Gravediggers

by Christopher Krovatin

  “You just . . . play sports,” says PJ, trying to explain rationally as my feet touch down on the ledge overlooking the city.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I grumble, edging out to my right with my back pressed against the uneven rock wall. Bit by bit, I shimmy over toward the indent ladder that we used to climb up into the cave. Out before me, the cluttered skyline of Kudus is what I focus on, trying not to look down as I side wind out to the ladder, which is a lot easier when you don’t have a couple thousand angry wall-climbing corpses coming at you in a steady wave.

  It’s funny how, climbing up this thing, getting onto the ledge of the city wall and turning around to face the oncoming hordes was easy, but here, trying to mentally plan out how I’m going to do this, I have no idea. Slowly but surely, though, I manage to turn to one side, sort of walking like an Egyptian, and then swing my foot around so I’m facing the sheer rock face of the cave itself. Slowly, suuuper carefully, I lower myself to one knee, trying to ignore the drop of sweat creeping down the back of my neck, and prod around the wall below me, looking for a foothold.

  My first couple of kicks at the wall don’t give me anything, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve totally screwed this whole thing up, when my foot presses into a huge hole in the wall. Reaching out with my other foot, I find the next one, then the next, and inch by inch I lower myself down the ladder and onto the ground.

  PJ and O’Dea follow after me; PJ takes a while, and turning around on the rock ledge puts that old stark PJ Wilson fear in his eyes, but he breathes deeply through each slow motion and somehow manages to climb down the wall. O’Dea does the whole thing like it’s nothing. The woman’s made of stone.

  “We need to fix something,” she says, clapping her hands together to dust them off.

  “What’s up?” asks PJ. “Let’s hurry, what is it?”

  Her bony hand snaps out at my face, and suddenly my goggles go over my head, sending me into total and complete blackness, and man, oh man, there’s never been anything as black and dark as this. My body goes prickly with goose bumps as my eyes just stare off into forever and see nothing but pure, endless blackness. By the sounds of PJ’s cries, she’s done it to him, too.

  Her calloused hand clamps on my head and a damp thumb draws something like a cross on my forehead. O’Dea grumbles a deep, guttural word, and with each blink, I feel a cold sort of buzzing spread up through my sinuses and move behind my eyes. It’s like the skin of O’Dea’s hand and the top of my head kind of melt into each other and there’s this flood of energy moving between us, going all the way from my eyes to O’Dea’s and back again, and man, I didn’t know my eyes could feel cold, that they could feel this kind of sensation this deep in them. All my years doing sports, it never felt like my eyes were muscles.

  The coldness sends ripples of light through my sight, making shapes out of various big black lumps that surround us. Everything around me begins to stand out—it’s still dark, still shadowy as it can be, but now it’s like shapes float on top of the darkness, standing out against the shadow as though they were floating on top of it and entirely visible to the naked eye.

  “Whoa,” I say, stepping back and trying to hold on to my balance. “O’Dea, is this some kind of . . . spell?”

  “Pretty simple one,” she says, sneering, and holy crap, I can see her sneer, I’m seeing in the dark over here. “Those goggles just get in the way. You see in the dark, you’re part of the dark. Makes it easier to move around in the dark.”

  “Well, come on,” says PJ, pointing toward the city and starting to trot out into its streets. “They’re waiting for us. We have to get Kendra and stop Savini.”

  O’Dea and I trail after PJ, who jogs along like we have no clue what he’s doing, when it’s actually so obvious. Because PJ’s bit. And he wants us to think it’s fine, that it’s all going to be okay once we save Kendra, but it’s not.

  I can see it in the way O’Dea jogs after us, her head down and her eyes all squinched up.

  He’s not going to make it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Kendra

  Darkness. My eyelids feel dense, impossibly heavy.

  Around me, there are footsteps, surrounded by an endless sea of scratching and bony popping. My stomach cramps. My whole body feels sore, slumped over a hard, jostling surface.

  Where are you, Kendra? Can you open your eyes any farther?

  My mind is a blur of images and emotions. These are fleeting glimpses of a life I did not lead, pieces of a story that seemed to hit me all at once and now unfold slowly, like a sophisticated aftertaste.

  My mind is that of a mother, fleeing through pounded dirt streets, tugging her child away from the rushing hordes of laughing attackers behind her. Then I am the child, struggling along after her mother, a man in full war paint and wearing a complicated feathered headdress rushing toward me with a wicked grin lining his pierced lips. Then I am the man, my spear held high, the smell of smoke and the sound of screams accompaniment to my battle cry . . . and then I am that same man, my spear and headdress falling as I try to outrace my brothers. My foot catches, and I stumble to the bloodstained ground. When I turn, the mother and her daughter are there, only their faces are pale and lifeless, their eyes blank and full of hunger, followed slowly by their fathers and mothers and friends, the people I slaughtered, now closing in on me. Finally, I am a woman, standing on the shaking earth as a great crack splits open down the middle of the city in which I was raised. The dirt suddenly gapes wide in a gash, and the whole city—the grand temple, the glorious longhouses, and finally the walls themselves—are eaten up by the hungry grimace of clay beneath it.

  As my consciousness returns fully to my own mind, my eyelids crack open. The night-vision goggles no longer bite into my face, and so I expect impenetrable darkness . . . which is why I’m surprised when I see light, faint and green, coloring the reconstituting world around me.

  A cold breeze hits my back, and the person carrying me stops. In one swift motion, he flings me off his shoulder, my body landing with a resounding thump on a dusty stone floor.

  Well, Kendra, you’re definitely awake now. Get your head together. Something’s wrong here—grossly wrong. Can’t you feel it in your bones? Can’t you feel it in the way the cool air prickles against your skin like a fine mist of acid rain?

  As my eyes adjust, I see Savini standing before me, his face and body bathed in eerie green light. He says nothing, his eyes are cast upward, caught on something behind me, and his mouth hangs open.

  “Where are we?” I croak, my throat impossibly dry.

  Savini’s lower lip quivers oddly, and then he whispers, “Look, Kendra. Look at what they’ve created.”

  When I turn and look over my shoulder, my first instinct is to scream, but the sheer revulsion stops the sound in my throat and refuses to let go. Instinctively, I crawl backward, until I collide with the shin of Savini. Before I can rise of my own accord, his massive hands clamp on the sides of my skull and force me to stare straight ahead.

  “No looking away,” he says. “Behold.”

  The pale, bulbous thing that fills the center of the temple’s main chamber nearly reaches the ceiling; I would guess it to be approximately forty feet tall. Its repulsive upper section is a bulging tumescence the pale, semitranslucent hue of a zombie’s flesh; indeed, peering at it, I can see blue and green veins running beneath its slowly pulsating surface. The light emanates from the flat portion beneath its top mass, a circle of fluttering gills that glow a bright toxic green as they shudder and sway around a stalk as thick as me that pushes into the stone floor, sending thick, rubbery roots splitting through portions of the rock around us. With a deep creaking noise, the mass sways back and forth, throwing emerald shadows across the room.

  A few blinks on my part are required to fully understand: a mushroom.

  A forty-foot, pulsating, glowing mushroom that appears to be made out of dead flesh.

  Well. I mean. We thought it could be a lot of t
hings, Kendra, whatever was making all that noise within this temple. But let’s be honest—this was not one of them.

  Slowly, I realize my surroundings—every inch of the temple walls, of the floors around us—are occupied by some few thousand zombies. They don’t move an inch, but instead simply stand or hang, their eyeless faces raised to peer out at the mushroom. Some even sit perched on pale fungus brackets that grow off the walls, dozens of them cluttering on each half disk of vile blubbery matter. And though I know they have nothing on which the fungus’s eerie bioluminescence could reflect, it is almost as if green orbs hang in those long-empty ocular cavities, as though the light gives them eyes enough to see it.

  “W-what is th-that?” I somehow stammer.

  “The result of their containment,” whispers Dario, his hands tightening on my head. “The mutation of the cursed, left down within the belly of the earth for so long. This, Kendra, is their great achievement. This is their god.” His voice quivers, his fear almost a fragrance drifting off him. “Have you ever seen a horror so great?”

  As though it heard him, the mushroom seems to quiver and then lets out the deep, rumbling groan that we’ve heard all through the endless night of our journey down into the cave. Its lamella—the flaplike gills on its underside—make a wet slushing sound as they ripple in unison, and from them and a few other gill-like fissures that tear open in its disgusting head, a cloud of faintly glowing green particles blow out, drifting over the cave zombies. Dario and I yank our shirts over our mouths, hoping to block out the cloud, while the cave zombies suck deeply at the air through their nose-less trunks and lipless mouths. With each inhalation, they let out a faint, almost contented hiss.

  Immediately, different aspects of our unspeakable journey click together, and a bridge forms in my mind connecting one fact to the other. The cave zombies, the climbers, did not attempt to devour us, only drag us along—because they didn’t need to eat us. It is just as Danny Melee told me on the island: eating the flesh is an act of spreading the deadly zombie spore. These zombies need no new matter to spread their life stuff to because they receive it directly from the source. That’s why the zombie mass within the sewer tried to devour us, and why it ate another zombie. It needs more matter, more food for the spore.

  As the cave zombies inhale the last of their sustenance, the great mushroom quivers, making another rumbling noise deep within its fungal innards, one not quite as loud and despairing as the last, but enough to send a ripple of movement through the cave zombies, crouching and hissing.

  Slowly, with the grace of a bat spreading its wings before taking flight, a fissure in the side of the mushroom’s head opens, revealing a moist, gaping hole from which blasts a beam of green light.

  Hands—two, then four, then a preponderance of them—reach out and grasp the edges of the pathway into the mushroom. Slowly, accompanied by a symphony of wet slapping and carnal popping, a shape emerges from the crack in the mushroom’s flesh and begins lowering toward us, bringing with it a stench of mildew that makes my eyes water and windpipe tighten.

  The creature coming out of the mushroom is somewhat like the sewer zombies—an extended mass of many different zombies that have fused together into a single organism, the brain at the center of the mushroom. Its body is like that of a centipede, impossibly long and flanked with row after row of feet and hands, half suspended in air by thick, pulsating tendrils of fungus attaching it to the gaping stoma in the mushroom.

  Its face, a many-eyed terror made of at least five fused and warped skulls, leans a foot away from ours, bathing us in a foul green light that seems to sting my skin. For a moment, nothing happens, and then it opens its wide, toadlike mouth, and in a deep, sonorous voice that resonates in the back of my head, it speaks.

  “You have come,” it says in a disjointed, buzzing tone like that of a haunted radio.

  “I have,” says Savini. “My time to retake the earth has led me to your abominable home—”

  “You must be silent,” says the mutant zombie lord, holding up three hands full of gnarled phalanges (two, but now’s not the time) to Savini. “We will speak with her. She is keeper and destroyer. She is teller of secrets and slayer of us all.”

  My mouth opens, sucking in mold-laced air, and I want to scream, to protest this hideous violation. Instead, I can only find myself stammering, “You . . . speak English.”

  The creature’s seven eye sockets seem to squint at me. “We see your brain,” it growls. “We read your speech, and use it. There is so much power there. You will use it to destroy the tooth. The power totem. You will destroy it for us. Release us.”

  “No,” I say, softly but sternly. This may be a giant horrible zombie mushroom I’m speaking to, but I have to be firm in my commitment to the cause. I will not be bullied by fungus.

  “Yes,” says the zombie god in a hollow and empty voice. “You will release us. We will fill the sky and earth. We are the great shadow that will cover all. You will do it.”

  Wait. Hold off on the “No” responses, Kendra. The longer this horrific being is talking to you, the longer it isn’t killing you. There must be rules to this game; maybe you’d always imagined it with a Sphinx and not a dead plant with a mouth made of ancient corpses, but it’s still a process you’re familiar with.

  “What are you?” I can’t help but ask.

  “We are the great shadow,” repeats the zombie thing, its voice taking an almost proud tone. “We are the eater of all things. We will choke the growth and swallow the garden. We will control your dead until all are like us. When the keepers imprisoned us down here, we began. This body was once one of us, but it has grown. Our core collected and brought it more. It intensified in that shell, and we are now it, and it is us.”

  A nauseating undulation troubles my guts. My zombie mold–ese is a little rusty, but I think it’s saying: “You used to be a zombie? A—” I point to the hordes standing around us. “A shell?”

  “All shells are us, and all are shells,” says the creature from the mushroom. The thousands of zombies around me bow their heads. “Each shell has within it great shadow. I am the first great shadow. Each is more. You will break the totem. You will release us, and each will lay roots, and spread, and reach out to the dead so that we may spread and devour.”

  My mind wraps around what it’s saying, convoluted though it may be. Each of these zombies, if the fungal outgrowth is right, can grow into the towering mold mountain before me. And let’s presume that I am currently surrounded by some five thousand zombies, the citizens of Kudus who somehow mutated enough or didn’t descend into the sewer systems. My mind paints an image: a cave zombie creeping into someone’s basement, or an abandoned well, laying down roots and then swelling, reaching upward and becoming a thick stalk of mold. Then, I picture our hometown, the town hall at its center replaced with a towering heart of fungus, throbbing out spore-filled vapors and turning every dead body within a five-mile radius into a staggering death machine. I see the skies going gray, the rivers clogging with corpses, a great and ponderous shadow thrown over all.

  “And if I unlocked the seal,” I mumble, only out of curiosity, “would you spare my friends?”

  “No,” booms the corpse being. “None will be spared. We will devour all. All land and sea and sky will be ours. You will be devoured when you have unraveled the seal. They will be devoured. We will take all. You will do it and release us.”

  “No,” I say again, almost offended. “I will never—”

  “We will make you,” it says.

  It is with unbelievable dread that I watch as, with the leathery sound of colliding flesh and an explosion of cracked bones, all five thousand undead faces in the room turn at once. Every single zombie, its eyes long gone, its face an almost expressionless skull, looks at me in unison.

  “We feel no pain,” intones the corpse. “But you feel pain. We will give you great pain if you do not unlock the great seal. We know the ways of agony. Unlock the seal, and you will join
us in the great mass. Your mind will become one with us, and give us power to make our way out of this place. We can feel the world over us, alive, full of noise and rushing blood. We will bring it silence and darkness.” The zombie’s teeth click together loudly as he finishes this sentence; flecks of gray foam spatter from its mouth.

  It’s salivating, Kendra. Its mouth is watering at the end of the world.

  “Either you will unlock the seal and join us swiftly,” it says, “or we give you pain until we get the answer from you. You will be ours now, or you will be ours then. But we will know your secrets.”

  Well, there it is, Kendra. Your options are limited to either being eaten by a mushroom the size of a moderately priced house after unleashing certain death on the entire planet, or that same thing after some hours of excruciating torture (“hours” assuming, of course, you don’t use your new Warden powers to unlock the magical seal on this place within the first three minutes of undead torment). What do you think—attempt nobility and go with the torture, or say “screw it” and not suffer before dying?

  The ornately carved tusk falls to the soft earth in front of me, tossed from a gloved hand. The superior zombie rears himself back, wary of it; the mushroom’s pale, fleshy surface quivers and ripples at the sound of it hitting the floor. In its surface, I can not only see the dull throb of elemental energy, but I can actually feel it, pulsing at the same rate as some kind of power deep in my veins, burning and throbbing and begging for release.

  “Do it,” grunts Savini. There’s the sound of metal on leather as his knife comes unsheathed. “Unlock the seal, and then make a run for it. I will hold them off and come soon afterward. Then, we’ll make our escape, and the world will know who is in charge.”

  This was his plan? To outrun a horde of mutated corpses? “I don’t know how,” I whine, staring down at the totem before me. “Wardens need to learn magic!”

  “And Gravediggers do not,” he snaps. “Though you may have the blood of a Warden, you act as a Gravedigger. You are above their simple laws.”