The Native Star by M K Hobson Read Free Book Online Page A

the rock, breathing hard. She reached out, trying to squeeze past her zombie attackers, but the one with the pick clutched at the loose end of one of her long braids. It yanked her back hard, forcing her to her knees. The pick gleamed above her.
    Desperately, she grasped for anything she could strike out with. A gleam caught her eye. She lunged for it, and her hand fell upon the blue gemstone.
    The moment her fingers touched it, everything changed. She could perceive everything with complete clarity. The texture of the walls. The sound of Stanton’s breathing. The bright metal head of the pick soaring down to split her skull. Faster than thought, she rolled to one side as the pick struck sparks on the rock by her ear. Dumb and dizzy, she grabbed one of the zombie’s leather-dry legs. If she could just knock it off balance …
    … and in an instant, the thing collapsed to the ground, the pick clattering against rock, the end of her braid still clenched in its bony fist. She struggled to free herself, but the second corpse gave her no chance; it clawed at her arm, but the moment its dead flesh touched hers, it shuddered and stilled, falling across her in a slimy heap.
    Then, all was silent but for the sound of Emily’s tattered breath and the roaring of her heart in her ears. The next thing she knew, Stanton had shoved aside the no-longer undead and was slapping her cheeks, even though she thought it perfectly obvious that she was completely awake.
    “Stop it,” she snapped, pushing him away. “I’m … I’m fine. What happened?”
    “I couldn’t get them all.” Stanton’s voice was distant and hollow. “How did you manage to …”
    “I don’t know,” Emily said. “They just … fell down.”
    She felt funny, drifting and warm and oddly light. She lifted a hand to brush a dirty lock of hair from her face and noticed that the strange blue stone seemed to have become stuck to her palm.
    No, Emily thought, “stuck to” wasn’t right. “Embedded in” was a more precise description. The stone had somehow worked its way entirely through her hand, a roundish lump protruding from her palm. She looked at it quizzically, turning her hand over slowly; the gem protruded from the back of her hand as well. She held her hand up to Stanton’s torch. The light glowed through the stone as if it were a piece of cobalt glass. The thin threads of white shimmered.
    “My word!” Stanton’s brow wrinkled. He put down the torch and took Emily’s hand, touching the stone with both thumbs. “Does it hurt?”
    “It does with you pawing at it like that!” Emily jerked her hand away. Then she noticed Stanton staring at her face.
    “What?” she asked.
    “Your eyes,” Stanton murmured. “They’ve gone all black.”
    But there was no time for further discussion of Emily’s eyes, for there was a skin-crawling shriek from the mine’s depths, and then another—long protracted shrieks that were coming closer with alarming rapidity.
    “There are more of them down there?” Stanton said.
    “Last I heard, Old China had well over a hundred zombies,” Emily said.
    “Let’s not stay to count.”
    In a sudden flash of panic, Emily reached to feel the back of her head. Her mother’s hair sticks were gone. Scrabbling on her hands and knees, she ran her hands over the dark mine floor, pushing aside corpses, groping around underneath them.
    “What are you doing?”
    “My hair sticks!”
    Stanton reached down and grabbed her arm. He tried to pull her to her feet, but she jerked away from him, and in that instant she saw the sticks glimmer in the light of his torch. Grabbing them, she caught Stanton’s sleeve and they raced up the tunnel. The shrieks of the undead were louder now. The corpses were moving fast, but she could smell fresh, cold air up ahead.
    “We have to block the entrance!” Emily said as they emerged into icy moonlight. She pointed at the rocks over the mine entrance. “Magic those rocks down!”
    Stanton