Gravediggers (10 page)

Something not quite like a person lets out a long, sad moan.

Quiet.

Then,
thump
.
Thump
.
Thump
. Footsteps, heavy, slow, enter the room, sending tiny showers of dust floating down from the floorboards over our heads. My hand covers my mouth instinctively—no sneezing, no coughing, not now. Each step sounds like the ticking of a clock counting down our doom. Behind the first set of feet, more footsteps follow, just as heavy, just as deliberate. Forget how many of them I could see out in those woods—between the number of feet and my imagination, there are hundreds up there, thousands, a million hungry monsters.

A moan, raspy but powerful, cuts through the silence. My arms feel pinched, and I look down to see Ian clutching one, Kendra the other, with both hands. Normally, it would hurt, maybe even leave a bruise, but my body is so tense right now that I can barely register any pain, not even in my messed-up ankle. Every inch of me is cold and numb. I don't think I'm breathing.

Finally, we hear the feet move over the trapdoor, and all three of us exhale a little. The picture my mind was painting—the square of light opening, withered hands pulling at the door, a set of milky eyes and dirt-covered teeth appearing in our view—melts away.

The footsteps stop. Stillness like this is impossible; anyone, no matter how poised, shifts their weight or moves their feet around a little, but these things don't. The quiet takes forever, and with each second, I grow a little more hopeful. Maybe they'll leave. Maybe they are that dumb, that they think we've just disappeared. Maybe they're blind, and they never saw us in the first place.

I don't know. This is my first day as a zombie expert, so I'm playing this by ear.

“I think,” says Ian, very softly, “I think we're okay down here.”

There's a shuffle and another moan.

Directly behind us.

Kendra whips the torch around, and there, climbing out of the dirt floor of the cellar, is a chubby man in a bloodstained T-shirt, the gaping hole in his cheek revealing a line of white molars. He rises out of the ground, pieces of dirt falling out of his hair and mouth, until he's fully on his feet.

I try to come up with a plan, but when I open my mouth, horror pulsates up into my throat, and I scream, “WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!”

His clouded eyes fix on us, and the thing stretches his filthy hands out, grasping at our faces. He opens his mouth, but any snarl or moan he might make is lost in the deafening scream that comes out of Kendra.

 

 

 

Chapter Ten
Ian

T
he dirt floor of the cellar behind us rises, then crumbles apart, and there, climbing out of the ground, is
another
zombie.

Another
one. Outside the cabin, down in the basement—they're everywhere.

PJ shouts and sputters; without his camera, he's lost all composure.

“Now what?” yelps Kendra.

That's a fair question.

“Fight!” I yell, snatching the torch from Kendra's hand and waving it right in front of the zombie. For a second, it works, the creature backs away from us with his arms held up to block his face, and I figure,
Yeah, we're saved, we can fight 'em off with a bunch of homemade torches and our wits to guide us—

Then the thing reaches out with a moan and just wraps his hand around the burning end of the torch, like it was nothing. There's a sizzle and a smell like burned hair, and the light goes out.

And then a cold hand lightly scrapes my face, and I just
lose it
.

“RUN!” I scream, and then I'm up the stairs and throwing the trapdoor open.

Too bad the cabin's full of zombies. In the light, they're even grosser than they were outside, like something out of the worst nightmare I've ever had. Their skin is gray and wrinkled, yanked tight over their bones and chipped away. Their mouths are black, full of dirt and bugs. They're missing body parts, ears and eyes and the occasional nose, but their cuts and wounds don't bleed, just sit open and gooey and
black
.

And the smell, man, I can't even describe it, like a roadkill sandwich with rotten lettuce and toilet sauce on sourdough. With every slow, stupid movement, mossy dirt and wriggling worms fall off of their bodies and tumble onto the floor. And even though some of them don't have eyes, it's obvious by the sudden simultaneous moan that comes out of them that they all see us just fine.

All at once, they reach out for us, twisted hands at the ends of stiff arms. “We're out of here!” I scream.

We bolt past the forest of outstretched claws and out the door, Kendra hot on my heels, PJ sort of limping and skipping, the army of hands only grazing my hair and clothes. The light of the cabin disappears as we're charging out into the woods again, only now there are more zombies, ones who haven't seen us before, whose faces twist hungrily as three fat entrees come barreling out at them.

“This way!” I shout, hooking around the side of the cabin and running full throttle, putting as much distance between the moaning mass of dead people and us as humanly possible.

“We're heading back the way we came!” shrieks Kendra.

“I don't care!” I yell back. “As long as it's away from all of them!”

“I'm with Ian!” PJ agrees.

Run, little poodle,
says a voice in my head that I still can't shut up, that eats away at all my wolfish courage. I try to respond that even wolves have to retreat from a fight sometimes, but I know I'm just being soft on myself. I'm not running because it's the right strategy. This feeling burning through my arms and legs isn't hot blood; it's plain old fear.

We run for what seems like years, crawling over rocks, squeezing between trees, gaining ground however we can. The rain starts up again, this time more mist than downpour, but enough to soak our clothes and make every breath a wet soggy hassle. After a while, even my chest burns enough that I need to stop, and when I turn around, I see Kendra and PJ a good thirty yards behind me. Both of them are doing their best to catch their breath and keep up; PJ's doubled over, his hands on his knees. I turn around and jog back to them, still keeping my eyes out for another wave of stumbling shadows.

“Everything all right?” I ask.

“Yeah,” pants Kendra, “just . . . need . . . a . . . moment. . . .”

“PJ?”

PJ answers by puking his guts out. A granola bar and what's left of his Homeroom Earth lunch go everywhere. It's gross, but not that bad compared to, you know, everything else. Kendra reaches out a hand and starts rubbing his back the way your mom's supposed to.

“Sorry,” he says between spitting.

“It's okay,” says Kendra. “Hold on.” She digs through her backpack and finds her canteen. PJ swishes his mouth out and then takes a deep drink from it. Kendra wipes the rim off and takes a sip herself before passing it to me. “We've got to stay hydrated.”

“And not get our brains eaten,” says PJ.

I can't help but laugh, even though I'm not feeling very amused. Must be my nerves. You can't blame me.

My whole body shakes, no matter how hard I try to keep it still. When I focus on one part of it and will it to stop, another part of me starts quivering. When I focus on it all, I feel like I'm going to straight-up cry. If Coach could see me now—just another shivering little poodle. If I get eaten tonight, I deserve it.

“We need to keep moving,” I stutter, mostly because it's the only thing I can think of doing that'll stop the nervous chill going through my body.

“Shelter,” whispers Kendra. “Somewhere to catch our breaths. Hide.”

We stumble forward, even less sure of our direction than we were earlier, only it's like there is no earlier, no home base or woods or mountain. The whole day we just went through, and the day to come, don't even exist. There's just the woods in front of us and the things we're running from.

Finally, we find a huge rock jutting out of the side of the mountain with a little hollow under it, almost a cave but not quite, and the three of us huddle underneath it. Less reassuring than finding a cabin with electricity and a fireplace, but definitely better than finding out the cabin was host to a living dead convention.

Kendra nudges my hand with her canteen until I take it and have a drink, and then I'm thirsty like whoa, and she has to nudge me again to keep me from pounding the whole thing.

We're silent for a little while longer. Kendra, of course, has to be the one to speak up, again. “We should figure out what happened just now.”

“What do you mean?” PJ asks. “I'm pretty sure we were attacked by zombies.”

She shakes her head. “No. Those . . . aren't real. It has to be . . . something else.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe . . .” She goes quiet, staring off into the woods, and then launches into “Maybe there was some kind of viral outbreak, a chemical weapons accident, or something. There's some kind of government facility up here, and they spilled a toxic agent that makes human beings deranged and hostile. The people who lived in the cabin got sick, and they attacked us after returning home and finding us there.”

“You said yourself no one lives up around here,” I reply. “And anyway, did they cart their furniture along with them when this phantom chemical spill happened?”

“That's not—”

“Plus, that was a lot of people to be living in just that cabin.”

“Granted—”

“Sick people don't walk around with missing body parts,” mumbles PJ, looking up from his ankle. “You need eyes to see, no matter how bad your cold is. Honestly, with what was written in that diary, zombies sound more believable than that.”

Kendra pinches her brow. “Okay. Maybe . . . maybe they weren't there at all. Maybe we had some kind of group hallucination due to a . . . a chemical spill, something in our food, and we just
saw
. . . those things. Maybe we're exhausted, and it's affecting—”

“Yeah,” says PJ rather sarcastically, “I
hallucinated
the dead guy in the basement.”

“I'm just trying to come up with a logical explanation.” She sighs, throwing her hands up. “Okay? I'm trying to think of a way all this could happen within the realm of possibility. Sorry if that's offending you two!”

Silence. We're all so beat. It's not even Kendra's fault that her brainy explanations are total baloney; at least she's trying. In my head, I weigh our options. So Kendra is right, it's insane to think those were zombies that attacked us, because she's also right, zombies don't exist; they're one of those things you come across strictly in bad scary movies and first-person shooter video games.

There are rules you learn in real life, and two of the most important ones are, first, that monsters like vampires and werewolves and zombies aren't real, and second, that dead things stay dead. The second one's a pretty big rule, too, one that you learn early on as a kid: there's alive and dead, and dead means no moving, no talking, no nothing. So this is insane, because it's breaking that rule, and suddenly I feel like, I don't know, like PJ without his camera, like all bets are off and I can't win.

And I haven't forgotten that this is all my fault. Well, mostly my fault. Obviously, I didn't put the zombies here, but I did lead us to them, or them to us, or whatever, and if you think about it, the real bad guy here is Michael McDermott's stupid asthma, making me move to Ms. Brandt's activity group, which meant I had to take that stupid wildflower class, which meant I was willing to run headfirst after anything that wasn't boring enough to make me want to go right back home.

But technically, yeah, this is my bad, so the zombies must be nature's way of calling me on breaking the rules and running off into the woods. I break the rules; nature breaks the rules. I disobey Professor Randy; the dead come back to life and try to eat us.

The rock outcropping is pretty lousy shelter, only blocking about 60 percent of the rain blowing at us. My clothes begin soaking all the way through. A rattling noise perks my ears, and when I look over, I see Kendra's lips vibrating. It's her teeth.

“It's really cold up here,” PJ shudders, and Kendra and I both nod hard.

Between the camera addict and the library resident, there's not much meat or muscle, and the temperature must be killer. With no idea what time it is, no clue how far we ran from the cabin and the blankets inside, there's only one way I can think of that will keep us all warm, and I'm not happy about it, but we're in a pretty rough situation here, what with the cold and the zombies.

“Here,” I say, scooting over and pressing myself next to Kendra. PJ gets the idea and crawls over onto her other side, and the three of us huddle together in a little clump, trying to pass some warmth from one person to another. Of course I'm not
thrilled
about having to cuddle with my buddy and a girl I don't especially like, but we get warmer instantly, and hey, Kendra's poofy hair is sort of pillowy, and it smells nice.

When I lean my head into it, I feel my eyelids getting heavier right away. Some time must pass, 'cause the rain lets up, and for a second, in the quiet forest, pressed against my friends, it's almost nice out here. The moon gives everything a pretty blue-white color, and the air is silent, without even the sound of crickets interrupting this little moment of rest we've got going.

“If they
are
, you know,” says Kendra, finally, “how do we get rid of them?”

“In
Night of the Living Dead
, you have to hunt them down with guns,” says PJ. “That usually involves getting the police together and sending out a search party.”

“Yeah, but is that the movie that said they were afraid of fire?” I ask. “So maybe the movie lied.”

“Right,” says PJ.

“In ghost stories, people come back from the dead because of unfinished business,” says Kendra. “We could try talking to them. To see if they can tell us what's wrong. Maybe they were reaching out to us for help.”

“Okay,” says PJ. “
You
go talk to them.”

We all laugh. We could use a laugh right now.

“But if they're . . .
infected
, in some way,” she continues, “by a disease, or by radiation, like you said, PJ, then we'll probably just have to . . .” She doesn't finish the sentence, but PJ and I meet eyes, and we both understand what she can't say, because it's disgusting and horrible.

We huddle closer.

My eyes close, and the woods drift in and out of focus. Kendra keeps talking about disease control and quarantine, but I'm barely here, slipping off toward sleep, imagining my parents at home, happy to see me, Coach Leider throwing an arm over my shoulder and welcoming me back, PJ's parents thanking me for keeping him alive. My eyes crack open and I glance at PJ, my buddy from birth, looking sad and wiped out in the shadow of the rock ledge.

Poor guy. It's been an insane day for him. For all of us, I guess.

PJ looks over at me, and then his eyes go huge, and he screams bloody murder.

The zombie is just over my shoulder, bending down so she can snatch me in her rotting claw, so close that I can see her flaking black lips, her sunken dark-gray cheeks, her matted hair, her filthy red fur-collared jacket, her fanny pack bulging with dirt and leaves. One of her legs is twisted painfully—I think I see a bone sticking out of it,
yecch
—and she claws at the rock around us, trying to stay standing as she lunges forward and grasps at me.

The three of us go scurrying out from under our rock, slipping and sliding in the wet dirt beneath us, but the zombie's no better, and she slips on her own broken leg and falls face-first into the mud. I leap back up and grab PJ's arm with one hand and Kendra's with the other, and we three manage to climb back to our feet just as the zombie regains her footing and comes at us again.

“We've got to run!” I shout at my friends, dodging a claw by only a few inches.

“There's nowhere
to
run!” shrieks PJ. “They're everywhere! They're—”

The zombie lurches forward, and her hand wraps around PJ's shoulder, but she slips on her broken leg again, and with this
awful
ripping noise, the hand comes free, so that she goes staggering in the mud but PJ is left screaming at this severed hand clutching his shirt.