Double Dead

by Chuck Wendig

  “You sonofabitch,” Kayla said.

  “It’s okay,” Gil said, pulling her close with his good hand. “Vampire’s right. I deserve worse.”

  Cecelia said nothing. Ebbie just stared, shell-shocked. Leelee lay over on the bed, drifting in and out of consciousness.

  “Daddy—”

  “Shh,” he said, stroking her hair. “It’s okay.”

  “Damn right it’s okay,” Coburn said, chuckling. “None of us are dead. Well. None of us beside me, anyway. And we got the old RV back. Frankly, you assholes should be throwing me a parade instead of staring at me like I’m Frankenstein’s monster. I didn’t drown a little girl or anything.” He plopped down on the edge of the kitchen pull-out table. “Somebody get me a map. It’s time to chart a new course. Need to move you moo-cows to the West Coast, I hear.”

  His laugh was dark and deep and it filled the air.

  PART THREE

  PREY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Herd Moves West

  They were being hunted.

  Down Route 70 ’til it turned into Route 44, through Indiana, Illinois, across Missouri, and finally into Oklahoma, they always felt that pressure at their backs. They never saw their predators, but Coburn knew who they were. Those rotters who had supped on his blood became different, somehow. Like his blood turned a dark key and unlocked something inside of them.

  Sometimes, if the wind was right or if the road was flat, they’d hear it: a chorus of their cries carried long across the distance. It chilled even Coburn’s already cold marrow—the sound they made wasn’t animal, wasn’t human, but was somewhere in-between. It was the sound of the Devil on the hunt, the keening wail of a vengeful banshee driven by a terrible and unpredictable hunger.

  The awful calls twined together, but if you listened hard enough, you could pull them apart and hear the four separate threads: a fearsome foursome out there wandering the highways and the hills, the long tracts of dead towns and empty forests.

  Nobody knew what to call them: super-zombies? The uber-dead? The rotters, squared? Nothing sounded right. All the names seemed twee.

  Mostly, they just thought of them as, well, Them.

  Closest they came to seeing them was just a week back—they’d been traveling now for a month, winding their way low and slow through the highways, avoiding towns and cities wherever possible. But then, not far from Joplin, Missouri, they heard those keening wails rise up like a hurricane wind carrying with it a handful of ghosts, and this time it was closer than before.

  Then—a bloom of fire and a distant whump shook the earth. Sky lit up before dying back to dark.

  “We passed a gas station back there,” Ebbie said. “You think…”

  Coburn nodded. “I don’t think. I know.”

  “But why? Why would they do that? Why take out a gas station?”

  “Because,” he said. “They want to fuck with us. It’s what I’d do.”

  Coburn was hungry.

  Out here, they’d found that, as expected, the dead weren’t as numerous, which made sense from a population standpoint: the entire state of Missouri had half the population of New York City. Fewer living folk made fewer dead folk. Of course, that also meant fewer survivors. Fewer survivors meant less blood.

  To reiterate: Coburn was hungry.

  He’d taken to supping off Ebbie, but that sonofabitch’s blood was so buttery-delicious that it took all his will not to crawl into the man’s gutty-works the way he had done with Ambrosia the Cannibal Queen. Plus, whenever he drank a little from Ebbie, Creampuff got it in his head to growl and bite at Abner’s pant-legs, sometimes nipping at any exposed flesh whenever the sock slipped down. That was just embarrassing for everybody involved.

  During the day, Coburn slept in the RV. Seemed like the hunger made his dreams worse. Heightened them, sharpening his daytime visions to a dagger’s point. Damn if he didn’t have some rough dreams. Dreams of dead little girls. Dreams of starving. Dreams of the floor falling out from under him, of his middle finger cut off and spiraling down in the darkness, of a house on fire under a fat full moon.

  Hunger made him more irritable, too. Sharpened to a brittle edge. Anxiety nibbled at him. Like piranhas biting. Back in the city, before waking up into the zombiepocalypse, he had everything he wanted. Having your wants filled up did a lot to curb worry. But out here, worry was suddenly all he had. Worry about whether or not he’d get fed. Worry over whether or not Gil would suddenly grow a pair of balls and come at him while he slept. Worry about Them: the monstrosities who were seeking his blood above all others’. Coburn didn’t think the humans in his herd understood that, yet, and he damn sure wasn’t going to tell them. The herd didn’t need to know that the wolves wanted a taste of the shepherd, not the sheep.

  Worst of all, hunger gave volume to the awful voice inside him. It was a bullhorn for the monster’s monologue. In his head, a constant chatter encouraging any and all manner of atrocities.

  At the very least, he was able to convince them to ditch the plan of heading through Sons of Man territory. He figured, go south. Curve low toward Mexico, maybe down what remained of old Route 66, take that path toward Los Angeles. No need to go messing with his old enemies, much as he’d love to be the maggot in their soup.

  Still. Hunger. Fear. Dreams. Worry.

  A bad combination.

  Kayla was scared.

  Nothing was going right anymore. Not since that night in the farmhouse. Their rescue and respite was anything but.

  Coburn had changed. Up until that night when he broke her Daddy’s fingers, she’d thought that in him was a glimmer of something good, a tiny portion of his humanity left intact. She’d felt close, like she was unlocking something, but turned out all she was doing was uncorking a bottle filled with bile and blood and shadows darker than what had been there before. His dreams were no longer accessible to her; she tried to reach him in the space between sleep, but whenever she reached for him a wall slammed down. And when that wall slammed down, the dream turned into a nightmare.

  The same nightmare.

  A series of images played out: a fire in the desert, blood dotted across sandstone, the howls and gibbers of their hunters, city streets choked with the dead and the skies darkened by flies, hands reaching for her and pulling her apart.

  One morning—late morning, when she would try to sleep and reach the vampire’s own day-dreams—she awoke from that nightmare and found herself feverish and sick to her stomach. Worse, her left hand was numb, it wouldn’t move. Leelee told her that it was the cancer. Getting into the bone marrow. Destroying the bone. But the numbness was more than that. That meant it was in her spine. Little tumors putting pressure on her nerves. Numbness. Paralysis. Soon it could—would, Leelee said—get worse.

  After all this time, she was dying.

  She tried to tell Coburn, but he didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t even want to talk about it. He was mean, too. What did she expect? She’d invited the monster into their life and now she wanted him to be her friend? Kayla reminded herself that she’d known the deal going into it.

  Nobody seemed the same. Her father remained present, but distant. Like he was retreating from the world. Cecelia tried to talk to him, but he didn’t want any of it. And that only made her meaner, too. Like it was somehow Kayla’s fault.

  Maybe it was.

  The only upside was Danny. Danny, who Coburn still called ‘Ginger,’ was the one shining thing in her life. He couldn’t speak, he wrote for them, explaining. That was how he communicated: jotting notes down on paper. He wasn’t deaf. He could hear okay. He wrote down on the paper that his muteness was due to an ‘iodine deficiency.’ She didn’t know why that would happen, but it didn’t bother her. He let her talk most of the time, which was fine by her.

  Of course, he was also really cute.

  When she was with him, she didn’t feel scared. They’d take a break when the RV would pull over during the day, somewhere that Ebbie couldn’t see a
ny zombies, and she and Danny would walk the dog, spend a little time together.

  Whenever they were apart, though, the fear came back.

  It was never gone for long.

  Danny was in love.

  Or, at least, that was what it felt like. He’d never been in love before. Whenever he was with Kayla—whenever he even saw her sleeping on the RV floor in a sleeping bag while he uncanned some food for breakfast—he got this happy tightness in his stomach. And everything seemed more alive. More awake.

  It was either love or a stomach bug, he figured.

  He preferred love.

  Gil was lost.

  Not physically lost, no, but spiritually, emotionally, mentally. Inside his head was a labyrinth built out of shame and failure, and he wandered it nightly—but at the center of this maze was not a minotaur. It was Gil. Gil was both the wanderer of the labyrinth and the monster at its heart.

  The days and nights passed in a way that made him feel like they had no borders—they oozed together like runny eggs in a hot skillet.

  The pain of his fingers had never properly subsided, and it always nagged at him: with every heartbeat the pain radiated, a dull, drumming throb. Leelee had set them as best as she could, but that night back then at the farmhouse she was sick, feverish, on the verge of falling over into the void and becoming one of the starving dead—yes, Kayla’s gift had saved her, but that night when she set his fingers in a makeshift splint using some duct tape and a wooden spoon, the job was only so good and his fingers still felt crooked.

  It amazed him how critical those two fingers are. Especially in a zombie apocalypse. Those two fingers helped him use a gun: the middle finger beneath the trigger guard and the doubly important index finger—to pull the trigger. Without them, it felt like he might as well have had his legs chopped off.

  Of course, almost everyone around him was a cripple, these days. Leelee limped, still. Always would, she figured. Danny couldn’t talk. Ebbie had actually lost a dozen or so pounds, but he was still north of three hundred and would never run a sprint in record time. Cecelia was, well, an emotional cripple. And finally, his daughter—her left hand, numb, moving towards paralyzed.

  Only one who wasn’t broken in some way was the vampire. Even though Gil knew it was absurd, he couldn’t help but imagine that the vampire had done this to all of them, not just him—like he was a vampire that drank more than blood. He drank their luck, maybe. Their spirit. Stole Danny’s voice. Robbed Kayla of her hand. It didn’t make sense but it didn’t have to. Monsters were real. Who knew what they could do?

  Gil pictured how miners used to hobble slaves, chaining them up or breaking their feet so they couldn’t go far. Wasn’t this like that? Coburn keeping his ‘herd’ nearby so they couldn’t stray?

  That was Gil’s fault, he knew. First bad decision was letting the vampire stay. Second bad decision was trying to get away.

  Yes, indeed, Coburn saved them.

  But sometimes, Gil thought, maybe being saved was worse than dying. Especially in a world like this.

  The only glimmer of hope he had was for his daughter. He knew she was special. She could see things in her dreams sometimes. And then her blood—that was special, too. But it didn’t stop her being sick. That sickness was getting worse. Cancer was an insidious thing, a monster, like Coburn, that moved in and wouldn’t move back out again.

  Sometimes, Gil thought, you just gotta cut the cancer out to be rid of it.

  Ebbie was worried.

  He was so worried, he could hardly eat. And there was food out there to be had. Sure, you’d think it’s the end of the world, all the food’s probably used up or spoiled outright, but this zombie thing happened fast. Lot of food left in the stores. No, you wouldn’t find a bag of spinach or a box of frozen hamburgers, and no matter how far you drove you’d never come across an operational KFC, but in stores and houses you could still find canned goods, bags of candy, sodas, even cereal. Amazing how good cereal tasted after two years. Must’ve been all that high fructose corn syrup, he thought. Which didn’t really help his diabetes, but the end of the world meant he didn’t have much time to think about his blood sugar levels, thank you very much.

  What had him worried—well, besides everything else that was awful about the broken, zombie-infested planet—was the Winnebago.

  This old beast had been with Gil and them since before they even picked him and Cecelia up. But the engine was starting to knock. Sometimes it sputtered.

  Thing was, the RV—a 1994 Winnebago Itasca Suncruiser—was diesel, which, according to Gil, was a good thing since diesel fuel didn’t ‘expire’ like other gas. Ebbie didn’t even realize that gas expired in the first place, but the addition of ethanol cut its shelf life down to ninety days or so. Which explained why they couldn’t just go snatching up any car on the road even though they had gas in ’em: they wouldn’t even start.

  Diesel was harder to find, but they managed: the highway was home to enough diesel vehicles (any time they caught sight of one of those little Volkswagen hatchbacks it was like playing a game of Punch Buggy, except this game had a lot higher stakes to it).

  Still, Gil said that maybe this batch of diesel was no good. Maybe it had water in it. Or microbes. That could happen, he explained, but he explained it in a way like he just didn’t care. Like he’d given up the ghost.

  That had Ebbie worried, too.

  Gil went on to say that it might be that the filter or fuel injector was gummed up—this was, after all, a decades-old motor home with 115,000 miles on it. At this point it was like an old dog. Everybody knew it wouldn’t last forever, but they really didn’t want to think about putting the beast to sleep.

  Along the way they’d been keeping their eyes out for something new—but not only had they not found anything, smaller vehicles just wouldn’t accommodate them all anyway. Back in Indiana, about ten miles south of Indianapolis, they found a motor home dealer. Lot full of RVs of all shapes and sizes.

  And not one of them diesel.

  Soon as the ’Bago died, Ebbie didn’t know what they’d do. He couldn’t walk long distances. He was too big. And then he really would have to worry about his diabetes. Walking made him sweat like a pig. They had bottled water, but not enough to keep him conscious.

  Of course, walking had another issue: Them. Behind them, the monsters followed. They couldn’t catch up, Coburn said, because the RV was fast enough—while they were fast, too, they weren’t machines.

  But once they started walking, well.

  The monsters would surely catch up.

  Cecelia was pissed.

  Fuck all these assholes. Fuck ’em right in the eye. They treated her like a pariah, now. She got food last. Water last. Always had to hold her piss until Ebbie deigned to stop. That dipshit kid who faked being mute got better attention than she did. It just wasn’t right.

  The tables, they had to turn. Only way that was going to happen was if she made them turn. Her mother always told her, “Cecelia, you want something in this life, you have to go out and get it yourself. Nobody’s going to give you shit, girl. The only way you get the cookie is if you reach in the jar and take it.”

  Then the woman would suck her Parliament cigarette down to a sizzling nub and hand Cecelia—young as age twelve—a sip of her Gallo wine.

  She was going to get Gil back.

  She was going to show him how to teach his uppity bitch daughter what’s what.

  Then she was going to send that vampire to Hell.

  Leelee believed.

  It was hard not to. She’d always been something of an agnostic, forever leaving room for God (or Buddha or the Goddess or whatever name the power of the divine had) in her life, but it was never something she thought too much about. Such an idea remained firmly abstract, outside her grasp, beyond any practical meaning in her life.

  That had changed.

  The dead walked. They had a vampire with them. They survived impossible situations. All those things were by thems
elves fantastic and strange and ostensibly served as proof of something beyond mortal ken.

  Really, though, it was all about Kayla.

  Kayla. The girl who should’ve been dead. The girl who dreamed. The girl whose blood was a curative for the rotten and wretched plague that destroyed… well, at least most of America, if not the rest of the world.

  Leelee knew that she herself should be dead. It was just that simple. She should be dead, taken over by whatever parasite, virus or bacteria it was that not only undoes rigor mortis but forces the dead to get up, stumble around and hunger for flesh.

  But a draught of Kayla’s blood had the power to change that.

  Which meant it had the power to change the world. Just as it could reverse the zombie plague in a person, it could reverse the sickness that plagued the human condition.

  Kayla could cure the world. Kayla wasn’t God—or Buddha, or the Goddess—but in her shimmered a spark of the divine.

  That was what Leelee believed. And it gave her hope.

  The hunters hunted.

  Four of them stalked the wasteland.

  They had changed. And the changes kept on coming, every night a new evolution. Long, curved claws like a vampire’s fangs but serrated on the inside. Legs broken, twice-jointed so that they could move and run faster. Their rotten skin tightened up—where it split, scabs formed and hardened like chitinous nodules, like hard caps of porous volcanic bone.