by Chuck Wendig
Then he would feed.
Fill his coffers with many pennies.
Fill his jug with the finest claret.
Fill his belly with—
Well. He’d guzzle blood, that was what he’d do.
Then, everything changed.
The door to the RV swung open as Little Miss Lipstick caught up to what was going on, realized that Coburn wasn’t where he had been and was now behind her silver-haired sugar daddy. She screamed.
Another girl came hurrying out of the RV—not the black woman from the window, no, this one was even younger than the dolled-up darling, maybe in her mid-teens. Frail, bird-like, even. Big wide eyes glistening, capturing the light of the moon.
Coburn smelled peaches and cigarettes.
She walked out, held out her hands, palms forward, as she tried to catch her breath. With those doe eyes she looked him up and down, her white-blonde hair bobbing atop her bony shoulders. Her eyes were ringed with dark shadows—like faint bruises. The girl smiled: nervous, excited, terrified.
“I like the jacket,” she said. Not wait, not stop, not oh my god.
I like the jacket. Well, shit. Flattery. Coburn liked flattery.
Gil gasped, struggled in Coburn’s grip, rifle tight against the man’s throat.
“It’s old,” Coburn said, smirking.
“It’s slick.”
“It’s seen some times.”
“I bet it has.” The girl circled around, still facing him. “You’ve been around.”
“Pshh. I’m young. Look at me. Tall, lean like a coffee stirrer, barely any salt in my pepper. This guy here”—Coburn demonstrated by lifting the gun and, with it, Gil—“he’s old. Older than his years.”
“And you? Younger than your years?”
“Maybe so.”
Gil was starting to turn blue. Eyes bulging.
The girl looked to the man. “It’ll be okay, Daddy.”
“Daddy?” Coburn asked, then offered a barking laugh. Still, he loosened his grip just enough so as not to kill the man, not yet. “Huh. Didn’t see that coming. The painted lady there, she’s damn sure not your Mommy, though. Not unless she had you when she was barely done playing with her E-Z-Bake oven. Pregnant at the ripe old age of eight? Nasty to think.”
“You sonofab—” The doll started.
“Cecelia,” the teen spat. “Shut the fuck up.”
“Oh!” Coburn said, surprised. “I like that. Lippy little girl.”
“What are you?” she asked.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Are you dead?”
“Do I look dead?”
She took another step closer. “Dead isn’t the same as it used to be.”
“Fair enough. Even still. I don’t smell like spoiled meat. Maggots aren’t using me like a condo complex. And all my organs? Still inside my body.”
“I know what you are,” she said.
“I doubt that.”
“You’re dead.”
“Am I?”
“But not like them. Not like the others.”
He chuckled. “I don’t smell like a dead goat that’s been bloated in the sun, for one. Don’t attract flies, either. And all my parts are still inside my body, so that’s a plus.”
“Still,” she said. “You’re different.”
Coburn showed her his set of bloody teeth. “Could be, rabbit. Could be.”
“What’s your name?”
“Coburn,” he said. What could it hurt?
“I’m Kayla.”
“Great. Whatever. I don’t normally name my food before I eat it, but whatever works for you.”
She was scared. But she crept closer just the same.
“I want to make you a deal.”
“A deal. For me. Cute. Ballsy. Not interested.”
The girl’s eyes twinkled. Something about them: she didn’t have much to lose. That intrigued him. Would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to continue with the plan: shoot the brat, choke the man, then take his time with the teen.
But something stopped him.
“Look around you,” Kayla said. “World’s gone sour. People—like, all people, society, civilization—didn’t make it. Not many of us left.”
“Getting bored over here. And peckish.”
“That’s the point. Bored now? Wait ’til all you got left are those rotters to keep you company. Think you’re hungry? What happens when there’s none of us left?”
If his heart still worked, it would’ve skipped a beat. Even still, the blood in his gut curdled, the dead muscles tightened. Fear and panic scrambled against his mind’s walls like a cat with its tail on fire. He remembered last night. He remembered the hunger.
He narrowed his gaze, then cleared a clot-bubble of blood out of his throat. “Go on.”
“The deal is this,” she said. “You help us, we help you. We show you food. We know where others are. Living people. Bad people. People who’d kill us just as soon as say hello.”
“And in return?”
“You keep us safe.” She looked to her old man. “But first you have to stop choking my Daddy. I think you’re killing him.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tête-à-Tête
The rinky-dink park playground was rusted, its equipment just a tangle of shadows—the torchlight played along its edges as the vampire Coburn followed Kayla and her torch. The girl—herself just a tangle of shadows, like a handful of coat hangers that got caught together—plopped down on the edge of a slide and lit a cigarette. A Virginia Slim. Comically too long, too effete, for this girl.
Off in the distance, Coburn could see the RV. But, more importantly, he could see the moon glinting off a rifle scope. He was in the old man’s crosshairs. The man—Gil, the girl’s Daddy—was not particularly keen on letting his daughter wander off into the darkness with Coburn. And yet, the girl persisted: she muttered about dreams, about the future, said something like ‘he’s what I was talking about.’ Then Gil waved her off, angry but acquiescing.
“You gonna sit?” she asked, blowing a dragon’s plume of smoke from each nostril. “You can. It’s okay. I won’t bite. Get it? Bite?”
“Funny,” he said. But he could tell that she was scared, just the same. “I’ll stand, thanks. Just in case your Daddy over there falls asleep on the rifle and accidentally pulls the trigger.”
“You sit, he’ll have a harder shot.”
He crinkled his brow. “You think?”
“I do.”
Shit, she was right. Coburn shrugged, and sat down on the edge of a squeaky playground carousel. He planted his boots on the ruggedized rubber ground so he didn’t drift and spin like an idiot. He had some veneer of cool to keep, after all.
From here, the shot would have to go through a jungle gym. A dozen chances for the bullet to go astray.
“How’s your shoulder?”
He wormed a finger into the hole the bullet tore into the leather. He pressed the finger deeper so it pushed into his own dead flesh. Didn’t hurt. Finger didn’t go that deep, either. Coburn watched Kayla with an unblinking stare. Watched the smoke wind around her like a pair of ghosts. “Right as rain, little girl.”
“You wanna eat me?” the girl asked. It was not, despite the way it sounded, a come-on. When she asked it, her hands were shaking.
Coburn smelled the air. “Funny thing is, no, no I do not. Something’s wrong with you. You sick?”
“Just a cold.” She flicked ash from the Virginia Slim.
“No. Uh-uh. It’s more than that. You’re too thin.”
“Hard to get food out here.”
“Dark shadows under your eyes.”
She shrugged. “Hard to get sleep out here, too.”
“You’re sick,” he said again.
“And you’re a vampire.”
The word gave him pause.
“Not many people are willing to say that word out loud,” he said. “I’ve killed a helluva lot of people, my teeth in their neck, their bl
ood in my mouth, and not one of them dared to call me what I so obviously was.”
“They didn’t want to believe.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
She laughed—but it was a sound without mirth. “Times have changed, though. Like Leelee says, these are the end of days. Gotta start believing in something. Might as well be vampires.”
Coburn didn’t know who the fuck Leelee was and he really didn’t care, either. Probably one of those blood-bags in the camper. He still planned on eating them all. Wasn’t sure how he’d do it, yet. Kill one? Kill them all? Blood from an already dead body swift became a non-nutritious snack—‘nutritious’ being a relative term and all. He wasn’t even sure why he was here, now, with this sick girl. Could be that the human part of him was bored, and this was one way to fill the hours. Plus, it let him ask some big questions.
“When did it happen?” he asked. He swept his hands out as if to indicate the world beyond this quiet, peaceful night-time park. “This. The end of the world. When did these shambling assholes start running the show?”
“You really don’t know?”
“I was sleeping.”
“Sleeping?”
“Let’s just say I was forcibly detained.”
She flicked the cigarette over her shoulder, lit another off her oil-rag-on-a-chair-leg torch. “Daddy’s been keeping track of the days. Said it happened about two years ago, I guess? But it feels like a lot longer.”
Two years ago. Christ. So he’d been out of commission for at least two years, and who knows how many before? He tried to conjure up the last year he remembered, but the information escaped him.
“How’d it all go down?” he asked. “What the hell is it?”
“They say it’s some kind of bacteria. Someone dredged up some long-dormant bug-a-boo from an oil well, I guess. Drill, baby, drill. They figure that Patient Zero was one of the rig workers. With the zombie disease, you get bit, you turn. Usually within twenty-four hours, sometimes forty-eight, maybe it depends on your immune system. But it gets you one way or another. Doesn’t matter if it’s just a little teeny-tiny bite or if they ate all your guts out. Even if they kill you, you’ll get back up, half-eaten and dumb as a bag of cat turds. You wanna know the funny part?”
He shrugged, the message being, Eh, not really.
“You know how in the movies the zombies are always like, Braaaains, braaaaains? And they crack open skulls like Cadbury eggs and suck out the head-meats?” As if to demonstrate, Kayla made a slurpy noise. “Nuh-uh, not true at all. They got that part all wrong. That’s the one part the zombies don’t eat—brains. And that’s the one place you gotta hit ’em to kill ’em.”
“That is funny,” he said without laughing or actually thinking it was funny. No part of this was funny. Just plain fucked up, was what it was. And when a vampire thought shit was fucked up, well, it probably was.
“You’re being sarcastic.”
“Me? Never.”
“I see what you did there.”
“Uh-huh. So—” Coburn tilted his wrist toward his face. No watch hung there (he didn’t need one; he knew when dawn was on its way), but even still, he tapped two fingers against his wrist bone. “You’ve got five more minutes to tell me just what the hell this deal is all about. After those five minutes, if I remain unconvinced—and let’s be honest, I’m totally not going to be convinced by this bullshit—then I’m going to break your neck, stalk back over to your friends in that rat-trap Winnebago, and I’m going to turn each one of them into a blood sprinkler. Then, just to be a real bad dude, I’m going to roll around in the blood the way a dog might roll around in a smeary pile of gopher shit.”
Kayla visibly tightened. But she laughed in a piss-poor effort to cover up her fear. “You’re a man who doesn’t mince his words. That’s real good. Here it is, then. I want you to protect us.”
“Uh.” He laughed, too, this time, for real, because hot damn if that wasn’t the funniest shit ever. “How’s about, no? Malnutrition has made you dangerously delusional. Let me guess: you’re a girl who likes ponies and unicorns, yeah?”
“Think about it. Your food supply is dwindling. You kill all of us, eat us right up, how long that gonna last you?”
He clacked his teeth together, leaned forward. “Maybe I can turn you all into jerky. Or blood sausage. Maybe your bodies will last me into summer.”
“Maybe. Maybe you’re just playing with me. Either way—what then? You think you can find more of us out there? You won’t find many beating hearts still in the world. We’re few and far between. Look at the biology. You drink blood and we humans always make more of it. Provided, of course, that we’re alive. We make blood same way cows make milk.”
“You want me to milk you?” This was absurdity, but he kept listening.
She almost looked stung, as if he was mocking her really good idea. “Well. Yes. In a manner of speaking. You keep us alive. You protect us. And we’ll keep you fed. Not just from us. Like I said, we know of others out there. Bad people. World went to Hell and so did the human spirit.”
Coburn clucked his tongue. “That’s not how I figure it. I figure the end of the world just ripped off humanity’s mask, and now the true face of mankind is out there grinning like a mad skull in the moonlight. But you think what you want. Keep talking.”
“I’m just saying, you travel with us, you protect us, you stay fed. You just need to get us out West. There’s people out West. Lots of ’em, if the stories are true. That’s where they’re rebuilding. That’s where the people are. And where you got people, you got blood. A near endless supply.”
“So let me get this right.” He sucked a little air between his teeth, licked some of the fat fuck’s blood off his teeth. “You want me to play farmer.”
“Shepherd, really. Don’t think of us like crops. Think of us like livestock. Think of it like you’re driving a cattle train. You’re just moving the herd. We’re your food supply.”
“Food supply.” He let those words hang out there. This wasn’t how he did things. Save people? Protect them? The thought made the fat man’s blood curdle inside him. Still. He had to give it to this girl. For a teenager, she was a lot smarter than he’d figured. His gut reaction to her plan was the vampire’s reaction, the monster’s reaction: kill her, lap at the sick girl’s blood like you’re at a water fountain. But his human side saw the reason in it. New York City alone had gone from millions of people to millions of dead people. Dead people whose blood was as good as road tar. Rest of the country couldn’t be much better. If he went ahead and gobbled up these fools tonight, in a few nights he’d be back where he started. Hungry. Wandering. Hunting night to night, looking for shelter for the day, watching out for those rotten fuckers at every turn. The thought didn’t thrill him.
Even still. The old man shot him. The fat man was delicious. He wanted more. He wanted it now. Every time he blinked his eyes, there it waited in the darkness behind his lids: a red haze, a bloody curtain, a crimson hunger.
Fuck it. Coburn made his decision.
He moved fast against the girl. Backhanded the torch out of her hand—it went spinning off into the shadows, rebounding against a set of monkey bars.
Then he grabbed her by the throat and lifted her up.
And he started to squeeze.
“I am not a good man,” he hissed. The girl’s eyes started to pop. “Point of fact, I am worse than a bad man because I am no longer a man at all. I am a monster.”
Bang.
Gil, her father, started shooting. But with the torch gone, he and the girl were mostly just shadows. The rifle barked an echoing report—a bullet whined off one of the bars of the jungle gym.
“I don’t like people except as tasty treats.”
Another shot ricocheted. If Gil got lucky and scored a hit—and if it hit Coburn smack in the head—well, that would be bad news.
But he kept on squeezing.
“I don’t especially like taking orders from some smart-ass teenage
r. I could break your neck just by twitching.”
Bang. This one hit the monkey bars on the other side: Gil overshot.
“But you know what? You got yourself a deal.”
He dropped the girl. She landed on her feet, but her legs were wobbly and didn’t hold her—her butt bone clanged against the metal slide.
Kayla gasped, wheezed, clutched her throat.
Just then, he saw her eyes flit to the space behind him. Creampuff the terrier stood there, watching all this unfold.
Coburn went over and scooped up the dog under his arm.
In the distance, Gil and the others were racing across the open ground between the RV and the play area, calling out Kayla’s name.
“Nice dog,” Kayla said, coughing.
“I’ll see you tomorrow night. Don’t leave without me. You do, I won’t be so inclined to be reasonable the next time we meet.”
And with that, he moved fast, exerting his vampiric will. Coburn and his dog vanished into the shadows.
CHAPTER NINE
A Day in the Life of a Dead Girl
Kayla hated having to pee in the coffee mug. It was bad enough having to pee outside, though by now she’d pretty much gotten used to that. But Leelee told her she needed to see the urine, which meant having to contain the urine by pissing into a coffee mug, which further meant frequently whizzing on her own hand.
This morning was no exception.
“Shoot,” she said, wiping her hand on the grass. She hiked up her panties, then lifted the World’s Best Grandpa mug and swirled it around. The urine was dark, turbid—the color of beef broth. Leelee wasn’t going to like that.
Kayla extracted herself from underneath the blue spruce and wandered down toward the lake’s edge, where Leelee was washing clothes and where her father, Gil, was sitting on a park bench oiling the rifle.
She thrust the coffee mug under her father’s chin.
“Coffee?” she asked, bright and chipper. “Still warm!”
Gil wrinkled his nose and waved her away. “Christ, Kayla. Quit fooling around. I got a gun here.”
