Gravediggers (19 page)

And like he's reading my thoughts, the zombie furrows his brow, puts his thumb on the big Play button in the middle of the camera, and presses it. There's a loud beep, and the recording starts blasting out of the tiny device.

The plan officially goes into action.

Easily
the most disgusting thing I've ever seen.

Chapter Twenty
Kendra

I
f this mountain is permeated with bad luck, as O'Dea the overly hostile Warden claims, then the confluence of events we're currently experiencing means that we have tapped into some sort of vein of good fortune running through the landscape. First, the creatures have enough of their brains left to remember their names, but not enough to expect the ambush we have planned for them, and now they've proven that they're semi-intelligent enough to operate simple technology, but not so much as to discern one humanoid from another.

If our lives weren't in peril, I'd consider someday writing a dissertation on the selective memory of the reanimated human body.

But I'm
ideating
(and that's five). Back to the plan:

The bearded creature presses the button on the handheld camera, and the speakers crackle to life with our voices—“Hey! Hey, zombie!” “Hey pal! Over here!” One by one, the other creatures turn away from PJ in the tree and slowly focus their eyes on their bearded cohort, who doesn't seem to notice, just stares at the camera in wonderment as the audio recording of our voices echoes through the woods. There's a pause, a moment when the other creatures silently consider their options, and then one of them lets out an angry snarl and the horde descends on him as one. The bearded creature looks around in blank astonishment as his reanimated brethren mistake him for a screaming human being and tear him to pieces.

It isn't pretty, but I make myself watch as they pull the creature to shreds. There's no blood, only dust and rot, but it is nonetheless unnerving, and the whole forest stinks of old books and bad meat. It isn't until the rib cage comes loose that I have to turn away, breathing through my shirt sleeve in the hopes that I don't lose my breakfast of peanuts and termites.

Finally, the tearing sounds cease, and when I turn back, the creatures stand around, hands caked with black filth.

Now to see if PJ's long-term plan is plausible.

One of the other creatures, the woman in the pink spandex, leans down and picks up the screaming camera, staring at it dumbly.

The heads turn, the creatures moan, they come at her all at once, and the carnage starts all over again.

I repeat: there's nothing pretty about what happens. The skeletons go rather quickly—they're basically bones held together by mummified dirt—but the Pine City Dancers still have a lot of dried meat on them, and it isn't until the other creatures tear them completely apart that the ones foolish enough to pick up the camera stop twitching and moving. After a while, it's just repetitive, and I sit with my back to the fighting, listening to excited snarling and moaning, ripping and crunching, and the tinny electronic voices of my friends and me loudly yelling things like “pus bag.”

Soon, the outcries die down almost completely, and when I turn around, I see a wiry woman with no lips and one eye holding the head of one of her undead contemporaries. After a moment of staring into the empty sockets, she tosses the head aside and bends down, retrieving the screaming camera from a gnarled gray hand detached from its body. For some reason, I'm surprised to see that the one surviving creature is female. I'm not sure why that seems so strange to me, but staring at her now, eye white beneath clumped bangs, gore-covered hand sprouting from a tapered-waist flannel shirt, I'm stunned. In the many sequences of this plan I ran in my head, the last of them was always a male.

“That's it, come and get it . . . ,” says prerecorded Ian, sounding tired.

“Is that enough?” asks PJ's voice. There's a crackle and a beep, and the noise dies out.

The creature shakes the camera, holds it up to her ear, and then drops it onto the ground.

“Uh, guys?” yells PJ. “What do we do about the last one?”

“You didn't think of that?” asks Ian from behind a tree.

“Guess not.”

Ah.

This is, conceivably, a serious problem.

All our voices are, of course, not helping the peace of mind of the last remaining creature. Her head whips from one shout to another with a series of howls and grunts, snapping her rotten teeth under her cracked, desiccated lips. The more she realizes she's surrounded, the more agitated she gets, until finally she gives PJ one last stare and then turns away from the old oak and launches herself into the woods, heading back to the path.

“We've got to stop her!” yells PJ as he begins shimmying down the tree. “Do something!”

Ian and I are on our feet and after her in seconds, following the bony back in the skinny flannel as it moves swiftly through the forest (somehow, I wish we could have rigged PJ's plan to leave us with one of the creatures with a broken leg, but the time for wishing is long gone). Ian gets to her first, putting his shoulder down in the hopes of toppling her the way PJ knocked over my attacker earlier, but she seems to expect that, and Ian is swept off his feet by a rotten backhand. When I reach her, I grab one of her wrists, my fingers pressing sickeningly into the crusty dried skin, but the bone underneath it is powerful and yanks away from me.

“HEY!” A pair of skinny arms appears around the creature's neck as Ian jumps onto her back. She screams and spins, snarling at the top of her deflated lungs as she reaches her clawed hands over her shoulders. At first, it seems like she's going to capture him, but then she wises up, and her hands simply snatch one of the arms around her neck and pull it toward her mouth while Ian's eyes go wide and he yells, “No no no
no no
—”

In seconds, I've grabbed Ian by the waist, and I'm pulling him, playing a twisted game of tug-of-war with the furious corpse in front of me, her hand still drawing Ian's arm to her lipless maw, my arms yanking at Ian's feet, Ian himself screaming like his life depends on it as he goes horizontal between the two of us, probably feeling the beginnings of a dislocated shoulder.

“Let GO!” I hear myself scream. My eyes clench shut, my teeth grind to the point of pain, and I put every ounce of energy I can muster into my feet, digging them into the ground, leaning away from the creature—

—and then she listens to me and opens her hand. Ian and I go flying backward. The base of my skull hits something hard, and a pillow seems to cover my eyes, ears, face. Somewhere, I hear Ian yelling my name, and then the world swirls into night.

 

“W
ake up, girl.”

The voice snaps on a light in my brain, beating away the shadows with a blinding flash. As I sit up, my head pounds, my stomach knots, and my hands fly to my hair, fingers digging into my curls.

Easy, Kendra, sort your thoughts. Take a deep breath, tear the cobwebs off of your brain, and assess the situation.
“What happened?”

“You got knocked unconscious,” says Ian, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Your head hit a rock and you were out cold.”

The world comes into focus. The afternoon light is dim enough to keep the pain in my head from throbbing too hard. Ian and PJ crouch around me, O'Dea staring down contemptuously from a few feet away. The cold stone beneath me and the fiery warmth at my back tell me that we've returned to the Warden's cave, that I'm safe, that the abyss of snapping teeth and rotten hands and white mindless eyes that I just barely escaped existed only in my unconscious mind.

“Yeah, she's all right,” says O'Dea. “Maybe a concussion, nothing serious.”

“A concussion's
nothing
serious
?” says PJ.

“Not in this business, it ain't,” says O'Dea, throwing another handful of sticks on the fire. “Girl, you stay awake, got it? No napping. You gonna throw up?”

It's a distinct possibility, but it feels inappropriate to be coddled like this, so I say, “No, I'm all right,” and then,
Come on, Kendra, drag yourself back into the now.
“Did we get her? The last . . . creature?”

“Gone before I got there,” says O'Dea.

“I'm such an idiot,” curses PJ. “Of course there'd be one left. You can't expect a zombie to destroy
itself
.”

“We got a couple of hours,” says O'Dea. “This here's a big mountain, and as fast as she may be moving now, she won't be getting too far. First things first: we eat. Then we get cracking, make sure your buddies down there don't have a run-in with her.”

“How can you eat at a time like this?” says Ian.

“Son, looking at you kids is painful,” says the old woman, jabbing a twiggy finger into Ian's ribs. “You're the palest bunch of malnourished train wrecks I've seen in a while. Can't have you fainting. You eat, then you go. Settle down.”

O'Dea ambles into the cave, mumbling about supper. PJ and Ian help me to my feet, brush bits of dirt and leaves out of my hair and off my back, and give me a nice fraternal pat on the shoulder.

“Are you out of your mind?” PJ laughs. “No one just attacks a zombie, not even in the movies, not unless they're totally insane—”

“—yanking me like that,” babbles Ian. “Like, seriously, if I had any idea you could get that kind of heel traction, I would've told Coach to get you on the girls' JV team ASAP—”

It's hard to concentrate on the exact words, what with the buzzing of a recent concussion still in my head, but somehow I recognize what's happening, and it causes a feeling in me that I'm not accustomed to, a warming sense of courage and strength that I have not felt in . . . maybe in my entire life. Through all this hardship and terror of the past two days, my plan to make friends has come to fruition. A smile crosses my face, and a similar look of amusement and glee crosses the faces of my co-adventurers.

“Thanks, guys,” I manage.

“Thank
you
,” says Ian Buckley.

“Seriously,” says PJ. “Careful, don't trip over that.”

I nearly walk into a canvas sack made huge and bulky with content, the bottom stained blackish green. A sweet, nauseating smell rises from it.

“What's that?” I ask.

PJ grimaces. “That's the . . . makings of O'Dea's new seal. She gathered it up before we brought you here.”

“Makings?”

Ian hisses through his teeth, “Mixed zombie debris.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah, at least you were unconscious when she was picking it up,” says Ian. He nudges the bulging sack with his foot, and then shudders when it responds with a soft squish. “I don't think she needed to take all this much. Went a little overboard, if you ask me.”

 

It's only grilled cheese and chicken soup, but it's easily going to be the best meal I've ever eaten after the mix of little to eat and high-energy activity that's marked the past thirty hours. Berries and nuts are good for you, but nothing compares to warm protein and carbohydrates!

While O'Dea makes the food, the three of us watch like hungry dogs, licking our lips and pacing, and when she hands us our lunches, they're gone almost instantly.

As we suck soup from our spoons, O'Dea gives me a light slap on the shoulder and beckons me toward the cave. Ian and PJ share a glance but remain silent.

Deep in its depths, the cave's stone ceiling flickers orange from a torch the Warden has fixed to the wall, and on the floor in front of a three-legged stool sits a ring of wood and reeds—the beginnings of a new dream catcher. O'Dea plops down onto the stool, picks up the ring, and begins weaving more leaves into it from a pile by her feet. It's bigger than the last one, at least three feet in diameter, probably to accommodate all the pieces in the grisly canvas bag outside. My backpack sits at her feet, the remaining contents strewn about carelessly.

After a few moments of her weaving silently and me standing there, she holds out a hand, callused and bony. “Let me have that diary you kids have been talking about,” she says.

My hand immediately goes to the lump in my pocket. “Why?”

“I'd like it very much.”

“Maybe I should hold on to it. It might come in use—”

Her eyes rise up from her weaving, and there's a hard white light in them that causes my breath to catch up in my throat, sends cold through my veins and heat through my face, blurs everything around us except those beads glittering in the darkness. It's something familiar, like when I first took the dream catcher in my hands, electricity that reaches all the way down into me, into my soul.

“Give it here.”

The words are oppressive—I have to obey. Without even meaning to, I pull the diary from my pocket and lay it in her hand. Then she sets it on her knee and takes her eyes off me, and the humming power is gone, leaving me breathless, unsure if I can stay on my feet.

“Much obliged.”

“What . . . what was that?” My head swims, and I lower myself to the ground slowly and carefully. “Was that . . .
magic
you just used on me?”

She nods. “Evil Eye. Oldest gag in the book. Doesn't take much, just the right stare, the right genes.”

“How did you do that?”

“Wish I could tell you,” she says, putting down the new seal and looking at me with nonelectric eyes. “Been able to weaken knees with a look since I was your age, and it's not just my beautiful face.” She grins and motions to her cheek, a road map of wrinkles. “It's in my blood, just like whatever made those poor dead folks walk around is in the earth. Some things just have a power about them.”

My face feels hot. Being overpowered by a stare is embarrassing. “Well, there's your diary. Can I go?”

“Not quite yet.” She cracks her knuckles and sighs. “It occurs to me that . . . I was a bit hard on you when you burned up my old seal. Laid into you real good. And looking back, I'm not all that sure I needed to do that.”

“But . . . I ruined everything. Thanks to me, there's a horrible creature making her way toward my classmates right now.”