Cavern of the Blood Zombies (2011) (9 page)

The old man laughed. “There was a group of people here two weeks ago, about a dozen of them, but they still have not come back out yet. This place is really dangerous. It’s not too late to turn back now.”

“Who cares if we find monsters—let alone whatever devils and demons might be here,” Big Kui said. “Tell you what, our young master here made a thousand-year-old zombie kowtow to him. Am I right?” he asked Poker-face, who ignored him as though he were empty air. Rejected, Big Kui fell into a bad mood, but there was nothing he could do about it.

We walked steadily and quietly, reaching our destination by late afternoon, just as the sky began to darken.

There were nearly a dozen military tents, all still intact; although they were covered with rotting leaves, inside they were still very dry and clean, with a lot of useful supplies. We found equipment scattered about, even an electric generator and a few gallons of gasoline. The motor had been wrapped in oilcloth but most of the parts were in bad shape. Big Kui tried to start it up with no success, but at least no water had gotten into the cans of gasoline, so that was still useful.

As I looked at the equipment I saw that all of the labels had been removed—even the trademarks on the tents and backpacks had been torn off. I thought, how strange is this? It looks like these people did not want anybody to know where they had come from.

We made a fire at the campsite and cooked a simple supper. As we ate, the old man looked around warily as though he was afraid that monsters would rush out at any moment and string him up to die on a tree.

Poker-face looked at the map as he ate. He pointed to the spot where there was the drawing of the strange fox face and said, “We’re definitely here now.”

We all crowded around him as he explained, “This is the place of worship. There ought to be a worship platform beneath the ground where we sit. The items that were buried along with the deceased might be right below us.”

Uncle Three squatted, grabbed a handful of soil, put it under his nose, and sniffed. He shook his head, walked a few steps, and grabbed another handful. He said, “If it’s here, it’s buried too deep for me to be able to detect its presence. We’ll have to dig a bit to find out.”

We screwed the steel pipes together, connecting them to the shovel heads. Uncle Three stamped a few footprints on the ground to indicate where we should swing our shovels. Big Kui poised the head of his shovel and tapped it into the soil with a short-handled hammer to begin his excavation. As he tapped, Uncle Three touched the metal pipes connected to the shovel head with his hand to get a feel of activity in the place underground. After a total of thirteen taps, Uncle Three suddenly said, “That’s it!”

We pulled the shovel up section by section. Big Kui detached the shovel head that had brought a batch of soil to the surface. He came to the edge of the fire so we could all take a look. Uncle Three and I stared, and our faces turned white at the same time. Even Poker-face cried out. The soil looked as though it had been soaked in blood, and a bloodlike liquid dripped onto the ground.

Uncle Three sniffed the dirt and frowned. Both he and I had seen documentaries on zombies, but our knowledge of them was general with no specific details. We could not accurately assess this situation, even with the help of my grandfather’s journal. We only knew one thing for sure—since there was wet blood in the soil, the grave beneath us was certainly no small bag of potatoes.

I glanced over at Uncle Three and tried to guess what his decision would be. He gave it some thought, lit a cigarette and said, “We’ll talk about this after we dig some more.”

Big Kui and Panzi had not stopped digging. Big Kui struck the shovel into the ground a few more times, and then brought it back up to show Uncle Three. Uncle Three smelled every shovel head, and began to connect the excavated holes with lines that he drew with a trowel. In a short time, an approximate outline of the cave was drawn on the ground.

Identifying the position of burial caves was a basic skill of grave-robbing masters. In general, the underground location of the grave was sure to look like the outline drawn above ground. Very few masters of the soil will make a mistake when doing this. But when I saw the contours that outlined the cavern we sought, I didn’t feel they were correct. Most of the graves from the Warring States Period had no chambers. This one looked as though there would be one. Moreover, our outline indicated that the roof was built with bricks, which was extremely unusual.

Uncle Three took measurements with his fingers and finally determined the approximate location of the coffin. He said, “There is a tile roof underground. My shovel cannot penetrate its surface. I can only mark the approximate location by rule of thumb. This underground palace is too bizarre. I don’t know how thick the bricks are, and we can only break in from the back wall according to my experience. If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to strike again. Move quickly now!”

My uncle and his men had many years of grave-robbing experience. With fleet movements, their three shovels whipped up and down like small cyclones. In only a minute, they had dug down about twenty-six feet. Because we were in the wilderness, there was no need to be careful about where we put the soil, so we threw it onto the ground as though we were creating a dust storm. Soon, Big Kui shouted from below, “Done!”

He had dug a hole beneath our entry point and had exposed a huge amount of brick wall. We turned on our miner’s lamps and pointed them into the hole. Poker-face noticed that Big Kui was preparing to knock on the wall and stopped him by snapping, “Don’t touch anything.”

Stretching out his two unnaturally long fingers, Poker-face gently touched the surface of the wall, and traced the seams of the bricks for what seemed like a very long time. “There’s an antitheft device here,” he said. “All the bricks must be shifted outward. We must not push inward, and we must not break any of them!”

Panzi touched the wall and said, “How is it possible to not crack one of these bricks as we work? And how are we going to pull these out?”

Poker-face was busy with a project all his own. Gently he touched one of the bricks and suddenly with an explosive force, he pulled it out from the wall.

I gaped at him. Knowing how sturdy those bricks were, I could not imagine the power it would take to pull one out with just two fingers. This guy was definitely a well-trained and extremely experienced grave robber.

Carefully placing the brick on the ground, he pointed at its back which was covered in a layer of dark red wax. He said, “The inside of this wall is covered with vitriol, an acid used to make pills of immortality. Once broken, this acid would immediately cover our bodies and burn off our skin in an instant.”

I gulped, my stomach jolted, and I suddenly thought of the skinless monster my grandfather had seen. Was it possible that it had not been a blood zombie, but perhaps his great-grandfather after a bath in vitriol? Were the shots that grandfather fired aimed at his own father?

Poker-face waited while Big Kui dug a well; then he took a needle and a plastic tube from his bag. Connecting the tube to the needle, he put the other end of the tube into the pit. Panzi lit a match and burned the needle until it was red-hot. Poker-face then carefully poked the needle into the wax wall. Instantly the red acid flowed through the tube into the well.

The dark red color of the wax on the brick wall soon turned white, which indicated that the acid had drained completely from the bricks. Poker-face nodded, said, “All right!” and we began to move the bricks. Soon there was a hole in the wall big enough for a person to go through. Uncle Three threw a match inside, and by its light, we were able to see inside.

We were now on the north side of the tomb. The floor was made of a solid piece of flagstone engraved with ancient writing and laid out very much like the arrangement of the Eight Diagrams in Chinese mythology. The farther out it went, the bigger its area; the farther in it went, the smaller it became. Surrounding the tomb were eight oil lamps to represent longevity. They of course had gone out since they were in a tomb. In the middle of the tomb stood a mammoth four-legged square vessel with the heavenly bodies engraved on it. On the south side of the tomb, which was directly opposite where we were standing, was a stone coffin and a corridor behind it which looked as though it led down to another place.

Uncle Three popped his head into the tomb to get a whiff. Then he beckoned for us to follow, and we made our way through one by one.

Uncle Three looked at the writing on the flagstone beneath our feet and asked Poker-face, “Take a look at this writing. Can you tell who is buried here?”

The straight-faced chap shook his head and said nothing.

We lit a few more matches, tossed them onto the oil lamps, and the entire tomb blazed into light. For no reason at all, I suddenly remembered the monster Grandfather wrote about in his journal, and seemed to hear the eerie rattling he mentioned repeatedly. My heart froze. Panzi climbed up to look inside the vessel and shouted, “Master Three, there are treasures here!”

We all joined him and saw a desiccated, headless corpse inside the vessel. Its clothing had all rotted away but its body was adorned with jade bracelets. Panzi reached down, took them off the body, and put them on his own wrists.

“This must be the body left behind after the human sacrifice was completed. They decapitated him, offered his head to the heavens, then put the body in here and offered it to the deceased. He was probably a prisoner of war. There would never be any jewelry on a slave’s wrists.”

With that, Panzi jumped into the vessel to see what else there was to find before Poker-face could stop him. Uncle Three cursed loudly, “You stupid bastard! This vessel holds offerings to the deceased. Do you want to be one of the offerings yourself?”

Panzi laughed. “Master Three, I’m not Big Kui. Don’t think you can frighten me that way.” He stroked a huge jade vase. “Look! There is so much good stuff down in here. Why don’t we turn this vessel over and see if there’s more?”

“Quit your nonsense. Come out quickly!” Uncle Three shouted. He saw Poker-face turn white with his eyes fixed on the stone coffin, and my uncle knew at once that something was going terribly wrong.

It was then that I heard the rattling sound that I had imagined just a few minutes before. I turned around and my blood turned to little bits of ice. The sound did not come from the coffin. It was coming from Poker-face.

At first I thought Poker-face was deliberately trying to scare us, but judging by what we had seen of his character so far, he didn’t seem like a practical joker. The rattling sound came from him without a pause, but none of us could see his lips move. We all looked at him and shivered. Was it possible that Poker-face was an undercover zombie?

When Uncle Three saw Poker-face’s ghostly visage, he pulled Panzi out of the vessel at once. At that point, Poker-face grew quiet and there was a weird silence. Then the top of the coffin flew upward like the top of a jack-in-the-box and shook violently as a ghastly, chilling sound came from inside it. It was a noise much like the one my grandfather had described in his journal—it was like the sound of a frog.

Big Kui was so terror-stricken that he fell flat on his butt. My own legs turned numb and I was ready to plop onto the ground as well. Uncle Three, who had been around and seen a lot, didn’t fall although his legs were shaking.

Poker-face turned even more ashen when he heard this sound. Falling to his knees, he kowtowed deeply toward the coffin. As soon as we saw this, we all immediately followed his example, knelt down, and kowtowed as well. He then looked up and began to chant a series of strange words, as if he were casting some sort of spell. Cold sweat rolled down Uncle Three’s forehead, and he whispered, “He’s not talking to it, is he?”

Finally, the stone coffin stopped shaking. Poker-face kowtowed once more, stood up, and said, “We must leave here before dawn.”

Uncle Three wiped his sweat and asked, “Menyouping, were you bargaining with the zombie just now?”

Poker-face made a gesture as if to say, Don’t ask. “Do not touch anything in here again. The owner of this coffin is immensely powerful. If he were unleashed from his burial spot, not even God could get us out of here alive.”

Panzi still did not understand what Poker-face meant and asked him, smiling, “Ah, come on. What kind of foreign language were you just speaking a moment ago?”

Poker-face ignored him, as usual, and pointed to the tunnel behind the coffin. He said, “Tiptoe past here and whatever you do, do not touch that coffin!”

With Uncle Three leading the way and Poker-face at the end of the line, we turned on our lamps and entered the tunnel behind the coffin. When Big Kui passed the coffin, he pressed his back firmly against the wall to keep as far away from it as possible. It looked very funny, but I wasn’t in the mood to laugh.

The tunnel of the gravesite curved downward. Both sides of it were carved with inscriptions on the rocks. I looked at them and could not make out what they meant. But since I was in the antique book business, and had studied these things quite a bit, I could still understand a few words here and there.