Gravediggers

by Christopher Krovatin

  And sadly, I recognize his words as the truth. Though I am unlearned in the ways of Warden enchantment, it is increasingly obvious to me that I can, somehow, inherently, tear asunder the magic guarding this seal. The zombie mushroom sees it, Dario knows it, and I know it. It’s aware that, though unpracticed, I am capable.

  If you wanted to, Kendra, you could set them all free. It’s like Dario says—learning or not, you act as a Gravedigger.

  A spark of internal power speeds my pulse and furrows my brow.

  Then choose not to be Warden, Kendra. Act as a Gravedigger.

  My hands snatch up the tusk, feeling its enchanted power burn against my hands. The pain is nothing, lost in the scream that rakes its way out of my throat; I am already in motion. With one deft swing, I bring the tusk’s point up under the zombie god’s head. At the touch of the magical seal, there is a crackle of green light as the creature’s face splits down the middle in a splash of foul-smelling fluid.

  “NO!” bellows Dario. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”

  The super zombie rears back with an ear-piercing shriek, its body bisecting laterally and revealing a twisting mass of green-lit bones, sinews, and teeth, countless teeth. As it vanishes back into the gaping hole in the mushroom, the cave zombies attack.

  The zombies begin dropping from the ceiling and leaping at us from the cave walls, hissing and clawing at our faces with talons of bone. The tusk burning in my hands fends plenty of them away from me, but Dario bears the brunt of their assault. He goes into full combat mode, a sight to behold as his knife wheels, his fists swing, his mouth foams in rage. Zombie parts fly every which way as he slices and dices the thousands of bony assailants, grunting and growling with each undead monster he takes down. For a moment, I see how strong his training is. He would have made a good mentor.

  Soon, however, even Dario’s massive shape is overwhelmed, writhing and bellowing as the swarm of bony assaulters seizes him and drags him in the direction of the towering mushroom.

  “NO!” shrieks Dario Savini, wild and girlish, as the cave zombies raise him up. “I AM A GRAVEDIGGER! I AM CHOSEN!” Between their frantic limbs, I catch one eye, wide and streaming tears, that latches onto my own. “KENDRA, SAVE ME! DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN—”

  But there are too many of them between us, and try as I may to clear a path and reach him by using the tusk as a sort of battering ram, I have no chance of reaching him . . . and at heart, thinking of O’Dea, of this grueling ordeal I have somehow survived, I simply don’t have the desire to rescue him. It is a damning thing to know, but I cannot help it.

  Admit it, Kendra: he deserves this.

  His feet vanish into the opening in the mushroom, and its edges pull greedily at Savini while the zombies push his body deeper into their fetid master. His pleas for help become a feral scream that fills my mind and the contours of the temple’s chamber.

  Through it all, I am suddenly aware that someone is speaking my name.

  Chapter Eighteen

  PJ

  “Kendra!” calls my voice in the darkness.

  Food, calls the bite.

  Through the shadows, we climb up the walls of the temple, pulling ourselves up the edges hand over fist. With every movement, with each inch we cover, it grows a little louder. Back at the wall, it was a dull, throbbing ache, more pain than message. Now, it is a voice as loud as my own in my head, ringing out over and over again.

  Food. You are food. You die. Then, more food is needed.

  Ian grabs my hand to pull me over a ledge, and his finger touches the bite. He pulls away with a gasp, but I barely feel a thing. There’s just the call over and over again, a steady command.

  Food. Die. Food.

  The central chamber of the temple is tear drop–shaped, and so after a few perilous swings and yanks from Ian or O’Dea, we’re on an incline, pulling ourselves up by the posed hands of stone Buddhas and the jutting jaws of ancient carved demons. With our new magically corrected night vision, their twisted grimaces and petrified smiles send shivers down my spine. With the goggles, everything seemed sort of . . . scientific. Like we were examining it with a special camera. Heck, the goggles were like their own set of cameras, like this was all a scene from a weird nature documentary and I was making some kind of strange investigative masterpiece.

  Now, these jagged, ancestral shapes floating in front of the shadowy blackness around us are like silent observers, judging us, mumbling, Go, go, time is of the essence, she could be dead, you could all be dead.

  You are dead. Soon, anyway. Die.

  Food.

  “You okay?” asks Ian softly as I climb up next to him with a grunt.

  O’Dea hops up beside us in the lap of a cobweb-veiled Buddha, and says, “He’s fine. Right, PJ? You’re fine.”

  Her blank look and matter-of-fact tone drive home my purpose, making me nod and reply through the tireless commands that yeah, I’m just fine. Ian’s worried, which I appreciate, but O’Dea understands me. She knows I can’t let that despair overwhelm me. We have to focus on saving Kendra. Don’t let the hate and fear sit; make them work for you. The fear is a part of me, and I can use it. Throw it at something.

  “Up there,” mumbles O’Dea, pointing to a section of the temple ceiling that has either been destroyed or caved in long ago. From it, I can make out a sickly green glow, faint but persistent. The sight of it makes the sigil on my forehead itch . . . and the bite on my hand pulsate faster and faster.

  We climb—well, we climb; Ian bounds—to the edge of the hole in the roof, my hands feeling solid on the jagged stone edge of the opening. For a moment, I wonder how we’re going to get down into the temple from here, and whether or not Kendra will actually be contained inside of this central area.

  Then something starts screaming deep in the temple. Something not human, something whose voice bores deep into my chest and sends blinding pain through my bitten hand.

  When I yank my face over the edge of the cavernous opening in the temple roof, it takes a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to what’s going on in front of me. After blinking a few times and putting some sense to the shapes moving fifty feet below me, I finally open my mouth and say between dry lips:

  “Guys . . . you’re seeing this too, right?”

  “I . . . don’t even know, man,” whispers Ian.

  There’s some kind of giant shuddering mound of what looks like human meat, skin and all, occupying most of the inner chamber of the temple. The sickening green light seems to be coming from this bleeding . . . radioactive . . . bug zombie that’s coming out of it (this is truly the best description I can think of). On the walls and floor around it are the cave zombies—all of them, thousands and thousands, pressed together into a single mass of crawling, swaying skeletal death that ripples and shakes like a school of minnows on Planet Earth. One or two even cling to the walls right by where we’re peering into the cave, but their bony heads don’t even twitch in our direction, instead focusing on the giant tumor that fills the room.

  And all of it seems to reach out and touch my bite. The voice becomes solid, powerful.

  FOOD. DIE. DIE. FOOD. DIE.

  On the floor, Kendra stands crouched, the tusk gripped in both her hands. Meanwhile, the zombies surge as one, raising up the screaming form of—

  “Savini,” growls O’Dea. “Sweet mother, they’re feeding him to it.”

  “To . . . what?” asks Ian, his voice still awash with total incomprehension.

  My mind spins, going through every horror movie I’ve ever stayed up late to watch, but every alien or undead or mutant just turns into the word food or an image of me flinging myself over the roof’s edge. This monster is different—ugly, giant, but in my mind, too, deeply rooted. There’s a power coming off it, and every so often it moves or quivers, so it’s definitely alive. But this thing knows only the cursed un-life of the zombie, a living death. The sensation in my festering bite tells me that much—this undead blob is wrong beyond wrong.

  Witho
ut a moment’s pause, the caves zombies press Savini’s thrashing body into the side of the pale, jelly-like mound, and his feet disappear into the flesh. Soon, only his head and hand sprout from its side, still gasping and clawing at the rotten air.

  “KENDRA, PLEASE!” he cries. “DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN!” Then, his mouth is absorbed, eaten by the flesh pile, and his screams go muffled and then stop. His hand soon goes limp. Then, a hissing sound fills the air, and the hand falls to the floor, its wrist eaten away by green fluid and sizzling.

  My mouth clenches shut, and stomach acid burns the inside of my throat. My head swims, my hand pulses and throbs beneath O’Dea’s roach-goop bandage. Whatever’s going on here, no one should ever have to see it.

  And yet, the bite in my hand reacts as though it were a beautiful sight to behold. It seems to swell, to tingle with cold pricks of pleasure. The bite is rooting for the monster.

  Finally, I pull my eyes away from Dario Savini being eaten alive by some kind of gigantic undead wart and focus on Kendra. The cave zombies have cleared a circle off to one side of the temple floor, and they all stare eyelessly down at a figure, frozen, a halo of ratty black hair surrounding her head. Steam or smoke pours from her hands where they touch the seal.

  “Great,” I say. “How do we get to her?”

  “Here’s what we have to do,” says Ian, nodding slightly to himself. “We’re going to jump down on top of this . . . zombie monster here. O’Dea, you cast a spell around me while I distract the zombies so that I’m kept from getting hurt, while PJ, you slide over the edge of this weird creature and grab Kendra.”

  I glance back at O’Dea, who looks at our friend like she pities him. It’s not his fault—he’s the physical Gravedigger, the action hero, so of course he thinks that pulling a Jason Bourne is the way to win in this situation. He doesn’t see a putrid mass that eats people alive, just an enemy.

  “There has to be another way,” O’Dea says. “There are too many of them.”

  Ian and O’Dea look at me expectantly, and I realize I’m supposed to have an idea.

  DIE. FOOD. FOOD.

  Then again, I have no idea what this giant evil meat being is—but, hold on. I do know zombies. I know monsters. So I might be able to help us out.

  “. . . there has to be a weakness,” I tell them. “All of the zombies have had it so far. The mountain zombies were dry, so water hurt them. The water zombies were soft, so solid weapons hurt them.”

  “And the cave zombies don’t like light,” finishes Ian. “We’ve been using light on them already. We don’t have enough lights to stop all of these things, man.”

  “Maybe . . .” I say, pushing my imagination harder, trying to remember every horror movie I’ve ever seen at once, “if there was some way to . . . reflect the light . . .”

  “Come on, PJ,” groans Ian. “It’s not like they made mirrors in ancient Indonesia, man. We need to take action.”

  “Look, man, we can’t—”

  “Got it,” snaps O’Dea. Our heads turn to her, the swiftness of her reply and sharpness of her tone nearly making me jump. “I think I got it. Ho boy.”

  “What are you thinking?” I ask.

  “That seal,” she says, nodding at the white shape in Kendra’s hands. “It’s bejeweled, isn’t it? Covered with precious stones?”

  “Yeah,” I say, the sense memory of its bumpy surface running through my fingertips. “It’s pretty thick with them. Why?”

  O’Dea nods to herself and rubs her chin. “We need to get Kendra to hold it up over her head,” she says. “The minute she has it up in the air, you two are going to turn those hard hat lights on and shine them directly at the seal.”

  “You think it’ll act like some kind of . . . disco ball?” asks Ian.

  O’Dea shrugs. “It’s a long shot. But it might just do the trick. Heard about it working once. Seal was an urn in India, covered in jewels.”

  Here we are again, low on options, relying on folklore. Every time, it’s like this. Does O’Dea’s plan have any real legs to stand on? It’s hopeless. I’m dead already, aren’t I?

  JUMP. IT WON’T WORK. JUMP. DIE.

  No.

  That voice has been with me my whole life. Even before the zombies, it has plagued me, made me hate my life, hate myself. Just because the poison pumping through my veins is making it stronger, making it real, doesn’t mean it’s allowed to win. It’s just fear again. This time, it’s just the ultimate fear.

  You’re going to die from this bite, PJ. Accept it. Now, help your friends. Let you be the only one.

  “Kendra!” I hiss at her, trying not to be so loud as to make the cave zombies aware of us. “Kendra!” Her head twitches, rising up and glancing to her left, then her right. Ian and O’Dea join in.

  “Kendra! Up here! The ceiling!”

  “Farther! Kendra, follow my voice!”

  “Hey, Queen Brain! Look alive!”

  Finally, her eyes flutter up past the hordes of clinging zombies on the ceiling over her and land on us. They are barely open, basically slits. Her body shakes and shudders, her teeth grit hard. Something dark runs out from under her nose. It’s like she’s having a standing seizure.

  “Kendra, hold it up!” shouts Ian, mimicking the motion over his head. “Come on, you can do it!”

  Kendra stares at the zombies huddled on all sides of her, then back at the tusk electrifying her as we speak. In a flash, she thrusts it upward with a cry, just as a crowd of bone-clawed zombie hands lean in toward her.

  “NOW!” shouts O’Dea.

  Ian and I flick on our helmet lamps and point the light directly at the tusk. In my heart, a prayer—Let this work, please let this work—runs over and over again.

  For once, my prayers are answered.

  The tusk explodes with light, each gem and stone studding its white surface illuminating and sending colored beams blasting throughout the room. The zombies recoil as one, holding their gnarled claws up to their faces to shield their invisible eyes from the blinding light. It’s no use, though—the light reflecting from the seal must magnify its magic, because those zombies it illuminates begin sizzling, their meager flesh peeling away and their black gummy viscera turning to gray, sandlike ash beneath the glow. The giant mound of flesh in the center of the temple shakes and twists, letting loose the deep, vibrating rumble we’ve heard all day; its surface throbs and bubbles where the light glances it.

  Kendra moves the tusk slightly, and a gem reflects a beam directly into my eyes.

  The pain starting at my palm stabs me in the face, sends me screaming. My hands bat at the stone beneath me, the people around me. My whole body tenses up, shocked, and suddenly I am leaning away from the opening, falling backward, spinning out of pain’s reach and into the darkness.

  “PJ, no—” shouts Ian, but my body is tumbling, crashing into statues and knocking off heavy stone demons with loud, booming crashes. Part of me wants to apologize every time I accidentally knock over an intricate gargoyle or leave a crumbling statue cracked and rotten after using it to jump from, but there’s just no time, and my head’s a blur. My body bends in ways it shouldn’t and slaps against hard stone over and over again, until I hit the dusty ground with a solid whud.

  O’Dea and Ian call my name, their voices getting louder and louder until I hear them right above me. Then, Ian’s crouched at my side, peering into my eyes.

  “PJ, man, are you okay?”

  My mind roams my body, taking inventory. “. . . Uh-huh.”

  “Is anything broken?” he asks.

  I shake my head and push myself up with one hand, surprised that nothing hurts, nothing even feels that bad—especially when I try to use my other arm. Ian and O’Dea gasp.

  “PJ, your shoulder’s dislocated,” says Ian. He’s right—my left arm, my bitten arm, hangs six inches lower than it should, and swings limply. But it doesn’t hurt. Honestly, I can’t feel a thing. Ian reaches out carefully, mumbling about popping it back in, and before I k
now it I give it a hard yank and Ian backs off with a gasp as it pops back into its socket.

  As I flex my left fingers, I marvel at the bite. It’s like it kept me from hurting, like it took away that deep, terrible fear—

  A powerful vibration cuts my inner monologue short. On the edge of the temple, a section of ceiling breaks off and goes falling, sending up a storm cloud of dust with a deafening crash. A gray blast of filth comes raging out of the front door, covering us with soot and cobwebs. . . .

  And suddenly, there’s Kendra, charging out of the smoke like someone in an adventure movie, the tusk jutting gracelessly from her belt. We scream her name, and her head darts back and forth, blinded by panic and dust. When it’s obvious she can’t see us, we go running to intercept her. My hands reach out and grab her arm—and there’s a pop, the same sharp pain that I felt when getting struck by the light reflecting off the seal. Kendra feels it, too, because she ducks backward, fists raised, ready to fight. Our eyes meet, hers baffled, mine widened with a sick realization.

  Touching her is painful for me, because she’s both a Gravedigger and a Warden—

  Witch, moans the bite, devil, captor, keeper, ruler, hag.

  And I’m a—a—

  Before the word can be born in my mind, Ian and O’Dea are grabbing us and pulling us along. The urgency retakes me and I push ahead, making my way through the darkened city as the temple crashes down and the bite on my hand screams in rage and hunger.

  It may be small by modern American standards, but Kudus is still a city, and we easily run for a mile through its streets. Before long, my lungs feel seared around the edges, and sweat stings my magically enhanced eyes. Somehow, though, my feet refuse to stop pumping, and the pain blends in with the fear. In my peripheral vision, I can see bits of rubble and wisps of dust go crashing around my feet, the white noise of the temple coming down filling the space behind us. The bite on my hand throbs, itches, burns with a horrible infected pain.

  Wait.

  Something in the bite stops me dead in my tracks. My friends keep running, unnoticing.