Cavern of the Blood Zombies (2011) (6 page)

As I watched, frozen, Panzi came up to the surface, but he wasn’t as lucky as I. Before he knew what was going on, the bug squeaked, abandoned the dead body, flew into the air, and landed directly on top of his head, burying a pincerlike leg right into his scalp.

Panzi was amazing—if I had been in his place, I would have sooner announced my presence to the King of Hell than battle that giant insect. Without a second’s hesitation, his left arm moved so quickly that I had no clue that he held his army knife. Stabbing the insect at the base of its leg, Panzi pulled the tentacle from his scalp faster than I could blink as the bug let out a bloodcurdling shriek.

All of this happened in the electro-flash of a struck flint. Panzi hadn’t even had time to notice me standing nearby, and that’s why he threw the corpse-eater in my direction.

Shit, I thought, how can Panzi do this to me. He had told me how he’d look out for me in an emergency and now that there was one, he threw this fucking monster right in my face. At least he had an army knife, while I only had my bare hands. I knew I’d be finished off right away.

The corpse-eater didn’t mess around but immediately tore a chunk of skin from my face with one of its sharp claws. Gritting my teeth, I gathered my strength to hurl it off, but didn’t realize the barbs of its claws were buried in my clothes. A few of them hooked into my flesh, and the pain brought tears to my eyes.

Just then, Poker-face floated up to the surface of the water. He saw that I was almost overcome by the insect’s attack, dashed over quickly, and with a swooping motion popped his two long fingers into the insect’s back. He pulled and with an explosive force, he yanked out a string of shiny white wormlike things that looked like macaroni. I threw the bug corpse into the boat, and felt that I had just awakened from my worst nightmare.

Big Kui gave a thumbs-up to Poker-face. “Pal, I truly admire your courage and dexterity. You dared to pull the guts out of that monster. I have got to give you credit for that.”

“Shit.” Panzi’s head now sported two bloody holes, which were fortunately not large. He growled, “Go fuck yourself. This is the ganglia of the bug’s central nervous system, not its intestines. This guy here paralyzed the bug!”

“Are you saying this bug isn’t dead?” Big Kui had his leg already in the boat but hearing this, he plunged back into the water immediately.

Poker-face swung into the boat and kicked the bug to one side. “We can’t kill it yet,” he told us. “We have to use it in order to get out of this cave.”

He flipped the insect onto its back, and embedded in its tail we saw a sealed, hexagonal copper wind chime the size of a fist with engraved incantations covering all six sides. The copper had turned so green that it was a hell of a mess and it was impossible for us to guess when it had been implanted in the corpse-eater.

As Panzi bandaged his bloody head, as skillfully as if he were wounded like this every day of his life, he kicked at the bug and the wind chime moved, making a sound that was identical to the noise that had driven us into the water. But while the sound we heard before was more supernatural, as if it had floated up from hell, now it was much less hypnotic. Evidently this bell was what we had heard, but it needed the open and vast echo from within the cavern to enslave our ears and minds.

What ingenious craftsmanship had made this bell so it could withstand a millennium without breaking or deteriorating? I thought, it’s probably made of gold or silver. But how was it able to ring by itself?

The bell continued to chime, as if an uncontainable and bitter spirit locked inside this relic were trying to escape. As Panzi finished tending to his wounds, he grew annoyed by the ringing and kicked the bell aside. Its copper casing had become weak over the centuries; it cracked open when his foot struck it and a stinking green liquid gushed out.

Uncle Three was furious. The only reason he didn’t punch Panzi in the head was because the two fresh wounds could make Panzi as easy to destroy as the bell had been. Instead of physical injury he resorted to verbal abuse. “Your goddamn leg better be more well-behaved than that. This thing is an antique and you just destroyed it for me with one kick.”

“Master Three, how was I to know the damn thing was so fragile?” Panzi protested. Uncle Three shook his head. Using an army knife he pushed aside the copper debris, and there could be seen many small bells the size and shape of a honeycomb. All these bells were attached on top of a delicate hollow sphere, which was covered with holes. Now that the sphere had been cracked open, we saw a green centipede, its head smashed flat with green liquid squeezed out from its finger-sized body.

Uncle Three turned the hollow sphere with the sharp point of his knife, and discovered a tube coming out of it that was connected to the giant corpse-eater.

“I believe when the centipede was hungry, it would go through this tube to the corpse-eater’s stomach to eat,” he decided. “How did such a symbiotic system come about?”

The partially devoured body of the boatman stayed afloat on the water, drifting, sinking, and coming back to the top again.

“This is certainly self-inflicted injury,” my uncle sighed. “They must have wanted to put us in this carcass cave, wait until we were killed, and then come back to salvage our stuff. But who knew they would find today’s misfortune and be killed by this giant corpse-eater. It truly served them right.”

“What luck for us,” I said.

Panzi shook his head. “I’m afraid that insect wouldn’t have been able to tear a person’s body apart in such a short time. If it was that strong, it would have dug out my brains before I could injure it. I think there’s probably more than one of these things. This one brought that half of the body over here to eat after the corpse was torn in two.”

Big Kui had been looking very relaxed but when he heard this, he choked.

“Don’t panic. Didn’t our pal here just say we could use this thing to get out of the cave? We’ll put this giant corpse-eater at the front of our boat, and let it clear a path for us. This thing ate dead bodies its whole life. Its negative chi is extremely heavy, and can act as a malignant force against any zombies that might be hiding here. I suspect they’re probably the supreme chiefs in this carcass cave. If we have this bug on board, we’ll definitely make it out,” Uncle Three said. “Come on. Let’s not give up now. I’d like to have a look at what’s here that could create such an enormous insect.”

Taking our folding shovels from our luggage in the back, we used them as oars, paddled along the stone walls, and forged farther into the cave. As I paddled, I studied the tunnel wall on my side and asked Uncle Three, “How did our ancestors excavate all of this in ancient times? Even now, it would take at least a few hundred people to dig a cave this deep.”

Uncle Three said, “You see how round this cave is? This is an incredibly ancient cave. I think the excavators belonged to a military squad, specifically trained to deter future grave-robbing. It’s not going to be easy to find the tomb marked on the map.”

“Master Three, how can you be so sure that this tomb is still intact? There’s no guarantee that all the things haven’t already been looted,” Big Kui said. “In my opinion, there’s probably not even a cover left on the coffin.”

Uncle Three groaned. “If this grave had been robbed by people several thousand years ago, then we’re sunk. But you can plainly see that the cave on the map does exist. This means that it was already here when the owner of the grave was buried. This cave has to be older than the grave we’re hunting for. And there’s probably more than one cave with tombs in this area. Who knows when this particular robbers’ tunnel was dug?”

“You mean to say,” I already felt the chilling significance of Uncle Three’s explanation, “everything we just crossed paths with, including the giant corpse-eater and the hexagonal copper wind chime—and anything that controls them—were possibly here before the Warring States Period?”

Uncle Three shook his head. “I am more concerned about why the owner of this grave wanted to be buried in a place where so many robbers’ tunnels were—and why did he position his plot here? Isn’t this a huge violation of taboos established by Feng Shui principles?”

Poker-face suddenly waved his hand in a signal for us to hush and pointed straight ahead. There was the deepest part of the cave, glowing with green phosphorescence. Sighing, Uncle Three told us, “We’ve reached the dumping ground for corpses.”

We stopped the boat. This was the most dangerous area of the cave, we knew, and we shouldn’t venture into it without being fully prepared for anything. Uncle Three glanced at his watch and said, “This type of carcass cave isn’t one where we can blithely come and go. In all the years that I’ve been robbing graves, this is the first time I have ever come across a place like this. I think we’ve gone right off the map by finding this hellhole.”

Panzi cut in, “Shit, Master Three. Tell us something we don’t know.”

Uncle Three glared at him and continued, “We only know what the old man wanted us to know. Is it true that only the dead boatman could guide us through here safely?” His voice grew serious. “If this really is a carcass cave, then naturally there will be danger ahead. Who knows what we might find as we go farther? Perhaps ghosts will change our course and we will be lost in this cave forever, or maybe hundreds of water demons will come to sink our boat and we will die in this black river.”

Big Kui inhaled sharply. “That bad, huh?”

“Anything could happen in a place like this. We haven’t even arrived at the grave yet and already we’ve encountered life-threatening perils. But we’re grave robbers, not even the devil can frighten us. If any of you are frightened, go find another job. In our line of work, the bizarre and the terrible are routine occupational hazards.”

Uncle Three told Panzi to hand him a double-barreled shotgun from one of the backpacks. “Look at our weapons. We’re in a much better position than anyone who came here before us. If there really are water demons here, they’re flat out of luck!”

Unconvinced, Big Kui trembled with fear. Staring at his pale, fat face, I said to Uncle Three, “How come your encouraging speech sounds so much like a ghost story? It’s not rallying your troops—look at the effect it’s having on your man here.”

Uncle Three pulled the rifle bolt. “This guy is really an embarrassment to me. I didn’t expect him to be such a useless fuckup. He was bragging like a goddamn hero before he got here.” Handing the gun to Poker-face, my uncle told him, “This gun holds only two bullets at a time. When those are gone, you’ll have to reload. The farther it has to travel, the less power the bullet carries—be sure to choose your target carefully before you fire.”

Panzi and I held the double-barreled shotguns. Uncle Three and Big Kui each had their army knives in one hand and folding shovels in the other, which they used to paddle the boat forward. Slowly we punted toward the mass of corpses that were bathed in a dim green glow.

Under the feeble light from our lamps and that mysterious green glimmer, we could see the cave become bigger and bigger. I heard Poker-face mumble words in a language I didn’t understand while Panzi cursed vehemently. And then I saw a sight that I will never be able to forget.

At the opening to this part of the cave, the green light showed us that we were entering a supercolossal natural chamber. The canal that we followed became a river, and on sand banks at either side lay many rotting, pale green carcasses. It was impossible to tell whether they had once been men or animals. Rows and rows of skulls were piled neatly in the innermost part of the cave, looking as though they had been stacked carefully by human hands. But the collections of skulls that lay farther outside were less meticulously grouped together, especially near the riverbanks where many of the bodies had not yet completely deteriorated.

All of the carcasses were covered with a thin layer of gray film, as if they had been swaddled tightly with plastic wrap. As we looked, several large corpse-eating bugs erupted from the insides of the bodies. Smaller corpse-eaters scurried over to join the feast but as soon as they arrived, the bigger ones snapped at them and swallowed them in one gulp.

“Look, you guys!” Big Kui pointed toward the wall of the cavern. We turned and saw a crystal coffin, tinged with green, mounted perpendicularly on the cave’s wall, looking as if it were floating in midair. Inside seemed to be a woman wearing a white dress, but she was too far away for us to see her clearly.

“There’s one on that side too!” Panzi pointed to the other wall. Sure enough—at the same exact spot on the opposite side hung a crystal coffin, but this one was empty.

Uncle Three gasped. “Where did that body go?”

“Could it be a zombie?” asked Big Kui. “Master Three, there couldn’t be any zombies in here, could there?”

“Pay attention, all of you. If you see anything moving at all, don’t ask questions—just shoot it,” said Uncle Three as he stared into the darkness.

At this moment, we went around a bend in the river that took us past a large pile of skulls and bones. Big Kui screamed with fear and fell on the deck of the boat. The rest of us saw a woman with her back turned toward us, long black hair falling past her waist. Her clothing was made of white feathers and the adornment on her outfit I was sure dated back to the Western Zhou dynasty.