Gravediggers by Christopher Krovatin

Author:Christopher Krovatin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

PJ

At least Joseph Savini’s walking corpse is the kind we’re used to. Without the chance to mutate or evolve or whatever horror has happened to the zombies out there, his body has stayed relatively normal and has returned that way. His hands go grasping out blindly in front of him, his teeth gnashing and his eyes rolling white and soft in his skull, his bushy white mustache giving him a walrus-like quality. The moan that comes out of his mouth is morose and sends me into a fit of something like ants crawling down my flesh, but they’re the ants I know. He doesn’t tap out messages with his feet or sniff the air; he just lumbers at us like he wants to eat us, like Romero made them do.

There’s something kind of comforting about it. Like eating McDonald’s on vacation—it’s familiar.

All three of us cry out in what must be a deafening roar in the black, gaping, silent shadow of the cave encasing Kudus like a giant crypt. Kendra manages to shoot out a foot and knock the creature off balance, but he hangs onto her one shoulder and won’t go down, instead dangling from her like an anchor and dragging her to the floor.

Finally, my mind cuts out of slow-mo, and I manage to climb to my feet and hook my arms around his waist. When I try to take a deep breath and concentrate, my nose and lungs are filled with the stench of a freshly hugged dead body (like cheese, really, like fancy cheese that has been forgotten in a warm place), but I fight through it and focus my overwhelming fear and disgust. My foot plants behind the zombie, and I throw all my strength into my shoulder and toss his body backward. Sure enough, his heel catches on my ankle, and the sack of rotting meat goes crashing to the ground.

At first, we’re all ready to go back into fight mode, Ian searching frantically for his machete and me cracking my knuckles . . . but then we actually watch the zombie. We watch as he crawls to his knees and paws blindly at the air, eyes aimed dumbly at the hut ceiling. Twice he falls while he tries to get up. This poor, pathetic thing doesn’t have the smelling power of its mutated

counterparts—he hasn’t been wandering the tunnels for year. He can’t see a thing.

“It’s almost sad to watch,” I say.

“We need to kill it,” says Ian. “Before—”

The zombie whirls with a wild clawed haymaker that barely misses my face.

But slaps off my goggles.

Darkness. Pure and impenetrable darkness, greater than that of any room I’ve ever been in, than any space I can imagine. As my eyes blink, taking in the pure nothing, I think about how foolish I’ve been, getting used to the goggles and believing that that was reality, with the world outlined in spooky Jodie Foster-at-the-end-of-Silence green. Wrong. We are basically in a black hole, only this one is

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