Gravediggers (15 page)

“Huh!” he says, a perplexed look crossing his face. “I didn't even
think
to do that. I sort of figured I'd get here and . . . get into it. Learn it firsthand.”

“That's sort of your MO, isn't it?” He looks up at me quizzically. “Modus operandi. Your . . . main way of . . . doing things.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He laughs. “Leap before you look. Guess that's kind of
inauspicious
of me, right?”

“That's not what
inauspicious
means,” I tell him.

“Didn't you call me that earlier?”

“I called you
puerile
,” I say. “That means childish.
Inauspicious
means menacing or unlucky. You were puerile. The cabin was inauspicious.” Without warning, I blurt out, “I assign myself vocabulary words on a weekly basis. My goal is to use each one five times a week.”

WOW, Kendra. You have never told anyone that before. What on earth made you say it now, here, to Ian Buckley of all people?

Ian nods as though he understands. “Cool.”

Still, my cheeks burn with mortification. “What do you expect—I'm a ‘pathetic nerd,' right?”

“What do you—
oh.
” He looks away from me. “When I . . . That was just a stupid thing I said. I never meant for that to be a big deal.”

How do you respond to that, Kendra?
“Well . . . surprise! It was!” I say
,
sort of laughing.

“Right, but did you really have to bash me with a textbook?” he gripes. “That seems harsh. It hurt a lot.”

“You called me a
pathetic nerd
, Ian,” I say. “Has anyone ever called you
pathetic
before? It hurts, too.”

He gets this look on his face—now he's hurt and confused, like the very idea of the word is painful. “You're right,” he says. “I guess that must feel pretty awful. I'm sorry.”

We're silent again, and part of me is glad, glad that maybe Ian Buckley has learned something today, but another part of me is sad for losing the conversation, guilty for going after him at a time like this. I almost had my second friend in two days.

Change topics, Kendra. Get back to the problems at hand.

“I've been thinking,” I say. “According to PJ, there seem to be two different ideas about the creatures attacking us, if they are what he
believes
they are. Either they're magic creatures, servants for some kind of witch doctor, or science creatures, dead bodies reanimated by a virus, ambient radiation, or some other form of scientific anomaly.”

“That's one of your vocabulary words, huh? Anomaly.”

Keep it simple, Kendra
. “Last month, yes. It means something that's not as it should be. Something wrong or weird.”

“Gotcha.”

“Now, if these creatures are science creatures”—there is still no way I am saying that idiotic z-word—“then there has to be a scientific cause for this condition. Maybe someone's been using this mountain as a toxic waste dump, or there's a special moss that grows here. That means that whoever saved PJ is definitely on our side and most likely doesn't want to hurt him. If they're magical creatures, it implies that the person who rescued him is their master and needs PJ for some reason.”

“Like?”

This idea still doesn't sit right with me, because
magic isn't real
. “Unsure. But if he or she saved PJ from his or her own henchmen, I can only assume it wasn't with PJ's best intentions at heart.”

Ian gulps and nods. “Let's hope they're not magic zombies,” he says. “Look. I think this might be the path up ahead. . . .”

The woods stop suddenly, and we stand in the middle of a wide pounded-dirt road trailing off both up and down the mountain. Unlike the woods that seem to have no end, the mountain is perfectly framed in this vista, from its peak to its foothills. We've gained ground, apparently, as the hillside sits far down below us. And there, at the bottom of the mountain, is a gray winding line, almost invisible beneath the trees—a paved road.

If we followed this trail down, we might be able to escape, find a car, get back to Homeroom Earth, leave this place behind.

“Kendra?” Ian stands behind me, pointing up to the peak, where a line of smoke dances into the sky. “We're heading that way. See? There's a fire.”

The downhill climb would be so much easier, and it would mean our safety. For all we know, PJ is already doomed. Berries or no, I am so tired, so hungry.

“Maybe—”

“No.” Ian's voice is scary. His face is alive with outrage. “I know what you're thinking. I know this sucks. But you couldn't do that.” He narrows his eyes. “Could you?”

“Ian . . . maybe if we got the authorities, there's a better chance of finding him.”

“How many hours will that take?” he snaps. “In that time, PJ could be dead! You're not worried about saving him; you just want to go home!”

He's caught you red-handed, Kendra. Try to outthink him.
“It's only logical—”

“Don't
do
that!” he screams. His voice echoes off the mountains, and a bone-chilling moan rings out in response. He doesn't notice. “Maybe I didn't read a book about these mountains, and maybe sports is cooler to me than studying, but I'm no idiot! I know what you're doing! What happened to PJ being your friend, too? When'd it become okay to abandon someone, just because it
makes sense
?”

My mouth opens, but my arguments all fall apart when they reach my tongue. Finally, I come up with “I'm just . . . so tired, Ian.”

“Wow,” he says, his voice quivering. “Never mind, guess I was wrong about you. Go home, get some sleep.” He turns and begins stomping uphill toward the mountain peak.

My eyes fly from one direction to the other—paved road, mountain peak, back again. It'd be so easy. There'd be a shower, my mom, my phone, my laptop, my life—

And he'd be right about you, Kendra. You'd be that kind of friend
.

“Ian, wait!” I yell, jogging after Ian. He stops and looks at me over his shoulder, visibly trying not to smile.

 

 

 

 

Chapter Fifteen
PJ

A
s my eyes crack open, I think,
It's cold in here. Mom should turn up the heat
. Then a dull moan rings in my ears, and you bet I'm awake.

When I'm done scrambling against a wall and hugging my knees to my chest, I realize that I'm alone—the moaning isn't a zombie moan but something softer and more natural. Everything's dark, but light streams in from somewhere, casting everything in dim gray. To my back is cold stone, and somewhere I hear the sound of dripping water. A cave. I'm in a cave.

As my eyes adjust to the dim light, the outlines of shapes around me come into focus—wicker furniture, stacks of linens, framed pictures leaning against the walls. Beneath me, a musty mattress covers the stone floor. Someone's using this cave as a home, or at least a storage locker. A breeze ruffles my hair, and the moaning increases.

It's the wind, just the wind. No need to cough up your heart.

The smell of smoke and food drifts into the cave, and my stomach growls. Barely thinking about it, I climb to my feet and stumble toward the day.

Outside, it's cold and crisp, just damp enough to be biting but not so much to make me shiver. The rocky clearing is bordered on all sides by walls of dark pines, and across from the mouth of the cave, I can see the whole mountain range, an ocean of green hills folding into each other. From here, the other mountains look so close, great peaks reaching into the air, some furry with trees, other stony peaks showing like rocky bald spots. The sky's mottled gray clouds look painfully close to the tops of the mountains, but the two never quite meet.

The pop of a bonfire draws my eye back down to the clearing, and the old woman. She sits on a wooden stool before a small fire, hunched over Kyra's picture book with a look of intense concern on her skinny face. Her body is wiry, a scarecrow dressed in a filthy jean jacket, fatigues, army boots. Her hair flies in gray tangles down the back of her head. Her skin is a deep earthy brown, and her hands look hard, like they're made of wood. She scares me, not like the zombies but like the lynx—like she's a wild creature ready to snap me up at any moment. When the diary said there was an old woman on the mountain, I imagined a fat old crone with a boiling cauldron and a wart on her nose. This woman looks more like a coal miner.

My breath catches in my lungs, and my hand goes flying into my pocket, but it's empty. My camera must have fallen out while I was being saved from the zombies. There's nothing separating me from this horrible woman—

Her eyes meet mine, and she gives me a yellow-toothed smile. She motions to a stool across the fire from her, on which sits
a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast. Like in a cartoon, the smell snakes over and drags me by the collar, puts the fork and plate in my hand, sits me down on the stool, and—

Now wait a second. I should know better than this. This is a witch, a woman who cursed a dozen poor modern dancers to their doom a year ago. This is Scary Movies for Beginners stuff. You never want to take anything that's offered you—poisoned apples, monkey's paws, puzzle boxes. When people do this in the movies, you laugh at them for being so dumb.

“What is this?” I ask.

“Breakfast,” she says. Her voice is like stone and leather. “Eat it.”

“What's in it?”

“Breakfast, mostly,” she says. “Eat it.”

“Did one of your zombies make this?”

She snorts. “That's cute,
my
zombies. Eat it or don't.”

With those options, what else can I do? Everything's delicious, but I barely taste it. A long night of near-death experiences works up an appetite. The old woman watches me the whole time, her eyes following my every bite.

“Thank you,” I say, licking bacon grease from my fingers.

She grunts, then holds up Kyra's book and taps the cover. “What's his deal?”

“Who?”

“Him. The guy.”

“. . . Burly Bunny?”

“Right.”

“You want to know about Burly Bunny?”

Her eyes narrow. “I asked, didn't I?”

“He's a bunny. . . . He ate a radioactive carrot that makes him superstrong, but he's clumsy and he breaks things because he doesn't know his own strength. It's a book for five-year-olds.”

“Gotcha,” she mumbles. “Felt like I missed some backstory.”

Okay.
. . . “It's my little sister's book.”

“Kyra?”

Her name is like an electric shock. “What?”

“You kept saying that in your sleep,” says the woman. “Kyra. She your sister?”

“Yeah. I was supposed to read her a bedtime story yesterday, before we got lost.”

She hangs on me with those pale hazel eyes and says, “Just the three of you, huh?”

If this is anything like the movies, I'm either okay or about to die. “Yes.”

She nods. “Good. I was worried you might've been a big group that got split up.” Then her face turns angry; all her wrinkles come out at once. “You didn't think to stop at the wall? The girl even picked up some of the peanuts, for crying out loud.”

“How long have you been watching us?”

“Long enough.”

It all makes sense now. All the missteps and confusion we went through weren't accidental; they were planned. “You did all this to us, didn't you? You . . . you tricked us somehow. You led us here, to be eaten by your zombie minions!”

She shakes her head. “There you go again,
my zombies
. I've got no love for those walking piles of meat. And a zombie's got no love for anything but pain and death.”

“But you're a witch, aren't you?”

“Not quite.” She leans forward, squinting at me. “Where's all this coming from? Seems like you have an awful lot of ideas about me.”

“We . . . we found a diary,” I tell her. “In the cabin. In the basement.”

She spits and shakes her head. “That's not a good thing. Whose diary was it?”

“This girl, Deborah Palmer . . . she came after us later, as a zombie. And we . . . killed her.”

In seconds, she's on her feet, over the bonfire, grabbing my collar with one of those industrial-strength hands. “You killed one?!” she shouts. “How? Which one? What'd you do to it? You sure it was dead?
Speak
, boy
.
”

“A girl—broken leg, furry jacket! Deborah! She had her ID hanging around her neck! We dropped a dead tree on her! It crushed her!”

“Hrm.” The old woman drops me, and I go falling on my butt and scooting away from her. “I guess crushing them works. I gotta remember that. Anything that destroys them completely, smashes the spinal cord. But if the tree's not heavy enough . . .” She looks over at me. “It takes some backbone, killing a zombie. I'm impressed.” She holds out a bony hand. “O'Dea Foree, at your service.”

“PJ Wilson,” I say, shaking it.

“Your name's PJ?” she says, then shrugs. “Takes all kinds, I guess. How's your ankle?”

Whoa—I barely noticed it when I woke up. “It's . . . still a little stiff.”

“Let me see.” She leans over and wraps a hard hand around my ankle, and suddenly there's a buzzing coldness that comes out of her grip, reaches deep into the joint, and vibrates the pain away. She begins mumbling a steady line of hushed gibberish under her breath, then stops suddenly, lets go of my ankle, and sits back down. “Now try it.”

There's no stiffness, no ache. It even feels stronger than before. My lips quiver so hard, I can barely speak. “What was that?”

“Amateur's magic,” she said. “I put a salve on it last night, and it seems to have worked—”

“Okay, wait.” I scoot my stool back away from her and hold up my hands. My ankle's still buzzing, my head is swimming, and my stomach's churning. It's all too much. “I'm sorry, what's going on here? There are walking dead people, and you say they're not yours, but you
are
a witch, and . . . please. I just need an explanation.”

She's quiet for a moment, then looks away from me. “It's the land,” she says. “Believe it or not, you and your friends wandered onto one of the worst places on earth.”

“Oh, trust me,” I say, “I believe it.”

“There are bad spots in the world, see,” she says. “They get rotten, like a bruise on an apple. That's what happened here. Way I heard it, there was a settlement on this very mountain, mostly escaped slaves, some Crow Indians. They thought that the altitude would keep away the law—no cop wanted to climb this high. They didn't really have neighbors, so who would rat them out? But one night, a runaway slave making his way here got caught and had the truth tortured out of him. The next day, a council member from one of the nearby towns—odd fellow, not quite right in the head—rounded up a couple of slave trackers and went for a hike.”

“And he caught the slaves?”

She chuckles darkly. “Nice try. No, he ordered the trackers to destroy the settlement. And they did. Burned it to the ground and killed every man, woman, and child who lived here.”

The words make the hairs on my arms stand on end. “That's horrible.”

“Yes it is,” she murmurs. “And when something that horrible happens somewhere, it seeps into the earth, affects the karma of the place. You know what karma is, right?”

“It's like luck?”

“Sort of. It's like the soul of a place, the energy running through all living things. That's why I'm here. I'm a Warden, see. You know what that is, right?”

“Someone who protects wildlife?”

“Again, sort of. We're a different kind of Warden. We keep the dark forces from getting out into the world at large. I was basically born to be Warden here. My blood's a good mix for magic—Appalachian mountain folk, Crow Indian, and just a bit of Haitian slave. I have some voodoo priestess, some medicine woman, and yeah, some good ol' American witch.”

“What do you do, brew potions in cauldrons? Commit animal sacrifices?”

“Nah, that's all Shakespeare,” she says. “It's sigils, mostly. Don't know that word, do you?” Her hand darts into the bonfire's ashes, and then she finger-paints a black design on the gray stone, a cross marked with circles like the one we found in the basement of the cabin. “They're symbols with power to them. Spreading food's good, too—the darkness is always hungry. Rum and nuts for the voodoo gods. And of course we have totems, which are the real important things. They're objects we create that control the flow of energy to keep things balanced. Indians around here used totem poles, but I've always preferred dream catchers myself.”

My mind flashes back to the drawing of the dream catcher in Deborah's diary, but I keep my mouth shut—I still don't know if this woman can be trusted. “Is that why you live in a cave?” I ask. “To be close to the earth?”

“What? No,” she says. “I live in a cave because a bunch of college kids forced me out of my house at gunpoint.”

“What?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Last year, bunch of kids in spandex and leg warmers. They showed up, saw all my Warden's gear, and flipped out. Pulled a gun on me. Said
I
was the reason they were lost, just like you did.
I
made the weather go bad, made the forest swallow them up. They chased me out of my house. When I came back the next day, they were gone . . . though not for long.”

From somewhere off in the trees a sorrowful moan echoes up the mountain. My blood turns frosty, and I climb to my feet, but O'Dea holds up a hand.

“Far off,” she says. “They'll never come around here. That's why I put that bone totem in the cabin's basement—it's a beacon. Draws them like flies, keeps 'em away from up here. As long as no one messes with my magic, we're fine.”

Something in her voice makes me believe her. I sit back down, and after a moment, she continues.

“You ever hear stories about whole towns just dis-appearing? It's always a Warden issue, a Warden passing away suddenly or being chased out of town by people who don't know any better. Next thing you know, everyone feels like they're being followed or watched. Everyone gets roaring mad at each other. If they're lucky, they escape the cursed land, usually with a Warden's help. If they're not, they die. And then they come back.”

“Zombies.”

“You got it,” she says. “When evil forces find a vessel, they use it. It's not pretty or smart, but it doesn't feel pain, just cold hate and hunger; and while coffee and peanuts and rum feed the earth, the walking dead only hunger for one thing—fresh meat. They'll eat anything and anyone they catch. There's nothing human about 'em except for their bodies, and those are far from saving. A few days later, I was still cleaning up the mess in my cabin when I heard that moan in the forest, and I knew they were lost. I grabbed what furniture I could and hauled it up here, piece by piece, and then got to work.”

“Whose skull was that in the basement?” I ask her with a shudder.

“Bird-watcher, crushed by a falling branch,” she says. “The woods got him, and he came back the next day. He wandered off a cliff chasing a rabbit two days later, and it killed him again. Wardens aren't allowed to kill zombies ourselves, see—interference isn't allowed. I figured that poor sap's bones would be powerful enough to create a beacon. That's why they came after you when you kids entered the cabin. You basically flicked the light, and the moths came running to see what was up.”

“Are you sure it's a curse? Couldn't this just be a disease, or some kind of . . . mutation?”

O'Dea shrugs. “No one knows. There was a Warden in Russia who tried to find a cure—she thought it was a
fungus
, if you can believe that. There's always a Warden who thinks that science is the answer. March of progress! Yeah, well, there's
something
marching out there. Besides, virus, curse, science, magic—it still means the dead walk the earth. Only two things are certain—one, they're real hard to kill, and two, you're a goner if they get you. One bite, one scratch, and after a few hours, the breath just gets pulled right out of your chest. A few minutes after that, you stand back up and go after the nearest thing with flesh on its bones.”