by Chuck Wendig
What was going on? None of it made sense. This was some kind of fever dream. He never woke up. Clearly—plainly!—he remained down in the dark, trapped in the throes of some undead nightmare.
Still, this all felt pretty goddamned real.
Coburn tried to find focus as the panic inside him was boiling what little useful blood he had in the cauldron of his vampire’s body.
He gritted his teeth so hard together he thought his fangs would snap. What time was it? How soon was dawn? No telling. What to do? Wait here? Wait the rest of the night as his body rendered the blood inside inert? Or go? Go and risk the dawn, the dark, the dead city?
“Fuck it,” he said. Coburn wasn’t a timid creature. He wasn’t a church mouse—hell, he ate church mice like they were Jalapeno peppers. Standing around like this, he might as well go and shove one of those antlers up his ass. The time for thinking was over. The time for doing had begun.
No windows in this room—no use having windows in a theater. But up above, he did see a vent.
That was where he had to go. Up.
The theater curtains—red, ratty, moth-eaten—felt uncertain in his grip, like they might fall apart at any moment, but when he tugged on them, they held. And so Coburn began to climb. For him the task offered little struggle: he wasn’t some gawky teen hauling his bony butt up the rope in gym class. He was a vampire. That afforded him abilities and powers others could only dream of.
When he reached the top of the curtain, he kicked out with his legs, swung over and caught the ridged vent cover with his (remaining) fingers. He pried it off with a twist of his wrist, and then crawled up into the ventilation system.
Up top, the air didn’t smell so thick with the stench of death. Coburn elbowed open the vent and wriggled free like a worm escaping from a foul apple, and he took a deep breath up here. The breath did little for him; fuck oxygen, because his vampire’s body could thrive only on blood, but even still it was good to exercise those dead bladder lungs of his, if only to draw scent from the air.
And here it smelled clean.
Or cleaner, at least.
No time to dwell.
The rooftop gravel crunched under foot as he hurried to the building’s ledge. The darkness of the city below struck him. New York had always been a vibrant, living thing: a bleary neon beast with arteries of light and blood, a monster that never slumbered, a city that was as much a vampire as he was, awakening at night to drink the life of the weak.
And now, it had been rendered a dark ruin.
The moon rose fat above, highlighting distant windows—some broken, some not—but the rest of the city lay covered in shadow. Just black shapes. Silhouettes.
He couldn’t be the only one.
It couldn’t all be dead.
If it was…
Well. No time to contemplate that. No time to think about how without blood he’d turn into a dried strip of vampire jerky. That was not a future he decided to entertain.
Had to be blood out there.
He lifted his chin, urged his lungs to suck in a powerful breath through his nose—scents on the wind, the commingled odors of death. But somewhere beyond it all, he could smell a flower pushing up through broken concrete, he could detect a rat taking a piss on a ledge, he could smell a faint lingering whiff of gasoline…
There. It lit up his dead synapses like a circuit-board. Suddenly his gut clenched, ripples of want and need and I’ll tear down this dead city to get it wrenching his esophagus closed. He felt like a dog watching his master eat: if he could have drooled, he would have.
On the wind, the faintest aroma of blood.
Human blood.
Vibrant and bright and alive. But far off, too. Distant, like the Dog Star.
Just then: a hiss down and to his right.
One of them—let’s just say it, he thought, it’s an undead motherfucking smells-like-a-roadkilled-possum-stuffed-with-gorgonzola-cheese asshole zombie prick—lay against the ledge. Except, this one didn’t smell bad—or, at least, not like the others. This one was practically mummified. Skin like that of fried chicken. Eyes white and bright. Teeth, too, like white pebbles in the dry cavern of its mouth. Lips pulled back. Gums just hard, parched nubs. Couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. It just lay there, moving only its head, snapping its teeth in his direction. Equal parts ‘comical’ and ‘pathetic.’
Maybe the sun did this. Thing got trapped up here. It wandered. The sun cooked it down, dried it out.
Coburn kicked it in the head.
The head came off easy as anything. Like flicking a seed pod off a dry stalk. It broke apart, the crispy head shards spinning off into darkness.
Down in the theater, one rot-fuck got a hoof through the temple. The other caught an antler up under the chin. This one stopped moving when he booted its head off the roof.
“Just like in the movies,” he said. “Aim for the head, they go dead.”
The rhyme pleased him, if only a little.
He turned, once again looked at the moon. It had already begun its descent toward the horizon. He didn’t have long until morning.
Two hours, maybe? Three, at best.
He stood at the edge, caught that scent of blood once more. It waited for him out there. Out beyond Riverside Drive. Out beyond the river itself. Wouldn’t be far. He could make it. If only it really were like the movies, he could think real hard, squeeze his butt-cheeks real tight, and—poof!—turn into a bat and flutter away without a second thought. But vampires, they couldn’t fly.
Though they sure could jump.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Deader of Two Evils
Coburn leapt roof-to-roof, a shape blacker than the night itself. He did so silently, the only sound being the thump-and-crunch of boots striking rooftops. Not every roof was parallel—sometimes he crashed hard into a fire escape, then bolted his way up to the rooftop. Not fifteen minutes later he stood atop a ten-story walk-up, the roof home to a pigeon coop whose only inhabitants were a morose display of long-dead birds, matted feathers hanging from rust-colored bones. The vampire didn’t stop to admire the attraction.
From here it would be easy: this was the Upper West Side. From this roof to the river, he could plan his journey above the city with ease—in the moonlight he could see a path cut between the too-tall buildings, a path that would let him take a slow descent. At least, until he got to Riverside Drive: there, the buildings shot up again to ensure that the hoitiest, toitiest New York citizens got a view of the river. Of course, all those citizens were now food for the living dead. Or were perhaps themselves the living dead—Coburn didn’t have to time to worry about the mechanics of it, as to whether this was somehow viral or bacteriological or mystical or whether it maybe fell from the sky as part of some kind of alien meteor. Didn’t matter and so he didn’t care. Wasn’t his fault, so—fuck it.
Once he hit Riverside, he’d drop to the ground, cross Riverside Park, and throw his own ass into the river. The air here was cold, but not wintry—he suspected it was spring, or just on the cusp of it—but it wouldn’t matter anyway. Temperature changes had little effect on his body. As long as it had blood in it, his body would self-regulate. He went to the doctors once on a lark, just to see what his temperature was: 89.8F. A lot lower than the average living human, and to most his skin felt icy—the ‘chill of the grave,’ he’d say, with a bullshit Bela Lugosi accent to go with it. But to him, he always felt hot. Feverish. Hungry.
He took another running leap, aiming for an eight-story brownstone—he sailed through the air, legs kicking like he was riding some kind of invisible bike, the wind caught under his coat, that lingering tickle of blood-scent deep in his sinuses—and he landed, looked up, and found himself surrounded by the living dead.
These, like the last one, were mummified: less rotting corpse and more dried-out husk, but unlike the last, these fuckers were all up and walking around. A dozen of them, milling about in a clumsy, drunken moonlit waltz. One in a ratty sweater. Ano
ther in a ruined suit—the fabric once dark and clean, now sun-bleached and tattered at the edges. Over there, a woman wandered around in a dress half-torn off, her shriveled tits like a pair of hog scrotums popping out, each a lifeless, milkless sack. Others shuffled in the dark of the roof.
Coburn landed, tucked, rolled, and stood up in their midst.
They hissed, raspy and wordless, and turned toward him.
He didn’t have the time for a game of zombie grab-ass. Ratty Sweater reached for him and he caught its arm, snapped upwards, the bone splitting—the arm remained connected only by a tenuous, leathery cord of tendon.
“You my dance partner?” Coburn asked. Ratty Sweater’s bulging white eyes stared, offering not a single lick of recognition or cognizance. The vampire jerked Ratty Sweater left, crashing him into Missus Hog Balls—they both went down.
Then they came at him, en masse.
They were slow, and he was fast. Faster than any human. By the time they reached him, he wasn’t even there anymore: he was behind two of them, and he wrapped his arms around their necks, putting them in a headlock.
Coburn squeezed his arms. Their heads popped off with the sound of someone breaking a hard loaf of bread.
Then, because he didn’t want to waste any more time with these assholes, he took off running for the next rooftop.
He leapt. Right leg forward, left leg extended behind him.
Something grabbed his foot.
He pivoted, mid-air, just in time to see Ratty Sweater already back up—the ugly mummy had reached out and caught Coburn by the boot.
Thus ruining any forward momentum he had.
He—along with Ratty Sweater, whose zombie grip on the vampire’s Fluevog boot was unyielding—tumbled down through the darkness.
Vampires? Hard to kill. Or, since they were already dead, hard to destroy. But that didn’t mean they were impervious to harm. Far from it. Their organs didn’t work, no, so it wasn’t like they could suffer liver failure or kidney damage or heart attacks or anything. But their bones were the same bones that humans had. They shattered just as easily. And if you put a bullet in their brain, that vampire would be done for. Game over, good night. All that would be left was to sweep up the greasy ash pile left behind.
No brain bullet here. But even still, Coburn fell eight stories.
With a zombie holding his ankle.
Ratty Sweater hit the ground first. He didn’t explode so much as fold up upon himself, collapsing from head to foot into a cloud of skin-dust. The sweater held together. The rest of him, not so much.
Coburn hit, legs down, landing on his feet like a cat.
This was not ideal. All those movie images of a vampire dropping down from ten stories up and landing in some kick-ass dark hero crouch? Not happening. His boots hit asphalt, and the impact shattered his leg bones; osseous shards thrust through his skin at various angles. Coburn howled some unutterable profanity, some inhuman invective from the most primitive part of his reptilian brain, and then he collapsed to the ground like a house of cards, laying there in the remnants of Ratty Sweater.
He took a moment. Not because he wanted to, but because he had to. For a human to suffer this kind of trauma, well—the human would soon perish or, at the very least, be in traction for the rest of his pathetic life. And thus came the vampire’s edge: yes, Coburn’s bones shattered into a grenade of bleached internal shrapnel, but they damn sure weren’t going to stay that way. Long as he had blood in his body, he could channel the red stuff to his injures and set the life stolen from others to work mending bones and stitching flesh.
But it didn’t happen lickity-split. Quick, yes, but not so quick he’d be up doing a merry jig in a trio of seconds. It would take a few minutes.
He craned his head up and peered through the darkness. This was Broadway. He’d recognize it anywhere: the center lined with trees, now overgrown and spilling out into the street (nature had come to reclaim the city, replacing the asphalt jungle with, well, the jungle jungle). Further down, the shadowy marquees. The defunct buses and taxis, their windows busted out. Here, a Blockbuster video in ruins. There, a shawarma joint now just a darkened cave. The city left for dead. Or rather, for The Dead, because here they came.
They did not move quickly, but they did come without hesitation. Dragging limbs. Drooling fluids. A steady stumble, a certain shuffle.
At first they were just shadows—a ring of them encircling him at all sides. A hundred feet away. Then ninety. Then eighty. And by then his eyes adjusted as they stepped into the moonlight. At first? Dozens. But it didn’t stop there. They came like dark water seeking to fill a low valley, gravity drawing them ineluctably toward him—a slow-moving piranha frenzy, a sluggish army of hungry hyenas.
As individuals, he realized, they were dumb. Almost harmless. Even two or three of them, well, fuck ’em. They were like cows: just stupid animals.
But get a bunch of those stupid animals together, and they might stampede.
They became dangerous in numbers.
They’re going to tear me apart.
The irony was not lost on him. He was long an undead predator, plundering life from the living by feasting on their blood. And now he would perish in much the same way: these were not predators, these shambling rotters, but rather, scavengers. Just the same, they’d pick him apart and eat him: the dead feasting. Even when a lion fell, the vultures came to eat the hunter’s flesh.
No.
Fuck that. To Hell with them. They were slow and stupid. He was fast and smart. He wouldn’t go out like this.
He gritted his teeth, willed the blood to work faster.
Coburn rose on half-shattered kneecaps, steadying himself with the flat of his hand against the street.
Here they came. Moving around the back end of a ruined bus from one direction. Filtering around two collided taxis from another. Some just climbed over. Many that did slipped and fell, face-planting on the asphalt.
Coburn tried to stand, but his legs didn’t support him—he fell to his knees as the circle closed in around him.
They were at fifty feet, now.
Forty.
Thirty.
Fuck.
He churned and burned blood. The whitetail’s life—only recently measured in his dead arteries—was fading fast, soon gone from Coburn, its carrier. His mind felt stripped bare. The pain was clarifying. Every part of him: one raw nerve.
Coburn sprang up on half-shattered legs and broke into a run—straight at the collapsing ring of moaning, groping zombies.
He ran straight toward some stumpy undead hausfrau in a nappy pink bathrobe. Half her scalp was peeled back, revealing an equally-pink ridge of scalp.
To Coburn, this looked like an excellent stepping stone.
Plan was: leap up, plant foot firmly on skull patch, vault over the zombie housewife and then bolt toward freedom.
As he approached, she belched a frothy stream of spit and blood.
Coburn leapt.
Or, tried to, at least.
His legs were like mushy brownies: they weren’t done cooking and the bones were still soft in the middle. As he raised up on his heel the leg folded underneath him and suddenly it was all jumpus-interruptus. He hit the ground with his shoulder. The sting was almost worse than the one his pride took for having fucked up two easy jumps in the last fifteen minutes. This wasn’t like him. He was better than this.
The zombies fell upon him. They were all rotten hands and snapping teeth. One pressed the heel of its palm on his face, pushing his cheek into the macadam. Others tugged at his legs. Someone stepped on his hand. All the while, they bit down—gumming his jacket, mostly. Leather was tough, and they couldn’t bite through it. A flare of possibility lit up inside his cornered animal mind: he wasn’t weak, he was strong, all he needed was a little leverage and—
The bathrobed housewife ripped into his neck with her teeth. She nuzzled her face like a dog digging into someone’s crotch and ripped a hunk of his neck flesh out. T
hen she lapped at the hole with her ruined tongue.
So this is what it feels like, Coburn thought.
The blood fled him. While the other living dead chewed fruitlessly at his clothing, the housewife pushed aside his flap of neck-flesh and supped at the slow-drooling blood creeping from his neck wound. His eyes were suddenly covered by dirty pink bathrobe.
Numbness tingled at his fingertips.
A red haze crept in at the edges of his vision.
His skin tightened. Soon it would begin to crack and split like dry lips. Not long after that, he would—what? Well, he didn’t really know. Never happened before and he didn’t know many of his own kind. His flesh would split apart like a red pepper over a grill’s flame, maybe. Or it would flake apart and fall to the wind like dandelion seed.
Then, a curious thing occurred.
The hausfrau paused in the consumption of her bloody meal.
A sound first came from her throat, a kind of halting, choking sound, as if something very unpleasant were lodged in there. She lifted her head up, her tongue jutting from her mouth. It began to swell. Her eyes, too, turned from pink to red as fresh blood overloaded the capillaries and they began to burst.
She began to weep runny red tears.
Whatever it was that was blocking her throat was suddenly gone: she lifted her head to the sky and let fly with a barbaric, guttural cry. The other hungry dead paused as if gazing at something shiny, their heads tilting like curious cats.
The hausfrau went apeshit. She began swinging wildly, biting at her undead cohorts, clawing at them with broken, yellowed nails. She struck one with her taloned fingers and tore half his face off in a powerful swipe.
Coburn felt dizzy, weak, confused.
But he knew this was his only chance. And so the vampire began to crawl. He no longer had the strength he possessed before, and his bodily repairs were only half-formed, the bone shards fitting awkwardly together in the meat sacks that were his legs. He didn’t know how long it took him to escape that scene—he belly-crawled through an alley, the sounds of carnage and undead wails behind him, the living dead occupied by their rampaging compatriot. He dragged himself through greenery, over a shattered bike path, pulling his body by whatever park bench or shrub root he could grab.
