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soil had been dug recently; I could smell it in the vaporous air. There was no grass on the site, just messily-packed dirt. An earthworm writhed through the clumps of damp soil. Whether there was a casket in the mound was hard to say. “This grave looks like it's been messed with.”
    Joe hesitated. “Maybe. Coulda been one of the ones that got dug up. Then again, maybe someone just got buried in it.”
    “Maybe...” I walked around the grave.
    A flash of intuition hit me like a two-by-four to the base of the skull. My pulse started pounding and my stomach tickled vaguely with something like dread. I blinked repeatedly in the moonlight, wondering if I'd missed something, but repeated perusals of the gravesite yielded nothing.
    The threat was felt, but not seen.
    “Feel that?” I asked Joe, resting against the tombstone and casting a long gaze about the graveyard. This feeling reminded me of the strange pang of fear I'd felt the night before, when walking to Ken's party. We'd seen my old teacher shambling down the street then; a teacher I could've sworn was long dead, and buried.
    That was when it clicked.
    “Shit. I'm picking up a bad vibe here.” I turned, finding only confusion on Joe's face. He wasn't on the same wavelength. Whatever was making my spine tingle was totally lost on him. “I think we're about to have company.”
    No sooner did I say that did a humanoid shadow lumber around the corner of the mausoleum.
    Technically, I'd already seen a zombie once. My teacher, the dead one, had walked past the two of us the night before. The one that approached us in the graveyard now was different, though. Where the first had still retained the bulk of his humanity, this thing was a sickening husk. Years in the ground had allowed the skin to dry out and settle close to the bones. The creature's movements were especially creaky and unsteady; years upon years of atrophy and degradation can do that. What I was looking at was only a grotesque impression of a human being; I couldn't even consider it a person.
    The rags it wore were so ragged and worm-eaten that they scarcely covered anything. Here and there the body had degraded enough to reveal bone, and as it stepped forward in the moonlight with an animalistic curiosity, I got a good look at what was left of its face.
    Spoiler alert: There wasn't much.
    The bulk of its face had rotted away, leaving empty sockets for eyes, a set of bared, jagged teeth and a pus-laden nub where a nose had once been.
    I turned and faced the thing. Beside me, Joe whipped open his lighter, the flame dancing higher and higher as he prepared to launch a strike. “Hey there, young man. A little late for a stroll through the graveyard, don't you think?” I said.
    The creature made a noise. It wasn't a happy noise; I doubt that it was laughing at my joke. It was more like a death rattle, the sound of dry bones scraping against one another in the hollows of its body.
    And then it lunged.
    Something so frail and desiccated as this shouldn't have been capable of such speed, but it rushed forward suddenly, without any build-up, so that it very nearly succeeded in taking a swipe at me.
    Thankfully, Joe had been on his toes. With a wave of his hand, the flame had burst from the lighter and sailed into the zombie like a fireball. The creature was thrown back, landing in the grass, where it shrieked and burned to cinders within the space of several seconds.
    I was about to pat Joe on the back and congratulate him on the expert kill when something else shuffled out of the darkness.
    The zombie had brought friends.
    One, two, three more zombies ambled towards us, and were then joined by several more. All told, there must have been about a dozen. I couldn't tell just where they were coming from; the wave of oncoming bodies made it so that I couldn't approach the mausoleum without getting swarmed. The creatures existed in varying states of decomposition. Here was a young woman who barely looked dead. If not