Cavern of the Blood Zombies (2011) (21 page)

I was almost up to the crevice in the roof of the cavern when I felt a twinge on my back. I turned my head and saw a corpse-eater had jumped upon me and was biting viciously. I shot it dead just as an even bigger one attacked my thigh. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I shot it, but by then a third and a fourth had already jumped on my body.

I was only a few feet away from the crack in the roof which gave me a new surge of energy and strength. I thought, Go ahead and bite—you only have a little more time, which is not as much as you need to kill me. You’re all going to die once I get out of this hellhole.

As I climbed, I suddenly felt another presence, looked, and saw a bloody face peering out from behind the tree trunk. His eyeballs were staring straight at me, looking as if they were about to burst out of their sockets.

The face was badly mutilated. I couldn’t see if the skin had melted and exposed the muscles inside, or if blood was oozing from its body to cover its face. All of a sudden I realized this was someone I knew—looking carefully, I recognized Big Kui.

A bullet had trimmed away a layer of skin on the left side of his head, exposing the bones of his skull. But it had not seemed to have gone into his brain and I felt some hope that even though his wounds were serious, they didn’t appear to be fatal.

“Big Kui, come with me,” I called to him, “perhaps we can save you.”

He didn’t move and his eyes stared at me resentfully, as if he hated us for abandoning him. He grabbed my hand and it took on the same hideous bloodred color that covered his entire body. I felt a burst of burning itchiness and I knew I was finished.

A faint voice came from Big Kui’s mouth as he pulled me downward. I thought of the horror of watching his skin melting and with a burst of determination, I shook away his hand. But then he grabbed my foot as if his dying wish was for us to be together in hell.

I screamed, “Big Kui, let me go! Life is all anyone really wants—if you want to live, then climb up with me. Who knows? We may find a cure for what is killing you now.”

My words only seemed to make him even more furious and he leaped upon me, his eyes radiating beams of evil. Grabbing me by the neck, he began to strangle me.

One of us was going to die, and it wasn’t going to be me. I kicked him viciously and as his grip loosened, I aimed my gun at his chest and pulled the trigger. He hurtled away from me, his blood splashing in all directions. Both of his arms outstretched, he fell straight into the mass of corpse-eaters.

My hand that he had seized was so numb that I could feel nothing and I had no idea if it was still holding onto a branch or not. As my body slipped, I tried to grab onto one of the devil-armed vines with my other hand but since I was protected by rock dust, the vine drew away from me. I cursed in the dark as my body slid down, landing on a huge tree branch.

The branch was covered with corpse-eaters and some fell off when I landed. I gripped the branch with my legs to stop myself from sliding down any farther but found that the corpse-eaters were starting to surround me again.

I could not help but smile as I faced the bitter truth of my predicament. I had so many options of death to choose from—I could fall to death, have the bugs eat me to death, or be poisoned to death. With fate generously providing this bounty of choice in my hour of need, I should feel more gratitude than I was currently able to muster, I decided.

And then there was Fats, climbing up toward me, kicking a few corpse-eaters out of his way. He looked at me and yelled, “How the hell can you just lie here staring at me? See how many holes there are on my butt?”

When he came over to give me a hand, I shouted, “Don’t touch me. I’ve been poisoned. Just go. You can’t save me!”

Fats said nothing as he picked me up, laughing. “Find a mirror and take a good look at yourself. Your fucking complexion looks better than mine. In fact, your cheeks are as glowing and rosy as a pretty girl’s. How could you be poisoned?”

Startled, I looked down and saw only a red rash on my hand that went up my arm, as if it had been bitten by thousands of mosquitoes. But it stopped at my shoulder and seemed to be slowly fading away. How could the poison have had no effect on me?

Fats hauled me on his back, gritted his teeth, and continued to climb as I served as his human shield—all the corpse-eaters now jumped on my butt and started biting me. I yelled, “You fat fuck! I thought you wanted to help me, but you just needed a goddamn shield!”

He shouted back, “What are you complaining about? If you’re not satisfied, why don’t you come and carry me? Don’t you see I barely have any unbitten flesh left on my butt?”

I did not want to talk nonsense with him. There was a thick circle of corpses hanging close to the tree trunk of our hydra-cypress and occasionally Fats would bump into a pile of bones. Fortunately the corpse-eaters did the same thing, and they couldn’t tell the difference between our living bodies and the corpses—many of them jumped on the corpses and started chomping away at the dead flesh that moved wildly as Fats collided with them.

Noticing this, Fats thought it worked to our advantage so he told me to push the bodies slightly and make them swing when I was able to touch them. Although it disgusted me, I did as he told me, hoping it might save our lives.

Every time I saw a corpse, I kicked it and soon the areas we went through were filled with spinning corpses. When it came to IQ levels, corpse-eaters were unfit to compete with humans. They had no idea whether it was better to chase after us or stop and feast on spinning corpses. Fats increased his speed, the distance between us and the corpse-eaters widened, and we finally felt it was safe to breathe a sigh of relief.

My arms and legs were no longer numb, and I began to think that the feeling I had when I was poisoned seemed to be the same thing my grandfather had documented in his journal when the blood zombie raced across his back. Grandfather survived. Could it be that, as one of his bloodline, I had inherited his immunity?

Now that my limbs were fully functional, Fats set me down. His face was sweaty, and he was panting like a dog in August. I remembered that when I had carried him on my back earlier, I had almost spat up blood. Now we were even.

Suddenly, behind Fats I saw someone on a branch waving at me. Trembling, I rubbed my eyes and the person disappeared. Thinking he had hidden behind the tree, I stuck my head out to investigate.

“Stop wasting time,” Fats grumbled. “Come on.”

“Wait a second!” I pulled him back. “Go left! I just saw someone waving.”

We looked, and there was nothing but a hole in the tree that looked like the shape of a man. It was dark and I wondered what was inside.

Fats turned on his flashlight. There was a bunch of rolled-up vines in the hole wrapped around a rotting corpse of a man. His blue eyes were so clouded that it was impossible to make out where his pupils were, and his mouth was open as if he wanted to tell us something.

Fats sneered at me, “He’s only a dead man. Maybe ghosts have begun to greet you with friendly waves, do you suppose?”

I had encountered too many strange things on this trip—whether ghosts were real or not wasn’t something I wanted to debate with Fats. If this corpse had beckoned us over, he definitely had a reason, I thought. As I stared at him, I saw he had something clutched in his hand. Prying his fingers open, I found a pendant in his death grip.

The corpse-eaters below were rattling again and had begun to climb up to us. I looked at the dead man, gave him a salute, and continued my climb. Fats and I both moved much faster than usual; we weren’t too far from the crack in the cave’s roof and reached it easily.

As we climbed through the opening, we looked down and saw that the corpse-eaters had no plans of stopping their assault. They had reached the edge of the crevice and Fats yelled, “It’s not time to rest yet. Run!”

I had been underground for so long that the openness of my new surroundings felt confusing to me. A man carrying something came running out of the bushes— it was Uncle Three. When he saw me, he shouted, “Quick—pour this gasoline everywhere!”

I ran to him and looked—where we had entered the tomb and the crevice we had just emerged from were separated only by a low cliff just several feet high. Our equipment was still there and when I saw the barrels of gasoline waiting for us, my heart soared and I thought, all right you little bastards—just wait and see what’s in store for you now.

Fats and I leaped down, each grabbed a barrel, and ran back to my uncle. He was already pouring gas through the opening we had crawled through and down the walls of the cave. As the corpse-eaters approached the crevice, Uncle Three lit a cluster of matches and tossed the flaming bundle into the crack in the roof.

A fireball shot into the air and the smell of hellfire filled our nostrils. The tide of corpse-eaters retreated in a flash as the gasoline formed a wall of fire. We heard them wailing in agony as they burned alive, and it sounded wonderful.

Adding more fuel to the conflagration by pouring in our remaining barrels of gas, we watched the fire erupt from the crevice to a height taller than two men put together.

We were struck by a wave of intense heat that singed off my eyebrows, and, taking a few steps back, I looked at the pendant that I held tightly in my hand. It was a name tag for James—perhaps the corpse I took it from? I polished it on my sleeve and put it in my pocket, thinking if I had the chance, I would find his family and give this to them so he might rest in peace.

Fats was sweating like fifty pigs from the heat of our inferno. He asked Uncle Three, “Where are the other two?”

Uncle Three pointed behind us. “Panzi’s out of it. It looks like he’s got a fever. As for Menyouping, I haven’t seen him anywhere. I thought he was with you guys.”

I glanced at Fats and he sighed, “I haven’t seen him— I’ll bet he didn’t make it.”

Uncle Three shook his head and said, “No. This guy comes and goes mysteriously—and he was ahead of all of us the whole time. If he had been caught in the explosion, he would probably have been blasted out of the cave and we would have seen him.”

I looked at Uncle Three’s expression and knew that he really wasn’t very confident about Poker-face’s safety. Although it was true he was an expert grave robber, he’d been in the same mess as we were before the explosives went off. If he had been flung out of the tree by the blast, he was dead for sure.

We looked around within the vicinity but without success. There was no sign of Poker-face.

We returned to the camp, packed our things, and lit a bonfire to heat the canned food that we’d packed in our bags. I was unbearably hungry, and could have eaten anything put in front of me. As we ate, Uncle Three pointed at the low cliff behind us. “You see, this camp is right at the edge of the crevice. Obviously the tree demon that the old guy saw was the hydra-cypress. It was probably the noise from the celebration of the men he had guided that caused the tree to break through from the cave’s roof. Good thing we didn’t stay overnight here but went straight down into the tomb, or else we too would have been captured by the monstrous tree.”

“We don’t know how long our fire is going to last,” Fats observed. “If it burns out, the corpse-eaters will come and we’ll be in trouble. It’s almost dawn. Let’s hurry out of the forest and we’ll talk about everything later.”

I quickly took a few more bites of food and nodded. Fats and Uncle Three took turns carrying Panzi and we set off into the forest.

We were quiet as we traveled. When we first came to this place, we had talked and sung happily. Now we were completely focused on finding safety and jogged in silence. We knew we were fleeing for our lives.

My strength had reached its limit. In the last part of our walk, I was relying almost solely on willpower to carry me through. If a bed had appeared before me, I would have fallen asleep in less than two seconds—but none did.

We walked all that day and into the next morning before we got out of the forest. Passing the rocky slopes created by the landslide, we finally saw that sweet little village.

But we couldn’t relax until we took Panzi to the village clinic. The country doctor came, frowned, and immediately called the nurses to come and help him. Sitting on a nearby stool, I fell asleep.

It was a sleep caused by severe exhaustion—deep, dark, and with no dreams. I only woke up because I heard a disturbance outside and wanted to know just what was going on.