Gravediggers (9 page)

When we found the old woman in her cabin up the mountain, we thought she would help us, maybe even give us shelter from the bitter weather. Instead, she screamed bloody murder, ordered us to go back to wherever we came from. The cabin was full of what looked like tools for witchcraft—bones, feathers, boiling pots, dark symbols. The men snapped, and Leonard and Bill almost attacked her. The woman ran off, screaming that we'd “be sorry.” At the time, we were too ecstatic to have the cabin to care. A fireplace, a bathroom, a generator, a roof over our heads, these were all we could think about. Everyone calmed down—we thought it was all over.

The first night in the cabin, Bill said he saw someone peering in the window, smiling at us. He was convinced it was the old woman and ran out in the dark after her, cursing and screaming. An hour later, he came stumbling back, his face a bloody mess, his body broken and torn. He said three words—“They're out there”—and collapsed.

 

“So . . . is that Bill's skull?” whispers PJ, his teeth chattering in fear.

“What I want to know,” says Ian, his voice quivering, “is who was out there.”

As if on cue, a moan, husky and dry like the one we heard earlier, rings out through the woods. All three of our heads snap up, and while I can't speak for the boys, a fearful feeling spreads over me, pumping ice water through my heart. Then there's another moan, and another, and soon a chorus of soft, sad moaning can be heard distinctly outside the cabin, moving slowly in our direction.

“This place is haunted,” whispers PJ, his voice cracking. “There are ghosts out in the woods. The evil spirits, like it says in the diary—”

“There's no such thing as ghosts,” I hear myself say.

Outside, twigs crunch. Ian goes to the window, and I jump to my feet and join him. The clouds have parted, and the bony light of the moon paints everything a cold, luminous blue.

Through the woods, silhouettes move slowly toward us, marching on two legs. My heart leaps, and relief washes over me.

“People!” I yelp. “We're saved!”

“Wait,” warns Ian.

“The school must have sent a rescue team!” I yell at PJ. “See? There's no need to panic—”

“Kendra,” says Ian, his face drained of all color, “I . . . don't think that's a rescue team.” He points out the window, his hand shaking. Outside, the silhouettes have come through the trees, the moonlight falling on their faces.

Immediately, my stomach cramps up, and my breath disappears.

There are six of them that I can see—hunched, slumped figures, faces gray and unmoving, eyes glassy and white set in deep black sockets, like stepping stones in the middle of dark, stagnant pools. Each one of them looks old, but too old, with dried skin stretched tight over gnarled bones and yellow teeth protruding from pulled-back lips. They wear hiking gear that's been torn to shreds, smeared with dirt and filth. The smell that comes off them is sickening, and I have to cover my nose and mouth to even stand being at the window.

They move forward through the underbrush with slow, deliberate steps, crashing through sticker bushes and around trees like they barely notice them, hands outstretched in grasping gnarled claws. With each step, a deep wailing moan comes out of their open mouths, which is even worse when I realize that their chests don't move, their lips don't quiver, their nostrils don't flare or twitch,
they aren't breathing
.

One of them raises its head, and where its eyes should be are two empty, bottomless holes. It opens its mouth, and between the rotten teeth sprouting from behind its black crusty lips, it lets out a deep, sorrowful cry.

“They're . . . dead,” murmurs Ian, as if reading my mind. “They
are
ghosts.”

“No,” I whisper through my quivering lips and fluttering breath, “not ghosts . . .”

Not ghosts. There's no such thing as ghosts, and anyway, ghosts don't come stalking through the woods at you, at least not in the literature I've read. Ghosts are phosphorescent and can fly and come out of paintings or cellars.

These are . . . something else. The stumbling, the shriveled faces . . . it's on the tip of my tongue. Living dead, walking dead . . . my mind strains, exhausted, angry. What's the word I'm looking for—

“Zombies.”

 

 

 

Chapter Nine
PJ

I
an and Kendra turn around and stare at me like fish, eyes wide, mouths open. Finally, Kendra chokes out, “Excuse me?”

“Zombies,” I repeat. I can't really see through the window over Kendra's huge hair, but what I catch—stumbling figures, outstretched arms, deep moaning, the sudden spike in my heart rate and breathing—all points to zombies.

Kendra's mouth snaps open and shut a few times before she declares, “That's ridiculous.”

“I don't know,” says Ian, “I mean . . .”

I come up behind Ian, and my skin crawls. My stomach churns. I know I'm right. Look at them.

Only a handful of them are close enough to see in the moonlight, but off in the trees there are more, slouching into view like the shadows just coughed them up. The visible ones are horrible, bony grayish-green things wrapped in ruined hiking clothes, flannel and boots and fur-collared jackets. Their arms reach stiffly out straight ahead, their fingers clasping and unclasping. The throaty moans have gone from soft and creepy to overwhelming, a great big chorus of hungry death rattles. The closer they get, the more violent they sound, going from sighing to moaning to snarling and growling.

My hands nearly tear my pocket open trying to yank my camera out. It's a race against time—can I film this before I start having a full-on panic attack?—and I win, pulling up my handheld and holding down the Record button hard. Ian and Kendra jump at the beep and then stare wide-eyed into the glowing screen as I zoom in on one of them, a skinny woman with wide white eyes and not much left in the way of lips. The pounding in my head and chest die away, my breathing slows, and I can focus on things for the first time since we were attacked by the lynx.

“We've come across some strange creatures,” I whisper into the camera, “which appear to be . . . we're pretty sure they're . . .” It's like the woman, the
thing,
hears me, because those white eyes turn and focus right on the lens of my camera. Her yellow teeth part, and she lets out a harsh rasping growl. “They're zombies,” I say. “No question. I'm filming a zombie.”

“They're not . . . that's a
ridiculous
word,” whispers Kendra between sharp breaths.

“What do we do?” Ian shouts, his hands tearing through his hair.

I pan over the crowd of zombies, taking in the sheer number of them. There are definitely more than six, more like fourteen or fifteen that I can see. Not all of them are in the same state of decay—some are just gray skinned with sunken eyes, while others are almost like walking bones wrapped in yellowish canvas—but they're all dusty, dry, covered in cobwebs, leaves, dirt, the kind of stuff you pick up when you drag yourself through the woods all day.

“God, it's just like the movies,” I whisper to myself. “This is like
Night of the Living Dead
redux.”

“Oh man, that's it!” says Ian, grinning like an idiot at Kendra, then at me. “This kid knows what's going on! He's an expert! PJ, tell us about zombies!”

“Huh?” I ask, not really paying attention. Whoa, look at that one. How's it moaning without a lower jaw?

“Come on, PJ, help us out!” Ian jumps in front of my lens, forcing me to look up at his sweaty face. “You've watched all those scary movies. What do we need to know?”

Reciting things about movies—this I can do. My mind is a blur of black-and-white stills, of wide angles and worm's-eye-view shots and bad old film posters with blood-dripping font on the title, but through it all I manage to grab the vital information and spit it out.

“Zombies are walking dead people,” I say. “They come back from the grave because of . . . radiation. Or space dust. Or black magic, or a virus. It depends on the movie.” What else, what else? It's hard to concentrate with Ian taking up my shot. “They're mindless, but they're strong, and come in serious numbers, so it's tough to fight them off. Usually, it's easier to outrun them.”

“What do they want?” asks Ian.

“They want to eat us,” I say, and I can see the fear spread across his face (got it on camera, too—fantastic). “They're cannibals—no, not cannibals; they're not human so it's not really cannibalism, but they . . . they devour people alive. Wait, or is it brains? Sometimes they only eat the brains. But usually in those movies, they yell ‘Brains' a lot, and these ones aren't. At least not yet.”

“I think we can safely say that both options are problematic!” shouts Kendra.

Ian shakes his head like he's forcing the idea out of his mind. “How do we stop them?”

“Shoot them in the head,” I say. A line from the movies themselves comes to mind: “Destroy the brain, kill the ghoul.”

“Okay,” says Ian. He steps back with his face bunched in contemplation, like he needs room to think. “We . . . don't have guns. Maybe if we hit them really hard. Does that work?”

“I don't know—I can't remember—”

“Guys!” gasps Kendra from the window. “They're getting closer!”

I push Ian aside and keep filming out of the window. She's right. For slow-moving creatures, they're gaining ground surprisingly quickly. That's how it always is in the movies—you think you're safe, and then they're right on top of you.

Up close, we can see every wrinkle in their mottled skin, every white grub writhing in their matted hair. As I pan across the approaching crowd, each individual corpse stands out disgustingly in the harsh eye of the camera, their horrible features incredibly detailed. A large muscular zombie moans at us, and when he turns his head, the light from the windows reveals that half of his face has rotted away. One skinny zombie in a scoutmaster outfit has a huge antique camera hanging from his neck, the lens cracked.

This never crossed my mind when I woke up this morning. The list my parents gave me has a million things on it, and none of them say,
Whatever you do, don't get eaten by corpses
.

“What do we do?” says Kendra, her voice sharp with panic. “We can't— They're going to—
What do we do
?”

Ian stands at the window scratching his head so hard he might hit skull, saying, “Uuuuh,
uuuuh
” over and over again. The whole army-of-the-dead thing has wiped his mind clean.

The more I stare out at these creatures, the more bad movies come back to me. Ian's right, I've done my homework here. Maybe I was paying more attention to the camera work in
Citizen
Kane
than the zombie behavior in
Tombs of the Blind Dead
, but if anyone's an expert on our current predicament, it's me.

“They'll beat the door down if we don't act fast,” I say, spouting everything, anything I can remember from the movies. “They don't have any powers, like vampires or whatever, but they just keep coming, and they have strength in numbers.”

“Vampires aren't real—” starts Kendra, shaking her head.

“We know, okay?!”
yells Ian.
“None of this is real! That doesn't matter! Whatever's out there is coming for us! We need to do something, ANYTHING!”

Wow, is this how I sound when I'm having an episode?

I'm expecting Kendra to flip out, but she just nods, blinks, nods harder. “What do we have that we can use to barricade the door? What about in the kitchen?”

Ian darts in and out of the room. “There's a chair we could jam the knob with. But nothing heavy. No fridge.”

“You get the chair,” she says. “Are there
any
weapons here?”

My brain spits up an image from one of the movies—a lone warrior waving a burning bundle of sticks at a zombie, the creature cowering in fear. “Kendra, can you make us a torch with some of that firewood?”

“Maybe,” she says. “We need something flammable, though.”

“There's some bug spray in my bag,” I call out, “and some gauze. Wrap the gauze around one end of some wood, soak it, and set it on fire.”

“You brought gauze?” asks Ian as he shoves the back of a small metal chair under the knob of the door.

“My parents were worried I might get cut or scraped during—”

A slapping sound sends us all a foot into the air and my camera flying out of my hands, clattering across the floor. Our eyes flick toward the window. A zombie—old, withered, bones covered with a tight draping of greenish rot—stares hungrily back at us. He pounds a feeble hand against the glass and hisses between his yellow teeth. He looks too weak, too wasted away, to break the glass, but he's smaller than the others. The big one with half a face could easily smash his way through that window.

That's when the fear takes me, prickles my veins, splashes cold water in my face, fires that familiar tightness through my chest and throat. Because before, these creatures were footage—footage from a late-night spook flick maybe, but
just
footage, not real without lighting and set and special effects. And now, there's one right outside the window, trying to beat its way in. It's like the lynx, only worse. It's an army of lynxes, and they can't be killed, not like normal creatures.

“We'll talk later,” Ian says.

“Totally,” I choke out.

Kendra wraps a white bulb of bandages around one end of a piece of firewood and then hits it with bug spray until it's soaked. She shoves the one end into the fire, and with a
whumph
it goes up, creating a rippling flame that gives off black smoke that stings my eyes and nostrils. I dive for my camera, hoping that maybe if I turn it back on, start filming this, it'll all become a movie again and I won't feel like I'm drowning in a freezing ocean—

There's a knock at the door, no, not a knock, a pound. Then it's joined by another, and another, and soon there's a constant drumbeat of fists slamming against the wooden door. The window is full of faces, sunken eyed and yellow toothed, twisted in rage. Slowly, the doorknob wiggles, and the chair makes an ugly scraping noise against the floor as the door pushes in inch by inch. Hands, gray and dirty, make their way around the edges, poking into the cabin.

“Here they come!” screams Ian.

Ian and I put our backs against the door, shoving hard. The gray fingers catch between the door and the wall, but there are no cries of pain, just more hungry moaning. The heels of my sneakers dig hard into the floor, but our barricade isn't working. Every pounding hand sends a shudder down my back.

For a second, the whole thing goes quiet in my head, and everything seems still, surreal, like it's not really happening. There's Kendra Wright, Queen Brain, waving a torch at the window like some Transylvanian villager; there's Ian, my best friend, screaming something I can't really hear as he puts his shoulder into the door; there's the cabin, full of light, literally vibrating with the pressure of dozens of dead hands. It's a dream. Has to be. I mean, stuck in a cabin in the woods, attacked by zombies—what an obvious nightmare. Something this horrible can't be real. In a second, someone will say my name, and I'll wake up on the bus to find out we've only just arrived at Homeroom Earth, and all of this will be forgotten in an instant—

Glass shatters, and masses of frantic hands come reaching in through the window, grasping at Kendra. She waves the torch at them, but they don't seem to notice, even when the flame glances on their skin and smokes it black. The chair wedged under the doorknob digs trenches into the floor with each shove and pound.

This is no dream. This isn't a horror movie; it's a horror reality. I'm here. And so are they.

“What are we going to do
now
?” shouts Kendra. She's resorted to stabbing the lit end of the torch into the wriggling hands over and over.

“PJ!” screams Ian. “If you have any clue what to do next, now's the time!” An arm has snaked its way around the edge of the door, the hand clawing at Ian's T-shirt. He wriggles out of its grip just as a pair of demon eyes appears at the crack between the door and the wall.

I scan the room and land on the square of darkness in the floor. “The cellar!” I shout. “Get in the cellar! We can hide down there!”

“There's a skull in the cellar!” Ian responds.

“But it's not moving!” I yell. “They won't be able to find us down there!”

I'm not much of a fighter, but I know a thing or two about running away.

Kendra grabs her backpack and leaps down into the cellar, and somehow I mange to hobble down the stairs without twisting my ankle any further, and yes, there's the skull they mentioned on top of a pile of bones, in the middle of some weird witchy design, lit orange by Kendra's torch. That's the least of our worries right now. Ian comes flying down last, grabbing the edge of the trapdoor and yanking it shut with a dusty, echoing BOOM.

And now it's us three, huddled together around the light of the noxious-smelling torch, making the room flicker like an old film reel. Our only company is the human skull in the middle of an evil symbol, staring up at us with hollow eyes and a toothy grin, laughing at what should be a goofy Halloween story but instead is life or death.

“Quiet,” whispers Kendra.

Above, there's the muffled thump of eager hands, and then, slowly, the beating stops. The occasional creak, the crackle of the torch, is all we hear.

“Do you think they know we're down here?” whispers Ian.

“They saw us,” Kendra mumbles. “They must have.” The words shoot electricity through my heart, down my arms and hands.

“Maybe their eyes don't work well,” he says.

“Some of them don't even
have
eyes,” whispers Kendra.

A boom makes us jump, followed by a clatter over our heads—the chair flying across the room.

A sickening scrape shakes the ceiling over us—the door being shoved open.