Alex pushed his hand down into the shifting sand — nearly shaking hands with an emerging mummy in the process — and struggled to his feet. He took hold of his mom’s wrist. “Ready?” he shouted over the rumbling din.

She nodded, and he leaned back and heaved her to her feet. Her face was stoic and determined despite the pain, and that gave Alex strength, too.

“Here,” he said, holding out the scarab. “It’s yours, and you’re better with it, anyway. Maybe you can hold them off.” Alex had seen what his mom could do with the scarab during their last clash with The Order, and it was awesome. His mom reached out, but as soon as her hand closed around the ancient artifact, her eyes rolled back in her head and she tipped backward toward the shifting sand.

Alex reached out and grabbed her arm just in time to keep her from falling. Her pulse was racing like a drum solo beneath her skin. The supercharged boost the amulet imparted — the pounding pulse and surging adrenaline — was too much for his mom’s weakened system. The realization that she was hurt even worse than she was letting on hit him like a baseball bat. He reached over and pried the scarab from her hand.

As she recovered from the rush, gasping for breath, Alex hooked his arm around her waist and led her forward gently — or as gently as he could in the rumbling tumult all around. After years of her taking care of him — worrying over every ache and cough and fall — it was his turn. He kept his grip tight and his eyes on the death-torn ground.

“Which way?” shouted Luke, hustling over to help Todtman to his feet.

“There!” called Ren, pointing.

Alex followed her finger and saw sunlight reflecting off a lump of glass and steel in the distance — a car!

They hobbled toward it, not walking as much as continually falling forward. All around them, gaps and chasms yawned open in the sand, and leathery hands grabbed at anything solid. Even worse, some of the mummies were beginning to pull themselves out of the ground entirely.

As Alex concentrated on keeping his mom upright, a squat, five-foot human husk turned to stare at him through empty, faintly glowing eye sockets. But the mummy made no move toward Alex and his mom as they labored past. It just stood in the sun, swaying slightly and dripping sand.

“How old do you think these are?” he asked his mom, trying to keep her distracted from the pain.

She assessed the swaying corpse. “Twenty-five hundred years. The first of these mass graves was only discovered recently, but they seem to be mostly from the Late Period.”

Alex remembered when the first of the grave sites had been discovered. It was just a few years earlier, right before his shaky health had forced him to start homeschooling — and long before his magical recovery. It had been the talk of the Met break room: the discovery of hundreds of thousands of mummified bodies. They had no treasure or tombs of their own, just the occasional coin or trinket tucked into their wrappings and a big shared hole in the ground.

The friends weaved their way through the legions of the dead, acres of Egypt’s former middle class.

“Why aren’t they attacking?” called Ren.

“Give ’em time,” hollered Luke. “They had a rough trip!”

Alex eyed a wraithlike mummy, its long arms hanging down like willow branches. Is that it? he thought. Are they just recharging, like solar cells in the desert sun?

Sweat ran down his forehead and into his eyes. His shirt was plastered slickly against his back, and his left arm ached as he tried to carry as much of his mom’s weight as possible. Her jagged breathing gave him a sick, worried feeling that lay on top of his own fear like two feet of mud.

The glare from the glass washed across his eyes, snapping him back to attention. What he’d hoped was a parking lot full of sleek getaway cars was, in fact, a single battered old minivan on a small square of cracked pavement.

Todtman limped straight for the driver’s-side door. Another jolt rocked the ground, extending the long cracks in the pavement. Alex crouched down low, but the tremors were subsiding now, the earth moving fitfully as it settled.

The entire landscape between them and the tomb exit was now covered with swaying bodies, like a windblown grassland of the dead. Here and there stragglers clawed up from the sand to join them, the mummies already on the surface stooping down to haul them free.

“There must be ten thousand of them,” Alex said, his voice soft with awe.

“And it’s not over yet,” said his mom, pointing out into the desert where still more of the undead were emerging an acre or two at a time.

“They seem to be waiting for something,” said Todtman.

He was right. A moment later, the leader — Alex’s father — emerged from the same tomb exit they had used.

The raggedly wrapped and mismatched bodies stopped swaying and began to line up in neat rows.

“Groups of twenty,” said Ren, counting quickly.

Even across hundreds of yards and with thousands of mummies between them, the leader’s massive frame stood out like a park statue. He raised one mighty hand in the air, and the tattered soldiers of the undying army snapped rigidly to attention for their general.

A cold and exposed feeling swept over Alex: the overwhelming sensation of being watched. He couldn’t see his father’s eyes at this distance, but he could definitely feel them.

Fuhhh-SHOOOOP!

It was the sound of one hundred dry bodies turning as one. The five units closest to the parking lot had simultaneously dug their left heels into the sand and turned crisply toward the gawking friends.

“I think we should go now,” said Todtman.

Behind them, one hundred unkillable soldiers rushed forward.

Alex helped his mom across the cracked pavement toward the battered minivan. He gripped her tight and used all his strength to haul her forward. But her injuries had taken their toll. The toe of her left boot caught in a crack as she dragged it heavily over the pavement, and they both went down in a heap.

Alex risked a quick look behind them. The undead were coming. With old bones and dry flesh, most of them were running none too fluidly, either. But there was one moving faster than the rest, fired forward from their ranks like a missile. Alex wrapped his arms around his mom and tried to haul her from the pavement.

Suddenly, strong arms grabbed him. Alex prepared to be torn limb from limb — but it was Luke. He’d come back for them and was now lifting both his cousin and his aunt to their feet.

“Let’s go!” he shouted. “Bauer power!”

They stumbled up and forward. “Watch out,” said Alex. With his hands supporting his mom, he couldn’t grasp his scarab and could only nod at the lone mummy approaching ahead of the pack.

“I got him,” said Luke.

Alex looked at him skeptically. Maybe if I can get one hand on the scarab …

“Get your mom to the van, man!” shouted Luke. “I said I got this.”

As Alex turned and hustled his mom toward the minivan, he could already hear the bony slaps of the sprinting mummy’s feet against the pavement.

Todtman and Ren were in the van now, the big side door wide open. “Come on, Mom,” he said. “Just a little farther.”

Her reply was cut off by a hoarse cry from the onrushing mummy, and Alex turned his head back just as the sprinting corpse crashed into Luke. “No!” gasped Alex.

Instead of avoiding the mummy’s grasp, Luke grasped it right back. As he did, he whipped his shoulders around and ducked down, using all of the ragged creature’s momentum to toss it over his hip. “Aiyah!” he shouted.

Suddenly, the mummy’s dry old bones were bouncing across the cracked pavement — and Alex and his mom were arriving at the minivan. Alex heard the engine start up — coaxed to life by Todtman’s amulet — and saw Ren’s hands reach out from the side door to help his mom in. He looked back for Luke, who was bending down to pick up something shiny from the asphalt. Behind him, the first mummy was already climbing back to its feet — and ninety-nine more were rushing onto the lot.

“Get over here!” shouted Alex.

Luke palmed his shiny find and rushed for the door.

Alex climbed in after his mom as the minivan began rolling. Luke leapt into the open door as the lumbering vehicle began a slow turn toward the road. Alex leaned back and did his best to catch his cousin as he thumped down inside.

Ren slammed the door closed and Todtman stomped on the gas.

He ran over two mummies who’d managed to get in front of them. The van rose up and down on its old shock absorbers to a sound track of sickening crunches. But a moment later, they were up to full speed and pulling away from the rest of the pack. Todtman wrestled the lumbering vehicle around a sharp turn and off the lot.

Open road stretched out ahead, and the fields of the undead disappeared in the rearview mirror. Alex helped his mom settle into the bench seat in the back of the van.

“Just need to rest a little,” she said.

“I know,” he said. Her battered body needed to shut down to heal. Sick for almost his whole life, he knew all about that. He spied a dusty horseshoe-shaped travel pillow hooked around the armrest and handed it to her. She placed it between her injured ribs and the seat. Soon, her eyes fluttered closed and her ragged breathing calmed slightly.

Alex wiped the first trace of a tear from his eye, exhaled, and returned to the first row of seats. He watched the road disappear under the minivan’s wheels. There were other cars on the road now, a freeway entrance up ahead. They were back in the real world.

Next stop, “the seat of power,” he thought. Even though The Order members had managed to assume their Stone Warrior forms, the Spells could still end all this, could send the undead back to the afterlife and shut the doors for good. But he knew the mummies and Walkers weren’t the only ones who could be undone by the Spells …

He shook his head hard, trying to clear the thought away. Then he turned to his cousin. “Thanks, man,” he said. “You really came through back there.”

Even Ren chimed in. “Yeah, that was pretty cool of you,” she admitted. “That mummy was going like a thousand miles an hour.”

Luke just shrugged. “Judo, yo,” he said. “It’s awesome cross-training.” His attention was on the shiny object swinging from a rusty chain in his hand.

“Is that what you picked up off the pavement?” asked Alex.

“Yeah,” said Luke, still not taking his eyes off it. “It came flying out of that mummy’s wrapping when I hip-tossed him. Pretty cool, right?”

Alex nodded. He knew that mummies were often buried with amulets and other charms tucked into their wrappings.

This one was in the form of a cheetah, the world’s fastest animal.