Gravediggers

by Christopher Krovatin

  “Keep moving,” he pants, brandishing the arm like a club. “We’ll just have to fight as we go.”

  “But—” Before I can form my sentence, a bony hand grips my ankle. Without thinking, my foot wrenches out of the steely grasp and my heel thrusts out, catching a withered corpse in its wrinkled nasal bridge. With a crunch and a hiss, the monster goes falling off of the wall.

  Come on, Kendra. Forget everything else. You have a great and inborn skill within you. You’re a Gravedigger. And Gravediggers fight zombies.

  Our movement is reduced to baby steps, but somehow we continue our death shuffle toward the black mouth in the stone wall at our backs, fending off zombies the whole time. PJ continues his strange zombie martial art, yanking the zombies from their perch and tossing them into each other or swatting at them with a severed limb when he can wrench one off, while Ian brandishes the tusk alternately like a cricket bat and sword, making the zombies rear back in terror at the conduit of pure containment magic. One leans in too close, and when Ian brings the tusk down on its head, it doesn’t just die; its skull explodes in a cloud of dust and a crackle of magic.

  While they fend off the horizontal climbers and ceiling descenders, I focus on the zombies below us, demolishing the face of any corpse determined enough to attempt yanking us down with them, coating my heel in black fleshy scum. I am beyond complaining. Skeletal cave zombies fall; new ones arrive. That is our current mission.

  “Ian!” cries PJ. My eyes flash to my right and see him crouching, trying to stay out of reach as five different zombies—three on the cave wall, one on the ledge, one climbing up beneath him—reach out their pointed dead fingertips. “I could use that tusk for a second!”

  “Here,” says Ian, holding the tusk out to me.

  Once again, an extra sense seems to smolder inside my head, as though something deep in my frontal cortex senses a menace behind this object. “I . . . I can’t.”

  “What?” he says, glancing at me with disbelief and anger.

  “I don’t know why, but I can’t—”

  “IAN!”

  “Ah, for crying out loud—CATCH!”

  Before my own eyes, Ian lobs the saving grace of all Indonesia over my head (I must remember, later, to kill him for doing something so reckless). It is only the tusk’s enormous size that enables scrawny, uncoordinated PJ to grab it out of the air. Instantly, as he holds it out, all five of the taloned hands reaching for him pull away with a panicked hiss; the zombies rear back, giving him a two-foot radius.

  “Ian, be careful!” I scream. “If you drop that thing, we could be done for.”

  “Just be quiet and keep kicking zombies,” he grunts, landing a sharp left jab in a corpse’s throat and sending it tumbling twenty feet down.

  Hear that, Kendra? Ian Buckley is being the voice of reason while you’re acting the silly, fretful girl. There, with the missing teeth—kick. The one with the huge half-disc fungus bulging from its eye socket—kick. Do not plan, just think; use your swift mind to make you swift footed. There—kick.

  Eventually, the hole in the wall is reachable, and Ian hooks one arm inside and cries, “Guys! We’re in! Come on!”

  “It might be full of zombies!” yells PJ, jabbing our artifact at a frightening monstrosity.

  “No—no,” he says, glancing in quickly. “They’re not here. It must be protected. Come on.”

  In terror, I watch Ian shuffle two more feet and then duck into the cave. Sure enough, he’s right—the undead hover around the edge like hungry ants but dare not go in. As I inch closer, I catch a faint glow that likely only I can see coming from deep within.

  “Oh no,” rasps PJ. On my other side, I can feel him stop swinging and shoving.

  “What?” I say, trying to peer farther into the opening in the rock.

  “He’s back,” groans PJ.

  My eyes meet his—wide, dark, heavy with despair—and follow his gaze to the city of Kudus, swarming with dead. There, in the midst of the forward-pressing horde of carnivorous meat scarecrows, comes a shape—brawny, cloaked, plowing through the creatures as though they were nothing. Watching Savini make his way toward us through the horde is a truly incredible sight—he crushes skulls without looking away from the wall, slices out and snaps spinal columns as though they were nothing.

  You may have doubted him in the past, Kendra, but if he’s not a Gravedigger, he’s just pretty damn good.

  The figure’s hood rises, and two sparkling eyes meet mine.

  “Head into the cave!” I shout, shuffling the last few feet to the stone mouth and leaping in backward past a web of snatching hands. Sure enough, a few feet down Ian sits with his back to a wall covered with faintly glowing designs, imbued with an effervescent light that dully throbs every time I exhale a breath—

  “Grab PJ!” shouts Ian.

  Remember PJ, Kendra?

  My body spins, and my hand closes around the back of PJ’s shirt. With a sharp pull, he comes flying backward into the shelter, landing on his tailbone with a thud and a sharp cry.

  The tusk slips out of his hands and goes rolling toward the open mouth of the cave.

  Behind me, Ian gasps; next to me, PJ scrambles, but I have the clear shot, the clear path, the perfect view of the magical seal as it skitters toward a twenty-foot drop.

  It’s now or never. Do or die. If O’Dea would sacrifice her life for this, it’s only fitting that I would also.

  Grab it, kid.

  My body launches forward, and my hand closes around the patterned ivory of the seal. My hands burn, and something powerful strikes me in the chest and doesn’t leave. The air leaves my lungs, my ears ring, and everything goes blindingly white.

  Chapter Fifteen

  PJ

  For a moment, a single shining instant, I believe Kendra has saved us. It’s truly beautiful—she dives, slides, and grabs the totem over which I sweatily lost control.

  “You’ve got it!” I shout, and then everything goes downhill.

  Kendra’s body spasms once, hard, her arms and legs going straight out and her chest thrusting forward, her back arching painfully. It reminds me of a movie hospital when someone gets the shock paddles on their chest after their pulse drops—beeep, “CLEAR”—and then all at one, she goes limp, her head hitting the cave floor with a sickening thump.

  “What the heck was that?” shouts Ian. “What happened to her?”

  “It . . . must have been the tusk,” I say, doing my best to put two and two together. “Maybe these new Warden powers . . . maybe it was too much for her. It blew out her system—”

  Before I can finish the word, Kendra’s body lazily slips over the edge of the cave mouth.

  “NO!” scream both Ian and I, bounding to grab her boot as it slides out of sight, but we’re too late. We lean over the edge just in time to catch her plummeting, limbs flailing, body bent. A scream escapes my throat and the world goes blurry as she descends toward the horde of living dead.

  Savini, watching from beneath us, has a similar reaction. He puts his huge meaty arms up in front of his face and barrels forward, mowing down the frail scrawny zombies in his path. His timing is impeccable: as if on cue, he gets to the wall and throws out his arms just in time for Kendra to collapse into them with a thud.

  For a moment, my heart spikes with panic, preparing myself for the cave zombie masses to pile on top of him, but it’s the opposite—they rear back, hissing and gasping at the limp form cradled in Savini’s arms.

  It’s the seal, the tusk carved with the Warden-craft sigils. Something about the sheer power of it just scares the living—unliving, whatever—daylights out of them . . . but it also almost looks like they’re worshipping it.

  Savini touches a finger to Kendra’s throat, beneath her chin, to make sure she’s alive. He glances at the tusk in her hand, then back up at us in the cave . . . then a sickening smile curls over his face. “And what do we have here,” he calls out. “Why, it’s a young Warden.”

  My heart
deflates. Ian spits out a word we don’t normally say at dinner.

  As if on cue, the cave shakes with another sorrowful, earth-shattering moan. As one, every zombie around us, from the ones dangling from the ceiling to those half crushed under the feet of their brothers, turn and look to the temple at the very heart of the city, its green night-vision outlines looming and distant. Savini’s gaze follows theirs, but he glances back at us one last time, eyes almost glowing beneath his hood.

  “If you boys are smart and wait there,” he growls, just loud enough for us to hear twenty feet above him, “I’ll come back for you and help you escape before the horde arrives.”

  Savini pulls the tusk from Kendra’s grip and tucks it into his belt. He turns and begins walking off into the city of Kudus with Kendra held in his arms like he’s Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. The army of zombies around him slowly follow, always making sure to give him a five-foot radius. On all sides of our cave, spidery corpses descend the walls one careful handful of rock at a time, their phantom eyes pinned on the temple in the distance. For what feels like an eternity, Savini strolls along with Kendra bouncing lightly in his grip, an ocean of skeletal monsters five thousand thick scuttling next to him, crawling over huts and spilling around longhouses, until Dario seems to have disappeared into the roiling mass.

  “This is not good,” snaps Ian, fuming next to me.

  “You can say that again,” I grumble, crawling back away from the cave mouth. “What are we going to do, Ian?”

  “We gotta climb back down and go after him,” says my best friend, dusting off the front of his jacket and running his hands through his raggedy blond hair.

  “That’s impossible,” I blurt out, my despair and hopelessness getting the better of me. “We’re not going to climb down that indent ladder on the city wall, Ian. And we’re not going to get through massive numbers of freakishly terrifying dead folks on all sides of Savini.”

  “It’s the only way, PJ,” he says, cracking his neck. “This isn’t even about saving Kendra anymore, or O’Dea. If he’s going to release these zombies, it’s about saving the world.”

  Okay, I need to take a moment and acknowledge how cool it is that Ian just said that, and meant it. People ask me why I want to carry a camera around everywhere—it’s because of things like this.

  “Ian, we have no idea what he’s going to do next,” I say. “We don’t even know if he knows what he’s doing! How long do we think Kendra will be knocked out? Who knows if she even knows how to use whatever powers she has—”

  “PJ, you’re scared,” he says as though it’s a scientific fact. “That’s okay, I get it. But this is the right thing to do. We’ve got a real full-on apocalypse situation on our hands, and we can’t be sitting around meditating. This isn’t Night of the Living Dead anymore, man; it’s Resident Evil. It’s time for action.”

  I couldn’t be prouder of Ian for making that reference, but my fear is still overwhelming me. I am baffled as to what to do next. I can’t get a grip, can’t calm down. We were just shuffling across a cliff surrounded on all sides by vicious acrobatic zombies, after all. And . . .

  And I dropped the seal. I couldn’t hold onto it for more than three minutes before accidentally killing my friend.

  My eyes shut, burning with tears. My teeth clench so hard I feel like they’ll shoot sparks. There’s got to be another way. Please, please, let there be another way.

  We’re being watched.

  It stabs me in the chest and yanks my head up, whirling. Don’t ask me how I know, but some portion of me is just aware that eyes have settled on us. Slowly, glancing from one inch of the tunnel to the next, I stare into its darkened depths and notice a rippling, a slight bit of movement.

  And more. And more.

  “Ian,” I say, slapping behind me for my friend. “We have company.”

  The roaches vary in size, but the largest ones are disgustingly big, about the size of a horseshoe crab and possessing up to eighteen legs beneath their glistening shells. Where their exoskeletons should be black and shiny, like film, they are instead white and semitranslucent; ten bucks says these things were born without eyes. Unlike the zombies, they seem to moving in a single huddled mass, like a school of fish, sweeping toward us. As they click and scuttle along the floor, Ian and I steady ourselves, backs to the mouth of the cave. My throat swells up with nausea, and I can even feel Ian shudder next to me. I hope they aren’t hungry—for some reason, being eaten by zombies seems far preferable to being eaten by huge, pale cockroaches that would die in light. An image from Creepshow pops into my head, and I force myself to swallow it.

  But as they near us, the mass of many-legged creatures comes to a stop about two feet away. For a full minute, Ian and I stand there in silence, waiting for the pile of roaches to do something; for a full minute, they stay quiet and still.

  “What do you think’s going on?” Ian whispers, as though they could understand him.

  My mind takes in the way the cockroaches sit before us, and something snaps into place. “It might be because we’re Gravediggers,” I say to Ian. “Remember the bats on Danny Melee’s island? They treated us like gods.” A strange shape, poking out from under the front of the cockroach mass, catches my eye. “There’s . . . something down there. They have something. It looks like cloth.”

  “Pick it up,” says Ian.

  My mouth opens to reply, but it’s dry, frozen. “I . . . can’t. I can’t do it.”

  He glances at me. “You’ve got to be kidding me. We’re fighting undead monsters here, PJ.”

  “I don’t like bugs,” is all that comes out. There’s no greater truth in the world than that. Through all of my Gravedigger training, my time spent around zombies, nothing has changed about the fact that six-legged creatures with shells that basically have acid-filled hair for mouths remain the worst thing on earth to me.

  “Can’t believe this,” grumbles Ian, bending down toward the roaches.

  “You were freaked out by the bats in Puerto Rico,” I stammer.

  “That’s different,” he says. “Bats are huge and have claws and teeth and drink blood.” He tugs at the piece of fabric beneath the squirming pale creatures, sending them scuttling out of the way. Lifting it up, I take in a ripped hunk of cloth, the edges frayed and stained with dark patches. My hand reaches out and touches it, recognizing the make, the softness—

  “O’Dea,” I say, feeling my stomach drop into an endless pool. “It’s O’Dea’s clothing. They’ve . . .” I can’t even say the words that come to my mind. The close-up shot in my head shows O’Dea, writhing in pain, before the white swarm of shells comes bulging from her mouth and nose and—

  “Monsters!” I bellow, launching a foot at them. Somehow, the eyeless bugs are quicker than I am, and the horde goes crawling down into the crevice. My rational mind tells me to stay calm, but instinct overwhelms me, and I go chasing after the wave of writhing bottom-feeders, rushing headlong into the darkened tunnel. Ian’s voice calls my name somewhere offscreen, but my rage at the flesh-eating insects that have devoured my friend is too powerful to ignore.

  The cockroaches take a hard left into another cavern in the rock walls of Kudus, and I go after them. The minute I enter this second chamber, I freeze, my mind grappling with the sheer weirdness of what sits before me.

  O’Dea is bound and gagged, tied to a stalac—stalag—a large stone spike hanging from the ceiling. Her face is a bruised mess, a little trickle of blood running from just above her right eye. Two cave zombies, crouched and sniffing the air, their black faces and gnarled claws twitching in anticipation, circle her. They seem to dance around her, making slow deliberate steps in uncomfortable-looking ways that pop and crackle their bones.

  Through the sudden lump of fear that wells up in me as I draw breath, I find O’Dea’s eyes, glaring at me in what looks like venomous rage.

  “Oh my God,” I whisper.

  One of the zombies turns to us with a slow, agitated sniff and opens
its mouth.

  This time, when I try to close my eyes and gather my breath, I just feel a sudden blast of energy in my hand. It becomes a fist, a blazing ball of light that is ready to strike out at whatever challenges it. I take two steps forward, cock, and throw. My fist collides with the zombie’s stomach, making its thin skin rupture, its tendons tear, and its upper half fall forward as its legs take a last few steps, jetting black fluid from the pelvis before they collapse in a heap.

  When I turn around, Ian has finished kicking out the remaining zombie’s legs and has begun stomping on the thing’s back, turning it into a broken stick figure. He glances over at me, and his eyes go wide.

  “Did you punch that thing in half?” he says.

  “Let’s get her down,” I say.

  It’s a blur—suddenly, I’m on Ian’s shoulders tugging at the rope looped between O’Dea’s bound body and the ceiling spike (note to self: get that terminology down from Kendra, if she’s still alive when you find her). Suddenly, the rope goes slack and O’Dea’s on the floor in a pile. The minute I hop down from him, Ian yanks the handkerchief out of her mouth, and we hear the voice we’ve grown to love.

  “You harebrained soft-witted twerps!” snarls O’Dea, writhing as we yank at the ropes on her wrists and ankles. “Are you out of your dull, half-formed little minds? Do you know what you did, going after me?”

  We finally loosen her bonds and O’Dea pops free, her long spindly limbs snapping out in a sharp flourish. Then, those bony fingers go at her nose and start scratching like crazy.

  “Oh, sweet mother, yes,” she sighs. “Been itching for an hour.”

  “Are you okay?” I ask her. “O’Dea, your face—what’d he do to you?”

  “Never mind that,” she snaps, sticking a finger at me like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. “I’ve taken a cheap punch or two in my day. What were you thinking, you two—” Her face goes slack and terrified. “Where’s Kendra?”