Gravediggers

by Christopher Krovatin

  He puts his left hand down a bit, and my body responds automatically, throwing a solid haymaker right for his cheek.

  That he dodges nimbly. And then he rears back his shoulder and—

  WHUD!

  Everything’s white, and I’m going backward, my limbs fluttering after me like the tentacles of some kind of stupid jellyfish, with this sharp, almost cold feeling spreading through my nose and up into my brain, making me think, Wow, so this is what it’s like to get punched in the face.

  Then, I’m bouncing off the dusty ground and staring at the rocky ceiling of the cave some thousand feet above us, a line across the one-half of my vision telling me that I might have just gotten these really expensive night-vision goggles broken, which I guess is better than my face.

  “Now, if a Gravedigger were training you and not a Warden,” Savini calls out, “you would’ve been able to deflect that punch. Another time, I’ll teach you some fighting skills.”

  You’re not a real Gravedigger, moron, I want to call after him, but I’m too busy groaning and trying to remember how to stand to really say anything.

  So there I watch, helpless, as Dario strolls past the cobwebbed-up fountain to where I laid down the seal, a look of calm satisfaction on his face. I’ll give this to the guy: he’s got a mean walk, the kind of walk that can freak a dude out of a fight (not me, I just go in and get my butt kicked anyway). But as he leans over, I see him overextend his knee, bending it inward, which is a bush-league move that he might recognize if he spent more time shooting hoops than thinking he was cool for being a Gravedigger. So:

  My body twists, my foot snaps out, and my heel catches Savini in the knee. The dude yelps and falls over, his hands moving away from the tusk and onto his leg. Somehow, through the haze of having just gotten my face rocked, I manage to slap a hand on the big piece of carved bone, but then Savini’s hand is on my wrist, and he’s got that look on his face like I’ve stopped being a prospective Gravedigger trainee, like I’m just another zombie.

  “Unwise,” he says, reaching for his knife with his other hand.

  Kendra’s hair is the first thing I can see with my goggles, coming up behind Savini like some big puffy sun, and then I see the dusty, rotten skull held above her head. It comes down in a toothy blur, smashing on Savini’s head and sending him collapsing. Skull-on-skull combat—badass.

  “Thanks,” I say as she yanks me to my feet. “Clutch save right there.”

  Her mouth flaps open and closed. “I . . . felt its memories,” she babbles. “When I grabbed the skull—I could hear—there was so much noise—”

  Yuh-oh. “Kendra, not now,” I say, grabbing her shoulder and pulling her away from Savini, toward where PJ waves at us in the distance. She doesn’t say anything, just nods kind of stupidly and lurches after me. I snatch up the tusk, and we begin running (more like stumbling, between my likely concussion and Kendra’s crazy channeling-the-dead moment) through Kudus. Of course, now, as we’re darting between huts and longhouses, my goggles begin to flicker, the punch to the face obviously having shaken some wiring loose. Stupid cheap Melee Industries brand—

  Two cave zombies pop into view as we hobble around a corner, and PJ nods us in a different direction, but just as we start to move, one of them twists its head at us with this loud, gross popping noise and sniffs hard, and then its friend does the same thing. They both drop to all fours at once and start tapping their fingers loud and fast on the cave floor, the sound echoing around us in the cave.

  “They’re not supposed to smell us,” says PJ, panic making its way into his voice. “We smeared ourselves with zombie blood—”

  It’s only when I feel this tickling behind my ear that I realize what’s going down, and it’s not good. “We’re sweating,” I tell him. “Bet we’re giving off all sorts of human smells.”

  The tap-tap-tapping sound starts to grow louder and louder, and I realize it’s not just them, it’s other tapping, coming from other parts of the cave, joining in with these two, and given how loud it’s getting, how many fingers I can hear tapping, it might be all of them, the whole zombie horde we had to deal with before, responding to these guys. Then, it’s joined by the groan, that deep, creepy rumbling that seemed to pull the zombies away before, that makes my teeth chatter and my hands go numb and makes me realize that man, something really, really bad is about to happen, and we don’t want to be here for it.

  “We have to book it,” I say, tugging PJ and Kendra away from the noise, and thankfully, they’re thinking the same thing. We barrel toward the outskirts of the city, watching as huts and houses turn smaller and smaller one by one, until only a few tiny huts and what look like small shrines are scattered throughout the streets.

  A wall starts growing in front of us, all cobbled-together stones and huge square bricks with the occasional gate or window in the edge, but the openings don’t go anywhere, just kind of lead into more rock heading straight up.

  “What is this?” I pant as we slow down, my lungs getting a little burn around the edges.

  “It’s the walls,” says Kendra, huffing. “Kudus was a walled city. Over time, the cave must have closed in around it and started absorbing the outer walls.”

  “Can that happen?” I ask. “I didn’t think rocks could swallow stuff.”

  “Guys,” says PJ softly.

  She shrugs. “With how long this place has been buried underground? Anything is possible. Besides, seeing as how this place is enchanted, maybe the earth is just trying to devour it.”

  “That’s creepy,” I say. “But the real question is, can we find a way to—”

  “Guys,” says PJ, louder and harder, in that way that lets me know we should pay attention. When I look at him, he’s staring the way we came with these intense sad eyes, which makes sense because when I follow his stare I nearly swallow my tongue.

  The temple at the center of the city, that big spiky shadow-artichoke, looks like it’s rippling, like it’s made of water, only it’s not rippling, it’s just emptying out. From every window or doorway or balcony in the statue-covered thing there’s a cave zombie crawling out, making its way into the general flood of crawling, leaping, scrambling skeleton creatures pouring off the edges of the temple and making their way toward us. There are so many of them that there’s no telling one from the other, like there’s just a fog made of skeletons drifting over the city, tapping a million bony fingers at once.

  My eyes shoot back and forth—zombies, wall, zombies, wall, zombies, wall. A ways down from us, something catches my eye—indents in the stone, made in back-and-forth handholds that lead up to the top, where the actual city walls have made a little ledge before the straight rock wall of the whole cave system just cuts down and stops them dead.

  “We gotta climb,” I tell them. “There might be a way out up there, a tunnel or something that we can use to get out of here.”

  “We need to find O’Dea,” says PJ, his eyes never leaving the zombie-lava surging toward us.

  “We need to survive,” I say, grabbing his arm. “I’m sorry, man, but if she’s safe through this, she’s safe. If not, there’s not much we can do for her when this zombie horde reaches us.”

  PJ glares back at me, and I can feel what he’s saying without words, and he’s right—I’m full of it. O’Dea might not be dead, but she might be, and if we find a way out we’ll probably never find her, or see her again, and she might kill herself if we don’t because that’s apparently the sick way Wardens work.

  But you know what, I can’t even think about it right now. It’s like my brain understands all of these things, but it’s just choosing to not look at them, the way you feel when you scrape a knee or stub a toe during a game and it doesn’t start to hurt until you’re sitting back down on the bench. My head’s in full-on Gravedigger mode, trying to find some shelter, protect the big magical tusk in my hand, and keep me and my friends from getting overrun by hungry corpses.

  “If she dies—” says PJ, his voice soun
ding out of tune.

  “PJ, our options are decreasing by the second,” says Kendra. She goes to pinch the bridge of her nose, but her hands hit her goggles, and she swears.

  “Let’s go,” I say, brushing past PJ and slapping my hands into the dusty stone indent in the wall. Part of me feels bad, blowing off his worries like that, but then I hear bone fingers and toes clicking on cave walls, I hear that deep earth-shaking rumble, and I know that we can’t be bothered by little emotions right now; we just have to go.

  Staying alive: it’s the only game in town.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kendra

  Critical thinking requires time, like sustenance. The longer a thought has to gestate, the more refined and polished it can become.

  I am a thinker, but I have no time, and therefore no chance at helping us. The undead are coming. A maniac stalks the darkness. We are outnumbered, unfocused, dare I say frightened. We must climb.

  It does not help that my brain still echoes with the cries of the dead. When I grabbed the skull with which I struck Savini, there was a crackle of energy before the bone spat a barrage of memories into my mind—long beautiful days, a mother’s signature stew, torches bobbing in the darkness, unspeakable agony at the tip of a spear—before I brought it down with a crash. Now, the fading memories of the dead still resound in my brain, stinging less but still raw and undefined.

  These newfound . . . talents, whatever they may be, are proving useful, if only they could be controlled. There must be a way to harness them.

  How Ian spotted the ladder carved within the wall, I can’t say—it must be part of his talents as a Gravedigger, to be able to pick up on escape routes the rest of us might not have noticed. The minute he begins scaling the wall, though, I notice the handholds, leading all the way to the ledge at the top. He is so good at automatic movement. I don’t know how he does it.

  “So this is it,” rasps PJ, glaring at me. “We’re just going to leave her.”

  “PJ, consider this rationally,” I say to him, holding out my hands as though I were holding the answer. “If O’Dea wants us to save her, she would want—”

  “Cut it out, Kendra,” he snarls, glaring at me. “I get it. I know what you’re trying to say. We’ve been over this. Just don’t try to make me act like I’m okay with it.”

  Try not to blow up at him, Kendra. That’s your fear talking, the oncoming army of mutated cadavers talking. PJ’s your friend, and you’re better than that.

  “Well, if you want to stay here and die, then you’re more than welcome to!” I snap.

  Classic, Kendra. So much for that.

  “I’m going,” spits PJ back at me. “We should just admit what we’re doing.”

  “Yo!” shouts Ian, his voice almost drowned out by the rattling of desiccated bone tapping on bedrock. Our eyes raise quickly to see him already on top of the outer barrier of Kudus, his back pressed flat against the stone toward which we climb. “What’s the problem?”

  “Where to begin,” says PJ, flinging himself against the wall and climbing. His anger is a liability; twice, his feet slip out of the crevices that act as rungs, nearly sending him falling to his death. Finally, though, he’s far up enough that I can begin my ascent.

  The rock feels dusty and smooth beneath my hands, so much so that I worry at any moment I will come sliding loose of the shallow holds and I’ll fly backward and hear a noise not unlike wood snapping as my tailbone shatters against the cold, hard ground of the cave. But inevitably, as my hands go numb and sweat beads on my brow and lips, and the enamel nearly chips off my gritted teeth, I scale the stone ladder. Finally, my hand reaches up to seek another hole and finds only open air on its top, a flat stone ledge on my palm. Two pairs of hands clasp me under my arms and drag me upward, until my feet touch the ledge and my weight rests comfortably thereon.

  From the precipice on which we stand, our view of Kudus is potentially breathtaking. The huts, with their simple shapes and thatch roofs, give way to great halls and longhouses with their extended bodies and horned awnings, all leading to the shape of the temple at the city’s core, writhing with a swarming mass of bony limbs and hissing, eyeless skulls. The cave itself is also visible, its ceiling an endless spiked overhang of stalactites that almost seem like a reversal of the city itself, a metropolis of dangling rock stretching out before us. For this brief interval, it is as though we are merely tourists observing this strange and beautiful place, a dark oddity writhing with the dead, the seventh horror of the world.

  Gravity yanks me hard, and my arms automatically windmill and grasp. On either side of me, Ian and PJ reach out and yank me back, my shoulder blades aching as they slam against the uneven natural rock at our backs.

  “Careful looking out,” says Ian. “We don’t have much ledge to move on.”

  A glance down proves he’s correct—though our footing is sure and our platform is even, the toes of my boots actually jut out from the ledge on which we stand. The drop beneath us, seemingly easy to master while climbing it, now confronts me—a plummet of over twenty feet, straight down.

  No throwing up, Kendra. Only once every trip; twice, and you’re an amateur. Suck it up. So that’s a long, scary drop. You’re a Gravedigger, or a Warden, or something important.

  “Okay,” I breathe out, willing my heart rate to lower and my stomach to remain subdued. “We made it. We’re on top of the wall. What next?”

  “That way,” says Ian, pointing to his left. A few feet down, I can make out what he’s directing us toward—an opening between two solid sheets of rock wall some hundred feet away, small and dark but seemingly large enough for us to fit through. Whether the cavern on the other side is a way out, a place to shelter ourselves, or simply a dead end where we’ll be zombie fodder, isn’t clear. But a saying about beggars and choosers comes to mind.

  “All right,” I say, pressing myself hard against the wall behind us, “we’ll need to shuffle over and then climb in. Let’s—” Within my first inch of shuffling, my foot slips and I cry out. Once again, the boys are forced to steady me, and my face burns red with overwhelming embarrassment.

  “Here,” says PJ softly, and I feel his small, cold hand wrap around mine and squeeze it tightly. My eyes flash over to him and catch that pained yet reassuring expression he’s so good at, as though he’s saying that he knows the situation is dire, that he understands, and that he’s here to help me through it. In my heart, an ache of remorse at being harsh with him earlier throbs low and dull. PJ Wilson is too good a friend to be under­appreciated.

  Ian catches PJ’s action and switches the magically engraved tusk to his left grip before snatching up my other hand in his. His palm is huge and sweaty, but there is something nice to its feeling.

  “Now look,” he says, “we’re going to do this slowly and carefully, got it?”

  “Got it,” PJ and I repeat.

  “There’s no reason we have to rush,” he says, as though he’s trying to imitate Coach Leider. “We’ll just do this one foot at a time until—”

  Below us, the rattling reaches a bloodcurdling crescendo, and the dead appear in the streets.

  To call the mass of bony loping corpses a mob would do human mobs a severe injustice. What approaches us is more of a wave, a crawling flood of hissing arachnid cadavers. Half of them lurch into view along the ground below us, moving with slow, purposeful footsteps, while the other half creep and cling to the walls of the cave, sinking their clawed fingers into the subterranean rock and one another’s leathery, fungus-pocked flesh as they rush up toward the ceiling, around the walls, worm-eaten nose holes huffing dry air, drawing them toward the ledge on which we now stand. They are all so uniform in their blank hideousness—bodies gnarled, arms and hands distended, teeth lipless and stained, eyes long since replaced with dust and mold—that their little differences begin to stand out in my vision. Here is one still bearing a rudimentary loincloth, here is one with faded tribal tattoos inked along its membranous skull face, he
re is one with tattered hair, here is one with a thick green lichen growing from its neck. The main differences are, of course, the bracket mushrooms protruding from their backs and necks, some dotted in patchy outcroppings, others rising from them like solar panels made of soft white meat. But their sheer numbers soon overwhelm my vision, and their single hissing mass begins to blend and flow into something resembling a fog of elbows and knees, a pulsing invasion of the long dead and once human.

  “There’s no time to waste,” I scream over the popping of joints, the tapping of phalanges (no time for that, Kendra, but yes, fine, one) against stone. “Shuffle! Shuffle like mad!”

  We climb a mere ten feet closer to the cave before the first zombie reaches the wall beneath us. Before my eyes, it extends its hands and claws at the stone twice, which emanates that sickening abrasive noise we heard earlier. On the third attempt I see its fingertips sink into the rock and watch its hollow face slowly move up to stare at mine as it lifts itself off the ground.

  “They’re almost here,” I say loudly, willing myself to stay focused, willing the zombies’ hissing to abate (that’s two, keep it up).

  “We can make it before then!” cries Ian. “There’s only a little—”

  A sharp vibration sends us reeling, and we turn to see a cave zombie, newly dropped from the ceiling above us, crouched next to PJ. Its mouth cracks in a feline snarl, and it slashes a clawed hand out toward my friend. PJ’s mouth goes wide and he leans back, lip quivering, arms bunching at his chest. Then his eyes clench shut, he exhales, and, letting go of my hand, he grabs the zombie’s arm and yanks. The off-kilter creature’s claws make a sickening scrape as PJ throws it into the air. The monster’s arm snaps off at the shoulder joint, its remaining carcass tumbling to the ground below and taking a few of its climbing brethren with it.