Gravediggers (12 page)

PJ shrugs and mumbles agreement. When I look to Ian, he is a statue, face frozen in a blank stare and one ear cocked to the air overhead.

“Ian?” I ask.

“Someone's here,” he whispers. “Someone alive.”

“What?” I gasp. PJ and I share a glance of stark terror, then turn our eyes back to our bloodhound-like friend. “Are you sure?”

“Yup,” says Ian, nodding surely. “Footsteps. And breathing. Somewhere out there.”

We scrabble to the window, PJ and I peeking over the edge, doing our best to reveal as little of our faces as possible (though unless our intruder is as equipped as us, there's little chance he can see much at all).

At first, all that is visible are the buildings of Kudus in their cluttered rows, the piles of dust and rot on the ground. Then, my ears tune in to the sound as well—footsteps, deliberate and slow, muffled by the dust but still audible.

Into view moves a large, broad-shouldered shape, its head covered with a hood. His eyes are invisible, but his breath—Ian was correct, this new figure lives—rings out sharply into the air and pegs him as a man.

“Do we think it's Dario?” I whisper.

“Tough to say,” responds PJ. “He's certainly big enough.”

The shape freezes, its body crouched and taut. For a seemingly eternal period of time, it stands perfectly still. Then, gradually, its hooded face moves in the direction of our window.

A sharp crackling noise makes us jump, and turns our intruder's head toward us. I am about to admonish Ian for giving away our position when a hand, cold and impossibly strong, clamps down on my shoulder.

Chapter Twelve

PJ

A
t least Joseph Savini's walking corpse is the kind we're used to. Without the chance to mutate or evolve or whatever horror has happened to the zombies out there, his body has stayed relatively normal and has returned that way. His hands go grasping out blindly in front of him, his teeth gnashing and his eyes rolling white and soft in his skull, his bushy white mustache giving him a walrus-like quality. The moan that comes out of his mouth is morose and sends me into a fit of something like ants crawling down my flesh, but they're the ants I know. He doesn't tap out messages with his feet or sniff the air; he just lumbers at us like he wants to eat us, like Romero made them do.

There's something kind of comforting about it. Like eating McDonald's on vacation—it's familiar.

All three of us cry out in what must be a deafening roar in the black, gaping, silent shadow of the cave encasing Kudus like a giant crypt. Kendra manages to shoot out a foot and knock the creature off balance, but he hangs onto her one shoulder and won't go down, instead dangling from her like an anchor and dragging her to the floor.

Finally, my mind cuts out of slow-mo, and I manage to climb to my feet and hook my arms around his waist. When I try to take a deep breath and concentrate, my nose and lungs are filled with the stench of a freshly hugged dead body (like cheese, really, like fancy cheese that has been forgotten in a warm place), but I fight through it and focus my overwhelming fear and disgust. My foot plants behind the zombie, and I throw all my strength into my shoulder and toss his body backward. Sure enough, his heel catches on my ankle, and the sack of rotting meat goes crashing to the ground.

At first, we're all ready to go back into fight mode, Ian searching frantically for his machete and me cracking my knuckles . . . but then we actually watch the zombie. We watch as he crawls to his knees and paws blindly at the air, eyes aimed dumbly at the hut ceiling. Twice he falls while he tries to get up. This poor, pathetic thing doesn't have the smelling power of its mutated
counterparts—he hasn't been wandering the tunnels for year. He can't see a thing.

“It's almost sad to watch,” I say.

“We need to kill it,” says Ian. “Before—”

The zombie whirls with a wild clawed haymaker that barely misses my face.

But slaps off my goggles.

Darkness. Pure and impenetrable darkness, greater than that of any room I've ever been in, than any space I can imagine. As my eyes blink, taking in the pure nothing, I think about how foolish I've been, getting used to the goggles and believing that
that
was reality, with the world outlined in spooky Jodie Foster-at-the-end-of-
Silence
green. Wrong. We are basically in a black hole, only this one is full of noises—Kendra screaming my name, Ian bellowing curse words and dumping his backpack on the floor, a loud inhuman creature clamoring for my flesh with eyes as blind as mine. The mind-blowing noise throttles the endless night around me.

All of my training, all of O'Dea's instruction to capture my fear and make something of it, is gone. There is no thought in my head but pure, instinctive terror. At once, my pulse spikes, my brow glistens with sweat, my whole body shakes, my every breath carries a piece of scream on the end. The unfiltered fear of this vast space full of invisible monsters wraps me up and conquers me entirely.

Footsteps grow in sound and become a loud crash that shakes the walls around me. Kendra's shrieking cuts off with a gasp while Ian begins a chorus of, “OH MAN, OH MAN, OH MAN—”

A blinding beam of white light cuts through the surrounding void like some kind of powerful laser, making me cover my eyes and hiss through my teeth. Ian and Kendra duck down, pulling off their goggles and shielding their own faces. The light illuminates the green-gray gob of Joseph Savini, his skin cracking in wet black gouges and his teeth a snaggled yellow fence beneath his smoky mustache. The man holding the flashlight is huge, and I faintly see a handlebar mustache and two heartbroken eyes beneath his hood.

“Oh, Papa,” whispers a hoarse baritone voice. “Papa, I'm sorry. I had hoped you hadn't . . . no. No, of course you did. Of course you're here.”

The zombie snarls viciously and staggers toward the light, unlistening.

The flashlight clicks off, and then the air rings with the sound of a knife leaving a leather holster—
shing
—before a wet ripping and crunching fills the air, cutting off the zombie's moans. Ian cries out, Kendra makes a noise in her throat, and I'm suddenly choking on a stench unlike anything I've ever smelled.

A few seconds later, something nudges me in the hands, making me start. As I reach out, I feel my night-vision goggles.

“Put them on,” says Dario Savini in his rumbling voice. “You're no good to me floundering around in the dark like a blind man.”

My hands shaking, I yank the goggles to my head, clamping them on. My eyes are filled with a green silhouetted world—the hut, my friends staring dumbstruck, the zombie's remains piled in the corner, and Savini, his barrel chest, and tree-trunk arms, and hard gaze looming over me, bloody knife still in his ham-sized hand.

“There,” he says. “Better?”

My mouth moves, but no sound comes out. My brain is still vibrating from the fear of the dark.

“Good,” he says, taking a step back. “Now, stand up. We need to talk. All four of us.”

My eyes shut, and I inhale sharply, trying to steady myself. But the stench of rotting flesh and subterranean hell just reminds me why we're here, and my focus is overwhelmed by emotion. I go ballistic.

My shoulder slams into Dario's stomach, making him cough out a “
WHUFF
.” In seconds, I've got my hands slapping around his thick neck, my mouth open and shrieking in his face, “WHERE IS SHE? WHERE IS SHE, YOU MISERABLE—”

One of his arms swings up and tosses me across the room like I'm nothing. This time around, my goggles stay on, but I land a lot harder—a flash of white in my eyes as I hit the wall, a dull pain in my back as I tumble to the floor. Ian yells out and takes two steps at Savini, but a hard glare from the large man makes him stop short, face twisted up in rage. Only Kendra, with her superior intellect, knows not to approach him.

“This helps no one,” growls Savini. “I have no desire to kill any of you three, but the next person who tries to attack me gets cut down.”

“
GOD
, you're a tool,” snarls Ian.

“Permission to pick up my friend,” spits Kendra.

“Granted,” says Savini with a nod. Kendra walks across the hut and grabs me by the armpits, lifting me to my feet.

“Are you unhurt?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I finally say, “just . . . upset.”

“I guess it was foolish of me to expect anything else,” says Savini. “It's in your nature, after all. Still, I'd hoped this would be a reasonable conversation.” His slumped posture speaks exhaustion. His breath is heavy. It's not surprising, given that he's just had to re-kill his zombie father. Slowly, he bends to the floor, eyes sharp and intent.

“You
kidnap our friend
,” snaps Ian, “and expect us to have a nice little talk with you? Eat dirt, Savini.”

“Your old Warden friend is safe,” he says. “I've hidden her in a side cavern that seems well protected by her people's magic . . . and I've managed to keep her from biting off her own tongue.” He chuckles. “For so-called peacekeepers, their methods are particularly brutal.”

Dario's words echo my own thoughts, but I won't give him an inch. “They're just worried about their secrets falling into the hands of people like you.”

Savini stands, and I see what he's been reaching for: his father's papers. All three of us share a glance and a silence. Do we take them from him? They're not ours. He was forced to just put down his zombie dad. He has a right to know. And besides, he could probably crush us like flies.

“And what about my secrets?” he mumbles after a long silence, as he reaches the blood-soaked last page. The man's eyes come up to mine, determined and vengeful. “What about yours?”

“I don't understand,” I whisper.

Dario lowers his head and heads for the door. “Follow me,” he growls. “Let's leave this awful shelter. It's time we talked.”

“We're not going anywhere with you,” says Kendra, but as if on cue, the tapping of bone on stone rings out through the cave outside, followed by a round of clicking responses that make my blood freeze. Dario doesn't even respond, he simply turns his back to us and walks out of the hut. For some reason—be it our lack of options, the impending zombie investigation that's about to go on here, or the off chance he'll lead us to O'Dea—I follow him. Ian and Kendra both look somewhat shocked, but eventually come take up the rear.

The cave city of Kudus is as massive and unsettling as before, but something about walking with Dario makes the cold air feel less oppressively clammy, the darkness less all-consuming. As we follow him, it dawns on me that this is the first time since we entered the cave that I've walked like a normal human being—we've been crouched, sneaking through the silent darkness, trying to avoid the cave zombies that seem to come out of the shadows on a whim. With Dario at our head, though, we're strolling down the streets of Kudus with our heads held high. We were acting like horror movie survivors, desperate to not be caught, while he's all action hero.

“How are you not wearing goggles?” I ask, as much as I don't want to speak to him.

“The hood,” he says, pointing to the leather hood hanging out of the neck of his jacket. “Your Warden friend enchanted it. It allows me to see through the dark.”

“Did she do so at knifepoint?” asks Kendra.

“You think me a butcher,” scoffs Savini. “I'm merely a man with a mission.”

“And what is that, exactly?” asks Ian in a snarky tone. “So far, all I got was the part where you beat and kidnap our friend so you can pretty much end the world.”

Dario's silent for a few seconds, and then says, “During the old days, the days when Kudus thrived and even some time after that, the Wardens were little more than hags and medicine women who knew some ways to fight off the evil. Containment rarely worked, and when it did, the Wardens used their powers of containment to threaten locals and use the undead for their bidding. If you've ever heard legends about witches summoning monsters and demons, that's why. The Wardens were not organized until centuries after Kudus fell, and even then, breaches in their little containment spells were common. The world lived in fear of these monsters because, despite their best efforts, the Wardens' attempts to contain them were futile. Evil would slip through the cracks, and innocent people would die.”

“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
.”