Revenant by Catrina Burgess

somehow released one into
the world.
    “Last
time it was here, it had quite a feast.” Gage made a grab for my arm and I
dodged him. He didn’t seem angry. Instead he gave a chuckle. “Touchy.” He
started walking and waved his hand for me to follow. “ Come along , this way. I want to show you the solution I came up
with in regards to the zombies. It’s by no means a permanent fix, but it might
do until we find one. I want to show you the progress we’ve made. I think you
will be pleased.”
    He
led the way, and I followed. I had to keep going along with all his games.
    Do what the crazies want, Dean had said, and he was right. As long as Gage was
threatening the people I cared about, what else could I do but play along?

Chapter 4
     
    We weaved through the
tunnels until Gage finally stopped in front of a wooden door. He walked into
the room, but I stopped just within the entrance. This was not a natural cavern like the one where the party was
being held. It was a man-made space cut out from the rock. The room was medium-sized with low hanging ceilings. The walls
of the room were smooth and painted red, but the ceiling was uneven, and I
could make out the jagged edges of rocks along it.
    Candlelight filled the room, throwing shadows
against the rocky surfaces, and it made the place seem smaller than it was. For
a moment, I felt claustrophobic. I looked up at the tons of rock just above my
head and wondered what it would take to make it collapse. An earthquake, or
just a tremor? For the first time, being underground began to feel dangerous. I
thought back to the miners who’d been buried in the side tunnels not far off
down the passage. How had they died? Quickly under the weight of the falling
rock? Or did they slowly suffocate as pockets of air dried up in their isolated
tunnels?
    Gage called out to me and I forced myself to
walk into the room. Bodies lay on organized rows of metal tables and a few girls
milled around them. I looked at the bodies and counted at least a dozen. Men,
women, and children… They look as though
they’re just sleeping.
    I watched as a girl my age dressed all in
black raised a knife and brought it down
hard, slicing open the man laying before her. The cut to his midsection was
swift and deep. She reached into the incision and pulled out his kidney.
    A girl to my right was taking a long rod and
shoving it up the nose of another body. When she pulled the rod back out , a mass of jelly-like tissue slid with
it. The rod had a sharp, curved point on one end that skewered a large section
of tissue. I realized in horror that I
was looking at someone’s brain. She just
pulled someone’s brain out through their nose. I gagged.
    Some of the girls clad in black were holding
books over the bodies and reciting words. My mind flashed back to Weatherton’s
ceremonial room at the asylum. I scanned the walls and floors for symbols.
There were none.
    Zombies moved between the workers, carrying
new bodies in and placing them on vacant slabs. One—a
tall, skinny undead—turned and caught sight of me after it dropped its
gruesome bundle. It began to shuffle toward me, its mouth moving as if trying
to talk. One of the workers stepped forward to stand in front of it,
gesturing emphatically toward the exit. The
zombie turned and walked jerkily away, but its eyes never left me.
    “The process of mummification is quite
fascinating.” Gage surveyed the room like a proud parent. “It won’t solve our
problem entirely, but it will help preserve the bodies.”
    That’s when I realized what was missing—the
smell of rotting flesh. These weren’t the dead from the field that I had been
handling every night. Fresh bodies mean…
    Gage
killed again.
    He walked over to a body. “Once we remove all of the major organs— with the exception of the heart—we place
them in these containers.” He pointed to four clay jars sitting in a row at the
corpse’s head. Looking around, I saw that the same four jars sat