Chris Grabenstein - The Smoky Corridor

He fought the slant by jamming his butt up against the ceiling and scrabbling forward on his elbows and knees.

He was only three feet up the tube when he heard a slobbery snarl below him.

But the thing did not climb in after him.

Maybe that weird tattoo was some kind of stop sign for giant gophers. Whatever. Kurt was out of the slide and in the room with the dirt floor.

He was going to live.

Jennings, too.

No way was Kurt Snertz sliding back down this coal chute to kill the wuss.

Not with a rabid gopher with laser-beam eyeballs growling up his butt.

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Zipper, hispaws poised on the first step, barked his warning bark up the staircase.

“He’s back,” said Zack.

“Is he coming down the stairs?” asked Malik.

Zack leaned over Zip. Listened hard. All he heard was some distant grumbling, like a caged lion eager to escape from the zoo.

“I think we’re safe for now,” said Zack. “We just need to find a way out of here.”

“Well, we can’t go out the way we came in.”

Zack shone his flashlight around. “Let’s keep moving forward. And, Malik?”

“Yes, Zack?”

“Thanks for figuring out the code.”

“Well, I had a little time to kill.…”

Now they both heard the zombie growling angrily behind them.

But just as the pocket watches said, he didn’t come down the left-hand tunnel after them.

97

Kurt Snertzran out of the janitor’s closet.

“You there!”

It was the new janitor, dressed like a golfer, and the blond history teacher, the one who was always busting Kurt’s chops.

“Have you seen Zack Jennings?” the janitor asked.

“Maybe.”

“Where is he?” asked the teacher.

“Why?”

“We have reason to believe,” said the janitor, “that Mr. Jennings brought his dog to school today.”

“Yeah. He did. Is he in trouble?”

“Big trouble,” said the teacher. “Detention hall for life!”

“Awesome. He went in there.” Kurt pointed toward the door he’d just come through. “There’s like this other room connected to the first room and then there’s this hole in the wall that leads to a—”

The teacher and the janitor didn’t wait to hear the rest.

They shoved open the closet door and, from the sound of it, knocked over a bunch of boxes and plastic jugs as they made their way to the room with the dirt floor.

Man, they must want to punish Jennings bad!

98

Captain Pettimorefinally piloted his new body to the boiler room and the smokestack chamber, his final defense against any intruders.

Now he saw an unknown man stoking the firebox.

“Who in blazes are you?” he had Azalea say for him.

The man turned around and Captain Pettimore could tell: He wasn’t a man anymore. He had the unstaring, unseeing, unfocused eyes of a soulless zombie.

“Who turned you, boy? Who is your bokor? Your voodoo sorcerer?”

“He’s ours, little girl!” two voices answered.

It was the Donnelly brothers. The blustering bully, Joseph, and Seth, the puny little clairvoyant whom the ghost of John Lee Cooper had once used to communicate with his kin, that foolish math teacher Patrick J. Cooper, one of the many Coopers to come north over the years to try to claim the captain’s gold as their own.

In short, the Donnelly boys had aided and abetted his sworn enemies! He had Azalea sneer at them. “I am Horace P. Pettimore! How’d you two worthless souls master the voodoo to raise a zombie from the dead?”

“We didn’t have to!” said the one called Joseph. “Yours bit the poor feller. Ain’t that so, zombie?”

The zombie stood there drooling.

“Answer my brother,” said the small one, Seth.

“Yes, master.”

“Well done, Seth,” Pettimore jeered through Azalea’s lips. “You taught your zombie to speak. Bravo. You should know, then, that his fate is forever linked to the fate of the slave I call McNulty.”

“Huh?” said the brutish boy, Joseph.

“If anything were to happen to my zombie, why, yours would simply become a man again, because you did not trap his soul in a jar, did you?”

“We didn’t need to!”

That made Pettimore grin. “Perhaps. But I always found it wise to keep one’s possessions tightly sealed and hidden away. Now, if you will excuse me …”

“Talking’s not the only thing our zombie knows how to do, pal!” boasted Joseph. “Now that your spirit is walking around inside the body of a little girl, my brother can have his zombie rip you to shreds and eat out your brain.”

“That’s right,” said Seth. “I can!”

Pettimore made the girl’s lips curl even higher. “I’d like to see you try.”

Seth hesitated. He clearly lacked the bloodlust to be a ruthless slave driver.

His brother, however, did not.

“Sic him, Seth! Do it now!”

“But she’s a girl.…”

Pettimore laughed.

Perhaps that was a mistake.

Anger flared in the younger ghost’s eyes. “Kill her!”

“Yes, master.”

The zombie lurched forward.

Pettimore had Azalea calmly show the zombie the amulet dangling off her necklace:

It was the same symbol he used to corral his own zombie, to keep McNulty from straying where he did not want the beast to go.

“What is that chicken-scratching?” asked Joseph.

Pettimore had Azalea chuckle. “You two fresh fish have much to learn if you ever hope to become true voodoo masters. This is the veve of Baron Samedi, a loa of Haitian voodoo!”

“A what?”

“He is one of the mystères, the invisibles, the saints of the voodoo religion! Baron Samedi is the loa of the dead! It is he who ferries souls to the underworld. No zombie dare anger him or attack a human under Samedi’s protection!”

The zombie backed away.

“Now, boys, if you will excuse me.…”

Captain Pettimore had the girl walk over to the boiler and open the fourth firebox door on the furnace below, the door with flames painted on its glass window because it wasn’t really a firebox at all. Pettimore had Azalea lift the latch and crawl inside. This part of the furnace was cold, an insulated cubbyhole with a bank safe for its floor, making it a trapdoor—if you knew the combination to the lock.

Captain Pettimore, of course, did. In fact, he was the one who, more than a century ago, had etched it into the steel walls.

CE-18, P-12, W-18

A simple back-and-forth numbers-letters code that translated to 35-R, 16-L, 23-R.

He opened the door in the floor and made Azalea climb down the ladder riveted to the wall.

“I’ll be downstairs, lads. Collecting my treasure!”

99

Judy andGeorge pulled into the driveway at the front of the school.

They had already driven around the cemetery loop road and hadn’t seen Zack, the teacher, or anybody.

“Maybe they went back to a classroom,” said George as they climbed out of the car with their pizza boxes.

“Would they let Zipper go into the school?”

“Maybe.…” Then George stuck a thumb and forefinger into his mouth and let out a piercing whistle, the kind that could stop taxicabs in Times Square.

Judy almost dropped her pizza.

“He usually comes when I whistle like that,” George explained.

Judy’s ears were ringing.

She’d be surprised if the whistle didn’t wake the dead people back in the cemetery!

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