by Chuck Wendig
On the far side of the chopper Coburn found Gil, Kayla and Creampuff. Arranged like a loving father and daughter, with their little terrier. Gil’s arm had been draped across Kayla’s shoulder. Her head, tilted gently so she rested on her father. The terrier, curled up and sleeping in their lap.
But the scene was imperfect. Gil’s mouth was stretched open in a horrible smile, his tongue missing. Creampuff’s head was turned too far inward, the neck plainly broken—his body thin, ribs exposed, drained of blood.
And Kayla. Her throat torn out. Like Rebecca’s.
Coburn collapsed onto his knees. Inside him, the monster’s voice chuckled, then the chuckle rose to a manic cackle, a breathless, riotous laugh that went on and on—above him, the moon looked too bright, the stars seemed to shift and swim, leaving trails of light. He felt the grim humming and buzzing in his own heart as the earth split open and swallowed him whole.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Blood Drive
Voices bubbled up out of the darkness. Incomprehensible at first. Like hearing them underwater. But soon, they became clear—
“—coming out of it.” A man’s voice. Deep. Bass. “I’m almost impressed.”
A woman’s voice: “Nobody can take that much voltage.”
“The Devil has many powers.” That voice, he recognized.
Benjamin Brickert.
Coburn opened his eyes. The world swam in and out of focus. Someone—a woman, thick, tough, broad shoulders—shined a bright flashlight into his face.
Beyond her stood two other men. One a gone-to-pasture biker-looking dude in a leather vest. A bit of gut showing from beneath a dusty white wife-beater. Next to him? Brickert. Older. Leaner. Gaunt. Gone was the well-fed whatever-he-was—plumber, brick-layer, dick-sucker, Coburn never knew. His black goatee had gone to a full beard and was now shot through with gray.
“The vampire awakens,” Brickert said.
“Fuck you,” Coburn said, his words slurring.
“Fuck me? Sure. You want to flip me off again? First time you gave me the bird, I cut off your finger. And boy, didn’t that turn out real interesting. Second time you flipped me off, I shot down your chopper. But I guess you can’t show me all that piss and vinegar with your hands bound up behind your back.”
Coburn tried to move: it was true. His hands were bound up. Tight. Maybe with zip-ties, he didn’t know. His feet—barefoot, since he’d never found a goddamn shoe to fit him in the 66 States—were sitting in a tub of water. Not far away, he saw a couple car batteries, wires, alligator clips. They’d been electrocuting him. Brickert learned that trick long ago.
He sat in an alcove made of boxes. The ground bucked and bounced beneath him, beneath everyone. They were in a truck. A moving truck, by the looks of it.
“Do what you want,” Coburn said. He shut his eyes, found a cascade of images behind the lids: his daughter Rebecca dead on the floor, Leelee blowing herself to pieces, Kayla sitting propped up with her father and the dog. Plus, a whole host of corpses with Coburn’s name on it: dead on bed, dead in tubs, dead in shallow graves. All that blood. His eyes shot open. “I deserve all of it.”
Brickert laughed. A genuine laugh. He wiped tears from his eyes.
“I killed them,” Coburn said. “I killed them all.”
“Who’s that?” Brickert asked.
“My daughter, Rebecca. Kayla. Gil. The whole lot of them.”
Brickert and Shonda shared a look. “You did, at that. That was a messy scene. You’re one mean mother, Coburn.”
Brickert backed up. “Redbone,” he said to the biker-type. “Let’s hit the bloodsucker again. Light him up like Christmas.”
Redbone did as told. Came over, got Coburn in the neck with alligator clips. Coburn’s world lit up as his body seized. Redbone yanked the clips, bringing a bit of the vampire’s flesh with them.
“Shonda,” Brickert said to the woman. “Did I ever tell you the story of how me and the vampire met? How he gave me the middle finger, and I chopped that finger off and took it away?”
She nodded. “You did. But good stories like that one, I’ll listen to again and again.”
“That finger of yours,” Brickert said, “wasn’t something I meant to take. But it happened and in that moment before I hurried away and the bombs went off, I had what some people call an epiphany. So I snatched up the finger. Bombs went boom. And I thought you were really for-real dead.
“That finger. I wrapped it up nice and tight. Put it on ice and dropped it in a cooler, then took it down the next morning to a friend of mine who worked for a little lab that got a bunch of freelance work from Big Pharma. I gave your finger to my buddy, and, hell, I guess I had some bullshit science-fiction idea in my head that he’d be able to, I dunno, clone you or something. That way, we’d be able to find your weaknesses. See what makes you tick-tock, Mister Clock. Like I said: bullshit.
“But my buddy—who belonged to our group and so he was excited to have vampire tissue under his microscope—said he could do experiments at the cellular level. Said your dead cells came back to life, or almost, at least, when put in the presence of red blood cells or blood plasma. He said the mitochondria, which looked inert, would suddenly swell up and go crazy soon as red blood cells even got near to them.
“My friend gets this idea. Decides to… I don’t know the correct term here, so forgive me, but he decides to ‘infuse’ the vampire DNA into a simple bacteria. Bacterium? Whatever. Interesting thing: it kills the bacterium. Or seems to, at least. Bacteria stops moving. Cell structures rupture. Mitochondria shrivel up to nothing. And yet—suddenly, the bacterium started to move again. And when put in the presence of other non-infected bacteria, it infects them, and the same thing happens there: pseudo-death, then revivification.”
Brickert walked behind Coburn, now. Hiding in the shadows offered by the alcove of boxes. “Now, maybe you know where this story is going, maybe you don’t, but like people used to say on the Internet when there was an Internet: spoiler warning, this is how the zombie apocalypse was born.”
“You’re a shitty liar,” Coburn said. But it was just bravado: Brickert wasn’t lying, was he?
“My buddy was the first to get infected. Be honest with you, I don’t know how it happened. I wasn’t there. None of us were. Maybe he didn’t follow procedure like he was supposed to. He always was a little sloppy. Or maybe someone else fucked up. All I know is that lab was ground zero for the infection. And I know that the first zombie I put in the ground was my friend. From that point, it was all over after a couple days. Nobody knew it was coming. Nobody but us. This was the kind of thing we prepared for.”
Coburn almost laughed. What a horrible thing to discover, so horrible it was absurd. His middle finger. The progenitor of the zombie apocalypse. A little fuck-you-attitude can really change everything. “So when you say you should thank me, you’re being sarcastic, that right?”
“What?” Brickert said. “No, no, Coburn. I mean it. Thank you. Thank you. When a thing’s a little bit broke, you can do a patch-up job to fix it. Table leans a little, you put something under the leg to set it straight again. When a thing’s a whole lot broke, well. Table has a crack down the middle, only thing you can do is put something better in place. Sometimes, you fix something, you first have to destroy it. That’s what happened. The world was getting too awful for its own good, Coburn. It’s like before, when God sent the deluge to drown out the iniquities of man.”
“Does that mean that God sent me, then?”
Another laugh. “Maybe He did. Mysterious ways and all that.” Brickert mussed up Coburn’s hair—a crass, almost fatherly gesture. “Jeez, Coburn. This has been a real bad night for you. Chopper crashed. Killed your friends. Realized that you killed most of the known world just by flipping it the bird. There’s an old myth that vampires can’t see themselves in mirrors. It’s not true, obviously, as I’m sure you know. At least, it’s not true in the technical sense. But you look a little deeper, maybe it is true
. Maybe the vampire isn’t supposed to see what he really is, because then what does he become? What happens when the monster sees himself in the mirror for the first time?” He got right up in Coburn’s face, unafraid. “Now you see yourself? That right? Bet you don’t like what you see, vampire. Bet you don’t like the Devil staring back.”
Coburn could’ve moved. Could’ve lurched forward, bit him right in the face, got a taste of blood. But he didn’t have it in him. He hated Brickert. But that hate had a softer edge than he expected. Almost like his heart just wasn’t in it. The man detested Coburn for what he was: a monster. It was certainly earned.
He was, after all, the creature that killed the world.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Putrid Frequencies
Down in the dark once more. They tortured him with electricity. They beat him. They cut on him. When day came they shoved him in a box; sometimes they pulled his hand and held it out the door, let it burn up, let it char to a stump that looked like a marshmallow held too long over the campfire. Mostly, though, Coburn drifted down in the murky depths of his own mind. Horrors and nightmares waited down there. Faces swimming up: Kayla, Blondie, Rebecca. A distant dog—the yips and yaps of a rat terrier—barking. The darkness turned red as blood before clouding back to squid-ink black.
Somewhere down there, a thread. Down below everything else, it flicked and twitched like loose fabric from a fraying sweater hanging out to dry in a hard wind—and when Coburn reached for it, he discovered that it was familiar.
It was pink.
He pulled on it, and he felt the darkness swivel toward him. Like a pair of wolf’s eyes noticing its prey.
There she was: the Bitch Beast. Not bodily. He couldn’t even see her. But he could feel her. Searching for him. At first he didn’t understand, but then the connection, which felt so intimate, like a coil of intestine shared between two bodies, became clear.
She’s mine. I made her. Then, to her: I made you.
In the darkness, she howled in protest.
He could feel her anger. It rose up like bile in a thermometer. Her scorn, her hatred, her hunger. The ragged wound she left him across his chest suddenly felt like it caught fire, like someone had upended a pot of scalding water there—her rage made manifest, her mark on his skin alive with pain. She wanted to tear him apart the way her own brothers and sisters had been torn asunder. He saw in her mind, saw her eating the other hunters, gaining their power and then sharing it with others in turn: tilting back zombie heads, vomiting black blood and dead flesh into their mouths, making more of them, giving of herself as much as she could give.
Coburn could feel them, too—though not as completely. They were hard to grasp, like seed motes floating through the air, evading touch.
But the Bitch Beast, she was as bright as a bonfire.
Her desperation was laid bare like a bone stripped of meat. When he had fled, she had lost the trail: Coburn’s scent had been on the ground before, but now it was in the air, dispersed, and when the time came for her to hunt him she was unable to find the trail. She did not know of the thread.
Not before now.
Coburn looked at what had become of everything. He’d sown so many seeds of horror. And now, the worst of it all lived in his dead heart. Guilt. Shame. Grief. These were not things he understood, and now that he was feeling them it was like being burned for the first time—it was a child’s first comprehension of pain, and that made it a thousand times worse. He could not dull the sensation. It throbbed, as alive as anything, certainly more alive than he.
Everything was lost.
And so Coburn reached and grabbed a hold of that pink thread that tied around the Bitch Beast’s primitive mind like a string around a pinky finger, and he pulled on it hard. He told her:
Here I am. You want me, you come and get me. You can have me. You can have my blood. You can tear me and the rest of the world to pieces.
She howled in response. Not a howl of rage, but a howl of desire, of celebration, a signal that the hunt was back on.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
City of the Dead
Coburn awoke to the sound of gunfire. Not steady. Just a few shots: pop, pop, pop. He didn’t know how long it had been. How long he had been down in the dark with her. Did that just happen? Was it hours ago? Days? Years? As a vampire, that was something he genuinely had to worry about: theoretical eternity made such lapses in time-keeping possible.
He lay on his side in the moving truck, still surrounded by boxes. At his back he heard the clomping boot-steps of someone big: probably Redbone, by the sound of it. Redbone, the fat biker in the too-tight wife-beater, was his constant companion, a steady presence whenever he rose from consciousness.
Coburn tried to crane his neck to see—his hands were still bound behind his back, and his feet were similarly trussed with zip-ties, obliterating any mobility he hoped to have—and as he did, the skin around his neck and jawline cracked. It sounded like a rib of celery bending and snapping.
It was his skin. His whole body was drying out like a corpse under the vigilant eye of the desert sun. He was a man without fluids, a creature without blood: the end of that road was clear. Soon he’d dry out entirely, turn crispy as a Kafka roach, and then be naught but a shattered husk, an exoskeleton on par with the remnant shell of a seventeen-year-old-cicada. It wasn’t a total death, but the transformation would still strip him down, his existence turned inert. Just as he had been beneath the collapsed floor of that theater back in Manhattan.
He still managed to crane his head—despite sounds that called to mind someone chewing through crunchy fried chicken—and look at whoever was moving around behind him. Sure enough, it was Redbone. Coburn saw his boots: they were steel-toe workboots, like you might see on a construction site.
“Those look about my size,” Coburn croaked.
Redbone looked down at him, grunted.
“I’m just saying. Nice boots.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Redbone warned. He heaved another car battery up onto one of the boxes, then patted it the way you would a good dog.
Coburn tried to laugh, but what came out sounded like he was gargling glass. “I got ideas, but no way to work ’em. I haven’t eaten in forever. Don’t suppose you feel like giving me a taste.”
“Fuck your mother.”
“Guess that’s a no.” Something tickled at the back of Coburn’s mind. A little scratching finger, entreating him forward. His head was too foggy to make much sense of it. He ignored it. Outside, more gunshots popping off. “Hell are we?”
Redbone stared down at him, not sure he should answer, but Coburn could see the acquiescence cross the man’s face, an attitude of eh, fuck it. “Los Angeles.”
“Los Angeles.”
“Did I stutter?”
“Might as well have. I thought we were going to Kansas.” He noticed then that the truck wasn’t even moving anymore. They’d stopped. Again, that tickle at the back of his brain.
“We’ll drag you back to Kansas soon enough, vampire. Gonna make an example of you in front of all our people. Let them know that the authority of the Sons of Man is total and complete.”
“Uh-huh. But why are we in Los Angeles?”
“Not your business. Curiosity killed the cat, you know.”
“And what’d it do to the vampire?”
Redbone grinned. “Got his ass electrocuted.” He held up the two alligator clips, tapped them together, got a few sparks arcing. More gunshots outside: these coming faster, more frequent, before cooling off.
The tickle at the back of Coburn’s head became more insistent, so much so that it was more like an irritating flick or even a swat.
A question suddenly entered his mind:
Why am I hungry?
He shouldn’t have been. He’d had a last meal. Kayla, Gil, the others: a blood-gorging orgy. The undead crucible that was his flesh should’ve been bloated with the red stuff. When he’d awoken in the truck with Brickert, and
even now, his flesh in places was still disrupted where the hunters took him: neck, wrist, foot. He hadn’t healed up properly yet. But why? If he killed those others and guzzled their blood like fruit punch, those wounds should be all closed up.
Further, the ragged wound across his chest—his reward from battling the Bitch Beast—remained open and suppurating.
Frankly, he shouldn’t even be in this situation if he had consumed such a grand guignol meal like that. That chest wound especially should have long healed over. In fact—did he even have the wound when he killed the others?
When he remembered killing the others?
Through his veins, an icy blast of realization. No, he didn’t.
In his vision, that wound was healed.
Which meant—
They weren’t dead. Were they? Kayla. Gil. Ebbie, Cecelia, Creampuff, maybe even Thuglow. That vision of them—it was just that. A vision. A dream. No. A nightmare.
Hope, sickly sweet, gurgled in his dead heart.
He was then forced to contemplate the other puzzle piece: Los Angeles.
Why here?
It was where they’d been headed all along. To Los Angeles. To find the lab. To take Kayla, to make her blood part of the cure. Brickert brought them here. He was their escort. He did what Coburn could not: he shepherded them forth, got them to where they needed to go. The vampire had been wrong all along. The Sons of Man weren’t trying to hurt them. Well, they were trying to hurt him, okay, sure. But their interests were human interests. Not like him. Him with his selfish hungers and callous games. Brickert was doing the right thing.
Of course, it all made sense: the Sons of Man were fighting for people this whole time, weren’t they? They were trying to help Kayla. Help her by keeping the monster out of the equation.
Well, shit.
