by Chuck Wendig
It was then that he caught the odor.
Kerosene.
That was what they were using. It was the sharp, acrid tang of kerosene. It was… drifting down from above? He tilted his head, lifted his nose.
Was it on the roof?
He heard the squeak too late.
The creaky squeak came from behind him—and just as he pivoted heel-to-toe with the rifle, the world roared with a bark from an autoloader shotgun.
It took Coburn’s right leg off at the knee. It was the leg on which he pivoted and now, quite literally, he didn’t have a leg to stand on.
He tumbled to the ground, taken totally by surprise. He’d been first dizzied by the scent of blood and then so consumed with searching out the invisible threads of kerosene vapor that he never heard the old man coming up behind him.
The old dude—his chin whiskers and head buzzed to salty nubs—rolled up in a wheel chair, a Remington 1100 shotgun sitting in his lap.
“Interloper,” the old man hissed. His voice carried a distinct Southern twang—a guttural West Virginian accent.
Coburn went to bring the rifle up to dispatch the old sonofabitch, but a boot stepped down hard on it. Two men—one short and fat, the other tall and thin with a scoliosis bend in his back—snatched the gun away and then started to pick him up under the arms.
The old man leered. “You’re invited to dinner.”
Coburn got the joke, ha-ha, he was supposed to be dinner, but really, fuck that right in the ear. He still had one good leg and two dummies supporting him. He shot out with a hard kick—but the old man was just far enough away that his boot snapped against nothing.
Boom.
The shotgun slug took off Coburn’s good leg right below the knee. The half-leg pirouetted through the air, clanging into a shelf.
Coburn’s first thought was, I like those boots.
His second was, I’m going to need new legs, stat.
“Wyatt, Stevie, get him into the carrier.” The old man gestured behind him, and sure enough, Coburn saw that behind the old cannibal lurked a pet carrier—a dog kennel big enough for a German Shepherd.
“You motherfuckers,” he growled through gritted teeth, as Wyatt and Stevie carried him over to the kennel. He wasn’t going to go easily—he knew he had a choice here, which was to concentrate for a minute and put all his energy into growing a new pair of legs, or, instead, make short work of these monkeys without worrying about the legs.
He decided, for now, hell with the legs.
The vampire didn’t know which one was Wyatt, which one was Stevie, but the way they were carrying him, they had his arms around the back of their necks while they carried him around the trunk. Didn’t give him a whole lot of leverage, but his arms were pretty well-placed—
He cinched up his right arm and started choking the short, fat one—then he leaned over and took a bite out of his neck, or, at least, tried to. All he managed was to get hold of the cannibal’s rubbery ear, but that would have to be good enough. Coburn jerked his head and ripped the ear clean off.
Short, fat cannibal—Stevie? Wyatt? Styatt? Weevie?—screamed.
Then Coburn pulled tight on the other arm, bringing the back-bent cannibal’s own head around until it thwacked hard into the other one’s skull. All three of them dropped to the ground in a heap.
Coburn “stood up” on his two uneven stump-legs, triumphant, resplendent, fangs out, tongue tasting the air moments before he intended to thrust his face downward and feast upon one of the two chuckleheads…
But the old man in the wheelchair had other ideas.
Gone was the shotgun. In its place: the AR-15 that Coburn had dropped.
The old man licked his lips, then began firing.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ambrosia, the Queen
Being a vampire had its perks. Endless life (provided he followed the rules). No conscience to worry him (provided he tamped it down into a deep dark hole). He could run fast, jump high, and twist people’s brains like a nipple held betwixt thumb and forefinger. He could even survive, when, say, shot in the chest a dozen times by a .223 Armalite Model 15 assault rifle.
But one thing a vampire could not do: betray the laws of physics.
Normally, bullets didn’t cause him much worry. They didn’t feel great, and getting punched in the trunk with a high-velocity rifle round was certainly distracting, but even still, it wasn’t a game-ender. Not like he had internal organs anybody could hurt. Perforate his spleen? Puncture his lung? Explode his heart? Eh. Whatever. He wasn’t using them. They were just dusty meat inside his dead body anyhow.
But his bones.
He needed those. They were his support system. If one part of his body held particular importance, it was his skeleton.
Disrupt the skeleton—with perhaps a shotgun slug to the kneecaps or rifle-rounds to the bones that held his arms together—and things got a lot more difficult. Especially since healing for him was not immediate: bones took a while to knit or regrow. Like slow osseous crystals forming from a bed of salt and calcium.
But even that was not Coburn’s biggest problem.
His problem right now? The dog kennel.
Soon as the old man—whose name, as it turned out, was simply ‘Grandpaw’—finished hole-punching Coburn’s body with rifle rounds, the other two cannibals shoved Coburn’s broken, legless body into the pet carrier. Though, not before the taller, stooped-over cannibal stripped him of his leather jacket—now perforated with holes—and put it on.
It was barely big enough. His leg stumps thrust up against the back of the kennel, and that was again a cruel reminder that he could not violate the laws of physics. Much as he wanted, without room to grow his legs, they would not grow. No legs meant he couldn’t dismantle this thing.
And his blood was swiftly leaving his body through the many holes and two stumps. Given that blood was a necessity when it came time to heal up, it meant he couldn’t heal his arms, couldn’t tear the door off this carrier, couldn’t do squat. He tried to will his body to retain the blood, to harness it and channel it—but it wasn’t happening. With every moment, a darker shadow of desperation drifted over him.
Wyatt and Stevie—the tall one who stole his jacket was Wyatt, the earless buttplug was Stevie—hooked the carrier up to a chain, then started dragging it across the busted-up tile floor of the Wal-Mart. Grandpaw wheeled alongside as Coburn struggled to make something, anything, happen.
“Shit,” Grandpaw said, peering in through the side holes. The word came out as shee-yit. “You still alive in there? After all that? You must be some goddamn miracle food. Ambrosia might make you a meal all for herself.”
Coburn tried to curse the old man out, but all that came out was a ragged whisper and a mouthful of blood. A bullet must’ve clipped him in the throat.
Grandpaw had one thing right:
Shit.
They heard gunfire. A couple booms, then several pop, pop, pops.
“Was that it?” Ebbie asked. “Was that the signal?”
“I don’t know,” Leelee answered.
Kayla nursed on a juice box, nervously chewing the straw. “I bet that was it. I bet that was the signal. He said we’d know.”
“But we don’t know,” Ebbie said. Leelee looked to her with eyes uncertain, eyes lost and wandering.
They’d been orbiting a strip mall parking lot for the last hour, leading a small but growing band of the undead around in circles. It was like herding cats with a laser pointer. But once the gunfire started off in the distance, about half of them broke away from the pack and started staggering off toward the Wal-Mart. That was how they were: creatures of stimulus and response.
“I think it could’ve been it,” Kayla insisted.
Gil came up behind them in the front of the mobile home. Jaw tight as he chewed on sunflower seeds. “That wasn’t it. We need a bigger opening than that. That distraction wasn’t more than a couple mouse farts.” He spit seed hulls into a paper cup. “We wa
it.”
“But—” Kayla started.
“I said, we wait.”
“Bring me the meat.”
He pressed his face against the cage of the carrier, and his first thought was, That body must contain blood in the gallon, not the pint.
Ambrosia, the Cannibal Queen of the Man-Eating Wal-Mart, was easily eight hundred pounds. She did not sit so much as allow her fat to sprawl out across a dais made from shipping pallets, six-packs of soda, and various repurposed ottomans. Her ‘throne room’ was framed by a niche of flat-screen televisions (this was, after all, the electronics department). While none of the televisions had electricity, on each was painted a garish and frankly amateurish portrait of Ambrosia in greasy colors.
Incense burned—ghostly serpents of scented smoke coiled around her head. But it did little to mask the smell: Ambrosia’s stink was wretched. Had Coburn tears in his head, his eyes would be leaking. The odor was some mind-boggling combination of rotten onions, rancid lunchmeat and sweat-soaked gym socks.
Basically, she smelled like human garbage.
Wyatt and Stevie dragged the vampire kennel up to the edge of the dais, then lifted it up with a groan and placed it before their fleshy mistress.
Ambrosia struggled, grunting as she leaned over her own prodigious flesh, and stared into the kennel. Coburn bit at the grate like a rabid animal. It didn’t work. His strength was swiftly waning.
Next to him, he heard the squeaks of Grandpaw’s wheelchair.
“Ooooh. He’s feisty,” Ambrosia said, chuckling. Her words and chortles sounded like someone had stuffed her throat with pudding. Gargling, gurgling. And her breath could’ve choked a hyena.
“Shot him plenty of times,” Grandpaw said, sucking air through his teeth. “But there he is, still kicking like that battery bunny what used to be on TV.”
“I want him for breakfast.” She licked her rubbery lips.
“You want him raw?”
“Sashimi,” she corrected. “We must strive to be civilized, Grandpaw. We are creatures of the world.”
“’Course, what was I thinking?” In his voice, Coburn could hear the man’s dismissal—he didn’t give one whit about this woman or what she was saying, but put up with it because clearly she was the one with the power. Was it just her size that convinced others? How the hell was she so damn big? Coburn decided to ask.
“How—” he started, his voice croaking. He pushed past vocal cords that felt like broken glass: “How the hell are you… so… fucking… fat?”
“My breakfast speaks!” Ambrosia said, her voice a high-pitched twitter. She clapped her hands together, hands that were actually quite small, like doll’s hands. “My dear, I have a most undesirable metabolic disorder.” She studied his face, saw it wrinkle up in disbelief. “I’m just kidding! Human meat is wonderfully complex and fatty.” She leaned in and whispered, as if confiding a secret: “I eat a lot of people. And soon I’m going to eat you, little rabbit.”
She pulled back from the cage.
“I want most of him cooked,” she declared, as if ordering a chef to do her bidding. “Take him to the roof and roast him over the spit. But. But! I would like a raw preparation of sashimi to precede my meal. Also, if any of his back-fat remains, I require a lardon of man-bacon.”
Ambrosia flapped her little hand in a wave of dismissal. Her arm-fat shook with the motion, like a sandbag full of gelatin.
As the cage withdrew, Grandpaw wheeled up and presented her with something. Coburn saw that it was one of his feet.
“An appetizer if’n you want it,” the old man said.
She took it like a buttery cob of hot corn, shucked the boot and rolled back the pant leg—
Then took a big wet bite.
As the pet carrier rounded an endcap away from the electronics department, away from Ambrosia’s throne room, he could hear the moans of delight, the smacking of her lips, the pleasurable sighs blown through her nostrils as she chowed down on the vampire’s flesh.
He hoped he tasted good, at least.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Spit
Wyatt and Stevie slammed the pet carrier down onto the roof after using a pulley-and-pallet to haul it up there. They slid the pet carrier in place between two other carriers, both similarly-sized but different in design—both were wire mesh, more ‘cage-like’ than Coburn’s own kennel. Then they went back inside.
Even with the blood having mostly fled his body, the vampire could feel his skin tingle. It wasn’t long until sun-up. The edge of the sky beyond the Wal-Mart’s roof was growing slowly stained with purple, like a cloth mopping up wine.
Once the sun came up, they wouldn’t need to cook him. The rays of dawn would do that for them—the world becoming one big microwave oven.
He looked around, took quick stock of his surroundings.
Sentries manned the roof. Four of them, by the look of it. Each armed. Each squirrely, jacked up on something by the look and the smell of them. Trucker meth, maybe. Or just cranked-up cold meds.
Over toward the AC unit was a big oven and spit made out of cement blocks and wood. The spit was a truck axle. A pot-bellied, sallow-chested cannibal in an apron stained with yellow fat and red blood upended a bag of charcoal briquettes below the rusted axle.
Beyond that? The stockpile Coburn needed: tanks of fuel. Kerosene containers, but gas cans, too.
Coburn was not the only meat on the menu—the two cages he sat sandwiched between were occupied. To his left, some Charlie Manson wannabe picking at his skin like it might be run through with ants and worms. To his right, a clean-cut kid in a too-white t-shirt and jeans—maybe 16 or 17 years old. A ginger. Freckles and everything. Smelled like soap.
He didn’t have long. He felt his body going weak from the blood loss and knew that with the coming of morning everything would begin to stiffen up—so that meant this was a now-or-never situation.
Coburn pressed his face against the side of his carrier. Holes peppered the hard plastic, presumably so a dog could stare out, and that was exactly what Coburn did, lined up both eyes with two holes and stared into the cage of the teen boy.
Kids were dumb. He was counting on that.
He pretended to have something in his mouth and spoke accordingly.
“Hey, you,” he said to the kid. “I gah the key. In mah mouf. Can use it to opeh your cage.”
The boy, though, didn’t say a peep and instead shied away.
Fine. Wasn’t taking the bait.
“I want the key,” whispered Charlie Manson. “Gimme the key. Come on. I’ll do it. I’ll let you out, legless dude. I’ll let us all out.”
Good. Someone was taking the bait.
“Here,” Coburn said. “I nee you to puh you toh—” He tried again. “You tongue fru the hole. Stig it out! Hurry! Fas!”
Charlie scooted over to the edge, and then Coburn saw that he was basically just skin and bones—hollow cheeks, the two bones of his wrists clear beneath the skin like a pair of rotten broomsticks.
Manson-esque stuck his tongue out, pressing his face hard against the side of the cage. His pink tongue thrust through the side of his cage and into Coburn’s, but only by a couple of millimeters. It wasn’t enough for Coburn’s plan—of course, Coburn didn’t have a key. What he needed was blood, and this dummy’s tongue was going to be a blood spigot once Coburn had enough on which to clamp down with his fangs.
The tongue kept waggling, like an earthworm just poking out of the hole.
“’Imme uh key! ‘Imme uh key!” Manson-esque chanted.
“Moh closer! Moh closer!” Coburn hissed back.
Manson squashed his face hard as he could so that one of his eyes was bugging out against the metal mesh.
The tongue came all the way through.
And Bingo was his name-oh.
But then Manson-esque muttered, “Shit!” and sucked his tongue back in his mouth, retreating to the back of his cage. Coburn dropped the pretence of having something in his mouth
.
“Hey! Get the fuck back here.”
“Shh!” Manson exhorted, but it was too late. Suddenly Coburn’s kennel rattled with the butt of one of the sentries’ rifles.
“Shut the fuck up, you dumb mong—” The sentry stopped and peered into the cage. “Jesus, Cookie, this hunk of meat really doesn’t have legs.”
The ‘chef’ (apparently named Cookie) mumbled in assent while sharpening his knives against a cement block. “I’m told that Grandpaw blew the legs off with that Remington of his. Fuck it. Best meat is on the trunk anyhow. Get him out of the cage and bring him over.”
In the distance, the sky brightened at its margins, from purple to red with the barest fringe of orange.
The sun was almost here.
As two sentries opened the cage and reached in to grab hold of him, the vampire realized that this was well and truly his last shot.
The hands hauled him free—he had no strength, had no legs, didn’t have a snow-cone’s chance in Hell to make any dramatic moves. But one wrist strayed awfully close to his mouth…
He bit down. Fangs crunched through tendon.
His mouth, flush with blood.
The world brightened. Came alive. His flesh tingled, his leg stumps burned. A hot rush of giddiness swept inside him: feeding was, in its own way, like the human orgasm. Longer he waited, the stronger the sensation. Positively Tantric.
It was that moment that represented a somewhat critical divide for Coburn—a branching of paths, a choice made unexpectedly. A small voice, a loud whisper, rang out inside his head.
Everything came to this point.
At the horizon’s edge, the sun slid upwards, rising, rising.
The sky, brightening.
Coburn wrenched himself free from the man’s wrist.
The man’s rifle clattered to the ground. The world moved in slow-motion. Cookie came at him with a meat cleaver. The other sentry scrambled for his own rifle, bringing it clumsily up against his shoulder.
