Gravediggers

by Christopher Krovatin

  “What is it?” asks Ian.

  “It’s the seal,” I say, knowing I’m right as the words leave my mouth. “Every containment site has one—the dream catcher on the mountain, the zemi on the island. This is the magical seal of Kudus.”

  “That makes sense, actually,” says PJ as he and Ian crouch next to me. “It’s huge, and it looks as though there are a ton of really tiny sigils on it. This must have taken hours to carve.”

  “Days,” says Ian. “Weeks. Geez, look at it.”

  “Hold on,” I say, reaching out to—

  Wait.

  Kendra. Stop. Use your brain. All day, you’ve been manifesting the powers of a Warden in ways beyond your control. Now, you want to touch easily the most powerful magical item in this cave? Enjoy your seizure.

  “Ian, can you grab the tusk?” I ask.

  “Why?” says Ian. “You grab it.”

  I open my mouth to speak, but no words come out. Blood involuntarily rushes into my cheeks.

  “Or not, whatever,” says Ian. He grabs the tusk, and, with a dry crackling noise, manages to pull it free of the corpse’s hands, a thick membrane of cobwebs stretching and tearing loose as he yanks. Up close, the tusk is even more magnificently carved; along its concave side is a spine of blue and green jewels, uncut and shining even in the faint light coming from our goggles.

  “And look,” says PJ, reaching deeper into the corpse’s balled-up body. His hand returns with a wad of ratty papers, folded haphazardly. Before I can scream at him to please, please be careful, he unfolds them and begins reading.

  “What do they say?” I ask.

  “Oh wow,” says PJ. “Listen to this . . . ‘My name is Joseph Savini.’ ”

  Cold strikes me in the chest and radiates along my veins. Ian mumbles, “Ho boy.”

  “‘I am a hunter of the cursed, the living dead that stalk the evil regions of the earth,’” continues PJ in the hushed tone of a boy used to reading ghost stories by the glow of a flashlight. “‘For years, I kept the world safe from the hungry damned. But my family was slain by these monsters because of the stupidity of the Wardens, sworn to contain and protect these beasts from slaughter as though they were sacred cattle. In my rage, I came here to Kudus to free the masses of undead that haunt this sunken city. Instead, I found horrors beyond my knowledge. The cursed down here have transformed into strange new monsters thanks to the gifts of their foul lord. They are . . . lej-ay . . . leg-ee . . .’” He looks up to me, his brow furrowed over his goggles.

  “Legion?” I ask.

  “Right, right,” he says, and then goes on: “‘They caught me as I had just discovered this, the uniting totem that controls the Wardens’ magic over this place. Through my training, I fended them off and hid myself in this hovel. I cannot say how long I have been trapped within here, only that the cursed are no longer clawing at the windows. I am . . . sluggish. I feel the curse of Kudus all around me, pulling me in. When I try to destroy the totem and release the dead, it won’t let me. I need their magic to break it. To stop . . . ’ ” PJ grimaces. “Welp, the writing is getting really hard to read . . . and there’s blood.” He scans a bit and hisses. “Oh no.”

  “Dude?” asks Ian. “Everything okay?”

  “‘There is no hope. I am a fool. God forgive me. They are everywhere. Victoria, forgive me. Dario, Danielle, forgive me. Death to them all. Curse the Wardens. Kill them all.’” PJ looks up, his face tightened into an expression of disgust and sorrow. His mouth is downturned at its corners, as though he might cry; even toward a man who might have ended the world, my sweet friend has sympathy. “And then it’s just scribbling and lots of blood on the pages. I think it’s blood, but I don’t know.”

  “How long do you think he was down here?” asks Ian.

  “Is there a date on the pages?” I ask.

  PJ shakes his head. “Nothing like that. But he’s not nearly as rotten as anything else down here. If I had to guess, I’d say he hasn’t been here long. What, twenty years?”

  “Probably more like thirty,” I say, observing the desiccated corpse once again and remembering Dario’s revenge story on the island. “No matter how dry or damp it might have been down here, the level of decay this has undergone suggests that it—”

  “He,” notes PJ.

  “—he has been dead for quite some time.”

  “Not long enough to stop smelling, though,” says Ian. “Those cave zombies smell like gym shorts, but not dead people.”

  “True,” I say, “but this corpse has also been locked up inside of this tiny hut for quite a while. The cave zombies have a whole underground structure in which to air their rotting entrails. This creature has sat here in a ball, decaying, for quite some time. It’s no wonder the rot has been contained, given this small hut.”

  “You had me at ‘rotting entrails,’ Kendra,” says PJ. He tosses the pages down and sighs. “But no O’Dea. Not even a sign of her.”

  “This is still extremely useful,” I tell him. “Think about it—this means that Dario is almost certainly on his way, and that he probably knows a way in—and out—if his father knew enough to get down here and escape the cave zombies.”

  “But we knew that!” says PJ, throwing his hands up. “We found claw marks up at the entrance! This doesn’t help us at all! We’re in the same place we were at when we got here, and O’Dea’s still out there!”

  He’s right, Kendra. Panicking, overemotional, but right. What good did breaking into this hut do for you three? What clues have you picked up, other than a letter by a trained and established Gravedigger explaining that there’s no hope of escape from this appalling place?

  “We found the seal,” I tell him, pointing to the long white shape in Ian’s hands. “With that, we can hopefully fend off other undead attacks and make sure that Dario doesn’t succeed in releasing the zombies down here. Right?”

  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

  At 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 s
ends 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 w
alks 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.”