Gravediggers (16 page)

A wide-angle shot flies through my mind—Ian, toothmarks on his arm, on the ground, his eyes closed. Kendra's holding him, crying. And then Ian's eyes crack open, and he begins to sit up, and Kendra screams—

“My friends are still out there,” I tell her, urgency flaring up in me. All this information has been so fascinating, I haven't been thinking about my friends. “We need to find them before the zombies do.”

The old woman nods, then stands up and marches into her cave. When she returns, she has two sticks in her hand, short thick pieces of wood carved with strange symbols. “You like them? Carved them myself. They saved your life. Watch.”

She raises the sticks over her head and hits them together three times—
TOK TOK TOK
—and from the woods around us comes rustling, hissing, snorting, crackling, and from far off another low, sad moan. “Totem sticks. Best magic weapons around, flameless and bloodless. Lots of big predators are scared of the noise. To the living dead, it's like a boot to the brain.”

A smile creeps over my face—this is just too cool. “Can you make me a pair?”

“Won't do you much good,” she says. “No offense. It's a Warden thing.
You
whack these things together, it'll be loud, but it won't have any power. What I can do is use these to keep you safe and get you to the path. It's a hiker's trail with some sigils protecting it, goes all the way down the mountain.”

“Well, let's get going!”

“Wait,” she says. She lets out a sharp whistle from between her teeth, and a sparrow darts out of the forest and flutters into her cupped hands. The sight sends prickles down my arm, like something from a surreal version of
Snow White
, but she treats it like it's no big deal. She brings it to her ear and listens intently.

“Sounds like your friends might not need our help,” she says, tossing the bird into the wind. “They just found the path themselves. They're on their way.”

 

Chapter Sixteen
Ian

W
e've walked for hours, but the path goes on and on, getting spookier with every step. The trees on either side of us are carved with symbols a lot like the stuff we saw on the stone wall and down in the basement, and it's freaking me out, man. They aren't cool climbing trees any longer, just big solid poles that block us in on either side. There hasn't been a bird or squirrel for miles, not even a grasshopper, just the trees, the path, Kendra, and me. At points, the path gets so narrow that the branches create a canopy over us, and I feel like a kid in a fairy tale wandering down some dark scary tunnel. There are wolves here—not wolves the way Coach Leider thinks of them, but big bad wolves, wolves with rotting flesh and eyes full of wriggling worms.

But the map was right—we can see all the way up the mountain, and the smoke cloud up at the very top gets closer with every step. So, yeah, my legs are killing me, my eyes feel like raisins, and I'd let a zombie bite me if he gave me a cheeseburger—I've decided I'm pro-bacon—but we're getting there.

For all we know, PJ's up there watching some horrible old hag light a fire under the pot he's bathing in.

Kendra's rattling off endless wilderness survival tactics, like if she impresses me with her knowledge of nature, I'll forget that she almost left PJ to die. So far, I haven't forgotten.

“Want to know how to find north?” she says excitedly.

“Whatever,” I say.

“Hold on,” she says, and breaks a twig off one of the trees, sticks it in the ground, and marks its shadow. “We have to wait about fifteen minutes for the shadow to move.”

“We don't have time for that,” I tell her. Sure, it's cool, but I'm still ticked at her. You trust someone for one second, figure they're going to do the right thing, and then they poodle out on you. Not acceptable.

Every couple of minutes, when my foot hits a hard rock or my calves start burning, I wonder why this is happening. In all of PJ's favorite movies—why, oh why, didn't I take PJ up on all those invitations to come over and watch a movie?—gross and scary things happen to people who deserve it: drunk teenagers making out in their car or stupid rednecks driving around looking for trouble. So why us three? I'm a good person, right? Maybe I'm a lousy friend, I'll own up to that, but I'm just an average kid who wanted to play basketball and get a picture of a big deer.

And what does the universe reward me with? Flesh-eating zombies. That's what.

Okay, maybe I'm getting a little nuts, but it's not my fault. To try to get me back on her side, Kendra won't stop talking about owls. For forty-five minutes straight, just . . . owls.

“. . . because in certain African and Native American societies, owls are considered harbingers of dark magic,” says Kendra, to me, I guess, “which makes sense in a weird way. We Westerners think the big eyes in the small head means wisdom, but it
does
sort of look like a skull. Maybe these cultures think wise people cause death and destruction.
There's
an idea! But in a lot of traditional folklore, they're
funerary
birds, which means they carry souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead. That's different from being harbingers of death and destruction.”

Do crazy people know they're crazy while they're talking crazy?

“Hmm, but maybe . . . This is interesting: owls are
nocturnal
animals, which means they only come out at night—”

“I actually know what
nocturnal
means.”

“Maybe the reason these cultures consider owls evil beings, or not evil,
funerary
, is because they come out at night, and in those cultures night holds a lot more danger than it does in Western culture, what with our long traditions of electric bulbs and gas lamps. That's a fascinating idea, isn't it?” She looks back at me with this totally stoked
Eureka!
expression, and then it drops like a sack of bricks. “I'm boring you.”

“It's cool.”

“I'm sorry,” she says. “I just figured, the berries, the termites . . . so far, my knowledge has really kept us alive!”

“Not sure every little fact about owls is going to help us.”

She nods, still looking downtrodden. “You're right, I shouldn't . . . talk much.” Maybe she is a betrayer, but I feel lousy shutting down her rambling. “Most of my friends are internet friends, so I . . .”

“Never get to
actually
talk to anyone.”

“Yes.” She stares up the mountain, her eyes following the faint indent of the path through the trees. “Let's talk about something else.”

“Sure,” I say, “let's talk about how we're going to save PJ.”

She clasps her hands in front of her and twists them like a mad scientist. “Good point. First, we need to get past this mountain woman and her creatures.”

“
Her
creatures?” I ask. “So you believe they're magic.”

She sucks on her lower lip. “I believe that two things happened to PJ here in the woods—attacked by creatures and captured by someone—so they're most likely connected. It doesn't
have
to be magic. But we know they're stupid creatures, and easily distractable, so I figured that's what we need to do, act as bait. That way one of us can sneak around and find PJ.” She gulps. “So what I was thinking was, you provide a distraction while I attempt to get PJ away from the old woman and investigate our surroundings. Maybe I can find a clue as to how to get us home.”

Whoa whoa whoa, this plan sounds a little uneven on the danger spectrum. “Why do I have to play bait for the zombies?”

“Because . . . you're faster,” she says. “Remember that game against Monroeville, when you spun around that tall kid with the terrible acne and snatched the ball right out from in front of him?”

Wow, Queen Brain goes to my games? Of course I remember that one; the kid fouled me three seconds later and wasn't called on it, and Coach nearly got thrown out for flipping out at the ref. Great game. Ugh, now Kendra's got dirt on me. Can't go soft on her, though. “Yeah. So?”

“So I can't do that,” she says. “I have bad knees. There's this disease, Osgood-Schlatter's, that makes your knees weak and can cause serious—”

“I
know
what that is. I play basketball.”

“Right, well, I can't pivot well or jump on one foot, things like that. And we need that kind of agility when it comes to avoiding these creatures.”

Something tells me I'm getting played here—
oh, Ian, you're so fast and strong, do me a favor and get in harm's way
—but the last thing we need is someone taking a sharp turn, popping their knee, and lying there wincing while the dead close in around them. It just sucks that Queen Brain's smart enough to know how to get me to go along with whatever she says, even though
I'm
smart enough to know what she's doing, which makes me wonder if she's smart enough to know that I know, but whatever, now I have a headache and there are only so many hours in the day before we get eaten. Take one for the team. It's what a good wolf does, I guess.

“Fine,” I say, “but this had better not end with me getting my brains eaten.”

“Trust me, this will work.”

We must both be attuned to the same weird
uh-oh
frequency, because the crack of a stick suddenly makes me tense and cold. Kendra grabs my arm with a kung-fu grip. We dart into the trees on one side of the path. For a second, I hold back, like if we leave the path it might disappear forever, but I know something's wrong—we both do—and in the past twenty-four hours I've learned to trust my instincts. We find a large cedar and duck behind it. Any other time, I'd feel a little weird about how hard our shoulders are pressing together, but it's all fear right now, man, no time for anything else.

“I don't see anything,” she whispers.

I peek around my side of the tree. Same old path, same old trees on the other side. “Yeah. Maybe it was just a deer or something.”

“Probably,” she whispers. “We are somewhat high-strung, after all, so— Oh, no, wait.” She grimaces. “There they are.”

Another peek and I see them, stumbling between the trees on the other side of the path. Their faces hang in the shadows of the woods, grayish ovals with sad, drooping mouths and shining white eyes. It's hard to tell how many of them there are, because for every face peering directly out of the trees, it looks like there are two or three behind them, staring blankly at us—

“IAN!” screams Kendra, and I look up to see a bearded zombie in torn pants come shuffling right freakin' toward us, his gray arms scraping at the air and his mouth open in a dusty growl. We yelp and jump out from behind our cedar, scrambling back into the path. From the other side of the woods, we hear the zombies begin moaning and snarling and snapping their yellow teeth. I look for the nearest rock, stick, anything that we could use to fight them off. The path is all pounded down, though, and scratch as I may, there's just no way to dig out anything usable—

Kendra grabs my shoulder and shakes it. “Ian,” she pants, “what's going on?”

The zombie coming after us in the woods stands at the edge where the forest meets the path, moaning and crying as he claws his hands out at us. Behind him, more are coming at the usual slow-mo pace, but the few that have caught up with him also stop at the edge of the path. On the other side of the woods, they're doing the same thing, crying out in hunger, snatching out their rotten hands in the hopes of grabbing us, but never crossing the threshold of the woods, never setting foot on the flat pounded dirt.

“I think . . . they can't come onto the path,” I tell her, getting back on my feet. I take a couple steps forward, right up to the bearded zombie; I can see every wrinkle in his dried gray skin, every fly crawling along his cracked lips. The stench I won't even go into. But for all his moaning, hissing, and grasping at me, he can't leave the woods.

“It's gotta be these,” I tell her, pointing to the symbols carved into the tree trunks along the path. “If they are magic zombies, like you said, these have to create some kind of force field or something.” The eyeless zombie with the heavy camera around his neck appears between two pines and starts snapping at me with his rancid teeth, but his face never once crosses the line of trees. This close, I can see every inch of him, down to the yellow crusts in the corners of his eyes.

“Isn't that right, big guy? You and your buddies can't follow us onto the path, can you? Who's a trapped little zombie, huh?”

“Please don't patronize the monsters,” says Kendra, but that smart-kid curiosity gets the best of her, and she wanders up next to me and peers at the zombies like they are zoo animals. “You're right. Look at this one.He's dying to eat us”—Kendra extends a shaky hand, and the camera zombie's jaws begin clicking faster and harder—“but he can't. Fascinating. These sigils are protective.” She turns back toward me, motioning out into the trees. “Maybe we could copy some down and use them for—”

Her arm must break the barrier, because the camera zombie grabs it with his skeletal hand and pulls hard. Kendra shrieks, and I grab her by the waist and yank her back toward me. There's a pop and the zombie arm comes unattached. Once we're back on the path, it drops from her arm and falls to pieces with a little cloud of dust.

“You okay?” I ask her. As the spots in my eyes stop sparkling, I realize what I'm doing and take my arms from around her. “Sorry, just trying to help, didn't mean to grab you too hard—”

“It's okay,” she breathes. “Now we know what happens if they enter the path.” She kicks the bone dust at her feet and smiles nervously at the zombie. “Bad creature,” she says with a little laugh. Then her smile drops, and she bites her lip and shudders. “That was . . . really . . .”

“It's okay,” I tell her, “I'm here.” Then I remember that I'm angry at her, and I step back, brush myself off, and keep walking. “Just stay inside the path, okay? And try to keep up.”

We walk and they follow, never tearing those big white eyes and deep black sockets away from us. At first, I figure it's no problem—yeah, their faces are disgusting and their moaning sends chills through parts of my bones I didn't know I had, but they stay outside of the path; everyone's happy until we reach the witch's cave and find PJ. Right?

Wrong.

Twenty minutes in, I think I'm going totally bananas. The whole time, they flank us, dead faces staring back at us from out of the woods. The smell travels with them like a great big stinky green cloud, and my nostrils burn, my stomach groans, and my brain feels too tight, like someone overtwisted a screw in it. Kendra tries to talk about owls again, but she's drowned out by the crunching footsteps and hungry moans coming from both sides of us. Every time I look up to admire the woods or talk to her, there are zombie eyes, coldly floating in the shadowy background, sizing me up for dinner.

The more we walk, the louder they moan, the more it annoys me, the worse it smells, the less I can take it, until finally, my foot hits a rock and I snap, and before I can stop myself, I grab it and chuck it with all my might, and it crunches into the forehead of a skinny walking corpse, who drops to his knees in a dusty pile.

“There!” I scream. “You like that? Shut up and leave us alone!”

“Ian, stop,” says Kendra, grabbing my shoulder, but I don't listen, I
can't
listen, it's like I'm entirely beyond calming down.

I start grabbing anything I can find at my feet, pebbles, pinecones, bits of grass, and hurling them at the line of gray empty faces, but nothing works. The pebbles bounce off, the dirt flies in their eyes and mouths, and they don't so much as flinch. The one with the rock in his head is back on his feet, moaning even louder, like the stone in his half-caved skull is making him hungrier. Kendra finally grabs my arm and shouts at me when I take off my shoe and cock it back. When I look at her, she stares at me with these wet, scared eyes, and I start breathing hard and fast, and the whole time, they keep moaning, biting, clawing at the air. There's no scaring them, hurting them, convincing them.