Gravediggers

by Christopher Krovatin

  A voice, deep and beautiful and full of calm, speaks in my head. It feels like when I have a camera in my hands. Like when I close my eyes and meditate. It is peace, vast and transcendental.

  Slowly, I turn around, and my eyes drink in the unthinkable.

  From the cloud of dust and rubble billowing out at us, the mushroom emerges, like a sickly pale whale breaking an ocean of smoke. It leads with its top, surging forward nose first and crawling along the ground with a series of grasping, yanking roots that look somewhere between albino arms and bloodless veins. From its horrible flapping underside comes a jet of glowing green spores that pull with it the few remaining cave zombies, skittering through the cloud with their faces pointed skyward. Its giant body makes the ground shake, its mass topples longhouses and huts on their sides in crunching bursts of clay and wood; on its pale and revolting skin I can see the burn marks from where the seal-reflected light assaulted its flesh. As it nears me, the ground cracks beneath its weight, the ruptures in the earth reaching my sneakers and making the ground I stand upon bounce.

  My body freezes, unable to digest what my eyes are absorbing. This—this would be the greatest shot my camera could ever catch: a crawling, hungry fungus emerging from a destroyed temple, making the ground beneath our feet shake as it hauls itself along.

  This is what Josefina spoke of when she warned me about coming to this place. This is pure horror; this is clumsy, shambling death incarnate.

  Yet I can’t look away. The bite won’t let me. Through it, I feel the cold and flawless song of the mushroom, the promise of eternal peace, of a purpose. As an eyelid of flesh opens on its head and that green glowing creature emerges, I feel bathed in a wondrous, healing light. As the being stretches its many hands and its singed, misshapen mouth toward me, the bite shushes my fear and worry and tells me to simply stare deeply into the eye sockets of God.

  “PJ, NO!”

  Ian’s voice, from far away, reaches out and shakes me from my reverie, just as the glowing zombie deity comes close to my face and splits in half, becoming all mouth.

  Hold still, says the bite.

  No, I tell it.

  When I click on my headlamp, the beam of light blasts directly into the mushroom zombie’s maw, and its insides blacken and crackle, sending up a gust of foul-smelling smoke. The creature rears back, raising its many hands and legs and jaws and screaming deeply. My bite screams with it, bringing me down to my knees.

  As the creature screams, the mushroom’s gigantic mass shakes and writhes, making the stones beneath it shatter even more. With a great galumph, a section of the floor collapses, giving way to blackness. The mushroom lowers halfway, threatening to slip into the dark.

  But then the fused zombies of the sewers rise up as one. In a rotting green tidal wave, the merged bodies of the waterlogged dead surge out of tunnels beneath Kudus, hungry for the spore-filled flesh of their God. With their many decaying hands, they begin wrenching great hunks of bulbous fungal meat out of the mushroom, revealing glowing green insides heavy with organs, bones, and wriggling flaps. The cave zombies around it claw at the collapsing floor with their bony hands, but they, too, slip into the sewers, hissing as they go.

  As the last of the skyscraper-sized mushroom goes sinking into the sewers, the whole cave begins to shake. The hands of my friends grab me from all sides, pulling me to the walls of the city, and before I know it we’re climbing up the ladder carved into the stone, inching along the thin ledge, and barreling into the narrow opening in the rock just as the stalactites over the city come shuddering out of place and bury the dead of Kudus once and for all.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ian

  For a while, my whole life is noise. The ground, the sky, my friends, my body, everything’s screaming at once.

  After a moment, though, it lets up. The rocks settle into place, the dust stops blowing around the tunnel, everyone’s yell turns into a squeak, my aching joints have a moment to work through the pain stored up in them, and there’s just the big, tight black of the cave. Everything hangs there in stupid campfire shadow because PJ’s headlamp is still turned on.

  When I peek outside, I’m freaked out. It’s like Kudus was never there, or no, it was there, but it got eaten alive. There are bits of wood and hunks of statues sticking out this way and that, but it looks nothing like the big dead sprawl we hunkered through before. Mostly it’s just jagged crags of fresh rock jutting out of the ground and forming a new layer. Like the cave was a mouth, and it finally decided to chomp down on the place.

  Back in our tunnel, things are still tense.

  O’Dea’s on her hands and knees with her palms and forehead flat on the ground. After a few more moments, she sits back on her haunches and takes a slow deep breath. On the floor are two handprint-shaped burn marks, blackened onto the stone itself. And she’s not looking her best, man—her eyes are all sunken and her face is pale, and there’s this twitch going on with her upper lip, kind of pulling it at the corner, like she’s snarling.

  “Guys,” I say. “Guys, help me out here. I think O’Dea might have pulled something.”

  Kendra and PJ groan as they climb to their feet, but they snap into action when they see O’Dea looking half dead.

  “O’Dea?” asks Kendra. “Are you conscious?”

  “Uh,” she responds.

  “Are you okay?” asks PJ.

  “Yeah,” she says softly. “I might just need . . . glass of water.” And then the Warden’s eyes roll back into her head, and she falls forward and hits the ground with a hard whack.

  The three of us crowd around her and do everything we can think of to wake her up—we shake her, we yell her name, Kendra even gives her a light slap on the cheek—but it’s no hope, she’s out, gone, lost to us. When I put my ear to her chest, I can still hear breathing and a heartbeat, so at least we know she’s alive, a fact that makes PJ sort of grunt, which is weird; he’s normally super-concerned about O’Dea. But as much as we try to get her awake, she won’t budge.

  “Great,” he finally says, running a hand nervously through his hair. “What do we do now?”

  “We have to get her out of this cave,” I say. I mean, what else are we supposed to do? “It can’t be good for her to be down here, what with all the cave-ins and the giant monster mushrooms and the zombies that eat other zombies.”

  “We have no clue what’s wrong with her,” says Kendra, peeling open one of her eyes and squinting into her pupil. “If we move her, it may be detrimental to her state. It might even kill her.”

  “Yeah, but a falling hunk of cave ceiling will definitely kill her,” I say.

  “That logic is certainly sound,” sighs Kendra. She’s blinking hard in that way she does when she’s working something out in her head, but then her eyes light up and she snaps her fingers. “Wait. I have an idea.”

  Ho boy.

  “What’s the deal?” I ask.

  “PJ, hand me the tusk,” she says, pointing.

  A little ways back in the tunnel lies the magic seal, the carved-up tusk that Kendra somehow managed to keep her grip on the whole trip up here. PJ leans back and reaches out for it, but his hand stops a few inches away. He furrows his brow, and then he sits back, staring hatefully at the tusk.

  “. . . No,” he says.

  “What?” I ask. He shakes his head and mumbles something. Food or something.

  And then I see PJ hiding his one hand in his armpit, and bam, I’m the world’s biggest jerk, it all comes back to me in an instant, grabbing me by the throat and slamming me into a wall. The more I focus on him, the more I can see just how crappy he looks, how pale and tired and sweaty, how much his whole body rises and falls with every breath.

  The zombies, people with the whole reanimated-dead-guy thing, can’t touch any of the objects with good karmic sigils carved into them.

  They can also probably pop their shoulders back in place without even wincing.

  And here’s PJ. Mumbling about food.
r />   “Why not?” asks Kendra with a frown.

  PJ looks at me, and his eyes are sad, tired, uncomfortable, and he doesn’t say the word, but his stare explains, crystal clear, what he’s thinking, which comes over me in this awful, heavy wave:

  Kendra doesn’t know. PJ got bitten after Dario carted her off, and we haven’t really had a chance to chat, what with all the cave corpses and zombie fungus and flesh-eating disco lights.

  PJ opens his mouth to say something, but some automatic instinct in me kicks in, and I grab the tusk and hand it to her with a “Here you go.” My eyes shoot back to PJ, and I shake my head, saying no, don’t mention it, don’t say a word about it, I don’t even want to hear it.

  Because . . . because, even though Kendra’s one of my best friends, and is so much smarter than I am, she’s all logic, and I don’t want to, can’t, deal with that right now.

  Because with PJ’s bite, we all know there’s one logical answer.

  “Hold it to O’Dea’s forehead,” she says. “I have a hypothesis.”

  Slowly, I touch the tip of the seal to O’Dea’s head. Nothing happens; she still just lays there. “Am I doing something wrong?” I ask.

  Kendra scratches her chin and blinks some more, and then, carefully, she sticks out her index finger and touches it to the other end of the tusk—

  There’s this sharp, cold shock that zaps my hand and makes me drop the tusk and forces Kendra to yank her hand back and hiss, but man, it works—O’Dea gasps loudly, and her whole body twists and her chest rises up, and her lips pull back like she’s trying to scream but no air is coming out. Then, she starts coughing and finally sits up. Finally, she whacks her chest with a fist and hocks a loogie blacker than an eight ball.

  “O’Dea, you okay?” I ask.

  She nods hard. “Yeah,” she coughs. “Geez Louise, what a rush. Yeah. I’m okay.”

  “Thank God,” mumbles PJ.

  “What Warden spell was that?” I ask her, basically stuffing the whole What happened, where am I routine that I’m pretty sure we’re headed for. “Cave-in spell?”

  “Protection,” she coughs, giving me the stink eye. “Figured anything I could do to keep a big piece of rock from busting through that window and impaling your scrawny butt was the least I could do.”

  “Do you feel well enough to move?” asks Kendra.

  “Sure,” says O’Dea, climbing weakly to her feet. She spies the tusk and starts. “First, though, we have to do something about that seal. Keep it from ever getting found again.”

  “What do you figure?” I say, picking up the jewel-covered tusk.

  “Why not bring it with us?” says Kendra. “You don’t think a museum—or a Warden could look after it—”

  She shakes her head. “That’s how this happened,” she says. “We Wardens are just a bunch of old folks. We can be easy pickings to the right guy. This needs to go unfound . . . wait. Come with me.”

  Slowly, O’Dea hobbles deeper into the cave mouth, the three of us slowly trailing her. We eventually reach the side cave, the one where she was tied to the stalagmite about to get eaten by sigil-avoiding cave zombies, where those big white disgusting cave roaches are still milling around the floor. She points to a gaping black hole at one end of the cave, which sparkles as we get near it—an underground pool.

  “There,” says O’Dea, pointing to the hole. It doesn’t look big enough from far away, but close up it’s huge, a glittering piece of water, looking black as ink and super cold. A shine of one of our headlamps shows it stretching deep down into the ground and sends a horde of tiny white fish shooting through the water frantically.

  “You’re positive this is a good idea?” asks Kendra.

  “If it’s at the bottom of some deep pool, no one can get to it,” says O’Dea. “No one can get to it, no one can mess with it. Ian, go ahead; drop it down there.”

  She doesn’t have to tell me twice—this thing has been nothing but trouble since we found it. When I toss the tusk into the underground pond, it splashes, and we watch as it drifts deeper and deeper down and then nothing, gone, like it never existed.

  “Done,” says O’Dea with a sigh. “All right. Now, we get out of this damn hole in the ground.”

  Just like that, the end of the world is gone.

  Except, I think, looking at PJ aggressively keeping his hand jammed in his pocket, it’s not.

  Leaving the Kudus cave isn’t nearly as easy as I’m hoping it’ll be. We follow the path O’Dea and Dario took, a different set of tunnels than we used (as in not through a crack in the wall—O’Dea’s hair was on the edge only because a zombie tried to yank her into it before Dario saved her).

  Kendra and O’Dea keep reading sigils on the walls, finding new tunnels carved in the stone. Kendra’s Warden abilities keep shocking O’Dea—she’ll read something off a wall by putting her hand to it, and O’Dea will just nod along and kind of peer at Kendra, like she’s beginning to actually consider what we told her earlier. Kendra doesn’t even ask how we can see in the dark—she just knows.

  What’s especially weird is how Kendra’s reacting toward PJ. Just like with her new Warden abilities, she doesn’t seem to realize it’s happening, but I can see it from miles away. Every time PJ speaks to her or offers some advice on the directions, she screws up her face like the sound of his voice is nails on a chalkboard, like he smells bad. Even O’Dea has to jump in here and there when Kendra begins to peer at PJ like he’s a specimen in a glass cage or something; for all we know, she’s seeing the change in PJ, watching black mud spread through his veins or whatever. Some part of me wants to tell her, but I keep coming back to the same worry—that she’ll have a “solution to the problem.”

  It’s tough, ’cause most of the time, I’m the harsh truth guy, saying the stuff no one else wants to mention ’cause they’re too chicken. But I guess this truth is just too harsh for any of us, especially me.

  Finally, we come upon a narrow tunnel in the rock through which we see something, something weird and unusual and a little painful on the eyes after all this time.

  “Light,” says O’Dea, nodding to the pool of dim white on the floor at our feet.

  “It’s narrow,” says PJ. “We’ll have to crawl single file up to the surface.”

  “Obviously,” says Kendra, snapping. “How else would we do it?”

  O’Dea and I share a look. Getting worse by the minute.

  Of course, no one else wants to go first, so it’s up to good old Ian Buckley to go shimmying up this tube of stone. The tunnel’s so narrow I have to bunch my arms in front of my chest and use my elbows and sweaty palms to push me up, one little shuffle of dusty cavern after the next. At first, I’m doing all right, just a little annoyed at how tight a squeeze it is, and then I think about getting stuck in here, or about a cave zombie’s cold bony hands scratching at my ankles and calves, and I almost freak out and lose it. It’s only Kendra’s hand, warm and sure, gripping my ankle, that calms me down, gets my heart to stop uppercutting my ribs, and gets me back to shimmying.

  As the circle of light fills up my whole vision and opens up over me, I expect to see some blinding blast of daylight, but instead there’s the sunset, all orange and red and peachy as it goes down behind the mountains around us. The fresh air is the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted in all twelve years I’ve been around on this planet. My eyes spin around, and I take in our scene—the hole is actually a few yards away from the cave itself, the ticket booth, our Danny Melee–provided car and driver . . . and the two police cars parked next to them, their lights flashing. Indonesian cops.

  Oh, crap.

  As Kendra comes sliding out of the hole, taking deep, loud breaths, I pull her aside and start yanking PJ out. “Come on, we’ve got to go,” I say.

  “What’s the hurry?” he says, wincing as I tug at his wounded hand.

  “There are cops here,” I tell him, reaching for O’Dea the minute he’s clear of the hole. “We’ve got to bail before they
want to ask us some questions.”

  One look at my friends tells me it’s worse than I thought. PJ and Kendra are covered in dirt and scratches, and O’Dea’s bruises are mad purple and yellow and puffy, and great, we’re going to end up in Indonesian juvie playing some kind of dice game we don’t understand where we’re betting fingers, all because we had to go and save the world—

  “The police are of no concern to you.”

  The deep, smooth voice gets us all turning at once, pointing and yelling and scooting back. The old woman is wrapped in what looks like some kind of huge colorful shawl and rocking one of those dots, what’s it called, a bindi on her forehead. Beside her stand two other women, similarly dressed but much younger, glaring at us like we’re the away team. The old lady, though, she’s smiling, cool as a cucumber.

  “What?” asks Kendra, squinting at the three weird ladies.

  “We have pacified the authorities,” says the old woman calmly. “Our magic is strong, and they are easily fooled. I am Ratna Furani. I am Warden of area eighteen, near Jakarta. I have come to Borneo to help you.” She does a little half bow and says, “Greetings, sister.”

  “Greetings,” say both Kendra and O’Dea, and then they give each other this little look, like, Oh yeah.

  “We were on our way to lend assistance at the instruction of the Wardens’ Council when you arrived,” she says.

  “Is that right,” says O’Dea, sneering. “Guess you’re a little too late, huh?”

  Ratna Furani nods and smiles even wider, but it’s a smile I know, the kind of smile Kendra’s given me one too many times. “Too late for many things,” she says. “We heard the noise from within the earth, and felt the karma of this place change. If we’d been here in time, these unorganized imitators would not have destroyed this ancient and hallowed city.”

  More than anything, it’s that one word, imitators, that gets me. All the other stuff, the hours of fighting cave zombies and getting punched by some nut-bar world-ending psycho and fending off a big meat-eating mushroom, it’s like that’s all stored up in a pile, and that word, imitators, strikes the match in my head and tosses it onto that heap of trouble, until I can’t take it anymore and I open up my mouth and let the fire out.