by Chuck Wendig
“Later that night she was sleeping and we were all saying our final words and I had this vision of myself pricking my finger with the belt punch in my Swiss Army Knife, and putting my bloody finger in her mouth so she could nurse on it the way a baby sucks at a nipple and… next thing I knew, I was really doing it. Everyone looked at me like I’d lost my mind and I thought maybe I really had. Daddy pulled me away and wouldn’t even talk to me. But by the next morning, Leelee’s fever had broke. The bite mark on her hand didn’t heal, but it never became infected. And she never changed.”
“Huh,” Coburn said. “That’s pretty fucking weird.”
“Shut up! You’re a vampire.”
“I know. And that’s how I know it’s weird, because I’m a vampire. Saying that this is weird.” He shrugged. “Well. More things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, blah blah blah.”
“Okay. I guess. Whatever.” She didn’t look happy. In fact, she looked downright uncomfortable.
“Ain’t this some fascinating shit? I mean, here you are, a girl who should by all rights be in the ground, talking to a dude who should similarly be six feet under somewhere. And yet we keep on living. So to speak.” Each, he thought, with our own special blood disease. Good times.
“I should go.”
“Uh-huh. Before you go, I got a job for you. Your first official task as Liaison For The Wolf, To The Sheep.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell your Pop, I’m not sleeping here during the day. Tell him I don’t trust him well enough. You guys can drop me off before sun-up somewhere I can catch my Z’s, and then before night falls, just park the RV and I’ll catch up.”
“We can get pretty far during the day.”
He winked. “So can I, pretty little cancer princess.” As she stood to leave, he grabbed her arm. She winced—even that caused her some pain. “One more thing. Tomorrow night, when I catch up? I’ll want to feed.” The bitch in the pink robe took a lot out of him. “So, you better find me some food, otherwise I might take it out of the fat man again. Or maybe your Dad’s bratty ho-bag. Oh! And I’m going to leave Creampuff with you. He better be well-fed. If ever I see him starting to look extra-scrawny, I’ll break your Daddy’s neck.”
Kayla could not hide her horror.
“Toodles,” he said, waggling his fingers at her.
This might actually work out, he thought.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pretty Little Girlies
A thunderous drum of horse’s hooves, the world trembling under their trampling gallop, cups rattling in the cabinets, tickets burning hot in his pocket, plates clattering together louder and louder until—
Whack.
Kayla slapped him awake.
“Wake up, dummy,” she said.
Coburn blinked, tried to catch her hand before she slapped him again, but somehow his coordination wasn’t working—her open palm connected again and left him reeling. In his nose: the smell of sour booze. Like Southern Comfort. Mixed with bad bile.
Two hazy frames of vision merged together until they formed a single picture, and there he saw Kayla standing over him—he was, after all, laying across a kitchen table—and she had her hair pulled behind her in a pony tail and sported a dress as blue as a robin’s egg, as blue as—
—corpse-flesh—
He shook his head and stood up off the table.
“We’re late,” she said.
“Let me guess, for a very important date.” It occurred to him then that it was his mouth that tasted like sweet liquor and bile. Jesus Christ on an ice cream cake, was he hungry. He staggered past the girl and went to the kitchen—appliances all in avocado green or mustard yellow (harvest gold, they called it, wasn’t that right?) and he threw open the fridge to see if there was any blood in there and there wasn’t—it was empty but for a pair of roaches wrestling with one another over a crusted marble of old food, food that looked like a dung ball.
“Hey, vampire,” Kayla said again, this time louder, meaner. “Those roaches are fighting over you, you dumb piece of crap, you dried-up nugget of somebody else’s shit. Look at me when I’m talking to you—”
Coburn did look, and he wished he hadn’t.
Blood trickled from her eyes and from her nose, and when she opened her mouth to speak once more, all that came out was a bubbling slurry of blood and—bits of lung? Swatches of esophageal tissue? The mess poured down the front of her dress, and he felt around on the countertop to find a towel but nothing was there and he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, and then a handful of words came bubbling up through that black blood:
“You couldn’t protect me,” she said, each word framed by a muddy burp of gore, and then he saw her: Kayla standing in the kitchen doorway behind herself, two Kaylas, one with the pony tail and the bloody dress and the other girl with the dirty white t-shirt and torn-up jeans from the RV.
That Kayla, the second Kayla, looked over at her blood-drooling doppelganger and then met Coburn’s eyes and asked:
“What’s happening? What does this mean?”
And then again with the rumbling, the vibrating, the thunderous tumble of horse hooves, a stampede, the cabinet doors juddering against the wood, a glass tumbling out and shattering, a hard and sudden crack across the windowpane looking out over a gravel driveway—
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Wakey Wakey, Blood and Bakey
A shotgun barrel prodded him in the shoulder.
“Sun’s down,” came a voice. Gil’s voice. “That means you get up.”
Coburn cocked one eye, didn’t see any sunlight coming in anywhere. Not that it mattered: when night came, he knew it in his blood. With the advent of day, he felt sluggish, his limbs going stiff like the start of rigor mortis, almost like he was more than half-dead. But at night, his body came alive—well, so to speak—once more.
He sat up on the toilet. They’d dropped him off at a rest stop come morning, then gone to park the RV somewhere. Didn’t see any of the moaning dead out and about, which made sense seeing as how they were between towns and most of what was out here on the turnpike was just trees and asphalt. What was it that people said? Pennsylvania: Philadelphia on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, and nothing but backwoods-nowhere-Kentucky in between. Pennsyltucky.
Sleeping in a rest-stop bathroom—curled up in the stall like a dead bug—was not his ideal configuration, and part of him wished he’d just sucked it up and stayed in the RV. But now, with the shotgun barrel once more pointed in his general direction, he remembered why he hadn’t.
“I’m up,” he said, winking, licking a fang.
“Mm-hnn,” Gil said. The shotgun didn’t swerve.
“We gonna do this again? Really? Third time’s the charm?”
Gil snorted, pulled the gun away, and then headed outside into the rain. Coburn followed and, sure enough, the air was crisp—wet and sharp like a cold bite into a raw apple, with rain speckling his face and loops of fog drifting close to the highway puddles.
The old man didn’t say a word as he stepped inside the RV. Coburn followed after, and soon as he set foot inside, the rat terrier came over and fell in line behind him like a good little soldier.
“Creampuff,” Coburn said, greeting the dog.
The dog didn’t pant or smile or do any of that doofy cute dog bullshit, but instead just looked up at him with fond, glassy eyes. This dumb little idiot had no idea that, if Coburn got even a wee bit peckish, he’d break him open like a bone and suck the marrow out. Least, that was what the vampire told himself as he scooped up the dog in his arms.
“I’m surprised,” Coburn said. “Didn’t expect you to actually come pick me up. I figured on the first night you’d make a run for it, and I’d have to come find you. Glad you didn’t. Shit, that would’ve been tedious.”
Gil set the shotgun down. “Kayla made clear the consequences last night.” He nodded toward the front of the vehicle. “I’m driving first stretch. Ebbie’s going to tell you the plan.”
> “The plan?”
“You said you were hungry.”
Coburn smiled. “I’m always hungry.”
“Girls are still asleep. Kayla in the back bunk, Cecelia in the master. Leelee’s awake and with me up in the front.”
Ebbie sat down on the couch. It didn’t sag or bow, because it already looked like it had a space for him—a concave dip that fit his body in various configurations. Coburn eyed him up.
“Let me guess. This is where you sleep?”
“How’d you guess?”
“I have psychic powers,” Coburn lied.
Ebbie gazed at him in awe. His lips held an ill-contained smile. “Psychic powers! Wow. Just, wow. That must be amazing. Being what you are and all.”
“It is incredibly amazing,” he acknowledged, half-telling the truth, half peppering it with what he felt was his trademark sardonicism. “I am the luckiest boy in all of Mayberry. Fuck, fat man, it’s like a twenty-four-hour party for me. Well, twelve-hour party, I guess, seeing as how half the time I’d get burned to a greasy patch of ash if I hung out in the daylight. At least, that’s what I figure would happen. Not like I’ve ever gone through with it.”
“You don’t know what would happen? For real?”
“For real, Abner. By the way, I’m not calling you ‘Ebbie,’ because Ebbie sounds like a made-up name. It’s a name you’d give to a guinea pig or the name a child would have for his retarded grandmother.” He made a cranky baby voice: “Ebbie! Juice cup! Ebbie!” For added effect, he waggled his arms like the uncoordinated grabby-hands of a needy toddler.
Ebbie smiled. “It’s actually what my baby brother called me when he was, well, a baby.” The smile faded fast, though. His gaze turned down into his lap and Coburn knew that look: he had exploited his victims’ grief many a time. It wasn’t hard to follow the trail of tears: here was Ebbie and here was not a baby brother. Which meant that kid was probably an amuse-bouche for some zombie fuckwit out there. The fat man’s eyes slowly refocused and the smile returned, though now it was strained, forced, not really real. “Don’t you people gather in clans or families or something like that?”
“‘You people?’”
“Vampires. You know. Haemophages.”
“Haemo-who now?”
“Well, I just figured that would be the, ahh, scientific name for what you are? Haemo, for blood, and phage, for eat. Blood-eater.”
Coburn frowned. “No, you can just call me ‘vampire.’ Or, ‘hey, asshole.’ And no, we do not gather in… clans or tribes or some shit. In fact, there’s no we at all. It’s just me.”
“You don’t know any other of your kind?”
“Nope.” It wasn’t a lie, either. Coburn had never met another of, in Abner’s words, you people. Well, okay, that might not be entirely true: someone made him what he was. It was not an accident or a disease or a curse from God; his first memory as a hollowed-out, replaced-by-the-demon-of-blood-hunger vampire dude was a dark shape—a man, he believed—walking away and standing in a doorframe before finally turning and leaving. Forever. Coburn followed a set of bloody boot-prints for a while, but after 20 feet or so the tracks dried up. And that was the only thing he knew of another like him. Once in a while in the city he caught a smell of something—something familiar, something sinister, a little like blood and a lot like death—but then it was gone again, more a ghost than anything.
“Wow. So that means—”
Coburn felt the RV grumble to life and start to move, and he used that as a chance to interrupt Ebbie. “Listen. Abner. I don’t really want to talk about this, and while I’m happy you feel so comfortable around me despite the fact our first introduction had me using you like a ham sandwich, what I really want is for you to tell me about whatever plan you hairless monkeys have concocted. You picking up what I’m laying down, fat boy?”
The man looked stung. It was what it was. Coburn wasn’t here to protect their feelings, he was here to protect the food supply.
Abner, now quiet and meek like a wounded mouse, pulled out a road atlas and flipped it open to the Pennsylvania map. He opened a red plastic cup, the kind that must’ve once contained the plastic toys known as a Barrel of Monkeys, and upended it. Pieces from a different toy—the pewter game pieces and green plastic houses of Monopoly—spilled out.
With pudgy fingers, Ebbie began to move most of the pieces to the margins of the map, but then moved the Scotty dog game piece to the East end of the state.
“This is us,” he said, tapping the dog on the map to drive the point home. “We’ve been in and around this area for a long time. But we’ve been wanting to go West because we keep hearing that out West is where society’s started to rebuild. The plague didn’t hit them like it did here, so they had fewer zombies and had a chance to mobilize. But there’s a problem.”
He took a number of the little green houses and started plunking them down at the West end of the map, each at the mouth of various highways and interstates.
“This is what we call the Cannibal Nation.”
“A nation. Of cannibals.” Coburn almost laughed. “So you’re saying that a bunch of man-eater motherfuckers have organized. Like a political party. Or like the Boy Scouts.”
“I dunno what you’d call it, I just know that they got smart about it. They figured out that the East Coast had a whole lot of people. And that it was like a plague zone: lots of rotters making fast work of a big population—New York, Philadelphia, DC, Baltimore, Boston. It’s the megalopolis of the Eastern seaboard. Lot of people trying to migrate West to get to the safe zone, to be with the rest of humanity. The cannibals know that it’s like a cattle chute, though, and so they set up their camps along those roads and wait for people to come through. Sometimes they lure them in, other times they just attack like a kicked-over hive of killer bees. They’re preying on the dream. The dream of going West.”
Something about this smelled goofy. Maybe it was that these idiots didn’t know how to think like predators, and that was one thing Coburn knew very well. He knew how to mess with people’s heads. How to plant ideas to get them to do what he wanted. He’d tell a couple of club chicks about some new VIP lounge, he’d even make up some tickets with a bullshit address on them—oh, that sweet smell of exclusivity—and they’d come-a-running. There’d be no club. Just him. Waiting in the darkness of the warehouse or walk-up or whatever it was. Fangs out.
Like a roach motel—they check in, but they don’t check out.
“It’s probably bullshit,” Coburn said. “C’mon, Abner. Use your goddamn head. These cannibals? They set up the story. About the safe zone and going West and all that garbage. The myth of Western expansion died with the gold rush, there’s no magic white tower in Wichita or Minneapolis. Those places are dead, just like here. You were sold on a lie.” A cold realization struck him: “And that means that I was sold on a lie, too.”
He stood up and set Creampuff down.
He didn’t like being lied to. Didn’t like being duped.
It was all bullshit.
He was going to kill them all. Right now. There were no pockets of humanity Out West. They got sold on a rumor, and now they were dragging him along toward some mythical Wizard of Oz Shangri-La fol de rol. If the so-called Cannibal Nation really existed, then that right there was his food supply. He could graze off those man-eating idiots for months, even years.
It was time to wet his fangs.
Abner had no idea what was coming. He just stared up at the vampire, his plump, cherubic face a mask of innocence and naiveté. Coburn was going to rip that face off its mooring and throw it to the dog.
“It’s real,” Abner asserted, as Coburn’s fangs crept out over his lower lip. “We met some people who’d been there.”
The vampire hesitated. He wanted to drink, but still: “…You did? You met people who’ve seen this with their own eyes?”
“Yeah. About three months back. They called themselves missionaries. They said it was their job to go back into the i
nfested states, find the lost sheep and steer them Westward—to put them on a ‘pilgrimage,’ that’s what they called it.”
Coburn sat back down. Still suspicious. He pushed the fangs back with his tongue. “Uh-huh. And you’re sure these weren’t just a bunch of cannibal assholes pretending to be some kind of holy travelers? How do you know?”
“If it was a lie it sure was a convoluted one.” Ebbie shrugged. “They told us how they snuck back through the woods and didn’t use the roads, they told us to do the same—”
“And why didn’t you?”
“We’d lose the RV, and it’s kind of been our home.”
“Uh-huh. Go on.”
“They told us about how they had set up farms and had livestock and crops growing and even had power in some places, and they said that they were bringing in new folks every day and they had about ten thousand people now and that they belonged to this group, this group that had set all this up, these folks called the Sons of Man—”
At this, Coburn felt the blood drain from his face and move fast toward his dead heart—there the surge of blood gave the crumpled muscle a little kick and the heart shuddered once, twice, and then gave a third spasm before once more going inert.
“The Sons of Man,” he said, hands balling into fists, his nails biting hard into the flesh of his palms. “Shit. Shit.”
And then it all came back to him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Sons of Man
He thrust up his middle finger, a fuck-you flagpole flying the colors of the I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit nation. Coburn licked blood off his teeth. The camping hatchet—sharpened to a paper-thin edge—swept through the air and lopped the finger off at the base. A boot kicked him in the chest. Footsteps fleeing. Struggling to get up, get out. It was then that the bombs went off—boom, boom, boom, boom.
