Gravediggers (6 page)

“We better each have one of those,” says Ian.

“I don't think I'll need mine,” says PJ softly. “Okay, let's talk belaying. How do we do that?”

Between Ian and me, a plan is constructed: spike the rope at the cave mouth, link it through our belts, drop the remainder into the opening, and belay down. It all sounds perfectly logical if one doesn't take into account that none of us have ever climbed a mountain, or belayed down anything, or gone caving before.

I hold the spike, PJ loops the cord through it and ties a knot, and Ian drives it tightly into the rock, his hammer ringing
cacophonously
(again, old school) with each strike, echoing madly through the cavernous darkness that surrounds us.

“The tour will probably hear us,” I say, brushing stone dust from my sleeve.

“Then we'd better get going,” says PJ, looping the remaining rope through his belt. “O'Dea needs our help.” I follow suit, and Ian takes the third loop. He then holds the remainder out over the hole, opens his hand, and lets it drop into the blackness.

There are exactly nine seconds before we hear it hit bottom.

Do the math, Kendra. If time until impact is nine seconds, then you have approximately two hundred meters until you reach the bottom.

Enjoy your climb.

“You're first,” PJ says to Ian.

“
That's
original,” he responds. He pulls out a pair of gloves from his pack and slips them on. He then grabs the rope, leans back into the hole, and scoots bit by bit down until he vanishes. A few seconds later, the cord stops pulling through our belts, and we hear him call out, “Okay. Next, Kendra.”

Doing my best to be fearless, I recline gradually, pressing the soles of my boots against the stone walls at all times and allowing my weight to tighten the cord in my hands, suspending me. Below, I hear the zip and chuckle of Ian being an adventurer, and I attempt to imitate him by increasing my downward speed. Inch by inch, I sink in the enclosed silence of the hole, its smooth edges slowly engulfing me until I'm surrounded on all sides by walls of stone, all illuminated in spectral green.

And yet, in this clammy darkness, my goggles are nearly blinded by light.

Sigils. They descend along the walls of the stone tunnel in glittering lines, each intricate and careful in its artistry. My hand involuntarily rises to touch one, only to find a cool, smooth surface beneath it; either these sigils are painted onto the wall, or they're enchanted into it.

Though they resemble no alphabet I've ever encountered, both their swooping designs and faint glow speak to their meaning. I do not simply know it, like a piece of trivia, I feel it, like a belief, deep within my core.

Go back
, they say.
This is a terrible place. They are here.

For how long we drop, I can't tell exactly; PJ lowers down above me, and for what feels like hours we sink deeper, the sigils on the walls continuous and consistent. Suddenly, I hear Ian beneath me gasp.

“Guys,” he whispers, “we're here.”

“Is it the city?” I ask him.

“Nah,” he says. “But I'm guessing we're on the right track.”

As the walls finally open up into a cave ceiling, the view appears, and I, like Ian, find myself breathless. Before us stretches a vast cavern, with dozens, perhaps hundreds of stalactites descending from the ceiling, interspersed with the skinny tendril-like formations known as “soda straws” and jagged, monolithic pieces of epsomite crystal. Enormous columns of rock stretch between the floor and ceiling of the cave, creating sloping oval openings in the sprawling interior cave. And all along it, sigils, glowing white against the green background, thousands of them stretching in a spiderlike web that spans the entire floor and walls and through a darkness so huge and cold that it feels like we've arrived on the ocean's floor.

With no rock to brace against, I descend quicker than planned, but thankfully Ian is there to help catch me, and PJ shortly thereafter. The sensation of solid ground is reassuring beneath my feet, but my focus remains on the stunning cave all around us. As PJ and I make noises of wonderment at the incredible geological formations, Ian drops his backpack, sorts through its contents, and hands us each a plastic-wrapped item.

“Food,” he explains as I stare dazedly at his offering. “Those are Danny Melee Noob Chewers. Protein bars, basically. Eat; we'll need the energy.”

Only Ian could eat at a time like this. My mouth barely registers the flavored protein cud I gnaw upon. (If my tongue is accurate, Danny has chosen a hazelnut-graham cracker flavor here that will no doubt have a sour aftertaste.) Slowly, just to be sure, I lift my goggle from my eyes and stare out at the cave. And I am correct—even without the goggles, in the lightless subterranean void, the sigils continue their soft glow, giving the invisible space depth and shape even in the dark.

“Kendra?” asks a black space where PJ was. “Are you okay?”

Great idea, Kendra. Take your night-vision goggles off while your friends watch. That doesn't look suspicious, does it?

“I'm fine,” I respond, flipping the lenses over my eyes once again. In the green electronic glow, PJ nods with a knowing smile. Ian, meanwhile, chews his pressed protein supplement with a look on his face that suggests it has spoiled.

“What did you see?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I tell him. “It's . . . a scientific experiment. Total darkness. Can the eye adjust itself to the dark in a totally lightless space? Sensory deprivation has been said to cause interesting effects on the human brain.”

Ian chews a bit longer and then says, “So . . . are you seeing things?”

“Ian, stop,” says PJ.

Ian's eyes narrow behind his goggles, whether I can see them or not. “Warden things? Sigils and stuff?”

An influx of heat coats my face. My involuntary power immediately becomes my shame. “It's fine, Ian. All I saw was the dark.”

“You should tell us, you know,” he says. “If you notice anything.”

“Ian, what are you even talking about?” asks PJ, measuring his breath.

“I want to know, is all!” says Ian. “If Kendra is developing some kind of extra senses or magic powers, I think it's important we talk about it.”

That's a thought—why
aren't
you talking about it, Kendra? Why aren't you shoving your face in Ian's, laughing, shouting, “Maybe I do, jerk, so watch it or I'll make a Hand of Glory out of you”? Suddenly, it feels like his words, his
knowing
, is some sort of spotlight focused on you. It feels anxious, and creepy, and sad. What is that?

“Guys, focus,” says PJ. “We're in a cold, lightless space with no one around. Things are bound to get a little claustrophobic.” There's a distinct waver in his voice on the last word. PJ, it seems, is fighting his own fears as much as ours. “Whether or not Kendra's seeing things, we need to find O'Dea, and it's looking like this place leads to Kudus. We just need to figure out how to get there. Kendra?”

My fear swells up in my heart again, taking shape and lashing out. “I didn't
see
anything.”

“I mean, do you have an idea for a plan?” says PJ, sounding disappointed.

Ah, yes, Kendra. You're the smart one, remember? Focus on your brain
.

“Well, obviously, we have to feel the air for current,” I say, doing my best to sound analytical. “If there is a passageway out of here, it probably has wind blowing out of it.”

My statement is true, but I know it's unnecessary. My eyes have already settled on a spot, a circular shadow in the distance where the sigils amass, forming a ring.

Play along, Kendra. Lick your finger and hold it up. That's it. The air is coming from over there, right? Why, you didn't need magical powers at
all
to figure that out—

“
Stop,” says PJ, aiming an ear upward. “Do you hear that?”

At first, I want to accuse him of being preposterous, but then my ears find the strange sound in the air—a scratching noise that seems to get louder with each second. My mind runs through a list of wildlife found in Indonesian caves, but none of them make a noise as loud and unsettling as that.

My mouth opens to speak. Before I can, it appears.

The hole in the wall is too small for any human being to fit through, yet somehow the repugnant thing unfolds out of it like a spider—long thin fingers first, torso and head following. Slowly and silently, it creeps from its crevice and crawls along the edge of the cave wall insectlike, bones popping. From our vantage, its spine, thick, ridged, and discolored, bulges from its back at us. With every painstaking stretch of a hand or foot, the scratching noise rings through the cave.

Ian and PJ follow my gaze and both go dead quiet. We observe as the thing inches along the wall, stopping every so often to tilt its head to the air and sniff loudly.

Good Lord, Kendra. You looked at pictures of axolotl and cave cockroaches and hairless bats . . . but you never planned to see anything like this.
What in the world is . . .

Wait. Is that a zombie
?

The bead of sweat that forms at the rubber seam where my goggles meet my face is barely noticeable until it descends down my cheek rapidly. I am only truly conscious of it as it dangles momentarily from the very edge of my chin, allowing me a brief moment to paw at it before it drops from my face and hits the cave floor with an audible
pat
.

And, as expected, my heart explodes with fear as the creature freezes, twists its head in a complete reversal with a loud crunch, and looks directly into my eyes with orbless sockets.

Chapter Six

PJ

S
omething has happened, down in the cave.

In our run-ins with the living dead, something I always find upsetting about them is that, when all is said and done, they're people. It's what separates them from the other movie monsters. Zombies don't become zombies under the full moon. They don't turn into dust when you drive a stake through their hearts. Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney and Christopher Lee never played zombies, because walking corpses are not fancy or nuanced. They're just human beings, only the script got downgraded and the stunt wires are showing. Our first zombie horde was a group of college dance majors, and the second was a cruise ship full of tourists. Both were dead, and ugly, and ravenous, but they were people.

How did George Romero put it in
Dawn of the Dead
? “They're us, that's all.”

Which means this is, or was a long time ago, a person. It was us.

Which means things have taken a terrible turn in this place.

The cave zombie on the wall is a skeleton wrapped in gray chipped skin, its fingers long and knobby, its dusty eye sockets black and empty. Its backbone is like a Stegosaurus's spine, lined with bumpy, discolored ridges. The nose, the ears, all the extremities are gone, leaving this skinny skull-faced lizardlike thing that is, somehow,
climbing the wall
.

When it pulls its Ashley Bell impression and meets our eyes with its back turned to us, my stomach tries to turn itself inside out, but I manage to stave off my fear. Then, the rest of its body lowers gracefully off the wall and twists itself to meet its head, and I manage to croak out, “Oh
GOD.
”

“Okay,” says Ian, teeth chattering. “Oh man. Okay. It's coming for us, isn't it?”

“No,” says Kendra. “It can't. The sigils won't let—” She gasps and looks at us, eyes wide, mouth open. The words make me cringe, revealing what I've known since Kendra blasted that Warden across the room. Our friend is more than meets the eye.

“So there
are
sigils,” grumbles Ian.

“Well, look on the bright side,” I stutter. “At least we know it can't get to us.”

The cave zombie responds by carefully moving its foot forward and placing it on the dusty ground. Then, with a dancer's grace, its scarecrow body steps forward, balancing on—oh, what is this—on the very tip of its big toe. As it moves, its body bends and twists horribly, the arm and ribs shifting fluidly while the face stays set on us; the air is full of popping bones and creaking dead skin.

“Kendra,” I say, “what's happening?”

“It appears to be moving
between
sigils,” she says, voice sinking with hopelessness. “It must have been down here long enough that it has learned how to navigate around them.”

“Everyone get ready,” says Ian, dropping his bag and scrambling to find his machete. “We don't know how tough this thing might be. They might—”

The zombie takes a quick lunging step toward us and snaps out a long, bony arm, which sends us all stepping back with a cry. For a second, its grasp looks like it has just barely missed us, and then I see the finger hooked in Kendra's backpack strap.

Kendra yelps as the bony long-dead corpse yanks her toward it, doing its best to stay carefully standing between the magical symbols none of us can see. Her hand flies to her helmet, which is about to fall off, and by accident her headlamp clicks back on, filling my goggles with blinding light. As I yank them off, a cry leaves my throat, but it's drowned out by the raspy hiss of the cave zombie, which recoils from the light, acrobatically lurching away from us and back toward the wall.

Suddenly, it dawns on me—its lack of eyes, its twisted body. This thing has lived in darkness for years. It must find its way around using vibration, smell, or sound. And it must not like direct light.

So let's overexpose this sucker.

When I switch my headlamp on, I'm staring directly into the shadow where its head should be. My aim is good, and my beam strikes the thing in the face, sending the creature recoiling with another high, nails-on-chalkboard hiss.

“Aha!” shouts Kendra, her voice deafening as it bounces around the quiet, smooth stone of the cave. She points her lamp directly at the zombie. Ian follows, and the three of us slowly advance, watching its nearly translucent skin throb beneath the glare. By the time it's back at the crevice that it sprouted from, all three of us have our lights aimed directly at its back, framing it like a prison escapee.

Hands clawing at the crack in the wall, the undead creature seizes up, going into a round of quick, twitching convulsions before it tumbles to the cave floor.

In the pool of light at our feet, the strange insectlike corpse curls up. Its legs and arms twist in close to its chest with snaps, crackles, pops. Its mouth splits into a silent, lipless scream, and it tucks its head down, as if protecting the eyes it no longer has. Finally, entirely balled up like one of those Mexican mummies, the cave zombie is barely bigger than, say, a suitcase. We could probably fit it in one of our backpacks.

The cave, once filled with the shuffling of feet, popping of bones, and shouting of terrified Gravediggers, returns to its pitch-black silence, heavy with tension. The blade of Ian's machete appears in the light and softly taps the zombie. When nothing happens, we all exhale at once.

“I guess light kills them,” says Ian. “Maybe they're just not used to it.” He pauses and gulps audibly. “Shoot, guys, what . . . what do we think happened to this thing?”

“Their physiology must have changed due to its extended subterranean existence,” says Kendra. “It's common—animals lose their eyes over generations from living in total darkness for too long. And—my word, look.” She points to the zombie's hands and feet, gnarled near its stomach. When I see them, panic and confusion shoot through me—its fingers and toes have some kind of claws at the end, white and pointed . . .

Oh. Oh, no.

Bones. The zombie has worn away the skin at the tips of its fingers and toes, leaving sharpened ends of bone to poke through and form needlelike claws.

“They must utilize those for climbing along the walls the way this one did,” mumbles Kendra. “And look. Notice the prominent spinal column. Remember, Danny determined that the zombies keep their ‘brains' in their backbones.”

“This one must have gotten very smart,” I mumble, kneeling down next to the withered thing and poking the creature's spine. The ridges on its back are white, spongy looking, and as I poke them I realize that they're not made of bone as well. “I think these growths are fungus. Like those flat mushrooms that grow out of trees.”

“Shelf fungus,” confirms Kendra. “It's actually growing shelf fungus out of its spine. This is incredible.”

“Watch it, dude,” says Ian. “Maybe I should get in with the machete—”

“I think it's dead,” I mumble. “For good.” Hatred and disgust for the cave zombie radiate off my friends in waves, but something about its willowy body and blank, skull-like face makes it seem sad, pathetic, to me. As I get closer, my eyes find blue veins webbing through its skin and take in the deep indent beneath its rib cage. Is this what happens when zombies have nothing to eat—they just wither away? Imagine starving, every day, for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's enough to make you climb the walls.

Which this thing learned how to do.

My eyes drift up to the crack in the cave wall where the zombie emerged. It's a small crevice, but might be enough for us to crawl through. Switching from my headlamp back to my goggles, I peer into it, trying to see where it opens up, but its twists and turns eventually just drift out of sight. There's nothing visible inside, just smooth rocks and the occasional piece of moss—

Not moss. My hands reach out and grab the thin, grassy follicles in front of me, and looking at them up close sends my nerve endings screaming.

“PJ, what is that?” asks Kendra.

“. . . hair,” I choke out. “It . . . could be O'Dea's.”

“Whoa, wait a second,” says Ian. “Let's not freak out quite yet. It could be anyone's hair. Could be a zombie's hair.”

“Does this thing look like it has hair?” I snap at him. My mind is trying to force my heart into Calm Down mode, but it's not working; my deep measured breaths are slowly becoming hyperventilation. In my mind's eye, O'Dea smiles at me, her face hard but warm and welcoming, only when she opens her mouth to give me sage Gravedigger training advice, she screams and blood pours out. “Dario, or one of these things, took her through that hole. We need to get in there.”

“PJ, I'm surprisingly inclined to agree with Ian,” says Kendra. “That passageway is a tight squeeze. It would likely be impossible for anyone other than a desiccated zombie to fit in there.”

“If it fit in there,” I say, jabbing a finger at the balled-up corpse on the ground, “then we can most likely fit in there—”

Something impossibly hard closes around my wrist, squeezing a screech out of me.

The zombie's hand holds tight onto my arm even as I pull away. Before our horrified eyes, its body slowly unfolds, popping and crunching along the way. My meditation methods fly out the window, and my scream deafens us as it bounces around the pitch-black shadow. I tug hard against its grip, but for how skinny it is, the cave zombie is incredibly strong.

Ian raises his machete, but Kendra holds up her hands. “You could hurt PJ!” she shrieks.

For a second, I consider urging Ian to go right ahead, as any minute now I'm waiting for the corpse's bony face to dart forward and take a chunk out of my neck. But the bite never comes—the zombie steps a bony leg into its tunnel in the wall and yanks sharply, pulling me after it. Before I know it, my arm is into the crack, and then my feet are lifted off the ground as I'm yanked hand first into the stone wall.

As my feet disappear, I feel a hand clamp around my ankle and the extra weight of my friends being dragged after me.

The tunnel is too narrow to have ever been used by people, and even in my night-vision goggles everything is a blur of jagged rock outcroppings. As the zombie drags us along, my head, hips, shoulders, knees, elbows collide with sharp pieces of stone. Bolts of pain blast through my bones. My wrist and ankle both go numb with the two weights yanking at them, and one or two pops in my back and ribs warn me that I might end up with a dislocated
everything
if I'm not careful.

After what feels like an eternity of jostling and slamming, a rush of cool air hits my face, and my head emerges from the tunnel and into another cave, the points of stalactites jabbing down at me from the ceiling. This cavern is even larger than the last, sprawling out endlessly around us like a set piece from
Temple of Doom.
A glance down makes my breath seize up in my chest—we're a good fifteen feet up, being pulled out of a crack in a sheer rock wall, and the cave zombie is yanking me out of the crevice with all its might. This fall is going to end with broken legs unless we have something to cushion us—

Wait. My eyes shut. O'Dea's advice comes back into my head, and my mind goes into my breathing, each inhale and exhale like a bow moving across a violin, creating a focused note out of my fear and panic. As the world slows down, the answer comes to me in a slow-crashing wave.

The minute I'm able to pull my foot out of the rock crevice, I plant it against the rock wall and shove, hard. My other ankle slips free of Kendra's hand, and I fly backward. My body collides with the skeletal cave zombie, and we go tumbling off of the wall, its arms closing around me in a steely embrace, my hand coming up under its chin to keep its chattering yellowed teeth from sinking into my flesh.

The cave zombie is mostly skin and bone, so the landing isn't
comfortable
per se. For a second, all I see is Kendra's hand growing smaller in my view, and then there's a hard slam in the back and a crunch like a million flashbulbs going off at once. Everything goes white, and my breath flies out of my lungs, but a quick mental check reveals that nothing is broken and my mouth doesn't taste like blood. Small victories.

When I roll over, the zombie's broken body shudders where we landed, sharp hunks of bone rending open the tough skin and showing deep gouges full of foamy black liquid. The mushrooms from its spine fizz as they melt into pools of gray muck. Its misshapen form suggests I managed to crush its spine in the fall, and it lets out a last hiss as its carcass finally goes still.

“PJ!” calls Kendra, her voice echoing through the cavern. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I mumble back, my eyes frozen on the cave zombie's body. That's weird. Why's the blood bubbling and hissing like that? That's not normal. I hear myself whisper, “I'm sorry.”

“In which case,” she calls out, her voice edged with panic, “maybe you can help us down from here?”

“Right, right!” My shoulder screams in pain as I climb to my feet, but I can't think about that now. In the distance, I can see Kendra's top half sticking out of the crack in the wall of the cave, arms flailing. As I run under her, the lightness on my shoulders hits me—my Melee Industries backpack must have gotten yanked off along the way.

“How do you want to do this?” I ask, staring up at what looks like part of a magic act.

Kendra opens her mouth, then freezes. “. . . unsure,” she finally says. “I take it you lost your backpack.”

“Yup.”

“Mine as well.” She frowns. “No rope. This will prove difficult.”

“I could move the zombie remains over here, for you to fall on.”

She grimaces. “While not preferable, that is a viable option. Well, perhaps if we take off our clothing, and tie it together, we could use it to rappel—”