Gravediggers (13 page)

And then there's a snap, and the vine breaks.

Ian's face goes wide with fear. I fall, slam into the rock below me, roll, fall again, totally weightless, and then my chest hits something hard, my fingers tighten around something cold, and I swing in the air, my feet dangling in open space.

I hang from the edge of the second rock up, my heels only inches away from the rippling ocean of the dead beneath me. The moaning gets louder and more excited; the decayed fingers claw at the air. Sobs send spit and snot and tears coursing down my face. Every time I breathe in, a sharp pain shoots through my back. Somewhere far off, I can hear Ian and Kendra screaming my name, but it's drowned out by the throbbing of blood in my ears, the wails shaking out of my own mouth, and the slobbering horde beneath me.

It's not so bad
, I tell myself as my fingers begin to slide down the rock,
being eaten alive by zombies. At least your parents will know you did something exciting on your trip. And hey, maybe Dad and Ian's father will finally bond over this tragedy. And when they find your body, Kyra will hear that you had her book with you, and will know that even during his gory murder, her brother never forgot his promise to read her a bedtime story. Besides, this is a dramatic death, the way they would do it in a movie. No hospital beds, no car accidents, just good ol' devoured by a wave of hungry ghouls. Maybe Mom will start a cinematography scholarship named after you. Could be worse.

My fingers slide down the smooth wet rock face until I'm holding on by the very tips. A cold, steely hand closes around my ankle and lazily pulls me downward.

TOK TOK TOK TOK.

The cold hand releases my leg just as another snatches me by the back of the neck and yanks me to the ground. All around me, the zombies lie on their backs or fall to their knees, writhing in agony, their hands clapped on their ears, their eyes whirling in rage.

My savior stands next to me, rigid and tall, wrapped from head to foot in tattered rags, two polished sticks gripped in his hands like clubs. His face is covered, but his eyes are visible through the shadows of his hood, and in them, I see color, light, movement—enough to tell me that my new friend has a pulse.

The female zombie in the spandex lunges for the newcomer with a cry, but the skinny figure holds the sticks over his head and whacks them together.
TOK TOK TOK
, the spandex zombie is on the ground, desperately clawing at her ears.

Note to self: Get myself a couple of those.

“Oh my God, thank you!” I cry out to my savior. “Thank you so much—”

The newcomer shoves me forward, pointing with one of his sticks to a narrow hole in the ground near the base of the cliff, barely bigger than an animal burrow.

“I don't understand,” I shout. “What's in there?”

“You are,”
growls a voice from beneath the rags, and his hands seize me, lift me off my feet, and stuff me into the pitch-black burrow, sending me tumbling into darkness.

 

The tunnel is large, tall enough for me to stand up in, though I have to hunch a little to keep thick tree roots from smacking me in the head as I hurry along behind my guide. He holdshall, smoky lantern at the end of one of his polished clubs, its tiny candle providing only a flicker of light for me to follow blindly, overwhelming darkness pulling at us from every direction.

He darts through the shadows and I stumble behind him for ages, my feet colliding with insects, roots, even the bones of small animals. My elbows bang against the walls, and my knees scrape on rocks every time I fall down.

“Please help me!” I call out in the echoing blackness, and my guide grabs me by the arm and yanks me forward. It's hard to tell direction down here, but sometimes I think we're heading up, climbing our way through the mountain in tiny underground steps.

Finally, a circle of light appears faintly in the distance, then grows larger and larger, until we push through a wall of underbrush and out into the open, fresh air, cool and beautiful against my face and in my dusty lungs. We stand before a stone cave, black and ominous, in the center of a rocky clearing, trees bordering the gray rock floor on all sides. A small bonfire flickers in the center of the clearing. Without a word, the figure flings me to the ground, and I climb to my feet shakily, doing my best not to put pressure on my ankle or puke again.

When I stand up and observe my surroundings, the night sky overwhelms me. We must be near the peak of the mountain, because the view from the clearing is breathtaking, stretching out for miles around us. The woods rise and fall between gaping crevasses and swooping valleys, all of it lit creepily by twinkling stars and a bone-white moon. For a few seconds, all I can do is take in the expansiveness of the mountain, blue with moonlight, other peaks off in the distance topped off by the occasional low-hanging cloud.

Wait a second.

Mountain peak, stone cave. The diary that Kendra found had a map of all this.

Which means my new friend isn't a he—

“Now,” says the gravelly voice behind me, “if you don't mind . . .”

She stands over me, cracking her bony knuckles. The ragged hood around her head is pulled away, revealing a slim, wrinkled face outlined by a rat's nest of tangled hair. With the light of the fire behind her, all I can see is a shadowed silhouette, but her eyes, hard and shiny, stare out cruelly from the darkness that surrounds her, pulling the breath right out of my lungs. She raises her lantern near them, throwing twisted shadows on her withered face and sending twinkling firelight off of the blacks of her eyes.

“. . . you can explain to me what you're doing on my mountain.”

My lips try to form words, but her eyes shake me, make me feel dizzy and sick, and before I can answer, everything swirls into blackness, and my legs go out from under me.

Chapter Thirteen
Ian

“Q
uiet,” whispers Kendra. “They're leaving.”

Behind me, moaning and footsteps fade away into the forest. For the longest time, I can't look, since a picture of PJ's strained face sliding into a crowd of zombies sits in my stomach like a cold, hard rock. Thirty seconds ago, Kendra had to hold me down to keep me from going over the edge and down to him, and as soon as the noises fade away, and despite the curdling going on in my guts, I turn around, peek my head over the edge, and survey the damage.

One last zombie, a hiker with long gray hair who looks like he's made of beef jerky, stands at the bottom of the cliff and raises his eyeless head in the air, like he smells something not right. For a moment, I figure we're toast, and my fingers hurt from gripping the stone beneath us, but then he turns away from us and crunches out of sight.

Kendra and I breathe a little sigh of relief as the last of the silhouettes and moans disappear in the distance, but we wait another five minutes before even thinking about getting up. That last attack taught us something: these things may be slow and dumb, but they don't give up easily. If we run around making noise and one of them even glimpses us, we'll be surrounded in no time.

And they'll do . . . whatever they did to PJ. Whatever made that weird knocking noise.

PJ. Oh, PJ, man, what do I tell your family?

 

While I'm feeling wiped and depressed, Kendra's all nervous energy. “First things first,” she says, running her hands through her puffball hair nervously. “We ought to secure a perimeter. Make sure for certain that we're alone out here. Right?” I shrug. “Fine. Then, let's go see if PJ's still there, and we'll . . . deal with that. Got it?” That one I can't even shrug about. After a while, she continues, “Then we need to eat, rest, reconsider our options, and in the morning, we can figure out how to get off this mountain. Right? Does that sound good?”

“Whatever.”

“No, not whatever, Ian. That's the plan. Please let me know you understand.”

“Whatever.”

She grabs my shoulder and gets up in my face. I look away from her, but she moves her head to keep her eyes focused on mine. “Ian, this isn't— We need to—” She stops midsentence, lets her hands fall at her sides. Watching it hit her makes everything worse, and my eyes burn so hard I have to rub at them, which just makes me feel totally lame for crying in front of a girl.

My mind can't get past it, though. When I get home—I mean,
if
I get home—I'll have to explain to the Wilsons that I let their son, my friend, die. I couldn't help him when he needed me most. After the tears stop and I can keep my eyes open for more than a millisecond, Kendra's sitting next to me, her hands in her lap, staring straight ahead.

“I'm very sorry, Ian,” she says. “Truly, I am. This must be really hard for you. I . . . cannot even imagine.”

“I should've gone down there,” I say through a sob. “I could've done something.”

“No, you couldn't have,” she says.

“Yes, I could've!” I sob. “I could've fought them off, or pulled him up, or—” I can't even finish, I'm crying so hard. Just the thought of how he must have felt, the fear that must have gone through him as he slid down among those moaning monsters, gets me going all over again, shivering and bawling and totally losing my grip.

Kendra slides over next to me and puts an arm around my shoulder. She doesn't say anything, but every time I sob, she squeezes a little harder. Maybe it should feel lame, being babied by Queen Brain, but it doesn't;, it's just nice to have someone here.

“Look. Ian,” she says, patting my shoulder awkwardly, like she read about how to comfort someone in a book once. “PJ was hurt. He slipped, and the vine broke. You did everything you could to save him. It's not your fault. You did what you had to do.” She runs out of one-liners and finally says, “I could've gone after him, too.”

“He wasn't your friend.”

“Yes, he was,” she says softly. “Maybe I only knew him for a little while, but . . .” She sniffs, then wipes her glasses on her shirt. “Nevertheless. If we don't come up with a plan, he will have died for nothing. For his sake, we need to get off this mountain and tell everyone what happened here. Can we agree on that? Let's honor PJ by making the best use of the time we have.”

I nod, finally. Sitting here feeling sorry for myself only gives the living dead a greater chance at rediscovering our position. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing, though. Maybe I deserve it. Here's Kendra trying to put together a strategy, and here's Ian Buckley, crying like a baby. One wolf, and me, what, not even a poodle, a cockroach, pond scum, dirt.

No. Can't think like that; have to keep going. PJ would have wanted me to.

I wipe my nose, shake her arm off my shoulder, and climb to my feet. “Okay.”

“If you like, I can take care of PJ,” says Kendra. “You can check out the perimeter.”

“No,” I say quickly. “I'll handle PJ. You do the rounds.”

“You don't have to do that, Ian.”

“I want to.”

I really don't
want to
, but I
ought to
, if only so no one else has to see what happened to him. Some things you have to take care of yourself.

Kendra picks up a big, jagged rock—“Just in case,” she whispers, swinging it down in a smashy-smashy motion—and heads off into the woods. Slowly, I turn around and shimmy my way down each of the big rock outcroppings that make up the cliff ledge we just climbed, all cold and clammy beneath me. Each step downward makes my stomach knot up a little more—that's the vine that snapped and sent PJ falling to his death, that's a quarter that fell out of my pocket while I hung by my feet and failed to pull my friend to safety. The closer I get to the bottom, the less my body wants to move, knowing what it'll see, or worse, not knowing it. What if the sight is more twisted than I could ever imagine? My poor, brave friend.

My feet finally press into the slippery forest floor, crunching twigs and leaves underfoot, and I turn to see . . . nothing.

Wait, what?

I mean, there's a hat at my feet, one of those big square-edged hats with the fuzzy earmuff things on the side, meant for a hiker or hunter. I knock it over with my foot and see dirt and black crud smeared on the inside—definitely belonged to a zombie. But I scan the area, and other than the hat, the place is totally clear. No blood, no guts, no skeleton with PJ's head. Just a hat, some rustled leaves, a bunch of slimy zombie footprints. Even PJ's backpack is missing.

And they didn't take him, I know that much. The zombies wandered off into the woods like they usually do, no screaming PJ under their arms or PJ nuggets running down their chins. I heard him scream and figured that was it, but come on, Buckley, you know PJ, he screams like a girl when he stubs a toe. Getting eaten by zombies, he would've been going off like a car alarm.

So where is he? His ankle was twisted pretty bad, so there's no way he ran out of here. I look into the trees—did he scale a tree?—but there's no sight of him. What about the zombies—why'd they wander off? Did he just disappear? PJ, man,
where are you
?

My foot knocks something out of the leaves, something that clatters against the ground. PJ's little flip video camera that he got for Christmas.

I pick it up and press the Play button. The screen glows white for a moment, and then there's a green flash, heavy breathing, and a shaky landscape, something coming into focus—the buck,
my
buck, all twelve points of him, me crouching in front of him.

“Look at that,” says PJ's voice, buzzing out of the tiny speaker. “Got him on camera.” There's a flash, and then it's us in the woods, first me and then Kendra, telling PJ off for being a pain in the neck.

“Tempers wear thin, viewers. What happens next, only time can tell—” Then I come flying at him, and it's all static. Another flicker, and there's PJ whispering, Kendra crying out, and there's a zombie, Deborah, the one I dropped the tree on, stumbling toward the cabin, then looking right out of the camera and into my eyes, and letting out this vicious snarl that gives me a feeling like huge fat worms burrowing through my whole body. On the camera, I yell his name—“PJ!” One last flicker of white, and then all black.

My poor friend. His last piece of footage. All that's left.

“Thank you so much!”

Wait. Something's up. The camera is on, but the screen stays black. Muffled, I hear PJ's voice, then that noise, the
whack-whack-whack
noise, sounding out. There are screams, grunts, shuffles, another set of noises, and suddenly the screen comes back alive, tumbling to the ground, and there's PJ's body being dragged by the nape of his neck by a hooded figure. The stranger yanks him offscreen, toward the cliff.

“I . . . don't understand, what's in there?”

“
You are.
” Then, PJ's screams seem to fade and echo off into nowhere.

My head feels like it's going to explode. I can't get the pieces to fit—PJ got saved by someone and put, what, in between the rocks of the ledge? I run over to the flat rock wall, pushing and scraping against the cold rocks, sweating my face off as I try to find a door or a secret passage or a—

Cold air blows against my ankle from the wall. I look down to see a gaping black hole where the wall meets the ground.

A tunnel
.

On my hands and knees, I peer in, and the cool air blowing in my face is like the hand of an angel. PJ must have survived.

“Ian?” Above me, Kendra shimmies down the last rock ledge and drops to the ground. I barely notice her due to the epic rush of relief washing over me right now. “Are you okay? Did you . . . find him?”

“He's not here!” I shove the camera into her face, laughing and crying at once. “He made it out! You need to see this!”

Kendra watches the video with those wide bookworm eyes. As the camera beeps off, she looks up at me, and I point her to the tunnel. She kneels down and pushes her face to the narrow entrance, and when she feels the cold air on her face, she leaps to her feet and grabs me by the shoulders, laughing and screaming, “He made it! He made it!” over and over.

Then she yanks me in and hugs me really hard, which I'm not sure how I feel about, but I'm so happy PJ's not dead that I hug her back and don't care.

Once we've had our little celebration, we both kneel down by the entrance of the tunnel and check it out. We can't see anything in the total darkness, so I reach my arm in up to the shoulder and don't feel a thing.

“That and the draft suggest it goes on for a while,” says Kendra.

“We could go in,” I suggest, that spark of adventure doing its best to jump-start my muscles. “We could feel our way around.”

“If we had a light, I might chance it,” she says, “but there could be endless tunnels down there, each of them going on for miles.”

“True,” I tell her. “Starving to death in the dark seems worse than getting attacked by zombies.”

“At least we can run from zom—
attackers
,” she says, correcting herself. “We don't even know who saved PJ. Maybe they've set booby traps down there.”

“All right,” I say, “the tunnel's out. What do we do next?”

She blinks, and then heaves a breath. “We sleep.”

“What! Forget that—let's
go
!”

“Hold on. I know what you're thinking—”

“Someone has PJ, Kendra!” I yell, or try to yell, but my body is running on fumes and excitement at this point. “It could be that witch the diary mentioned, or a bunch of cannibal rednecks, or some kind of . . . of megazombie, that digs burrows and prefers takeout! How can you sleep at a time like this?”

“Ian, I'm so tired,” she says. “And you are too, by the looks of it. We've barely eaten, and barely slept. Think about it: if that person risked their life to save PJ, they probably aren't doing it just for fun. PJ will most likely be alive in the morning, and until then, we need to rest up.”

“I almost let him die, Kendra.”

“If you don't get any sleep, he's as good as dead,” she says in a voice that makes me believe her. “We'll collapse up on that mountain. We'll get hurt, or worse, we'll run back into . . . them.” She stretches out her arms in front of her and moans halfheartedly.

As she talks, I feel the last eighteen hours weighing on me. My hands hang at the ends of my arms like anchors. My eyelids feel like steel shutters. This is how the zombies must feel all the time—limp, used up, in need of one desperate thing
.

“But where?” I ask her. “What if the zombies come back?”

She blinks, and looks up as though a lightbulb appears over her head. “We can set up some noise-making devices,” she says. “One of my internet contacts described it to me. Basic traps that make enough sound to wake you up if they're jostled. They keep intruding animals from getting too close to you. We'll even put one over the tunnel entrance, in case our mystery guest returns.”

It's a flimsy idea, but I'm way too exhausted to complain. We go to work collecting dry leaves, strong sticks, and heavy rocks. Kendra creates a neatly stacked pile of rocks at the base of the stone wall, then uses the stick to prop up a single heavy stone. Somehow, it works, and the stone stays up. “If someone knocks the stick to the side, the rock falls,” she says. “The sound of the pile below it being crushed should wake us. And if we pile dry leaves, they'll crunch loudly if anyone steps on them. Maybe put some twigs beneath them.”

“Okay,” I tell her, my stomach growling. On to the good stuff. “Are there any granola bars left?”