Gravediggers

by Christopher Krovatin

  “How do you know this?” I ask him.

  “My father and his fellow Gravediggers—his cousin and their friend Octavio—worked with a Warden for many years in Italy,” says Savini, solemnly, his voice tinged with sadness. “She trusted him with many secrets, and told him of the times long before he was born. She considered it part of his duty, to know his history.”

  “Is this the Warden he killed?” I say, the words bubbling up before I can stop them.

  “Yes, that was her,” says Savini. His tone of voice is surprising—if I didn’t know better, I’d say that was genuine remorse. “Her name was Chiarra. She had been the Warden of the lands neighboring my father’s home for ages. Unlike many Wardens, she always saw the purpose of Gravediggers. She understood that, sometimes, unbelievable people must be sent to confront an unspeakable problem.” Savini shakes his head and stops in his tracks. “Her lapse in judgment—she forgot to properly mark and seal a cave in the mountains swarming with cursed—and the containment breach that it caused, cost my father his family, his fellow Gravediggers, and his sanity. It was a great tragedy on the whole, and he never forgave himself for ending her life. But you must remember that if he didn’t kill her, another Warden would have soon afterward. By then, the coven was already amassing.”

  He says the word coven as though it tastes bad. The idea had never occurred to me, but hearing it out loud, I can’t help but think of those women in that hotel, those three witches stacked against us and telling us we don’t exist.

  Two cave zombies round a corner and sniff loudly at us before hunching forward, claws spread wide, and stalking in our direction with a hiss. It’s like a cut shot—one minute, Savini has stopped in this dust-covered street, lost in the sorrow of his father’s death. The next, he’s got the zombie’s throat in his hand and yanks its shoulder forward. With a repulsive ripping noise, he tears the creature’s head off and pulls its spine out of its back, the vertebrae swaying slightly in our field of vision, coated with foaming black blood and noticeably swollen.

  The second zombie stalks toward us, and wordlessly, Ian thrusts the tusk in its face. The creature immediately hops backward on its ballet dancer feet, hissing and shielding its face from the conduit of good karma. Almost immediately, though, it begins tapping out a steady rhythm on the floor with its bony fingertips. Savini whips around and snatches one of its arms in his huge paw, tossing the frail creature over its head and swinging it into the floor with a blast of choking dust and a wet crunch. Even as he steps away from the mangled body, it still twitches, not quite entirely dead.

  “You see?” he huffs, storming down an alley so fast that we’re forced to trot to keep up with him. “Your Warden magic cannot actually stop them. They can still summon their brethren.”

  “Dude, the Wardens are nuts,” says Ian. “They kept all these zombies locked up for a bazillion years. That’s real.”

  Savini laughs, just a little. “You’re lying to yourself,” says Savini. “Do you believe any of the run-ins with the damned you’ve had would’ve turned out well, had you not been there to stop them?”

  “Technically, we caused those outbreaks,” says Kendra.

  “Except for the one where a teenager with lots of money caused it,” says Savini, his voice reaching an angry growl. His eyes turn to mine, and there’s a fierce shine to them, visible even through my night vision. “And even the one you did put into motion, your stunt on the mountain—have the Wardens come after you for it? PJ, I can tell you know. Why do the Wardens threaten to kill their own, but they haven’t touched you? Why are you beyond their reproach?”

  “Where is O’Dea?” I say, doing my best to ignore his words.

  “Why, PJ?”

  “Because they’re afraid of us.” It’s out of my mouth before I can even think of it. Savini smiles and nods.

  “Indeed,” he says. “They’ve never known what to do with us, because we have the power. Wardens need to be trained. Their blood has the potential for magic, but they need to be . . . whittled out of a person. Gravediggers are like diamonds.” The way he says the last word lets me see the bright, glittering jewel in his mind’s eye. “We have an inherent power behind us, an ability. The Wardens fear what they can’t control, and so they fear us. Back when this city flourished, we were hundredfold.” He sweeps an arm out into the inky shadows before him, displaying to us the deceased city full of the mutated dead. “Gravedigger clans roamed every land, defeating the evil as they came upon it. Wardens helped them, yes, but they were the law, the men and women who people turned to. It was understood that it was better to wipe the evil from this place than to try and keep it quiet and contained, hoping no one stumbled upon the cursed earth.”

  “So why are you trying to set it free?” Kendra asks.

  “Yeah, man,” says Ian. “Seems to me like the Wardens are doing their job and you’re making things worse.”

  We exit an alleyway into a small street leading directly to the temple at the city’s center. Before us, the three-pointed construction looms in the darkness, its statue-lined walls looking jagged and cluttered as they rise up toward the rock ceiling overhead. Again, Dario is silent, considering Ian’s words, and for a moment, I hope we’ve reached him, that we’ve turned our villain into an antihero . . . but the furrow that crosses his brow, the way his jaw sets, lets me know that’s only wishful thinking.

  “What the Wardens need is a wake-up call,” says Savini. Just like that, the impassioned Gravedigger is gone; this is the hard, cruel tone of a psycho. “Can’t you feel it? Something is going to happen. Soon, these things are going to get loose, containment be damned. So why wait? Let’s return the world to how it was meant to be, so that we can stop this infection from growing down here until it cannot be contained. It’s our time, children. We need them to see that our way is the right way—”

  “Your way,” says Kendra.

  “What?” says Savini, snapping out of his rant.

  “This is not our way,” says Kendra. “Don’t speak for the three of us. We have no intention of letting you release a horde of zombies onto the world. No real Gravedigger would do that.”

  Her words center me. For a second, I’m ashamed that I felt for Savini, that I listened intently to his words as though they made sense. Then, I’m just angry again.

  “Absolutely,” I say, feeling my face grow so red it might glow in the dark. “Is there anything else you want to tell us? Other than ‘Wardens lie’ or crazy bitter Gravedigger propaganda.”

  Savini takes a deep, slow breath and screws up his mouth the way my dad does when I’ve said too much. “I know your Warden friend has put a lot of ideas in your head,” says Savini, “but listen to me, the truth will set you free. With the right training, you can be shaped—”

  “We don’t need any of your training,” says Ian, looking angry. “We’ve got, what was it, inherent power? All of these soldier-type shenanigans you’re into sound like a ton of baloney. Us real Gravediggers, we’re like diamonds, or whatever.” He smiles. “See, that’s you. That’s how you sound.”

  Savini looks at Ian with those sharp, glinting eyes, and then with a blink they are soft and sad, like those of a dog. He steps up to Ian and claps a big hand on my friend’s shoulder, making him flinch. “That you are,” he says softly, nodding. “You’re very powerful, Ian. Perhaps I’m too hasty to deny what you three are saying. Maybe there’s another way.”

  Ian slowly nods, and Kendra and I share a glance. Maybe it did work. Maybe he’s seen the light. But this sudden change of heart just feels a little too, I don’t know . . .

  Convenient.

  Dario’s free hand wraps around the tusk in Ian’s grip, and before any of us know what’s going on, his palm moves from Ian’s shoulder to his face, shoving him to the ground and tearing the tusk away from him.

  “Give that back!” snaps Ian, scrambling to get back on his feet.

  “Make me,” rumbles Dario, admiring the intricately carved magical seal.


  “It doesn’t even matter,” says Kendra. “That seal is more magically encrypted than a server at Google. You’ll never be able to break its spell.”

  “Unless,” says Dario, a cruel smile growing across his face, “I have a Warden.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ian

  Oh man, we screwed up.

  Maybe I’m not as smart as Kendra, but I’ve got a brain, and something rattling around in it clicks into the right slot, and the whole thing gets moving at once.

  We could’ve done anything but go along with Dario Savini, like go running through the city or try to stab him with the tusk or stay put and use the rest of his dead dad to glue the hut closed while he stomped off doing his own thing. But instead, we wander after him listening to his super-sure speech and watching him break down zombies like it’s nothing, and we even think we can reason with him, and then he just takes our stuff and kicks our butts to the curb once we’re deep enough into the cave city to not have any idea where the heck we are.

  Coach Leider calls that “rope-a-dope.” It’s what Muhammad Ali used to do, get your opponent all settled in thinking they’ve got you, and then when they let down their defenses you come out swinging. Dario just saved PJ from his zombie dad and got all cozy with us so we wouldn’t be ready for when he snagged our magical seal and released a ton of zombies onto the earth. That kind of thing ain’t cool. My friends, yeah, they can treat me like an idiot, but this nut-bar? Not a chance.

  Staring at him, all smug with the tusk in hand and this giant evil-looking temple rising up behind him, it’s like I already know what to do. Feels a little low, yeah—this kind of thing gets you kicked out of a game, heck, thrown off the team—but considering the snatch ’n’ shove that Savini just pulled on me, it’s deserved.

  On my feet, I take two steps and whip my foot up between Dario’s legs, smashing him in the junk. The dude doubles over with what sounds like a loud cough, and in that second I’ve got the big carved elephant tusk in my hand and my goggles thrown over my eyes.

  “BAIL,” I shout, but my friends are already on it, barreling past me as we head into the cursed city.

  Immediately, things are rough. The dust and filth piled on the floor puffs up like snow, so we’re all hacking and wiping at our goggles, and the jumble of rotting buildings that Dario just strolled between is totally confusing, littered with cobwebby alleys and dead ends.

  Somewhere behind us, Dario shouts, “You three have made a very poor decision!”

  Kendra and I share a glance as PJ comes huffing up behind us.

  “What do we do?” he asks through deep breaths.

  I say “Split up” just as Kendra says “Stay together,” and then we both kind of look each other in the eye.

  “We’ll cover more ground splitting up,” I tell her. “Might find O’Dea quicker and lose this whack job.”

  “We’re in a city, Ian,” says Kendra calmly. “If we split up, we’ll never see each other again.”

  “We can follow our footsteps in the dust back—”

  “Guys.” PJ grabs us by the arms. Some ways behind us, Dario comes storming into view, head down and eyes angry. Kendra and I meet gazes again, and I open my mouth to agree with her—

  “Split up,” she says, nodding. “We meet back here in twenty minutes.”

  “Got it,” says PJ. “On three.”

  THWACK. That big ol’ knife we’ve been seeing so much of today goes flying past us, nearly taking my nose as it sinks into the side of a hut behind us, its handle wobbling rapidly. PJ nods. No three. Just go, now.

  The one good thing about being lost in a huge abandoned city—and this is important, because there aren’t a lot of them—is that you can run to and hide in all sorts of places. In even the smallest cities, there are a million nooks and crannies. So as I serpentine my way between huts and longhouses that look like sleeping rhinos, I know that I can, and will, eventually lose this bozo. I don’t care if he’s wearing a magical cloak and has a Rambo knife, he’s not going to find us each in an entire underground city. Even PJ, not the most athletic kid in the world, can find a drainage pipe or crawlspace.

  But somehow, no matter how far I run, I can feel Savini at my back. Sometimes I can hear his feet, and sometimes I can hear him grunt or breathe heavy, but most of the time I just know, in the middle of me where my guts and soul are, that I need to keep moving, keep moving, don’t slow down, he’ll get you, all he needs is a moment of your weakness to grab you and cut your neck.

  I just have to think of it like any basketball game. It’s no big deal. All you have to do is stay alive. My dad would be proud of me if he didn’t probably want to disown me for lying to him and running away. My poor dad, who I lied to so I could run around in the dark trying not to get caught by zombies.

  A hut with its door hanging open yells out to me with its big dark mouth, so I hop two stairs in a single bound and throw myself against the inner wall, my back lined up with the doorless opening in the front of the house, the tusk clutched to my chest like it could save my life.

  My heart’s pounding, my breath is sharp and quick, but man, do I feel on top of this. Through the edge of the door, I watch the space where the footsteps seem to be coming from, and then around a corner appears Savini with that same walk, slow and deadly and totally ready to get down and dirty. I’m almost laughing at him for walking past me, but then I catch his drawn knife in one hand, and my laugh sort of catches in my throat, which is not good, because it makes me cough.

  And then the footsteps stop.

  Oh man, it’s like every drop of my blood is screaming at once, like my pulse is so loud it’s making the hut shake. No no no. Turn around.

  Dario steps slowly backward, his eyes focused on the doorway, mouth screwed up in a sneer, and no, ah geez, he starts turning toward the hut and walking very slowly, lowering into a kind of attack stance with his knife raised at his side.

  “Hey, Savini!” screams PJ’s voice from off in the darkness, the sound echoing crazily off the inside of the cave and coming from everywhere at one. “Any luck finding us yet?”

  Dario’s head snaps up, his brow furrowing. Slowly, he turns around and stalks off into the spaces between huts, keeping his footfalls soft. After a few seconds, I lean my head out of the hut and watch him, slinking along with his ear cocked to the air.

  “You have no clue where we are, do you,” calls PJ, his voice booming through all of Kudus. He sounds like he’s traveling, moving from one point to the next with screams on his lips.

  “Dario, look,” calls Kendra, making Savini spin on his heel with a grunt of surprise. “Dario, I’m easily spotted. See? I’m over where the dust is.”

  “Hey, Savini, has anyone ever told you your mustache makes you look like a young Sam Elliot?” calls PJ.

  “I take it that when your father trained you to be a Gravedigger, Finding Loud Children was not adequately reviewed,” calls Kendra.

  At first, it works—Dario glances around the cave in a panic, confused by the blur of echoing voices, and I figured awesome, go Kendra and PJ, we’ve got him—but then, like a good Gravedigger, he lowers his head and closes his eyes and takes a deep, even breath before slowly stalking off into the city. I creep out of the hut and follow his footsteps in the ankle-high crud on the floor.

  “I bet O’Dea spit in your face when you asked for her help!” shouts PJ, laughing meanly. “She probably told you to go to h-h-HEY—”

  There’s a yelp, and then I’m running, my heart throwing me forward between houses and huts and alleys, until I reach an old town square with what looks like a fountain full of bones and cobwebs rotting in the middle of it. Next to the fountain, something makes my whole body stop short.

  Savini’s strolling up to PJ, who has two cave zombies creeping down the edge of a building and hissing at him. Within seconds, the zombies are split down their mushroom-covered backbones and oozing foul-smelling black foam, and Dario has PJ’s throat in one hand and his knife in the ot
her. The blade of the knife lowers slowly toward PJ’s face. PJ does his best to keep his eyes shut, to look away, but really all he can do is wheeze and scratch at Dario’s big, hard hands while his death comes at him.

  “Stop!” I shout. “Leave him alone! You want a fight, you fight me!”

  The knife just stops, man. Dario pulls his eyes off of PJ, and then lets me breathe when he tosses my friend to the floor. He turns and smiles at me like he’s heard the answer to a question he’s been really curious about, and then, what do you know, he drops his knife on the floor with a clatter.

  “Think you can take me on, Ian?” he says. “Be my guest. I’d love to see that.”

  Ah, crap. I mean, what do I do? I’ve played sports, I can size a guy up. Dario Savini’s got, what, a hundred pounds of muscle, two feet, and a lifetime of experience on me? I just watched him cut the backbone out of his zombie father, for Pete’s sake.

  But then again . . . then again, this guy isn’t some MMA fighter, or some kind of superhero, he’s a loser, the kind of nutcase who wants to make things bad for everyone, and those guys are never that good in a fight. Look at him, picking on kids, trying to start the zombie apocalypse—he’s just a bully, and bullies always think they’re tougher than they are. Besides, I’m a Gravedigger, not just a Gravedigger but the physical one, the fighter, and honestly, it looks like Savini only focuses on the glamour muscles. He’s got those alligator arms—big biceps, little forearms.

  Think I can take him? Damn right I do.

  “Damn right, I do,” I grumble, placing the tusk on the floor and putting my fists up in front of me before trotting over to him.

  “That’s the spirit,” he says, raising his hands in that sort-of-open martial arts kind of way and crouching down. When I get close to him, I lower my head and begin circling him, hunched, swift, trying to remember all of the boxing stuff I’ve seen on TV and video games. Bob and weave, keep your hands by the side of your head, keep moving, keep moving. The guy is bigger than you so don’t get too close; look for a weak spot.