The Grave Mistress

The heart-shaped locket swings from the chain around her fingertips. It’s almost a dowsing method that she’s constructed, the metal calling to the blood seeping into the earth below her feet. She breathes in the stale air that tastes of fumes and rot, a mixture known only to a dying earth.

"Miss Amalda,” her latest assistant, a boy named Burk, says, “do we need the lantern out?”

Amalda eyes the setting sun just beyond the trees. “Not yet,” she says. “The dead seem quiet tonight.”

Burk doesn’t look so sure, but he listens to her. She’s done the rounds of the nearby graveyards for years, all to ensure that no Risers escape. It was once a lonely job because the Council did not want to spare working bodies to the threat the Risers posed.

She doesn’t blame them for being cautious. The last assistant, a young girl named Mari, had been too quick to go the way of the soil when a hand grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her below. Amalda still remembered the girl’s final screams before she was dragged beneath the earth, never to be seen again.

Amalda said her blessings each night, hoping that Mari found some peace rather than becoming one of the restless dead.

“Miss Amalda?” Burk asks, worry running like a vein through his wavering voice.

Amalda sighs, though the sound mingles with the wind and gets lost in it. “We just need some more time,” she says. “There has to be a cure out there somewhere.”

A cure—the thing she’s been waiting on, the hope that’s always in the back of her mind. If only the Risers could be eradicated and left to their eternal slumber, then maybe she too might know some peace.

She’s not the only graveminder: she knows each faction of the world has its own team of few who can keep the Risers from over-running what remained of ordinary life. But she is the only one who volunteered for the job. Everywhere else had specialists, scientists, doctors, coroners; Amalda herself was a former housewife who saw the world erupt into war from the safety of her home feeds.

Only when her husband never came home from the last war did she seek training as a graveminder. The Great Rising—the day the earth lost its last hold on what remained of normalcy—had been the thing to ensure peace talks of the war resolved. The graveminders were supposed to be only temporary guides to make sure the world did not collapse in on itself from the weight of such recurring travesties.

Three years. Three long years it had been. Three years spinning down for a final tale of earth—and it was looking less and less like earth would come out triumphant.

“Miss Amalda, are you all right?”

She offers a vague smile in Burk’s direction. He is such a nervous thing, the way he trembles through each moment of the day, but she has a fondness for him. It’s not hard to imagine that she might have had a son like him someday, if the universe had been kinder.

“Just musing,” she says. “Never envy the old, Burk. The memories become burdens after a while.”

Burk opens his mouth to say something, but his words are lost in the noise of a guttural moan piercing through the air.

It’s instinct that makes Amalda grab hold of her staff as a Riser claws its way out of a grave just behind Burk. By the time the Riser has its head aboveground, Amalda has pushed Burk behind her. The locket falls out of her grasp into the darkness. She swings the staff at the Riser, cutting through the rotting flesh of its neck.

Not even a full minute has passed, yet the Riser falls as if it was just another task of the hour.

But when she glances back at Burk, she sees him shaking so hard that she worries he’s going into shock. It’s hard to tell, but she thinks she might have even relieved himself out of fear and nerves. She feels pity for him, but there’s also a spark of anger too. Softness cannot be tolerated in a world struggling to survive like theirs is.

“If you need to go home early, I understand,” she says.

He shakes his head, but she knows it’s just another front. His friends might laugh at him if they find out he left his graveminding shift early. She doesn’t blame him for wanting to appear stronger than he is.

She claps her hand on his shoulder. “Go home, Burk,” she says. “I can handle the rest of the night on my own.”

Even in the dark, she can see how Burk looks ready to break down into tears. “Thank you, Miss Amalda. Thank you. I’ll try to be better tomorrow.”

Then the boy leaves, back to his microcosm of a still-functioning world, and Amalda lights the lantern left behind. The shadows crawl away from the warm glow.

Sometimes she wonders if it might be better to die at the hands of a Riser than to continue living in a world that has no true hope left. Already the spaceships full of uninfected, vetted individuals are fleeting the planet while she and all the rest wait for the final bell to toll.

Graveminding is just one last stand. In a few months, there will be more Risers than graveminders. In a few months, the human race on earth may be just another lost population in the span of the universe.

In the dark, she retrieves the locket—the last thing she received from her husband. She clutches it close to her chest and allows a shuddering breath to pass through her lips. When did living become such a hard thing to do? When did surviving seem like the greatest futility of all?

She is so lost in her thoughts that she does not hear the soil begin to shift nearby. All her training may as well mean nothing in that moment.

When the gray hand wraps around her throat, all she has is one last gasp of recognition before the stars go out.