creepiest, most insane thing we’ve ever done, and we have a pretty solid history of undertaking absolutely loco zombie-filled adventures in our time, but this, this takes the cake. Sure, we are covered in a camouflage layer of cave dirt and zombie blood, looking through night-vision goggles at a massive underground city some crazy distance beneath the surface of the earth, while weird, reanimated blobs of dead bodies drag wall-climbing, mushroom-covered mutants into sewers to be eaten. And look, the idea that O’Dea got kidnapped and brought down here makes me chew the inside of my cheek and clench my hands into fists; fear for my friend is what’s driving me here.
But sometimes, it’s cool to be scared. There are times where you just have to go ahead and be frightened, but you have to do the right thing anyway. That’s what we’re currently working with. And I’m pretty down with that.
No matter how chill they’re trying to be, I know PJ and Kendra must be feeling something similar. PJ’s off in his own world, acting intense and cryptic, but I know that comes from him doing his fear-channeling craziness; and Kendra’s figuring out she’s a witch/X-Man, which is kind of awesome in some ways—reading the wall, zapping back the zombies with her weird cold-touch force field—but I can tell it’s also freaking her out a ton, and she’s not happy if she feels like she’s not in control. I wish we could all just ride the rise we’re getting out of this and push forward, braving this nutso scenario, and instead there’s just me being brave and them being weird.
To be fair, this place is in a whole different division from our past zombie-hunting experiences. With every hut window we peek in and piece of tattered tarp we pull back to look for O’Dea, I’m seeing stuff I didn’t think was possible. I’m talking cobwebs that fill whole houses, skeletons frozen with their mouths in silent screams, dust piled higher than snow during a blizzard. It’s like being on another planet or something . . . which is scary, but cool.
We duck into one hut to find the same thing as always—bones, dust, decaying fabric—when something catches my eye. There’s a huge shiny black pile in the middle of the floor that looks untouched, like it shouldn’t be there. No dust, no spiderwebs—just these weird, glistening black lumps.
“Guys, look at this,” I say, nudging it with my foot.
“Ian, leave that alone,” says Kendra.
“Do you even know what it is?” I ask. “Is there some sort of glowing symbol on it?”
“It’s not magical—”
She gets cut off by a loud hissing noise that comes out of the pile, sending me stumbling away from it with a hard slug of fear to the chest. Suddenly, the black pile splits to life and becomes about eighty tiny disks that go roaming around the hut, swarming over our feet and up our legs. PJ cries out, slapping them off his pants, while Kendra sort of tiptoes around them, kicking at the occasional black, slithering oval that goes rushing past her.
“I was saying,” she continues in her hushed teacher’s voice once the floor empties of creepy crawlers, “that they’re cockroaches. Caves like these are crawling with them.”
“Huh!” I say. “That makes sense, right? It’s like we’re under the world’s refrigerator right now.”
Part of me expects to get an eye-roll and some kind of insult to my intelligence like Brilliant description, Ian Buckley, but instead, she actually cracks a smile despite herself. “That’s a comical mental image,” she says. “You’re funny, Ian Buckley.”
“Thanks,” I say, and wait for it. She opens her mouth and freezes, lost in thought. I go ahead and finish it for her: “Funny looking.”
“That was what I wanted—ugh,” she says, shaking her head and grinning. “I promise, I’ll grasp this ‘joke’ concept soon enough.”
“Don’t hurt yourself,” I say. “We’ve got all night.”
“Thanks for your patience,” she says sarcastically, but still smiling, and then we’re just smiling at each other, and it’s like the cave isn’t so deep and dark and cold after all, like Kendra and I have a little fire going between us that makes this whole repulsive adventure worthwhile—
“Guys.” We both turn at the sound of PJ’s voice. He stands there, blank faced, staring at us. “
O’Dea’s down here somewhere. Enough jokes.”
“You’re absolutely right,” says Kendra, trying to sound
serious. My own embarrassment and guilt at getting sidetracked by . . . whatever I was feeling there is mixed with some anger at PJ. Leave it to PJ Wilson to remind you just how deep and dark and cold it is down here.
“Sorry, man,” I say. “I just want to keep the mood light. I can’t wait until we can get out of here, is all.”
Something about the way PJ nods and doesn’t say anything makes me uncomfortable. When I slap him lightly on the shoulder, I expect something, anything, out of the guy, but instead he just keeps staring straight ahead. Finally, he mumbles softly.
“What was that?” I ask.
“I don’t think I’m getting out of here,” he replies.
The words hit me with a cold wind on the inside, way worse than any of the quiet dark chills I’ve dealt with today in this giant bat cave. Kendra stares back at him with her mouth open, stunned. PJ’s voice just sounds so hopeless and serious, like this is a fact that he’s 100 percent sure of.
“Cut that out, dude,” I say. “We’ve just got to find O’Dea. Once we have her back with us, we’ll high-tail it out of here and leave Dario to the zombies. We’ve got this.”
“Our progress so far has been incredible,” chimes in Kendra. “You yourself have been exhibiting your skills as a Gravedigger—”
“I’m fighting off these things as best I know how,” he says, shaking his head. “But Ian’s got all the strength, and you have these new Warden’s powers . . . and I’m just here, feeling all of this pain and hopelessness that’s been trapped down here for centuries. It’s like this place has it out for me. I can almost smell it.” He sighs. “She was right.”
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