Gravediggers

by Christopher Krovatin

  “Savini’s got her,” says Ian. “He’s going to use her to unlock the city and let out the crazy crawling zombies.”

  “What are you babbling about, Ian?” she snaps. “He needs me. He needs a Warden. Ugh.” O’Dea gets to her feet and brushes herself down.

  “Kendra’s a Warden,” says Ian.

  O’Dea freezes, arching an eyebrow hard at Ian. “No. Kendra’s a Gravedigger.”

  “She’s seeing sigils,” I say to her. “She’s reading the walls by touching them. Grabbing the seal of this place knocked her unconscious.”

  “Gravediggers and Wardens are separate breeds,” says O’Dea, turning to me with a glare of pure contempt. “Those aren’t the kind of skills Gravediggers learn. They don’t learn anything; they just happen. Wardens have to be trained.” She shakes her head. “You’re obviously not thinking straight, and you’re not listening. I told you to leave me.”

  “We came to save you,” I say, now doing my best to keep calm, breathe slowly, not look away from her, not grab her by the collar. “We just did.”

  “I didn’t need saving.”

  “All right, guys,” says Ian, holding up his hands.

  “You have to be kidding me,” I say. “Killing yourself? Letting him beat you to a pulp?”

  “It’s our way, PJ,” she yells, so hard her lousy breath blows into my face. “We protect the secrets and dark karma. And this is why. Every second I’m still alive down here, it’s bad news for everyone on Earth. Look at these zombies. You let these mutated freaks out, it’s history for everyone.”

  “They die in the light,” I tell her. “Even if Savini let them out, they wouldn’t get far.”

  “All it takes is one night,” spits O’Dea. “PJ, what were you thinking? You, of all people. This is a scary business. Scary things happen sometimes, but you’ve got to let them happen.”

  “Wait, so I was supposed to sit there and let you die?” I say, torn up by equal parts shock and heartbreak.

  “Let’s keep it polite, guys,” says Ian.

  “You should’ve done what I told you!” she keeps shouting. “I’m sorry if that’s hard, but something like this gets avoided! That’s worth it! Containment is maintained! Now”—she swings the finger out toward where we came from—“you have two options! One is that Kendra isn’t a Warden—which, I gotta tell you, I don’t think she is; I’d know—and Savini kills her and comes after us, and we all die. The other is that she somehow does unlock the seal—and everyone dies!” By now, she’s screaming, curling her hands into claws in front of my face. “Do you hear me, PJ? Do you know what will happen if a bunch of weird, twisted zombies get loose in Indonesia?”

  “ . . . I wanted to help you,” I say hoarsely over the lump in my throat. “He . . . he would’ve hurt you to be able to unlock this place. I had to help.”

  She looks even angrier, witchier, than before, but then she softens her face and looks at me matter-of-factly. “PJ, Kudus is our atom bomb,” she says. “This place is our Pandora’s box. It’s the one thing every Warden has always been afraid someone will accidentally find and unlock. And when you came after me, you led the wrong person right to it.”

  Her expression bores into me and hollows me out. There is not simply anger, or irritation; there is blame in it. There is total hopelessness. Something heartbreaking has been awakened within her, and it’s our fault. Before I can try to stop them, two fat tears bunch in the corners of my eyes and rush down my cheeks.

  “Look,” says Ian in his best imitation of someone doing all right, “let’s calm down. There’s still some time. Savini seemed like he was bringing Kendra into the city.”

  “He’s taking her to the temple,” sighs O’Dea. “It was the magical center of the city. With any luck, they—”

  Her voice cuts out with a loud cry.

  The upper torso of the zombie I punched down the middle is hauling itself along the ground, a slime-caked tail of spinal column with a big hunk of pelvis attached trailing from behind it. Its bony fingers wrap around O’Dea’s leg, its pointed fingertips pressing hard against the denim of her jeans.

  My rage at my Warden friend, my sinking feeling of doom and inadequacy all crashes together, and I grab the zombie by the shoulders, lift its half body from the ground, and slam it up against a wall. The creature writhes in my arms, hissing and swiping its bony claws out into the air behind me. Its skull snaps out, teeth clicking together, and its kite tail of sinews and organs flaps violently, spraying my pants with zombie fluid.

  I snap my lamp on and the wretched monster cries out, twitching. It turns away from the glare of my light, but I clamp my hand onto its face and twist it forward, forcing it to stare me dead on as I fill those hollow sockets with burning, torturous agony. With any luck, the monster’s pain is nowhere near the anger I feel inside. Kendra falling to her death, O’Dea chewing me out—I channel it through my headlamp until I am totally numb with hate.

  I don’t even see how close the zombie’s teeth are to my hand until it twists its neck sharply and sinks them into my palm.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ian

  PJ’s scream makes me jump, ’cause it’s not a little shriek—it’s loud, it’s deep in his throat, it’s that kind of scream that’s uncontrollable, that comes from pain. Then, he stumbles away, letting the zombie torso drop with this splattery thump, and he holds up his hand in the light of his helmet lamp, and I see the wound, that curve of little tiny lines with blood running from them that now marks the webbed part between his thumb and his index finger.

  And it takes me a moment, just a moment, where I’m wondering what happened.

  And then it hits me. Slams me in the chest and sinks down into every inch of me, like a sickness I can feel coming on.

  He’s bit.

  PJ got bit.

  No, nah, nah man, oh no, oh no.

  It’s the end of the world. It’s—

  Oh my God, PJ got bit.

  PJ stumbles away from the upper half of a cave zombie, which lies there sucking the blood from its teeth in hissing gulps of air.

  Next thing I know, I’m standing over it and my foot has crushed a Nike-printed opening in its skull, but it doesn’t stop, just keeps sucking at the blood until my foot has gone through it over and over, finding the sweet spot and smashing its feeble brain back into whatever horrible mossy stench hole it came crawling out of.

  When it’s a foaming pile of dead, I turn back to PJ. O’Dea’s got his hand in hers and is saying . . . something.

  She’s not really talking. It’s more like she moves her mouth and something huge, and deep, and old, is speaking out of her mouth, like she’s someone’s magical . . . kazoo. Her fingers seem to stand out in the darkness, like they’ve been heated red in a fire, and she shakes his hand with a soft, steady rhythm. Tears course down PJ’s cheek, but he doesn’t sob, just grits his teeth and glares at his hand, probably feeling some kind of crazy magic current running through it.

  A cockroach skitters past her, and before I know what’s going on, she snatches it off of the floor and jams it into her mouth, chewing loudly. Without meaning to, I let out a pained “AWWWW.” After a bunch of crunches, she spits the mess of bug in her palm and claps it on PJ’s bite. Then she goes back to chanting. It’s truly the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. I try to talk, but my mouth is dry as a desert, and my stomach is just swimming with acid-covered butterflies. I try to move, and it’s like I’ve grown roots. What this means—what’s going to happen now—doesn’t stop hitting me; it just slams into me in slow, steady waves that drive me back against the cave wall, feeling like I’m going to yak everywhere.

  “O’Dea,” says PJ in a slow, shaking voice. “O’Dea, look at me.” She closes her eyes and looks away, still chanting. Slowly, PJ’s face turns to mine, his voice coming out in these quick little sobs, and he’s like, “Ian.”

  “Yeah, man. Yeah.” I try to take a step toward him, but can’t. “I’m here.”

  “
You know what you have to do, man,” he says, trying to sound calm. He switches to these deep, slow breaths. “Ian, I don’t want to walk around after I’m dead.”

  Aw. Aw, no. “Shut up, PJ, you’re going to be fine,” I babble, trying to push the thought out of my head.

  “I don’t want to crawl around some cave for hundreds of years until my eyes rot out,” he says, reaching his free hand out to me.

  “PJ, be quiet,” I snap at him. “Just calm down and hold on. O’Dea’s helping you. You’ll be okay. You’ll—”

  “There’s no help,” he says. “There’s never any help. The bite’s the thing, Ian.”

  “PJ—”

  “Do you still have your machete? Can you—”

  And then I’m outside of the cave, running down the tunnel, finding a spot and curling into a ball, clapping my hands over my head, trying to block out the image of PJ’s face as he asked me what he just asked me. Around me, the cockroaches sit, staring, as I slide to the floor and gasp for air, clenching my eyes, trying not to think about it.

  Because I can hear it in his voice, man—he believes it. There’s not an ounce of doubt in his mind. PJ, who’s stood up to me when I’ve tried to run headfirst into a zombie horde. Who did everything he could to keep his friends safe. Poor scared PJ, who has to meditate just to not be a nutcase the whole time. That guy, my friend from toddler days, wanted me to do it. He was asking nicely in the hopes that I would do him a favor and effectively ruin my life forever.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. Why is this happening?

  But I know, and it feels like maybe I’ve known the whole time we’ve been down here, slogging through the pitch-blackness. We’ve been lucky so far. O’Dea, Danny Melee, even Kendra’s crazy new Warden powers—they’ve all worked in our favor. But down here, in maybe the most awful place on the planet with air that feels like a massage from a dead fish, there’s no room to pivot around the curse. The whole place is soaked in it. So when the terrible thing goes down, which it definitely will, because look at where we are, it goes down hard. It’s not a bad time; it’s the big one.

  The droning of O’Dea’s amplified voice and PJ’s pleas go on for a while, all just a bunch of background noise behind my lungs gasping for breath and my blood rushing like crazy through my ears. After a while, PJ goes quiet, and then, gradually, O’Dea’s voice sinks to a low rumble, then stops altogether. Once again, it’s just us, alone, floating in this black space that we can feel stretching off around us for miles.

  A while later—I can’t really remember how long I stay curled there—footsteps ring out in the cave, louder and louder, until they reach me. There’s a thud as a body flops down next to mine.

  “I put him out for a bit,” says O’Dea in that gruff, low voice. “His hand is stable. Stopped the bleeding, dulled the pain.”

  When I uncurl out of my ball position, I glance up at O’Dea, and man, the woman must’ve taken a couple hard ones on the jaw. Her one eye is swollen up, and her cheeks and lips look just a bit puffy and dry, and there’s this tiny scratch on her brow all smudged and running blood. She’s got a look of straight-up hit-the-wall exhaustion, face all bunched up and mouth curled down. That doesn’t make me feel good—heck, when she was yelling at PJ before, that at least was normal tough-ass O’Dea. This look, tired and beat, is not good.

  “Sorry about that thing with the cockroach,” she says. “I bet you didn’t want to see that.”

  “It’s okay,” is all I can say. “You had to make a . . . a poultice.” The word stings the back of my eyes. It rushes back to me—the first zombie horde, on the mountain where we met O’Dea. It’s a Kendra word. Remember how much we fought, she and I? And now she’s gone. She’s somewhere in this giant death trap. And I never got to tell her. I never got to tell either of them.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Bugs aren’t normally friends to magic, but I guess the ones down here are the only forms of life left, so they—are you all right?” She reaches out a hand, but doesn’t quite touch me. “Ian?”

  “How bad is he?” I ask.

  She exhales through her nose. “We’ve bought him some time,” she says. “That thing had all the jaw strength of a jellyfish, so it didn’t get that deep. But it definitely broke the skin.”

  “But . . . is he going to be okay?” I ask.

  O’Dea just swallows and half shrugs. “We need to get him out of this place,” she says out into the black all around us. “It’s crawling with the evil. I can smell it everywhere. These zombies . . . they’re something new. No wonder the Wardens are so protective of this spot. It’s nothing like we’ve ever seen before. The longer his cut’s down here, the quicker it’ll become infected.”

  All I can think is that it’s not a cut, it’s a bite, a freakin’ zombie bite, but I refuse to say it. “And how do we do that?” I ask, trying to make sense of everything.

  “Preferably,” she says, “we do it by you three listening to me and not coming here in the first place.” I shoot her a look that she understands, holding up a hand and nodding. “But! Given the circumstances, the best bet would be for you two to go find Kendra. If Savini’s as crazy as I think he is, he’ll probably convince himself she’s a Warden, too. Did you tell him that little chestnut?”

  “O’Dea, she’s . . . got some kind of powers,” I babble. Dang, PJ can talk to her so easily. For me, it’s like chatting with a teacher. “She used them to fend off the zombies earlier. And she’s been reading things off the sigils in the walls. When she touched the seal for this dump, it fried her brain or something. Trust me, we’re not making this up.”

  “Ian, I’m telling you—”

  “Remember on the island?” I say. A memory clicks into place—PJ, Josefina, and I, surrounded by soggy hungry corpses, a hypnotic noise filling the air. “She played those drums to draw the zombies away from us. Josefina said only a Warden could do that. You were there.”

  O’Dea’s eyes are wide and hard like plates, but there’s that little bit of recognition in them that lets me know I’m right. She stares straight ahead for a few moments and then, in a real quiet voice, says, “That shouldn’t happen. None of this should be happening. Strange things going on down here in this hellhole, Ian, things I’ve never seen before. And when the rules change . . . it usually means we’re taking part in something big.”

  Great, fantastic, no one has any idea how to fix this mess. Right as we’re getting a handle on what it is to be a Gravedigger, the game changes. For a minute, we go silent, staring straight ahead. It’s weird, being just us, ’cause O’Dea and I were just never tight the way she was with the other two. PJ and her had some kind of weird deep friendship, and Kendra was always asking questions and figuring out secrets with her. Me, I feel like I got a lot of my physical smarts from Coach Leider and my dad. O’Dea’s just been teaching me how to make it work against zombies.

  “I’m sorry we came after you if you didn’t want us to,” I say, finally, because what else is there to say?

  “Ah, it’s all right,” she says, waving me away with a skinny knobbed hand. “I appreciate the thought. Besides, maybe that psychopath Savini is onto something. This place has sat around rotting in this cave for nearly a thousand years. Someone was bound to find out about it. It was just about when, and if they could unlock the magic holding it down.”

  “You really think these crazy mutated zombies could take over the earth?” I ask her.

  She nods, slowly and calmly. “Don’t get me wrong, they seem about as dumb as your average corpse, and like you said, daylight won’t be their strong point. But all of this climbing? The whole stepping-around-sigils routine? Yeah, I saw that, too. And the mushrooms growing out of their spines . . . it’s not natural.” And she hasn’t even seen what’s living in the sewers of the city. “If these things get out, it could mean a lot of trouble for a lot of people.”

  “Then what are we sitting around for?”

  PJ comes calmly down the cave tunnel, his one hand clenched t
ight and smeared with gray cockroach guts. At first, I’m worried I’ll see him bleeding all over the place, and then I see that there’s, like, no blood at all. The wound has basically scabbed over. And you know what, that’s almost worse.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask him.

  “Like time’s wasting,” he says, nodding toward the mouth of the cave, the city of the dead beyond it. “If we hurry, I bet we can catch them and stop Savini’s weird apocalypse plan before it’s too late.”

  “That’s not what you were saying a few minutes ago,” I tell him, feeling something like real anger as I look at this scrawny little madman who tried to get me to do the worst thing on earth one second and then starts ordering me to get out there and sink a three-pointer for him. “You were asking me—”

  “I remember,” he snaps. “I was there. I—” He goes quiet and lowers his head, then exhales real hard and sharp. “What happened back there scared me. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “I’ll say,” says O’Dea.

  “But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re on borrowed time now,” he says, raising his hand up as though we didn’t see it in the first place. “The longer we wait, the worse this is getting. Let’s just get out there, find Kendra, and leave before anything else happens. That way, this didn’t happen for no reason.”

  “Maybe you should sit this one out,” I say, holding a hand out to him. “You seemed pretty shook earlier.”

  “Not a chance,” he says, closing his eyes and grimacing. “It’s Savini’s fault we’re in this mess. Besides, you guys are going to need all the help you can get.”

  I trade a look with O’Dea, and she nods halfheartedly. I guess when you’ve been dealing with hordes of hungry, cursed dead people your whole life like she has, you get over any ego pretty quickly.

  “All right,” I say. “So, what’s the plan?”

  Like I needed to ask—a quick back-and-forth look from O’Dea and PJ, and I realize who’s leading the way here.