Noah fell into a meditative state as the minutes slowly passed, his thoughts on a careful leash that brooked no deviation from his self-imposed immobilization. He came up with countless reasons to leave the mausoleum, to crack the door, to check the time, and he parried them all without moving so much as an inch. It was an endless circular track of pulling his mind back from its hungry intentions, recollecting himself, and waiting for his own thoughts to inevitably rebel once more.
The candles burned slowly lower and lower. The air in the room was so still that the flames stood perfectly straight in two motionless flecks of light. Noah used them as a focus for his thoughts, letting them pull him back into control each time he was on the verge of losing himself. They became the eyes of a serpentine beast, echoing the hunger he felt, commiserating with his plight. He honed in on them until everything else faded away. It was a state comparable to the void of complete darkness; a floating, weightless sensation, but the candles served as his anchors, and he did not feel lost.
He became so completely transfixed that he failed to immediately notice when his friends finally began to stir and awaken. The quiet rustling sounds they produced were automatically seized and set aside before they could be allowed to affect his meditation, and he was quite literally blind to everything besides the twin candles.
He was only shaken from his trance when the flames began to quiver, shaken from their perfect stillness by the movement in the room.
Noah blinked slowly, the carefully restrained feedback loop in his mind finally springing free. He allowed himself to shift a little, half expecting to feel sore, but his limbs were as insensate as he had become accustomed to.
“Morning,” Leah said, sitting up. She was the first to fully awaken. Her eyes fell upon the candles, then shifted nervously to Noah. “Cutting it close, are we?”
“Hmm?” Noah suddenly realized both candles were barely hanging on by their last dregs. A thin layer of transparent liquid was all that remained in either one.
He didn’t want to disclose that he had completely lost track of the remaining duration of either candle. “Yeah, I figured they would last us until morning,” he decided to say.
“You should have woken us up before they got this low,” Brian said disapprovingly, brought to wakefulness by their conversation. “Either one could die at any moment.”
Leah stood up and walked over to the door, bracing her hands on the handle. “It is morning, right?”
Noah didn’t say anything. He had spent so much effort to stay inside that it felt strange for them to be opening the door with so little fanfare now. He shook the feeling off.
“Yeah, the sun should be up by now,” Brian answered for him, checking the time on his phone.
His words were proven true a second later as Leah heaved the door open and blinding sunlight cascaded inside.
A wide smile spread across Noah’s face. I made it. There’d been a dozen moments over the past hour when he had lost hope that he would be able to hold out. It felt like a small miracle that he was now standing with his friends in the slanted rays of the morning light. Part of him wanted to push past Leah to rush outside right away, but he held himself back with an effort of will.
Leah left the door open and turned to wake up May, who was only halfway to consciousness. Brian leaned over to put out the candles, but before he could, both flames suddenly winked out, drowned by the melted wax they had been weakly fluttering over. Smoke twirled from the black nubs of spent wick.
Noah and Brian shared a wide-eyed look. There had been hardly five seconds to spare between the door opening and the candles dying.
There might have been time to open the door before the last of the embers went out, Noah thought weakly. He decided to believe that would’ve been the case, if only for his peace of mind.
Neither May nor Leah seemed to notice that Brian hadn’t been the one to blow out the candles, and Noah supposed they were probably better off not knowing.
“Are we ready to grab the pendant?” Leah asked.
“Yeah. Let’s get out of here,” Brian answered. “Would you like to do the honors or should I?”
“I’ve already had to pull the lever twice,” she said. “I think it’s your turn.”
Brian grumbled to himself but trudged nonetheless to the coffin. He climbed slowly up onto the lid and tilted his head back to stare at the stone bust leering off the wall.
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Noah gazed at its ravenous expression. He hoped that wasn’t how he looked when he got hungry.
He wondered just how purposeful the choice of expression was. Had the artist known of the sickness that was sealed away beneath its snarling countenance? The design couldn’t be a coincidence.
Brian put his hand right into the sculpture’s hungry mouth and gave the tongue a tug.
“Push it up, not down,” Leah said wearily.
“Oh, right.” The tongue-shaped lever slid into place. Brian stepped quickly to the ground before the coffin began to unseal itself.
They all tensed slightly, ready for any sudden movement from within the box.
“We’re fine,” Brian said after a few anxious moments with no sign of motion. “Come on.”
The friends reluctantly stepped up beside him. Noah was suddenly afraid that they would look inside and see nothing but its broken shackles.
To his relief, its sunken face gaped lifelessly from the coffin.
“See, it’s dead,” Brian said. He reached cautiously towards the pendant.
As his fingers brushed the square metal clasp, the lower jaw of the corpse fell open with a soft clack. Brian recoiled with incredible reflex speed, but there were no other signs of life. Noah wondered skeptically if gravity was the culprit for the movement.
“Just grab the thing already,” Leah said impatiently.
Brian sent her a dirty look. “I’m getting to it.” His fingers hovered over the metal box nervously before he gathered his courage and seized it, then yanked the item back over the body’s head. He tried to pull it completely off in one motion, but the chain caught in the small of its neck and refused to shift further.
With a deeply unhappy sound, Brian gingerly scooped his hand beneath the skull and lifted it so that he could pull the chain the rest of the way off.
To everyone’s alarm, the body’s hands suddenly lifted jerkily from its sides, reacting to the theft. Its eyes fluttered open.
Brian yelled and stumbled back with the pendant in hand. “Close it, quick!”
May climbed onto the ledge of the coffin, carefully avoiding the uncovered side where the body was exposed.
Noah watched the zombie warily. It certainly seemed unhappy that its pendant had been taken, but it hardly had the energy to lift its own hands, let alone put up a fight. It trembled impotently as May flicked the lever and the lid drew slowly over its shriveled form.
To Noah’s amusement, May dropped into a sitting position atop the coffin and let it carry her sideways as it closed.
A moment after the coffin sealed, they heard the two dull thuds of what Noah assumed to be the body’s arms falling limply to its sides. There were no further sounds of movement.
“Like taking candy from a baby,” Leah said cheerfully.
“A really, really ugly baby,” Brian said.
“No need to insult it. It can probably still hear us, you know.”
“You think?” Brian exclaimed, looking alarmed at the idea.
Leah shrugged. “Well, we didn’t lose our hearing when we got the dust. If this zombie has the same sickness we do, and I’m going to assume it does because I don’t want to think about there being another method of zombification, then why wouldn’t it be able to hear?”
Noah furrowed his brows. “Not to be overly pessimistic or anything, but is this going to be us one day? Is this sickness really just the worst form of immortality ever?”
Brian gave him a nervous look, but Leah shook her head. “We can die, obviously. Look at what happened to Sophie. It just takes a ton of damage.”
Noah nodded, but privately he wondered what would happen if nobody were to go to the effort of chopping their heads off. If they were left uninjured, what would happen when they passed the point that they would have died of old age? It felt like such a long way away, almost too far into the future to bother worrying about, but Noah couldn’t help but worry about what their fate would be if they were unable to find a cure. Clearly, death hadn’t been the end for the poor guy that had been entombed here.
“I wish we could talk to whoever made this pendant,” Brian said. “I bet they would know all about whatever is happening to us.”
“Also, the coffin has shackles built conveniently right in,” May added. “Shackles are not a normal part of a coffin. Whoever installed them had to know about the dust, or at least they knew enough to be worried about it. They really planned this whole thing out.”
Noah shook his head ruefully. “What were they thinking, not putting warnings up? And a full detailed report on the effects of the dust would’ve been nice.”
May glanced sideways at the stone lid. “There’s some writing carved here. It’s not English, but it’s possible that it’s some form of warning.”
“I saw the writing earlier but kind of assumed it was just the name of the person,” Brian said, peering over. “I guess that would be a stupidly long name though. Maybe it is a warning.”
May took her phone out to take a picture of it. “If we can figure out what language it is, we can probably translate it.”
“Oh, good idea,” Brian said.
May smiled and slid off the coffin. “Alright, enough’s enough. Let’s get out of here.”
“Time to find out if the entire town has been infected,” Leah said brightly. “Hey, if everyone’s sick, then there’s no reason to close stores, right? Maybe the Corner Market will be open after all.”
“I don’t think we should be hoping that everyone has gotten sick just so that we have an easier time buying batteries,” Brian scolded her.
“Eh, I didn’t say I was ‘hoping’ for anything. But you’re right that it would be convenient.”
They gathered the five empty candle casings off the floor and exited the mausoleum. Nobody noticed the small pile of ash that used to be Noah’s finger.
I should tell them that I need to eat, he thought. But then they might not want me to go into town, and I really don’t want to settle for eating another random animal.
They set off along the trail.