Gravediggers (7 page)

This is quickly becoming the wrong kind of horror movie. “I'm very against getting naked in the zombie cave, Kendra.”

“As though I'm all for it?” she cries. “PJ, we're very low on options here. Sacrifices must be—” Suddenly, her eyes go wide, and she gasps. “What—no, no, NO, IAN, DON'T—”

There's something like a popping sound, and Kendra goes shooting out of the hole, flying through the air. Once again, I close my eyes, breathe deeply, and let the scene slow down. Her speed and distance become obvious to me, and I manage to run directly under her just in time for her to come down and make a sprawling heap of arms and goggles out of the two of us.

“Thanks,” she groans, rolling off me. “That fall might've killed me.”

“No problem,” I say, feeling something in my back shriek with pain.

Of course, Ian doesn't need to be caught—one minute he's in the hole, the next he lands on the hard rock floor with a
boom
, crouched perfectly to break his fall and sending up a small cloud of dust, his machete held out in terrifying Jason Voorhees fashion at his side. I can't help but blink at him in awe—jumping fifteen feet like it was nothing. When I notice he still has his backpack, and one of ours in his hands, my breath jets from my lungs in a grateful sigh.

“You could've seriously injured me,” snaps Kendra.

“While you guys were talking, I was stuck in a crack like some kind of cockroach,” he says, rising and brushing rock dust from him. “I was suffocating in there.”

She says no more, just snatches the backpack from him and begins rifling through its contents. Ian hauls me to my feet and brushes me off.

“You okay?” he asks. “What's this black stuff on you? That zombie blood?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I bodychecked him and crushed him on landing.”

Ian grins. “I would've never thought of that, man.”

“Perfect.” Kendra pulls a thin rod from her backpack and twists it, making it flare bright white in my night-vision goggles. “We'll leave glow sticks at important points along the way. That way, if we need to backtrack, we'll know where we are.” She looks into the bag. “Hrm. We have to hand it to Danny; he made sure we had everything we might possibly need.”

“Okay, this is zombie kill one,” says Ian. “Where is it?”

“Right over there—” I turn, finger pointed, to show Ian, but the words turn to a ball of ice in my throat and refuse to move further.

Crouched on its haunches at the edge of the shadows, leaning over its brother's broken corpse, is a second cave zombie—thin, leathery, eyeless. It looks almost identical to the first, save for maybe an extra wisp of hair. Its nose, or the hole that once was its nose, hangs over the crushed remains of its buddy, taking deep sniffs of its carcass.

On my one side, Ian latches onto me, hands digging hard into my shoulder. Kendra keeps examining the supplies in her backpack. “Our map is still secure. There's even a satellite phone in this one. Hopefully, once we discover the city of Kudus, we can find somewhere to try and call—”

“Kendra,” I stage-whisper, “stop talking.”

“What? Why—” Behind me, I hear her twist to face us, and then all noise stops and she goes deathly still.

Of course, there's no hope of going unheard. We know very little about these zombies, as they're nothing like the ones from the countless monster movies I've watched. But given the last zombie's response to very little noise, it's heard us.

Slowly—always slowly—the head rises, the gaping eye sockets aiming at us, its gross nose hole fluttering as it smells the air of the cave. For almost thirty seconds, we remain perfectly still, watching it take us in without any sign of hunger or hostility. The dusty air tastes dry on my tongue; the total lack of light puts a deep, resonant chill through my bones.

“It's not moving,” whispers Ian. “Why's it not moving?”

“Maybe . . . they've evolved into vegetarians,” says Kendra, “and it doesn't want to eat us.”

“Maybe it can smell the Gravedigger on us,” I whisper, the idea sending a surge of raw power through my body. “It knows what we are, and that we pose a threat. It's . . . scared.” I love it. Things have made a reversal. We no longer fear the dead for trying to kill us. The dead fear
us
for succeeding in killing
them
—

Suddenly, a rhythmic tapping,
tak-tak-tak
, echoes through the chamber, making us all jump and gasp. My eyes whip around, looking for the source of the noise, when I notice the zombie's hands and feet twitching. Sure enough, as I focus in, I watch as the zombie taps his pointed finger and toe bones against the floor in a careful, quick way, sending sharp noise echoing throughout this abyss.

“I think it's attempting to communicate,” says Kendra.

“Is that Morse code?” asks Ian.

“I don't think it's trying to talk to us, Ian,” says Kendra.

As if on cue.

First, one huddled shape crawls into view behind this new cave zombie, then a second, then four more, then eight more, ten, forty. In the distance behind it, the cave grows thick with slow, skeletal shapes that seem to emerge from the shadows like the night just spat them out. Not just on the floor, either—suddenly, over the walls, even along the ceiling, the cave fills with a scuttling swarm of thin, bony beings, creeping into view. As they make their way along, their own fingers and toes tap out a similar rhythm to the one being played before us.

“Kendra,” I call above the deafening tapping of bones, “tell me you see some sigils in this room that I can't see.”

She gulps and squeaks, “I'm afraid not.”

Chapter Seven

Ian

O
h man. Oh man. Okay. Oh man. Here they come.

There are a lot of them. No, scratch that, too many of them, a bazillion, creeping slowly at us all crouched with their arms curled up at their chests like T-rexes, or moving across the ceiling and walls like a bunch of undead Spider-Mans, and it's like my goggles go from seeing a green cave to some kind of barrel of ants, moving all over each other, each one more covered with flat mushroom scales than the last. The sounds are creepier than the other zombies we've fought, the ones that moaned and snarled and gurgled, 'cause with these guys all you get are these low-pitched scratchy hisses and the sound of their old skin rubbing together with this noise like bedsheets being gathered and the tap-tap-tapping thing they seem to like so much. I'm guessing that's a cave zombie's dinner bell. I don't know. I'm officially back to square one when it comes to dealing with zombies, because
what the heck are these things
and
how are there so many
are pretty much all I'm dealing with here.

They fill the room, forcing us to scoot away from the front line of them like three scared poodles. Here PJ was, talking about them being afraid of us, and now we're falling back faster than you can say “hopeless.”

That's when cold lumpy stone hits my back, and as hard as I push with my feet I can't move another inch. My head whips up, and I realize we're at the rock face we just popped out of, that the way we came in here is at least ten feet over our heads, so there's no hope of getting to it now. We're stuck here, in a giant stone coffin with no way out and a couple thousand flesh-eating skeletons coming at us. So,
that's
awesome.

“We need to fight them back,” I finally stutter. My hand remembers the machete in it, and I give it a toss in the air and tighten my grip on it. “It's the only way.”

“You're right,” says PJ, setting his feet, holding up his arms like he's Bruce Lee or something. “Headlamps on in three, two—”

There's this
WHUNK
and a blur, and PJ goes down screaming and scrambling, and before I can tell what's going on, something heavy lands on my back, the
WHUNK
sounding through my body in this sharp blast of white, and then I feel claws on my shoulders, bony arms on my head, and I realize that they're cave zombies that have just jumped down on top of us. They must have been crawling on the ceiling and let go directly overhead, death-from-above style. Suddenly, I go from butt-kicking Gravedigger to headless chicken, jabbing my machete into the thing on my back over and over again while trying not to stick myself.

And then they just swallow us up. Kendra's screams and PJ's repeated “I'M SORRY, I'M SORRY” go muffled as a few thousand zombies leap on us in a great big pile of corpses.

Imagine being thrown through a jungle gym, hard, for, like, fifty seconds. That's what's going on here, only every so often this tunnel of hard limbs has a rotten bone-tipped hand or a hissing skeleton's face. After a second, I'm not even screaming; I'm just making that karate-chop-on-the-back motorboat noise,
uh-uh-uh-uh-uh
, as my green night vision reveals a mishmash of seven million hard, undead knees, elbows, knuckles, fungus-covered spines. Are they even trying to bite me?

One of the hands snags onto my ankle and doesn't let go. I'm ready to get pulled in half like a gory piñata, but then the hand feels kind of cold and fuzzy, like the Icy Hot that Dad has me put on my ankle when I'm hurting after a long game. Suddenly, the whole tangle of zombie hands lets go of me, and I go flopping on the floor with a little puff of dust, my body feeling something different, not normal, definitely nothing like the chalky blackness of the cave. This feels powerful and bright and . . . alive.

Kendra's got my ankle in one hand and PJ's in the other, and man, whatever's going on, she's just burning up. Literally, there is
steam coming off her
in my green night vision. Sweat's dribbling down her face and even soaking the edges of her goggles. Her teeth are gritted hard with her lips all peeled back. She looks like how I felt when I sprained my ankle two years ago.

“What are you even doing?” I ask her.

“NNNNGGGGI DON'T KNOOOOOW,” she shrieks.

“She's keeping them back,” says PJ. “Look.”

He's nailed it—the whole squirming wall of claw-fingered bone-thin dead people around us is keeping this nice little three- or four-foot distance. I mean, they don't look happy about it, and their hands come out like they want to snag us and pull us to whatever dark hole they eat in, but they can't, and instead it's like they're warming themselves at the fire of Kendra. When I look up, my stomach goes flat—the wall of clambering zombies continues at least ten feet up. We've got a few thousand hungry dead people here, minimum.

“What do we do now?” I ask.

“HEDLNSH,” growls Kendra.

“What?” I ask.

“HEADLAMPS!” she shrieks.

Oh,
yeeeeah
!

PJ and I flick on our helmet lamps, and man, do the zombies not like that. The whole mass of interconnected crawling bodies shifts and shrieks wherever we shine our lamps on them. When we climb to our feet, Kendra lets go of our ankles and sways for a second, and PJ's there just to time to catch her, but it makes him turn away, and immediately a hissing zombie is leaning in, his sharp, skinny fingers going right for the helmet. If only I'd held onto—

Wait. Hold on. Right hand—hey! I
did
hold onto my machete!

At least today's improving.

A leap and a swipe later, the zombie backs away snarling, its fingers tumbling to the floor. PJ and I crowd around Kendra, keeping our lamps moving in a wide circle, me striking out with my machete, PJ doing his weird meditation-based closed-eyed zombie judo and tossing them away, but every time we turn away from one part of the horde of undead things around us, another begins to fold in toward us, hands out, mouths open.

“There are too many of them!” shouts PJ, swerving out of the way of a swift gray hand, and I'm pretty amazed by how well he's doing staying away from them. He dodges them like he knows where they're coming from, like he can hear them ahead of time, and it's cool to watch, his skinny little body twisting and lashing out over and over.

“Kendra!” I shout. “Can you give us round two on the juju?”

My answer is Kendra straight-up lurching forward and throwing up on the cave floor. It ain't pretty, and the sharp pukey smell gets me coughing, so I focus on swiping out with my machete and blasting the hissing mass of shadows with light. Whatever, it was bound to happen. One thing I've learned, man, you fight zombies, someone's gonna ralph.

We try to keep the perimeter around us tight, but I can't help but know we're losing mad ground with every second, and I'm feeling more and more of these creepy skinny cannibals connect with me, no matter how much I slash at them. There's a sharp-ended hand clawing at my hair, there's a pair of jaws coming hissing out at me from the pile. It's like they don't have any joints, just bones in a bag, and we can't win against something like that, no matter how ready and trained we are this time around, and I do exactly what O'Dea told me not to and start stiffening up inside, because let's face it, O'Dea's dead, she's gone, there're just too many of them for her to make it through this, no matter how tough and sage and wise and kind she is, she's dead, we're
dead
—

And then, it stops.

Seriously. Every shuffle of skin or pop of a bone in a socket, every gasp and shriek and hiss, they just end. The zombies freeze, all stuck in their big tangled heap. All you can hear is the sound of my, PJ's, and Kendra's panting.

Then, it's like this rumble, deep and loud, like the earth's stomach is growling, just shakes its way down the tunnel, growing louder and louder until it fills the room, making the floor tremble beneath us. This rumbling moan sounds like some kind of angry animal, something old with a lot of scales and eyes. Suddenly, the night vision doesn't mean a thing, the dark and cold of this place hits me, making my skin go all goosebumped.

The zombies start crawling backward—and I mean that—they don't turn around and leave; they back off—those black hollow eye sockets still zoned in on me, PJ, and Kendra the whole time. It's like they're being rewound in slow motion. They probably don't even need to see to know where they're going, which is the kind of idea that makes you want to cry.

And soon, the last few of them back up into the dark and vanish. There's a final
clik- clik-clik
as a final skinny one with a head of tattered gray hair crawls back along a wall. He lets out a loud, angry hiss as he disappears.

“Where do you think they're going?” I say.

“It must be something about that sound,” Kendra says, standing and wiping her mouth. “Something is calling them away.”

“Do you think it's a Warden?” asks PJ.

“Wardens repel zombies,” says Kendra. “Besides, this place has been out of reach for hundreds of years. Nothing could have survived down here.”

“Maybe it didn't,” I say. “Maybe it's some kind of . . . super-zombie.” Kendra gives me this look like I'm being an idiot, and it stings inside. “Hey, look at those things. If the zombies can turn into some kind of skeleton-spiders, anything can happen.”

Her eyebrows raise and she nods. “That's actually a fair point. Well said, Ian.” And the sting is gone, and I can feel my blood running through my face, like I'm full of lava or something, 'cause she said I—

I don't know why I'm thinking about this. Think of anything else. My shirt is ripped. Black foaming goo all over my machete. This room smells like barf. Where did the zombies go?

“Where do you think they went?” I say, jabbing out my machete toward the deep black shadow where the dead people disappeared. “We should follow them to find out.”

“Careful, Ian,” says PJ holding out a hand. “You don't know what could be down there.”

“You sound like your mom,” I say, storming fearlessly into the tunnel before me.

Of course, I've taken maybe ten steps before the floor just disappears from under me, and I go falling, like, midair falling, arms and legs wheeling. It's lame, too, because I looked so cool jumping out of that crack in the wall earlier (they can't lie; I was awesome), so to suddenly be screaming and tumbling blind in a shower of dirt and rocks is just not a cool look.

Fortunately, I land on my backpack, so it just feels like a giant punching me in the back and not a person actually taking a stone club to me. My breath flies out of my chest, and everything's a cloud of dust and PJ screaming.

“IAN!” he cries, his voice echoing all over the place and basically stabbing me in the eardrums. “Are you okay? Say something!”

“Stop . . . yelling,” I manage to cough as I climb to my feet. Once I'm upright, I take in all the dark shapes around me in creepy green night vision and see a curving wall, a set of blocks, leading . . . wait.

“It's a staircase,” I call, waving my hand at the two pairs of red power lights and thick lenses shining overhead. “Throw down a rope and let's follow it. It can probably lead us to wherever these zombies are hiding.”

It takes some figuring out, but Kendra and PJ manage to drive a spike into the floor near us and drop one of our remaining ropes. PJ goes down first, but he's sort of clumsy doing it and I have to help him. For a second, I think of my dad—
If it weren't for you, that kid would be dead by now
, he likes to say—and I feel bad, wondering if he's right, wondering how PJ can throw a zombie around like he's a Shaolin monk but he still can't climb a rope right. Then, Kendra zips down, but of course she goes all creepy and weird the minute she looks around.

“Oh, wow,” she whispers, wandering up to a wall and running her hands across it. “Look at these hieroglyphics. Incredible.”

“I don't see anything,” says PJ.

“What are you—oh,” she says. “You should get close to them with your lamp on. Then you can see them.”

Switching my goggles for my headlamp, I see what she's talking about—the walls are covered with these old-looking scribbled drawings of people running from other people with big sticks and skulls on their belts, all surrounded by a ton of weird, swirling sigils. But what leaves a sour taste in my mouth is that we need the light to see them, and Kendra didn't.

“Are they glowing or something for you?” I ask her. She doesn't come back with anything, so I try again: “Kendra, do you see some kind of magical—”

“I can feel them,” she says calmly. “That's all.”

“What do you mean,
feel them
?” I ask. “Are they hot? Do they give off some kind of smell or something? Work with us here.”

“I just . . . feel them here,” says Kendra, wrapping her arms around herself. “It doesn't matter. We should follow the staircase. If it goes to Kudus, it goes to O'Dea.”

“Wait, hold on,” I say. “Kendra, if you've got some kind of crazy Warden powers now, we should use them. Like, back there, I know you lost your Danny Melee power bar afterward, but that was a clutch save. We need more of that—”

“They don't work that way,” she snaps. “I don't want to talk about this.”

“What? Why not?” I say. “We're Gravediggers. Any tool we have against the zombies counts—”

“I'm not a tool!” she yells, her face scrunching up beneath her goggles. “I'm a Gravedigger, Ian, like you. Our Warden is somewhere down here, and we need to find her. That's all that matters.” She storms off down the stairs, shaking her head and grumbling to herself.