Gravediggers

by Christopher Krovatin

  “Who was right?” I ask.

  “Josefina,” says PJ calmly. “She had a dream, a vision. She said . . . that something happens here. Something bad happens to me.”

  For a silent moment, Kendra and I drink this fact in. “What happens?” I ask. “Does she know? Did she say where, or how it happens?”

  PJ frowns hard and mutters, “No. It’s a blur. But there’s blood.”

  “PJ, that could mean anything,” I say. “It could be about our time on the island. It could even be just a dream.”

  “Since we started fighting zombies, when has anything like this ever been what it seems?” snaps PJ. “I just want to find O’Dea before it happens. That way, you two can get out with her.”

  “We will not allow anything bad to happen to you,” says Kendra. “All three of us are making it out alive.”

  PJ’s face screws up, and I’m waiting for the outburst, but instead he just exhales and says, “Yeah, sure. You’re right. Come on, let’s keep looking.”

  PJ saunters away, and Kendra and I follow him, sharing glances of worry. It’s obvious we didn’t even get to PJ, that he’s upset but doesn’t want to worry us. It’s a shame, and I wish he’d told us about this sooner, but . . . we needed him down here. Kendra and I couldn’t do this alone, and we all knew it was dangerous, but scary Warden dream or not, we couldn’t save O’Dea unless he came. We’re a trio, a team. That’s something that maybe O’Dea didn’t teach me, but Coach Leider did while I was playing basketball—you have to be ready for anything, and you can’t get all upset or out of line just because things didn’t go your way. No raging at the ref, even if the call’s a total crock. That’s a personal foul.

  Thinking about basketball gives me this shot of sadness and anger as I tiptoe through little mountains of dust and corpse dandruff. My folks are probably freaking out right now. They’ve probably looked up the film festival (which does exist—Kendra on the research tip), but there’s a pretty high chance they’ve contacted our school and realized that they don’t know anything about it. Which means they’re worried sick. My dad’s gotta be losing it, calling the hotel we gave them twenty times a day . . . and my mom is probably crying. God, is there anything worse than your mom crying?

  No, you know what? Just like PJ, I had to be here. O’Dea needs saving. She’s somewhere in this gross hole, and there’s a total nut job holding her hostage. We need to be here, even if it is a massive bummer.

  Wading through piles of dust and decay, we get deeper and deeper into downtown Kudus. The huts and dirty igloos turn into these longhouses that look like Viking ships and white mansions with Hershey’s Kiss tops. Our wandering leads us into the middle of a marketplace, with rotten canvas stalls lining either side of a big square. There are even some mummified goods lining the cobwebby shelves, mummified bowls and jars dripping with dust. We make our way around the stalls, glancing in one after another, but each one gives us the same view of cockroaches, dust, and the occasional headless skeleton.

  “All the same,” says PJ when we finish our seventeenth market stall in a row. “Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way. We’ve still got a lot of ground to cover before we reach the temple.”

  Kendra stares straight ahead for a second and then nods slowly. It’s so cool to watch something dawn on her, like you can see parts of her brain moving around like a, what’s it called, a Rubik’s Cube. “You’re correct,” she says. “Our current method is counterproductive. Besides, one doubts that Dario Savini would make his way down to Kudus only to hide out in a long- abandoned fruit stall. Surely, he must have more of an agenda than that.”

  “There’s been no sign he’s even down here,” I tell her. “This all looks like no one’s really touched it since the city tripped and fell down this awful hole.”

  Kendra nods, and then opens her mouth and draws in a breath that’s just hard enough to be a gasp. “Ian, that’s it,” she says, grabbing my shoulder. “You’re a genius.”

  Coming from Kendra, about me, that’s huge. Plus, she’s touching me. And, well—wait. “Wait, how am I a genius?”

  “I was just going to ask the same thing,” says PJ.

  “We’re looking at it wrong,” she whispers. “We’ve been looking for a specific thing, signs of O’Dea’s or Dario’s presence. But as you just said, much of this place has gone undisturbed for centuries. What we need to look for is anything different. Even the slightest alteration in the area is a sign that we’re not alone.” She plays with her massive fuzz ball of hair, lost in thought. “If only we had a map of this place.”

  The image of a map in my head—of looking down over the city—turns into a fully formed idea, one that feels equal parts crazy and totally brilliant. “What if I got up there?” I ask them, pointing to an old longhouse. “I could climb up there and get a good view of the city, see if I notice anything.”

  At the idea, PJ seems to buck up a bit, like finding O’Dea beats the fact that we’re in hands-down the most horrible place on earth (and to defend PJ’s mood, this is basically God’s blind spot down here). We approach the longhouse, and the closer we get the taller it looms. When we reach it, I’m amazed at how big it is, but I can’t help but notice that its triangular roof has low-hanging sides that level out.

  PJ and Kendra cup their hands once we’re under the roof’s edge. After a few deep breaths and a quick stretch, I take two quick steps and plant my foot in their hands, and they toss me up with all their might (which isn’t much—if only I had my teammates here). For a second, I’m in midair, hands reaching out, and I’m sure the only view I’m gonna get is of the inside of my broken leg—

  My hands clap down on the edge of the roof, and with one strong pull I yank myself up onto the slanted surface. After a few moments of breathing and getting used to my steep new terrain, I climb to my hands and knees and start creeping toward the peak of the rooftop.

  Bingo: once I’m straddling the pointed top of the roof, I can see all of Kudus, and it would be a beautiful view if it didn’t look like a city after the apocalypse. The buildings continue growing larger as they near the temple, and now I’m really face-to-face with the massive pointed buildings, all covered with sculptures and ridges like big stone artichokes. The streets are stretched out in every direction, totally empty except for the shape of the occasional cave zombie stalking slowly through the blackness and looking like blurry stick figures in my night vision. All around us hang huge ceiling spikes and pieces of white jagged crystal; for a second, it’s like I’m at the very center of the cave.

  “Remember, just look for different,” says Kendra.

  There’s not much “different” going on here. The city looks pretty dead, even from this height, and most of it is completely swallowed by dust from the past five centuries—

  Hold on. What about that one?

  “Ian!” hisses PJ. “Behind you!”

  I turn just in time to see the cave zombie scuttling toward me, its fingernails tapping faintly on the slate beneath us, its backbone covered with one big flat slab of fungus, like it’s got a spinal Mohawk. In a flash, I’ve ducked to one side of the roof and dropped to my belly, creeping backward down the slanted slope until my feet reach the edge and dangle over.

  The zombie leans forward, its nostrils only a few inches from where my hands—one of my few body parts not disguised with zombie blood—just were, and sniffs loudly. Instantly, its bone fingers and toes begin tapping out a rhythm on the slate roof that gets responded to throughout the dead city . . . from nearby.

  As I dangle from the roof’s edge and drop to the dust-caked ground, I see PJ and Kendra looking over their shoulders and lowering into fight stance. They’ve got the same feeling I have, a kind of weird extra Gravedigger sense: they’re coming. We gotta go.

  “There’s a building,” I say, pulling my machete from my backpack and loving the weight in my hand. “A few blocks from here. It’s got a bunch of boards on the windows and door that look kind of fresh. All the buildin
gs around it are deep in dirt.”

  “Great,” says PJ, sounding ready for battle. “Let’s get moving.”

  We run fast, staying low to avoid the cave zombies that come crawling toward the longhouse with their nose holes to the sky. All we hear are our soft footsteps in the piled dust, the hissing and moaning of the zombies, and, way off, like a typewriter in a church, claws tapping against slate. Every couple of yards, I hold up a hand to signal a stop and we watch as a group of spidery cave zombies go scuttling past us, no doubt headed to where we were last spotted. Given how creepy they are, I’m surprised they can’t hear my heart thud-thud-thudding in my rib cage, but I have to assume that all that gear must have fallen apart in their skulls about two or three hundred years ago.

  “How do you think they got this way?” I whisper as a cluster of three disappears around a corner.

  “A lack of food,” says Kendra calmly. “Without any flesh left to devour, their bodies probably began to mutate.”

  “But they didn’t eat us before,” PJ says. “They could’ve.”

  “Maybe they’re too weak to digest us while we’re alive,” says Kendra. “They were taking us somewhere to . . . ripen us.”

  I’m about to tell Kendra that she’s officially the grossest person I know when my eyes finally notice a series of indents in the dust up ahead of us—big, boot-sized imprints, not like either our Melee Industries boots or the weird skeleton prints of the zombies.

  “Guys, look,” I say, nodding forward. Their eyes follow mine, and we all scurry toward the prints.

  “They’re old,” says PJ, and he’s right, they’re sort of half filled, like footprints during a heavy snowstorm, as though they were made a while ago, but they’re definitely boot-prints, large and industrial.

  “If they’re this old, they can’t be Dario’s,” says Kendra.

  “Then whose?” asks PJ.

  “Let’s find out,” I say, following their path. My friends slowly take up the lead, and we head farther into the darkness, until in the distance I see the building I noticed from the longhouse roof, a clay house with its windows and gateway boarded up, the boot-prints leading beneath the barrier.

  There’s someone inside that hut. And we need to know who.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kendra

  The huts of Kudus are strangely shaped, given their geographical location. Indonesian architecture usually leaned on the very angular and pointed Austronesia styles. The longhouses and the massive temple in the background have what I expected from that ancient style—jagged points, gabled roofs adorned with jutting hornlike protrusions, and hard angles. But these huts are domed and rounded, their edges smooth in an almost impossible way, one that would require an incredible amount of proficiency with clay, straw, and other natural materials. Now, buried by time, decay, and dark magic, they appear as great green lumps of unhygienic detritus in our night vision (that’s two on detritus, somewhat of a cheap shot this time around), like warts of the earth.

  Even among these strange structures, the one we’re nearing is especially unsettling, drawing us in with fatalistic purpose (two on “fatalistic,” as well).

  The windows of the hut appear to have been barricaded somehow. Its few portals are entirely clogged with lumber and bones. It looks almost like a reversed beehive rising out of the ground, its ominous nature only emphasized by the corpses of its shelter brethren that loom around us in this dome of pure, clammy night through which we sneak.

  And there’s a set of footprints leading to it. Not fresh, but unmistakably not zombie footprints. Someone boarded him or herself up in this hut. The question is, is he or she still there?

  The closer we get to the structure’s silhouette, the higher my heart rate climbs. A cold sweat beads on my brow, and I’m forced to remind myself not to swipe a mutant blood-coated arm across my damp forehead. God forbid I somehow end up with this terrible slime in my hair—its consistency suggests it will take weeks to remove. Assuming, of course, it doesn’t cause my entire scalp to go bare due to its toxicity.

  “Okay,” says Ian. “On three, I kick the door in, and we see what’s inside.”

  This is the worst idea I have ever heard. “Ian, are you insane?” I whisper. “Every living thing in this cave will hear the noise caused by such an action! We will essentially become zombie bait.”

  “I side with that,” says PJ calmly. “Don’t do it, man.”

  “Dario could be in there,” mumbles Ian, his stare never leaving the hut. “O’Dea could be. We have to look. There are footprints.”

  “Ian, this is a bad idea in any horror movie,” says PJ, trying to sound soothing but firm. “This is the mummy’s tomb, basically. If it was closed up, it must have been for a very good reason.”

  Ian nods. “Okay. On three. Ready?”

  Ian’s gone on autopilot, so I step between him and the door and put my hands out. “No,” I tell him. “Not a chance. There’s a smarter way to enter this hut, and I intend to find it.”

  As his shoulders sag and he exhales, I turn to face the barred door and consider our actual options.

  Every crack and crevice, Kendra—scout it out; use it to your advantage. Pry the blockage off with the hammer? It doesn’t look quite like that would work, does it? Or what about slowly pushing at whatever’s filling the doorway. First, test your barrier’s strength. Lightly press the item that’s blocking your path and see if it resists—

  “Three.” Ian’s leg rockets up from his side and obliterates the boards filling one window of the hut. A deafening crack rings out through the entire cavern city, echoing for what sound like leagues into the dark.

  “Ian!” I stage-whisper. “You idiot! You’re supposed to count to three!”

  His response is a dead-on stare and a matter-of-fact smirk. “I’m sorry,” he says, “was I not counting out loud?”

  How I feel is at odds with common sense. The logical impulse would be to reach out and wrap my fingers around his corded and athletic neck. But some part of me feels amused by, and enamored of, his stupid attitude and straightforward thinking. I can’t help but look away from him and do my best not to smile. Such a lummox, and yet so smart and . . . and sharp in his own right.

  Don’t forget that you had little to no idea of how you were going to get in there, Kendra. The lummox did you a favor.

  One by one, we heft ourselves through the window, cartwheeling to the cobweb-laden floor, Ian bringing up the rear with a quick and easy hop. The inside of the hut is about what one might expect—a wide circular room, one or two rotting tables, some old vessels made of clay and metal. The bed jammed up against the door is somewhat disconcerting but entirely justified given what has been lurking outside this hut. But it is the smell that is most discomforting, that stings our noses and immediately triggers my gag reflex, a smell not unlike that of the sewers we just escaped. Out there is an ancient death scent, a musky and mildewy stench of long-form decay and bulging spinal mushrooms. (No, Kendra, getting a sample to take home with you would defeat the whole purpose of this trip; don’t even consider it.) In here, there is the septic stench of rotten meat and neglect—fresh death, death in bloom. Like roadkill.

  “Pfuh,” hacks PJ, waving a hand in front of his face. “Whatever’s in here, it reeks. Kendra, we were right—this was the worst idea we’ve had so far.”

  “Why’s it smell so bad in here?” coughs Ian. “The cave zombies don’t smell that bad.”

  My eyes scan the room, my brain doing its best to overcome the odor of the place and focus on our task at hand. At our feet lie the boards, their edges heavy with blackened lumps of mud, bone, leathery flesh.

  “Whoever was in here was using pieces of zombies as some kind of mortar,” I say, nudging the split wood with my foot. “See? He or she must have killed one or two and then used their blood and body just as we used them—to deflect attention. It’s ingenious, really.”

  “Uh, Kendra,” says PJ, his voice going deep and hoarse, “I think it may ha
ve just been him.”

  My eyes fly up, and I follow PJ’s pointing, and nervously shaking, finger.

  Beneath a table, in the corner where the left-hand and far walls meet, is a dead body.

  It is not sprawled out or splattered like the corpses I looked at when I, preparing myself to be a Gravedigger after our jaunt on the mountain, googled “dead people” (a truly nauseating afternoon on the internet). Rather, this corpse is hunched over in a sitting position, its knees bent up by its chest, its back to us. Something about the climate down in the cave must have kept it preserved in that position—a flash mummification, if you will.

  Though perhaps I am just unused to seeing a corpse that is not attacking me.

  As Ian and I slowly approach it and round its front side, we see its face between the table legs—male, older; eyes, nose, and lips long since rotted away; expression relaxed, calm in death; empty eye sockets focused on a large pointed object clutched in his hands.

  “It appears to be some kind of bone,” I whisper. “A tusk, maybe.”

  “Looks like it’s all carved up,” says Ian.

  Indeed. As I crouch near the huddled cadaver and bring my goggles closer to the object, I can see the intricate web of sigils and swirling runes that cover every inch of the three-foot hunk of ivory, no doubt taken from an Elephas maximus sumatranus or Elephas maximus borneensis, the Sumatran and Borneo elephant respectively.

  And the closer I peer at the sigils, the more I begin to see a throb of light, heavy and slow, emanating from them. Soon, I can feel it on my skin, can hear the rumble of magical energy pouring out of it. This isn’t the loud, communicative scream of the sigils I read along the tunnel walls earlier today. These ones are strong but unmovable, powerful but quiet. They are not intended to frighten or warn, but rather to hold, to contain. Given its unspoken language, this tusk will feel like it weighs seven hundred pounds when I hold it in my hands, though it is in reality much lighter, I’m sure.