Double Dead

by Chuck Wendig

  He was about to explain to Redbone just how funny—not funny ha-ha, exactly, but funny ironic—all of this was, but he didn’t get the chance.

  Outside, a familiar shriek, a banshee’s cry:

  The Bitch Beast was here. But not just her. Other monstrous howls rose up after hers: one, then two, then three, and soon there were so many keening all at once that Coburn couldn’t even count.

  He had summoned her here. And she had brought friends.

  Her body, an infinite sacrament. It was a thing she learned, not a thing she realized from the beginning when she was once again gifted with a kind of life on the streets of New York City. Then, and for long after, she believed that to sustain herself, to ease the hunger within, to create more like her, it was necessary to have the blood of her maker: the vampire.

  But then came the night when her three siblings were eradicated by that weak, limping human. That vile act was a secret blessing, for she learned that she was able to eat of their flesh and feel sustained. It helped to heal her. It was like a key turning in a difficult lock, and suddenly it opened to her.

  The next night, when she had healed up entirely, she took her claws and ripped a piece of meat off her own body—a pound of flesh in the form of one of her bloated, blistering teats—and fed it to one of her lesser cousins, the stumbling, shambling fools unaware of their own potential for greatness. That zombie—a woman in medical scrubs—hit the ground writhing, her body shifting, the bones popping, her eyes opening, no longer as a mere rotting thing but as one of the hunters, with long claws and needled teeth.

  Her body began to heal the flesh she’d stolen from herself.

  She could take her meat. Feed it to others. Make more of herself. And heal the void. The others could do the same.

  Her body was therefore infinite. Their potential ranks, innumerable.

  It was then that she began to move, to hunt the vampire once more: no longer only to take his blood (for she still desired it, its taste unparalleled in her mouth) but also to punish him and tear him apart. It was as primitive as man’s need to blaspheme God, this urge to spit in the face of one’s maker.

  Ah, but his trail was gone.

  Her and her growing army of undead, inhuman hunters roamed without a meaningful direction, but then came the night in the Sonoran that she heard the vampire calling to her in the void of her mind. They were connected. Another thing she had not known but needed to learn.

  She no longer needed to scent his trail. Once he pulled that thread and brought her awareness to him, she could suddenly sense him out there. Like a fly buzzing in a far-off room.

  The fever was getting worse. Not like Kayla had a thermometer or anything, but she could tell that it was hitting her a lot harder than it had even a few hours before, when they first rolled into the city. Everything hurt. Her legs trembled. Her spine felt like it was an antenna drawing to it a signal composed only of electric misery.

  Inside the building at 1100 Wilshire, she stood propped up between Danny and Gil. Her head felt like a skillet. Her brain, a slow-cooking egg.

  Outside, one of the Sons of Man sentries popped off some rounds from one of the .50 calibers bolted to the back of a pick-up truck as Benjamin and Shonda worked to pull the metal gate back down behind the door.

  Somewhere up above them, in the top of this tower of glass and steel, waited the GeneTech lab. Or so Kayla hoped. Though the way she was feeling, she didn’t even know if she was going to make it up there—the elevators were damn sure out of commission, which meant walking thirty-seven flights. That was a lot of stairs, and Kayla didn’t know if she’d have been able to walk them two years ago, much less today.

  Brickert had popped the padlock on the door-gate with a pair of heavy gauge bolt cutters, but had nothing to replace it with. “Don’t want any rotters taking advantage of the opportunity,” he said. Even though they had a semi-circle of Sons of Man vehicles—half the convoy that invaded Altus AFB—protecting the front, it still behooved them, he said, to keep this building locked tight.

  He called for a screwdriver, then used that to stick through the hole. It was enough to keep the gate shut. A living human would be able to figure out how to remove the screwdriver, he said. Hell, a monkey could’ve done it. But a rotter didn’t have the presence of mind to consider it, not even by accident.

  The lobby of the building was well-kept, for the apocalypse. Most of Los Angeles outside looked like a ghost town, except, of course, for the throngs of zombies they passed, throngs chewed apart by the barking fifty-cal. Whole city was dirty, decrepit. Tattoo parlors and dumpling houses and movie theaters, all broken and sagging like slumped-over corpses. Here, though, the lobby wasn’t exactly clean—the beams of their flashlights showed an infinity of dust motes drifting through the air like snow—but nothing had been ruined. It looked merely abandoned, which again gave Kayla some small comfort.

  She sat down in one of the lobby chairs—a plush red-leather affair—and found herself shaking. Another bout of chills.

  “I wish Leelee were here,” she said, teeth chattering. Danny petted her head.

  “Here,” Benjamin said, turning his palm over and shining his flashlight onto it. Three white pills sat in the center. “The last of the aspirin.”

  He snapped his fingers, flagged Shonda over. She handed him some water without him saying a word. All along Kayla noticed the two of them were in sync. They didn’t seem to be lovers or anything. They weren’t even all that friendly; their rapport by all accounts was based on respect and honor. But it was a strong bedrock just the same.

  Kayla didn’t trust either of them.

  Everyone else seemed on board but her and Gil. Even Danny gave a non-committal shrug when, a week before, Brickert suggested he help them get out to Los Angeles to find what they were looking for. When his soldiers showed up at their downed helicopter late that morning, there came a sense of uncertainty about what was going to happen. The Sons of Man didn’t look like a cozy bunch: they were hard-edged home-brew soldiers, and most of them seemed ready to lock-and-load without a moment’s hesitation.

  But Brickert had done a lot to allay their fears. He told them he was just an ordinary man trying to make his way, and keep humanity safe. So when the time came that Ebbie spilled their intention—to get to Los Angeles and get a sample of Kayla’s blood to the scientists still reportedly working on a cure—Benjamin seemed enlivened. He said that this was good news—‘gospel,’ he called it—and said that he felt it was his job to carry the ball the rest of the way. Which meant helping them get to the West Coast to complete—again, his words—‘God’s mission.’

  Kayla wasn’t so sure. The way he treated Thuglow, for instance. He didn’t hit him or say anything—but the way he grabbed him, hoisted him up, it looked like it hurt. And through clenched teeth he sent Thuglow with the other half of the convoy, the half that headed back north toward the Sons’ home territory in Kansas. Not that Kayla had any love for the Clown King of Nowheresville, given that he tried to force her into underage prostitution—but even so, he did fly them out of there and when she saw Shonda throw him into the back of a covered truck, she had a strong suspicion Thuglow’s days could be counted on two hands. Maybe one.

  But the way they handled Coburn? That was even more telling. Coburn was asleep, or dead, or whatever happened to him when the sun rose. He slumbered in the shadow of the helicopter, swaddled in a trio of blankets they’d found inside it. Brickert didn’t say anything; he and Shonda just loaded the vampire into the one moving truck. Brickert said they’d handle him. Said he could be dangerous, given how hungry he was, said, “We’ll take good care of Coburn.” It was the look in his eye, though, that got Kayla. A brightness. Excitement. Victory living in the curled up edges of his smile.

  All along the way, as the convoy traveled long desert highways through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Brickert kept avoiding the subject of the vampire. Whenever she pressed him on it, he said that the vampire ‘wasn’t doing well,’ that
whatever he tangled with ‘left him pretty broken.’ At one point, Brickert tried to persuade her how dangerous it was being buddies with one of the blood-sucking dead, but she balked, got angry, spat on the ground. That was the last he spoke to her about it. For the rest of the trip, he always rode in a different truck.

  It was because of all this that Kayla wouldn’t tell him the address of the labs. She told him it was in downtown Los Angeles, but that was it. She’d give him the address when they got there. He seemed reticent at first but eventually said okay, stopped pressing her on it.

  And now here they were. The fever had been wearing her down for the last day or so. Rubbing her raw, and now she felt like an exposed nerve. Every little blast of air, every footstep, they all reverberated through her, awoke pain deep in her marrow.

  “What floor?” Brickert asked as Kayla swallowed the aspirin.

  “The thirty-seventh, I think.”

  “That’s a long way up. Can you make it?”

  “I can,” she lied.

  “We can carry you.”

  “I said I can make it,” she said, scowling. She stood up, waving away all hands trying to help her. “Let’s go, time’s wasting.”

  By the time the screams and wails of the hunters rose up across the streets of downtown Los Angeles, they were already in the echo chamber of the stairwell, unable to hear anything beyond their own feet clomping on the steps.

  By the fifteenth floor, Ebbie couldn’t do it anymore. He was proud of himself that he made it this far. Dragging several hundred pounds of flesh up the stairwell of an office building was no easy task, but he’d gone a lot further than he figured on. That made him feel pretty damn good, even as he poured buckets of sweat and felt like his legs were about to catch fire. Kayla looked worse—actually, she looked like ten pounds of hell in a two-pound bucket—but she kept on going and that was what gave him confidence.

  He sat down on the step, panting, telling everybody to keep going. He told them he’d catch up, take it one floor at a time.

  “I’ll see you at the top,” he told them. He kissed Kayla on the cheek. Cecelia came and gave him a hug, which surprised him. She’d been a lot nicer on the whole since Oklahoma, though. He shook Gil’s hand. Danny’s, too.

  Brickert said, “We’ll leave someone with you, just in case.” He peeled off one of his soldiers, a smaller guy who looked like he could’ve come out of the Sopranos: slick-back black hair, an owl’s beak nose, dark little eyes. Joey, Ebbie thought his name was.

  Ebbie bid them adieu.

  He and Joey didn’t speak much. Joey just kept watching him. Ebbie talked, instead, just filled the air with chatter. He liked to talk. Especially to new people. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later, with the sounds of the footsteps above them having receded and stopped, Ebbie heard the loud click and clatter of a door opening, and then the footsteps were gone.

  “I think they made it,” Ebbie said. “That’s good. That’s real good.”

  “Yeah,” Joey said, smiling.

  “I think I’d like to take a shot at another couple flights?”

  “No prob,” Joey said. “Let me help you up.”

  Ebbie started to get up and put out his hand, but Joey didn’t take it. He looked up to see why, and found himself staring down the barrel of a small .380 pistol. “I don’t understand.”

  Joey shrugged, then shot Ebbie in the head.

  Something still wasn’t right, Coburn thought. And it wasn’t just the howls outside, the cacophony of monsters calling to him.

  It was something else.

  Brickert had thanked him.

  He’d said, “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.”

  The zombie pandemic. The resultant apocalypse. Brickert wanted those things. Was pleased as punch that they’d happened. So why bring Kayla and the others here where they’d aim for a cure?

  Brickert didn’t bring them here to cure it. He brought them here to stop the cure.

  Outside, the howls came closer and closer. Wouldn’t be long before they’d be on top of them, tearing this convoy to pieces.

  Coburn had to move.

  But his body was dried out. Hands and feet bound. Not enough strength to do shit about any of it. Most he could move was his head.

  “What is that?” Redbone asked. He set down the alligator clamps, drew a Glock pistol and snapped back the action.

  Think, you stupid motherfucker, think.

  Redbone took a step forward.

  Nice boots, Coburn had said.

  That was it.

  No way he was ever going to bite through those things. The leather was tough. Meant to withstand a beating. But he didn’t have to bite through the leather. This didn’t require brute force, but rather just a little finesse.

  With a crackle of crisp skin, Coburn moved fast, before Redbone took another step, and he missed his window: he opened his mouth, wrapped it around the shoelace, and jerked his head back. The shoe came untied.

  “Boot’s untied,” Coburn said, hoarse.

  It was a natural inclination, a reflex built into children by over-protective parents: tie your shoes or you’ll trip and fall into traffic and then a bear will eat you. So Redbone, without thinking, muttered a profanity, set down the gun, and bent over at his waist to tie his shoe.

  Coburn could practically hear the man’s heartbeat drumming in his neck.

  The vampire launched himself forward, clamped his mouth on the biker’s neck, and began to drink. The sound of the blood filling his body dwarfed Redbone’s screams and drowned out the howls of the fast-approaching damned.

  The thirty-seventh floor.

  Down a hallway lay several doors. The Rush Agency. Gershowitz Insurance. Something called StarPortraits, Inc. And at the end of the hall, on a simple placard, the words: GeneTech Labs, LLC.

  The door had no lock, but a keypad and biometric scanner. Above the door hung a small spherical camera no bigger than a golf ball.

  As they approached—Brickert, Shonda and three other soldiers flanked by Gil, Danny, Cecelia and Kayla—the camera blinked red, then turned like an eyeball toward them.

  “They have power,” Brickert said. “But just to their lab. Not to anywhere else in the—” He stopped, looked at Kayla. His face, aghast. He fished in his front pocket for a red paisley handkerchief.

  “What?” she asked.

  Gil tilted her chin toward him. “Oh, Kayla. Your nose.”

  She dragged her forearm across it without thinking. It came away wet with a bright smear of red. Panicked, Kayla took the handkerchief and held it up to her nose. Her head suddenly spun. She almost fell, but Danny and Gil caught her.

  “Told you we should’ve helped you up those stairs,” Brickert said. Gone was his smile. “Well, can’t do anything about it now.” He instead turned his attention to the camera. “My name is Benjamin Brickert. I’m the head of Sons of Man, who have settlements across the Kansas territory. We have a girl with us, a girl who—”

  Kayla’s legs went out from under her. She hit the floor before Gil and Danny could stop her. Next thing she knew, she was on her hands and knees, throwing up—no food, just bile spattering onto the gray berber. Out in the stairwell, she thought she heard something, something that might’ve been a gunshot, but it was too distant, too hard to tell, and before she could say anything—

  A speaker clicked on. A woman’s voice, tinny, replied:

  “She’s sick.”

  “She’s not sick!” Gil said, pushing his way to the door.

  “We do not have a cure for the contagion,” the woman’s voice continued. Her words were hard-edged, but contained a morsel of remorse. “We cannot help the girl. Please remove yourselves from the building.”

  “It’s not the plague,” Gil said, pleading. “It’s multiple myeloma. She’s got cancer. It’s a cancer of the plasma—”

  “I already know what it is,” the voice replied, �
��and I don’t believe you. Please remove yourselves from the building.”

  “Her blood. Her blood cures the plague. We’ve come a long way. You have to listen to me.”

  Kayla looked up from her place on the floor. Her damp hair hung in her face. Her father was impassioned in a way she’d not seen in a very long time. He sounded, in fact, like he was ready to cry. Even more surprising: the fact that Cecelia joined him.

  “It’s true!” Cecelia added. “It does cure the infection. Maybe you can make some kind of cure from it, some kind of wonder-drug—”

  “Some kind of vaccine,” Gil said.

  “Vaccine, yeah. We came all the way from the East Coast. You wouldn’t believe what we’ve been through.” Cecelia started pounding on the door. “Open this goddamn door, you stupid bitch.” That was the Cecelia Kayla knew.

  Brickert shoved her out of the way. “Let’s blow it.”

  He nodded to Shonda, who moved behind Kayla, picked her up and started moving her to one of the side offices. She tried a few doors, found one—the insurance company—that opened.

  “Wait,” Kayla said. “I don’t understand, what’s happening?”

  Shonda pushed her inside. Kayla cried for her father as Shonda followed her inside the office, and slammed the door shut.

  “Quit your crying, girl,” Shonda said, then pulled a pistol.

  Coburn shook like a dog with fleas. Dried skin flaked off him like meaty flecks of dandruff. Redbone lay still on the floor, deflated by more than a little. Just because he was pissed, he picked up the car battery and dropped it on the dumb fucker’s head. Then he stole his boots.

  He had to admit, he felt a little like his old self again. But different, too. Better, even. Like he had a purpose. A real purpose. Turned out, he’d had it for a while now, ever since he’d met the girl, but he’d been pretending that wasn’t true.

  Now he knew the truth.

  With one of his new boots, he kicked open the back door of the truck.