May sucked in a gasp and dropped the pendant back into the coffin, stumbling back. Leah and Noah simultaneously fell backwards in surprise.

The cloud expanded quickly, billowing out of the wide-open box and filling the small enclosed space with a smoky haze. Noah pulled his shirt up to cover his nose and mouth, creeping forward to stare in horror as the body started shuddering and pulling against its metal bonds.

“What the hell?” Brian yelped from the far wall, seeing smoke fill the space. “What did you do?”

“May did something dumb,” Noah tried to say, but started coughing instead.

He broke off with a choking noise as the corpse’s flimsy, sunken eyelids pulled open to reveal gaping skeletal sockets. The lack of eyeballs did nothing to lessen the feeling that it was somehow staring straight at him. It pressed itself forward, lifting its torso a few inches off the base of the coffin before falling back. It leaned back and forth, suddenly managing to pull one its shriveled hands free of its metal shackle, and the undead creature clawed itself into an upward position, grasping Noah’s shirt before he could escape its range.

Noah shuddered at its touch and wrenched himself violently away. He couldn’t get free of its grasp, though, and began to panic as the corpse tugged him closer to the coffin. He wrapped both his hands around the thing’s wrist and heaved away mightily, but simply could not overcome the dead creature’s unnatural strength.

Brian had started screaming at some point, and now he ran up beside Noah and started punching the corpse wildly, punctuating each blow with a yell. It didn’t seem to mind overly much, ignoring Brian’s gallant efforts. When Brian realized his attack was not as successful as he had hoped, he switched tactics and began attempting to pull Noah away from the cadaver’s grasp instead. It craned its neck towards him, opening its maw hungrily.

By now the smoke pouring from the pendant had begun to peter off, and after a moment Noah realized the corpse was starting to weaken as well. He felt a surge of hope, feeling the thing’s grip loosen before the battle came to a sudden end as the body went slack. It unceremoniously slid limply back into the coffin, its head rolling to the side. The pendant clattered and belched a few last clouds of dust into the air.

Brian and Noah fell to the floor, gasping for breath.

“I don’t think I can take any more,” Noah said, flopping onto his back. “Two near-death experiences in one night is too much.”

Brian was shuddering all over. “That was terrible.” He looked around, finding Leah and May cowering wide-eyed against the far wall, and pointed at them. “One of you get this coffin closed. Maybe burn the body in there before you close it, actually.”

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For a few moments, neither of them moved, but then Leah slowly stepped forward and approached the coffin. She skirted around it nervously, looking sideways at the motionless body within. She screwed up her face unhappily, then seemed to summon her courage and stepped gingerly up onto the rim of the stone coffin. From there she reached up to the statue on the wall and clicked its tongue back down into its original position, then quickly hopped back to the floor as the coffin’s lid began to slide shut.

They all watched the gap slowly close, only relaxing once the corpse inside was sealed away once more.

“So, what just actually happened?” Noah said after a minute. “Because last I checked, dead things are supposed to stay dead.”

“And the pendant, too. What was that?” Leah asked.

“I think we found something we shouldn’t have,” May said quietly. “You saw those shackles on the corpse, right? Whoever laid it to rest here knew something was wrong with it. This might look like a mausoleum, but it’s really a prison.”

“A prison for the dead,” Brian said, and shivered again.

Noah exhaled and watched the dust in the air swirl around in response. “We probably shouldn’t be breathing this stuff in.”

“You think?” Brian said, shooting him a look.

Leah glanced towards the door. “The wolves are still howling out there. If we leave this room, we’re right back where we started.”

Noah turned toward Brian. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any gas masks in that backpack of yours.”

His friend sighed. “You suppose right. If we get out of this I’m definitely getting a couple, though.”

“For the next time we find ourselves in the burial places of the cursed dead, huh?” Leah said, elbowing him.

He coughed and pushed her away. “Obviously.”

Leah sighed and leaned against the wall, sliding down it until she was sitting on the floor. “How about water?”

“That, I do have,” Brian said, procuring a bottle and tossing it over. “Drink whatever you want, I’ve got a bunch.”

Noah picked up his hand warmer from the floor. He had dropped it when the zombie had lunged at him. It was still quite hot, so he held it to his chest with both hands with a sigh. He hadn’t felt the cold while he was fighting for his life, but now that he was calming down the chill was quickly becoming perceptible to him once more. Laying on the floor as he was, the cold was quickly leaching into him through the stone, but he didn’t bother to get up.

“I guess we’re going to be sleeping in here tonight,” he said. “If we can get to sleep in the first place.”

“Not sure how likely that is,” Brian said with a glance at the coffin standing ominously across the room.

Even with the lid sealed shut, none of them could forget the thing inside, separated from them by just a few inches of stone. It had seemed to be dormant in the last moments before the lid slid over it, hiding its desiccated form, but who knew if that dormancy was permanent. It had displayed such great strength that Noah had no trouble at all imagining it suddenly pressing the lid off the coffin and crawling out to consume them all.

Despite these anxious thoughts, he eventually closed his eyes and was overcome by sleep.