Gravediggers (18 page)

“Give it here, girl!” shouts the witch.

Ian's yelling, the witch is yelling, PJ's screaming, the horde around us is moaning, but through it all, my mind is clear. I can't trust this woman. She could destroy us. She could smash me in the face with one of those carved sticks, crush my skull, feed me to the ring of monsters around us.

My eyes dart to one of the creatures coming slowly toward me, his dry eyeless face contorted in pain and hunger. My mind flashes back to the zombies on the path, huddling away from the dream catcher, caught in a place worse than death.

SET US FREE
, the diary said.

My hand opens, and the dream catcher falls into the fire, bursting into flames.

“NO!” shriek the witch and PJ at once.

No?

The creatures freeze in their steady march toward us. The moaning stops at once. For a second, all is silent, save the popping of the dream catcher as the fire turns it black.

Then, as one, the dead start screaming.

 

 

 

Chapter Eighteen
PJ

B
efore I can explain that I don't need any saving, Kendra lets the dream catcher drop into the flames, and all hell breaks loose.

The circle of zombies around us begins screaming, thrashing their undead bodies around, clawing at their skulls. The sound is horrible, like ripping metal mixed with white noise and microphone feedback. My hands slap to my ears, trying to block out the racket.

The first one to pull itself together is a man, shriveled and long-haired, and something's definitely up. The blank look on his face is gone, and instead he wears a furious snarl of rage. He grunts at O'Dea and then does something none of us expect—he runs. It's not a sprint, but for how fast these things normally move, he's an Olympic gold medalist. The zombie barrels across the clearing, straight past the rest of us, and disappears off into the woods. One by one, the other zombies do the same, scrambling to their feet and booking it into the forest. The ones with bent and broken legs do sort of a power hobble, but even they are gone almost instantly.

O'Dea screams, “No!” and rushes one of the marching corpses with her totem sticks raised over her head like clubs, but the zombie dodges her attack and knocks her off her feet with a hard swing of his arm. The big guy with the half face is the last to go, and he even stops at the edge of the forest and growls at us over his shoulder before vanishing into the woods with a loud crunch of sticks and leaves.

The clearing goes quiet. O'Dea lies on the ground, a hand over her face. When I look at Kendra, she's shaking, staring at her hand where the dream catcher once rested.

“You okay?” I ask her.

“I think so.” She blinks and puts the hand to her forehead. “Did it work?”

“Did what work?”

“I was trying to save you. From the witch.”

“She's not a witch; she's a Warden. It's like a nature warden, only with magic.” Kendra blinks at me, so I go the
Wizard of Oz
route. “She's a good witch, not a bad witch.”

“Oh. Good witch. But. But in the diary—”

“Turns out the Pine City Dancers were a bunch of jerks,” I say. She gapes and blinks faster, clueless, so I pat her on the back and say, “I appreciate being saved, though. Real sweet of you. Technically, you did the right thing.”

“Did I?” she asks. “I did. It was a logical assumption. There's no way I made things worse, right?” Here's where I don't say anything. “Right?”

“Man, did you see those zombies go?” says Ian. “That was
nuts
. They were just, like, whoosh, we're
outta here
. That's not normal, is it?”

O'Dea stands back up and mutters a string of curse words under her breath. She dashes from one part of the clearing to another, squinting at the ground and the trees, then cursing louder and moving on. It goes on for about five minutes before Ian says, “So this is the witch, right? What's her deal?”

“Guys, this is O'Dea. O'Dea, these are my friends Ian and Kendra. O'Dea's a Warden, which means she keeps cursed places like this mountain in check, because apparently, when people die here, it fills them up with bad karma and reanimates them as hungry zombies.”

Ian says, “Oh,” and scratches his head. “So . . . we're good?”

“I'm not sure about that,” I tell him.

O'Dea crouches near a wet footprint at the edge of the clearing and then slowly rises to her feet. “Nothing,” she says, her hands balling up into quivering fists.

“What's that, O'Dea?” I ask.

“NOTHING!” O'Dea whirls around and leaps at Kendra, shoving her panicked grimace right into Queen Brain's face. “Not even a fingernail, a scrap of flesh, a strand of hair! I'm back to square one! Do you have
any idea
how hard it was to get all the pieces of that seal?
Do you?
Months and months of following those walking pimples, plucking and dashing, inspecting footprints, nonstop painstaking work—
and you burned it up
!”

Kendra blinks for what seems like forever, and finally says, “Seal?”

“You think I built that thing for fun?” shrieks the witch, clenching her hands up by her face, like it's taking every ounce of her energy not to choke Kendra. “You ever tried to sew with zombie hair? You ever handle human fingernails day in, day out? That there's a
seal
, darling. The wall, the bones in my cabin, all those piles of rocks in the old cemetery, they were all
carefully laid
, and they had
that
”—she points at the fire—“holding 'em together. All those spells, those symbols, all the rum and peanuts in the world, aren't gonna do
squat
now, because you broke the seal! You set them free!”

My stomach sinks. They're free. They're off the mountain. Of course they were running—they wanted to get away from us before we knew what was going on.

“But isn't that good?” asks Ian. “We set the zombies free. We saved them.”

“Oh, and
what
?” snaps O'Dea. “They were gonna turn to dust or just crawl into their graves? Leave magic to the experts, buddy.” O'Dea shakes her head and lets out a long, low-pitched growl; then her arms drop at her sides. “Number one priority of a Warden is containment,” she says, her voice as quiet and hard as a rock. “Whatever the cursed place spits up, we keep it here. The land's already ruined and destroying the monsters is forbidden, so it only makes sense to just store them here. If they get free, though . . .” She points down to the valley below us, surrounded by the mountains. “The only reason that countryside isn't swarming with zombies is because of the totem she just threw in the fire. Now the spell's broken, and they're free to go anywhere.”

“Oh no,” I whisper, because I've seen the movies; I know what that means. “It'll spread, won't it? The people they get to first will come back, and the ones
they
get to, and . . .”

O'Dea nods and puts her hands on her hips. “Ah, geez. I'm in trouble.”

The look on Kendra's face is breaking my heart—complete despair, and the knowledge that it's all her fault. “But . . . but we found the diary. It told us that by breaking the web—”

“Oh, I heard about your diary,” snaps O'Dea, giving me a stink-eye. “Tell me something, that part about destroying the dream catcher, was it written backward?”

Kendra responds with a pained squeak.

“Yeah, figured that,” says O'Dea. “You thought you were playing Nancy Drew, figurin' out a secret code that O'Dea can't understand, being some
mountain witch
. You know when people write backward? When they're
demonically possessed
. That wasn't a person telling you to destroy my seal; it was something else, something dark that you can't see but that lives in this woods, and it was communicating through a
dead girl.
And they left it in the cabin hoping someone would find it.”

Kendra's head sinks slowly until she's looking at her feet. Tears stream down her cheeks.

“So okay, new plan!” shouts Ian, trying to salvage the day. “How do we stop them?”

“Stupid kids,” laughs O'Dea. “You saw how hard they are to kill, boy. Hell, your buddy here had to drop a tree on one of them just to stop it.”

Ian cocks an eyebrow at me. “Did he, now?”

“They don't die,” says O'Dea. She lowers herself in front of the fire, face as gray and hopeless as the darkening sky. “Once they break free, it's over. The Crow Indians used to call them the
unstoppable demise
. Don't believe the movies—hitting them in the head only makes 'em look nastier.” O'Dea shakes her head again. “The Wardens' Council is gonna have my head for this. That isn't a colorful saying, either; they actually do that. Put it in a box, throw it in the river.”

I'm speechless. Our all-wise mountain guide has backed out on us. Kendra Wright is a shattered mess, her arms wrapped around her chest. Ian is staring from one of us to the next expectantly, waiting for an answer that's not going to come. And here I am, wishing I was home.

And then I think of Kyra, my little sister. My little sister is somewhere beyond this mountain, and soon, the zombies will be, too. If the curse gets out into the world, it'll spread, and it won't be just our problem, it'll be
everyone's
problem, the whole country's, the world's. And suddenly, I imagine Kyra in her bedroom, hiding under the bed with tears in her eyes as the door swings open and rotting feet slowly move toward her, and she's wondering where I am to help her. That's all it takes to get my mind working.

“We've got to stop the zombies from reaching Homeroom Earth,” I tell O'Dea. “If we can't reconstruct the seal, then destroying them is the only option we have left. There's got to be something we haven't thought of. There won't just be dead trees for me to drop on zombies left and right.”

“Really, dude?” asks Ian.

“What else has enough power to just completely destroy a zombie?”

Kendra mumbles something. When we ask her to speak up, she squeaks, “Moisture generally speeds up decomposition. We could attempt to . . . rot them to death, if you will.”

“Gross, but okay. Are there any hot springs around here, O'Dea? Maybe a geyser we could lead them into one after another?”

O'Dea shakes her head. “It's a nice idea, kids, but it ain't gonna happen. It's dry up here, with the mountain air. That's why their bodies are so dusty and well preserved—not a lot of moisture at this altitude.”

“We saw a couple of creeks—”

“You gonna hold their heads underwater?” She squawks a laugh. “You'd have to submerge 'em completely, and what if one of them got ahold of you?”

“Come on, O'Dea, give us a hand here!” I tell her. “There's no magic Warden protocol for this kind of thing?”

“Not since we got rid of the Gravediggers,” she says.

“The what?” I ask.

“There used to be two classes—Wardens and Gravediggers,” says O'Dea. “Gravediggers were the soldiers, the killers. The Wardens kept the evil contained, but if it got free, the Gravediggers were sent out to handle it. But the Wardens' Council got rid of them nearly sixty years ago. We haven't had a breach in ages, so we didn't need them. I even voted against them. I was so good at containment . . . never thought one of those stupid things was gonna
write a diary
that gave away all my secrets. Guess the dark forces always find a way to escape. We might as well just make some dinner and wait for the gunshots and the screams.”

“Well, great,” says Ian, flopping to the ground, “now what do we—”

A scream cuts through the air, and we all go scurry-ing around the clearing, trying to locate the source of the crackling wail, until O'Dea grabs hold of Ian's pocket. Ian digs around and pulls out, oh thank you God, my handheld camera, giving off a high-pitched scream in my voice.

“Sorry,” says Ian, clicking it off and holding it out to me. “You dropped this in the woods. I must have sat on the button just now. Here.”

“You should be careful with that,” I tell him, taking my camera back. “If the zombies were still around . . . they . . .”

WAIT.

“. . . they'd be drawn . . . to the sound . . .”

There's something about the feeling of the camera in my hand that focuses me, gets my brain lined up just right, and—

Wait a second, this . . . this could work. No. Wait. Yes. Yes, it's all coming together in my head, the zombies, the camera, my scream, the zombies, wait, I got it, yes yes YES!

“That's it!” I yell, shaking my camera at Ian. “Don't you see,
this
is how we're going to stop the zombies!” I crouch in front of O'Dea. “You said they're stupid? They have rotten eyesight? So they'll have a hard time distinguishing one person from another, right?” Slowly, the Warden nods. “And the only way to get rid of them is to completely tear them apart until there's nothing left. But we need something strong enough to do that, meaning we need something stupid enough to get near them.”

She shrugs. “Yeah, so?”

“So let's fight fire with fire.”

“We've set enough fires,” mutters Kendra, still lost in her embarrassed head.

I explain my plan, and one by one my friends come in close and listen. Color comes back into Kendra's face, O'Dea begins nodding, and Ian cracks his neck and stretches his knees. My strategy is a long shot, but it's all we've got right now, and given the unspeakable horror that we've just unleashed, it will have to do.

 

 

Chapter Nineteen
Ian

W
ho thought cowardly little PJ would come up with the idea that might save us all? One minute, he's trembling in front of this cave, like the big stone mouth is going to clamp down and chew him up, and the next he's huddling up with the old witch, or Warden, whatever that is, and he has the Plan, man, the sixty-million-dollar answer. It's really simple, and it sounds like it actually might work. When he finishes a basic outline, even Kendra signs off on it, though she still looks like someone let all of the air out of her.

What can I tell you? I figured burning the dream catcher was the right move too, but I guess we didn't know jack. So PJ's right, if we made this mess, we have to help clean it up.

He's also good with O'Dea, the magic zombie Warden, who I guess was the victim in the whole Pine City Dancers fiasco, which is hard to believe because man, she is one tough customer, quick and strong and more intimidating than Coach Leider on a bad day. While we prepare for PJ's plan, she rushes in and out of the woods carrying sticks, leaves, bones, berries, all the nonzombie ingredients to make a new dream catcher. She still keeps a mean eye on me and treats Kendra like dirt for releasing bloodthirsty zombies into the world, but she and PJ have a real vibe going on between the two of them. Again, how my little mousy friend was able to buddy up to the scary mountain witch is anybody's guess, but she won't listen to anyone else. She must be impressed by his tale of crushing the undead by pushing over trees.

For the record—I don't care how the rest of us remember it—I came up with the idea of dropping that tree on that zombie. I'm just letting him have it 'cause he almost died, okay? Least I can do.

The first job is to make a recording of our voices. We stand in a circle around PJ's little handheld camera, and when he presses the Record button, we get going.

“Hey! Hey, zombie!”

“Hey pal! Over here!”

“Over here, you ignorant savage!” (“Ignorant savage? Come on, Kendra, tough it up!”)

“Right here! Thaaat's it, see me? Huh?”

“Mm-
mmm
, tasty humans!”

“Come on, you . . . you smelly moron, eat me!” (“See, Kendra, you're getting it.”)

“Eat me! Eat my face, ya jerk!”

“Choke on it!”

“Whatsamatter, you scared?”

“Right here, slowpoke!”

“We're serving human tonight, hot off the grill!”

When we play it back, it's a solid two minutes of catcalling and attention getting, but Kendra says we need more. “Think about it timewise,” she says. “You've got at least twenty, uh, dancers and hikers, and then at least six or seven of the rotten Indian skeletons, and let's say it takes each one thirty or forty seconds to be . . . dealt with. That's twenty-seven creatures, with thirty seconds apiece, which means we need at least ten minutes of sound.”

This is why it's good to have a brainiac around. We do another round, this one for twelve minutes, which doesn't sound that long, but by the end we're hoarse and our insults sound bored.

Pretty soon, I'm getting antsy—this is all taking too much time. Those zombies were booking it pretty hard when they left, so they could be anywhere by now. O'Dea won't come with us—some Warden rules about not interfering with the natural order of blah blah blah, sounds like an excuse to me but whatever—though she describes the area the zombies should have reached about now (“If your calculations are correct,” mumbles Kendra, which gets her a dirty look) and a nearby opening in the forest that will work for our plan.

“And if this all goes smoothly,” says PJ, “you'll have enough material to make a new seal?”

“Oh yeah,” chuckles the Warden darkly. “If this works, I'll have enough to make a new quilt.”

“Gross,” he says.

“You'll need a guide,” O'Dea says. “Hold on.”

She gives PJ a slap on the back, then puts her fingers in her mouth and whistles hard, and the bushes begin crunching and rustling, and out of nowhere comes the buck,
my
buck, standing huge and proud in the fading sunlight, chest thrown out, head reared back, just as gorgeous as when we first saw him.

“Whoa,” says PJ.

O'Dea walks over to him like it was nothing, and the buck lowers its head down to hers. They talk (or whatever) for a moment, and then she pats his neck and turns back to us. “He says they're only about halfway down the mountain at this point,” she says. “He's going to lead you to them while I take care of things here.”

“Wait,” I say, “halfway down's a pretty far hike—”

“You better keep up, then,” she says. She slaps the buck's spotted hindquarters, and he goes bounding into the woods, and we go barreling into the woods after him, and of course I'm in the lead, but I keep my eyes over my shoulder and wouldn't you know it, the other two are doing just fine, PJ especially, his eyes bright with action.

The buck is a flicker of white tail and brown hooves for a while, and somehow we manage to stay on its heels, dodging between trees and bounding over rocks and burrows, and even though their breathing gets heavy and their collars turn damp, PJ and Kendra keep pace perfectly. This is amazing, running after the buck, but with a purpose this time, a mission, not just some stupid what's-going-on-let's-see kind of plan like the one I had before.

Suddenly, we turn a corner of the path and a steadily marching group of bony dead backs appears in front of us. The buck skids to a halt, and we duck into the trees on the side of the path, doing our best to tread lightly and barely breathe. The zombies are power walking now, too stiff to really run but hobbling with a vengeance, probably desperate to get down to Homeroom Earth before we catch up with them.

I look at the buck again, his antlers lowered, his nostrils flared. He glares back at me with those black glassy eyes, then nods toward the zombies, like he's saying,
I did my job; time to do yours
.

“Thanks . . . ?” I whisper to him.

He snorts, then vanishes with a quick leap into the thick woods.

PJ waves us up ahead, and we stealth creep from behind one tree to the next until we're right alongside the horde, doing our best to keep pace with their new supercharged death march.

PJ hisses at us and holds up three fingers, and we count down: three, two, one. I go first: “HEY!”

Next is PJ. “HEY! OVER HERE!”

We glance out from behind our trees. Nothing. They don't even look up, just move forward like getting off the mountain is all they can think about.

This isn't part of the plan. We make noise, they come after us—that's how it's worked for the whole time. Without the magic barriers, they must know there's bigger game out there than three eleven-year-old kids.

“What do we do?” I ask, no longer bothering to whisper.

“I have an idea,” says Kendra.

“Whenever you say that, everything goes wrong,” I reply.

She shoots me a stink-eye and then digs Deborah's diary out of her pocket and flips through it for a second. “Let's try . . . BILL?”

The fat zombie from the basement stops in his tracks and slowly, reluctantly raises his milky gray eyes into the air.

“GRACE! LEONARD! CHELSEA! AARON!” One by one, the zombies turn and look toward the woods, eyes frozen in recognition, faces slowly twisting into furious snarls. Hearing their names must remind them that they were people and now have to wander around as disgusting sacks of dead meat. Or maybe because they could use a snack. Doesn't matter; it works. The other zombies begin slowing down with them, bumping into their backs and following their stares to our section of woods.

Come on, zombies, don't just stand there. This needs to happen now. If you're as dumb as we think, the rest of you will follow. At least I hope you will.

Kendra leaps into view and goes nuts: “PINE CITY DANCERS! COME ON, YOU FAT HIPPOS, LET'S GET DANCING!”

Yikes, that does it. The Pine City Dancers turn their ugly gray faces away from hauling down the mountain and run snarling into the woods, and the rest of the horde follows, swept up by brain-dead mob mentality. At first, we're all smiling at one another, patting Kendra on the back for making the plan work, and then a zombie comes howling at us, eyes gone, mouth open, and we shut up and run like crazy.

My legs are killing me. My calves feel like they're about to split off my bones and stop for coffee. When we get home—and I never thought I'd say this, but—I'm going to take a week off from physical activity of any kind.

They're harder to outrun than they used to be. Even the ones limping on busted legs are keeping up. But this time around we don't have a wounded PJ, so the three of us manage to stay ahead of them.

“This spot O'Dea mentioned should be right up ahead,” says PJ over the moaning and cracking underbrush. “Big oak with lots of sturdy branches there.”

“Perfect,” says Kendra. “You'll be all right climbing—” Then her voice turns into a shriek that punctures our eardrums. A zombie in a red flannel jacket hobbles out from behind a tree and grabs her wrists with his stiff gray hands. Kendra kicks at the ground and pulls herself as far back as she can from the dead man, who moans and slobbers as he drags her fingers toward his open mouth—

“Come on!” yells PJ, and whoa PJ, Mr. Scared of His Shadow, puts every underdeveloped muscle in his tiny body behind his right shoulder and slams into the zombie like a defensive lineman. The walking corpse releases Kendra and falls to the ground with a moan. I bolt over to PJ, help him to his feet, and then we're kicking the zombie over and over, shoving our feet into his gray, lifeless face. His nose breaks, his teeth fall out, but there's no blood, just little clouds of dust and bits of face.

“Guys!” shouts Kendra. “I appreciate the help, but they're getting closer!”

PJ and I stop and stare at each other, wide-eyed. His face is redder than I've ever seen it, at least when he isn't crying, and there's a toughness in his eyes that's so not PJ. “The plan,” I pant at him. “She's right. Quickly.” He nods, and we're off.

We charge back into the forest, and soon the trees open up into a clearing, huge, sunny, floored with leaves and centered around a sturdy old oak tree with its first spring foliage popping out fresh and green between the beams of golden sunlight. It's the kind of place where you'd have a picnic—afternoon sunlight pours in gray and green between the branches, and the ground is soft and flat beneath our feet, nice for sitting and snacking.

But this is no picnic.

Kendra and I give PJ a hand up to one of the lower branches, and he starts scrambling up the oak. Once he's a good twenty feet off the ground, he gives us a thumbs-up, and Kendra and I hide behind a couple of trees at the edge of the clearing and wait for the horde.

There are no silhouettes in the distance or far-off footsteps this time—within seconds of us hiding, they come marching in, heads raised, mouths wide open like they're ready for a buffet. When PJ screams out their names, the forest of hands stretches up toward him like maybe, if they reach hard enough, they could extend their arms and drag him down. That hippo crack did a number on them, too—they're not just hungry, they're
ticked off
, screaming and scrambling against one another with genuine rage.

Maybe the sad, sorrowful moaning that drove me crazy on the path was bad, but this, the shrieking and gurgling, makes my blood run cold. Soon, the last of the skeletons stumbles into view, and the clearing's packed with the entire horde, moaning for a quick snack before they hit Homeroom Earth and start in on the main course.

“Come on, guys!” calls out PJ. “Come and get it! Grade-A man flesh!”

Just like PJ expected, they huddle around the tree, clawing at the bark with their rotten hands or snatching blindly at the air. Across the clearing from me, Kendra holds up her palm—
Wait for it
. Once the group is tight packed at the base of the tree, she gives me the thumbs-up, and I pull PJ's handheld camera out of my pocket and go tiptoeing up behind the nearest zombie, the big guy with the half face, his ham fists pounding angrily on the tree trunk.

My hand slowly drifts toward the zombie's back pocket and I ready my finger on the camera's red Play button.

“Hurgh!”
Next to me, a skinny zombie with a bushy beard turns away from the tree long enough to spy me trying to slip the camera into Half-face's pocket. He claws a bony hand at my chest, and my heart skips three beats, and then I'm back behind my tree before I know it, only I don't have the camera, I dropped it in the clearing, I never pushed the button, I—

Oh no! I've ruined everything. The plan's gone out the window. Ian, you idiot, you can't even
run
right! You can't even put a piece of plastic and metal the size of a candy bar into someone's back pocket! Now PJ's up a tree with a crowd of hungry corpses underneath him, and you've let him down
again
, and you've probably alerted the entire zombie population of this mountain that this kid up a tree is part of an elaborate scam, and Coach Leider is gonna have to tell your dad that he found your half-eaten leg somewhere in the woods.

I expect to see Kendra either glaring at me with superintense
You let this happen
eyes or staring in horror at the fallen camera as one of the zombies learns how to climb, but instead, she's got her palm up again, telling me to wait. She's focused on the clearing, and when I follow her stare, I see why.

The bearded zombie isn't running at me and moaning
It's a trap!
in zombese or whatever. He stands there with PJ's camera in his hand, staring at it like it's a photo of someone he can't quite remember, running his big gray thumb over its face. I can almost see the rusted gears turning in what's left of this thing's brain.