by Chuck Wendig
The dark street of downtown Los Angeles awaited. A machine gun nearby chattered bullets. Echoing over the dead city came the discordant calls of the coming hunters. It wasn’t long before Coburn saw them: emerging from around the corner across a strip mall, it was like something he’d seen on a nature program, the way that a big pack of wolves ran across an open field, shoulder to shoulder, driven by their persistent need to feed. This was like that, but bigger. Not a pack of wolves but big as a whole goddamn herd of buffalo: dozens of them, maybe hundreds. Not zombies. But hunters. Evolved. Mutated. Damned.
Coburn leapt from the back of the truck, bolted toward the building. Saw that while the front doors and windows were all shattered, beyond them a metal gate had been drawn down.
No time for finesse.
He stuck out his shoulder, pushed blood to his legs, then crashed through it.
Gil had a gun, and nobody knew it. Well, nobody but Kayla, because he showed it to her not long after he stole it out of one of the trucks. He didn’t pull it, not yet, because once he did that, the stakes changed. But he was ready. The weight of the gun was heavy at the base of his spine where it sat tucked in his pants.
“No, no, look,” Brickert was saying, pointing to the door. One of the soldiers, a jack-booted thug with an Irish red faux-hawk, tried to go at the door with a crowbar he’d brought, but Ben stopped him. He pointed to marks along the frame and edge of the door. “Bullet holes here. Axe marks here. Someone already tried to get in. This door is fortified. Like I said, we need to blow it.”
The other soldiers kept Cecelia, Danny and Gil back against the wall. Faux-hawk dropped a long duffel and from it withdrew a handful of empty shotgun shells that had been shoved together, forming a closed tube, a cap on each end. From each capsule came a little fuse. Together, Faux-hawk and Brickert began duct-taping these shells against the edge of the door, then Faux-hawk unspooled some det cord, cut a length of it, and tied each little bomb fuse to the longer length so it was all connected. Brickert gave it a once-over, offered a satisfactory nod.
“This is wrong,” Gil said. “This isn’t the way. We blow our way in there, they’re going to see us as intruders. They’re going to—”
Brickert stomped over, pointed a long-barreled .357 Colt Python at Gil’s face. “Shut up, Gil. You’re not giving the orders.” He turned to Faux-hawk. “Blow it.”
Faux-hawk flipped open a Zippo with the American flag on it, struck a flame with a snap of his fingers, then touched the fire to the cord.
The fuse sizzled.
That was when everything really went to shit. Cecelia stepped in between Brickert’s gun and Gil and she thrust her chest out and sneered.
“Don’t you point your gun at my boyfriend,” she said, proud.
Brickert shrugged, then shot her in the heart. Gil screamed. Cecelia dropped. The fuse struck the shotgun shells, each a second after the last, and a series of small deafening pops filled the room: pop, pop, pop, pop. The door fell off its hinges as the air filled with what smelled like the acrid stink of burned bleach.
But then Gil was sidestepping, his own .38 snubnose already in his hand, and the revolver was barking bullets as he backpedaled through the stairwell door.
Brickert didn’t really intend to show his hand so soon. Wasn’t supposed to happen like this, but like the saying went, no plan survived contact with the enemy. And Brickert, well. He was forever besieged by enemies.
He’d never planned to help the girl ‘save the world’ or whatever bullshit illusion she had going on. What mattered was that she lead him to this lab, these people. Brickert planned on putting a stop to this ‘cure.’
The world was as it was because God demanded it be this way.
Same as the Flood, same as God tearing down the Tower of Babel. God had a plan and that plan involved plagues—whether it was a plague of locusts or a plague of the dead. It wasn’t for man to intervene with his “science.” Hell, it was science that got everybody into this mess to begin with.
Besides, if the Sons of Man were able to get hold of that cure for themselves, well, all the better. Just to be sure that it was in the hands of righteous men. Those who deserved the cure would get it. Those that didn’t would suffer and die as God had decided.
Simple enough.
Now they’d blown the door, killed the one bitch, and if everything had gone according to plan, Joey’d finished up with the fat fuck. And now that the old man had escaped back down the stairs, Joey would take care of him, too.
Fine. Whatever. His mother used to say, “Shit happens, but shit comes out in the wash.”
He checked the door where Shonda and the girl had gone. Still closed. Good. He wanted Kayla kept alive. In the instance that what she said she could do was real, then she’d be a real prize to bring back to Kansas. Actually, Ben had entertained the idea of keeping Gil alive, too, if only to calm her down. That, it seemed, was no longer an option.
Where was the mute kid, though? Tommy? Denny? Danny? Whatever his fucking name was. Ben looked around. Saw Carlos standing there to his left, and over closer to the door stood Ray-Ray with his red shock of an almost-mohawk. “Ray-Ray, lock and load, let’s take the lab.”
But Ray-Ray staggered forward, itching his stomach like a man who just woke up from a nap. When his hand came away, it came away bloody.
“Old fucker tagged me,” Ray-Ray said.
Then he fell forward, faceplanting into the carpet. Bomb smoke whirling around him in artful spirals.
Shonda had the gun pointed at Kayla. She ordered the girl around the far side of the desk, but when she told her to sit in the chair, Kayla wouldn’t.
“You sit in that damn chair,” Shonda said. “Don’t make me shoot you.”
“Go to Hell.”
Kayla glanced down to her left and right, looking for something, anything, to help her out here. Her nose was bleeding something fierce now, not just down her front but also down the back of her throat. It almost gagged her.
Then her eyes caught something. Sitting in a half-open desk drawer.
Outside the door, the gun fired, the bombs went off.
It was enough. Shonda flicked her attention toward the door. Kayla remembered something that Coburn had said long ago:
The blood is the life, baby.
Indeed. Kayla grabbed a silver letter opener from the desk drawer, clambered up over the desk, and just as Shonda was turning back toward her, she spit a lung-gusting spray of her own blood into Shonda’s mouth and eyes.
Shonda fired the gun but the bullet went wide, smacking into the drywall—Kayla fell forward into the woman, stabbing her in the chest with the letter opener.
At first Gil thought the blood on his chest was all Cecelia’s, and his mind replayed that horror again and again as her body rocked and fell into him—the poor girl, the poor, sweet girl. A part of him knew she wasn’t sweet, not really, but he also knew that the life she led made her the girl she was. He knew that she was starting to change, starting to figure out how to be a person and not a user, not an abuser. And now she was dead, her journey cut unmercifully short.
But when Gil started firing and backed out into the stairwell, he almost collapsed down the steps. He found it hard to get a breath suddenly, and pain radiated out from his shoulder into his arms and neck.
The bullet had gone through Cecelia and struck him in the shoulder. A small part of him thought, shit, that’s poetic, but it wasn’t poetic. It was tragic, was what it was. Plus, his daughter was still in there.
He had to go back in. Had to get her. At any cost. Even his own life.
Gil leaned against the railing, overlooking the steps down. Catching his breath. But then a dark shape ascended the steps.
Joey. The soldier that Ben had left behind.
He smiled at Gil, a sociopathic smirk, then drew sight on his .380.
The sound of his neck breaking echoed through the stairwell. A dark shadow—a blur, really—whirled up beside him like some kind of ghost, and J
oey’s head spun around on his neck like a cap on a soda bottle.
Joey dropped, but Coburn caught him, then threw the body down the stairs.
Coburn leapt up, caught the railing, and hoisted himself over it next to Gil.
“It all went wrong,” Gil croaked.
Coburn nodded, grim. “Then we better go fix it.”
Kayla emerged from the office, wet with her own blood and Shonda’s. The woman lay dead inside the office. She’d fallen on Kayla, choking her, but as she eased forward, she pushed the letter opener deeper into her own chest until it punctured something important. Heart, lungs, didn’t matter. Her eyes clouded over and that was that.
Her ears were ringing. Her eyes stung from the smoke in the air. Kayla, as numb and confused as a zombie, stumbled forward, saw Cecelia’s body laying still. Sadness rose up in her like a storm. She saw the lab door had been blown off its hinges and shuffled through the doorway.
Ahead of her, a woman screaming. A man yelling. Gunshots.
She stepped through the haze and moved deeper into the lab.
Cubicles to her right. A young man in a black t-shirt lay dead across a desk, a microscope under his unmoving arm.
To her left, open lab space. Tables. Centrifuges. Whiteboards. Glass door. Blood sprayed up on the glass. She could see a pair of feet. Loafers askew. The rest of the body hidden behind a table and chairs.
She staggered ahead, the fog of smoke thinning out.
Ahead stood Ben and one of his fellow soldiers. Ben pointed his gun at the chest of an older woman with graying dark hair and a lab coat.
The gun went off. The bullet bloomed in the woman’s chest like a red rose, and she fell over an office chair, dead.
Kayla screamed.
The other soldier—Carlos—saw her, raised his own gun.
His head snapped back as a bullet clipped him in the forehead, taking his brains out the back of his skull.
Kayla turned, dazed, as behind her by about twenty feet came her father and Coburn. It was her father who held up his weapon, the barrel’s mouth blowing gunsmoke.
Everything swung into a kind of slow motion. Kayla felt a presence behind her, felt Brickert’s forearm closing hard on her throat, drawing her to his chest. His gun barrel pressed against her temple. Coburn and her father came up, skidding to a halt, hands up. Somewhere in the distance, the sound of screams—inhuman screams, the shrieks of the infernal hunters, a sound Kayla had never expected to hear again—rose up from inside the building.
Her heart thumped dully in her ears. The rush of blood. The roar of fear. Brickert was yelling, as were the vampire and her father. She couldn’t make the words out: the ringing in her ears made sure of that. Gil put out his hand, let the gun fall around the hook of his trigger finger before finally dropping to the carpet. Coburn hissed, bared his fangs, looked like a bull ready to rip a matador in twain. Cecelia was gone. Ebbie was nowhere to be found, nor was Danny. She imagined that both were no longer among the living.
Then, movement to their right.
She turned to see Danny. He saw her, too. Their eyes met.
He came out from behind two cubicles, bolting toward her and Brickert like a dart thrown from a fast hand.
Brickert turned. The gun barrel left her temple. It found its target.
Danny took the shot in the chest, and he spun heel-to-toe, dropping.
Kayla felt herself scream, but could not hear it.
The distraction was just long enough.
Before she knew what was happening Coburn was pulling her aside, cradling her protectively with one hand, and with the other, grabbing a tuft of Brickert’s long beard. He jerked his hand forward, and she saw Brickert’s head unmoor from the neck—it still remained attached, but the neck had broken completely. What Kayla had heard referred to as an ‘internal decapitation.’ The gun fell out of Brickert’s hand. Then Coburn and her father were around her, holding her, helping her sit down in a chair.
Coburn picked up the gun that Brickert had dropped and put it into her hand. “Here,” he said. “I’ve got it all figured out.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Maker of Monsters
Coburn knew they were coming. The hunters. The damned. He detected it in many ways: the way the building trembled as they came pouring up through the stairway, through the elevator shaft, in the duct-work. He could hear them, too, like a fast-approaching cloud of crows or starlings blotting out the moon. But worst of all was the way he could sense them. Like a deep hungry well of darkness pulling at him. They had terrible gravity, those monsters.
He wrapped Kayla’s hand around the gun. He waved Gil over.
“Danny,” she said, wiping away tears. She reached for him, almost as if he were there. Coburn could feel the heat radiating off her. The fever was tearing her up. He pulled her gaze back toward him.
“Kayla,” he said. “Listen to me. The monsters are coming. There’s too many of them. We can’t take them on. And there’s nowhere for us to go.”
“Please, Daddy, Danny, please…”
“I think I know how to make them go away,” Coburn said. “But you have to listen to me. Are you listening?”
Gamely, she nodded.
In his head, he replayed a voice from his dream. “It’s one of those old immutable laws,” Blondie said, making a face that might’ve been a grin, might’ve been a sneer. “Kill the maker and you kill the monsters he made.”
Kill the maker.
Kill the monsters.
Easy-peasy lemon-motherfucking-squeezy.
“I need you to shoot me,” Coburn said.
“No,” Kayla said, eyes tearing up. “What? No!”
“Yes. In the head. Here.” He helped her lift the gun, tapped the barrel hard against his forehead. Now the screams of the damned were louder. The floor began to visibly shake, and Coburn could see that even Gil noticed it. The fact they weren’t hearing any gunfire outside made it clear that whatever remained of Brickert’s convoy had been taken apart in short order. “You need to hit the brain. You hear me? The brain. Destroy the brain, destroy me.”
“I can’t, don’t make me—”
“I can’t do it. I won’t. It doesn’t make sense.”
He heard the stairwell door on the thirty-seventh floor crumple inward. Heard the elevator doors banging, then bending, then wrenching out of their mechanics. The duct work below groaned; he could sense it through the floor.
They were almost in.
“I can’t do it,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll let myself. I’m a survivor. The monster inside of me wants to live but by God, I want it dead. You’re a girl of pure heart, as pure as I know, so pure your blood wipes away the stains of evil and can turn a real asshole like me into someone worth having around.”
Shrieks filled the lab. They were here.
“Shoot,” he said, steadying her hand.
“No,” she wept. “Please.”
“Shoot.”
The damned entered the room. The Bitch Beast at their fore. Claws out. Jaws wide with their needled teeth. The ground shook. The air stank.
“Coburn,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks.
He felt the air move behind him. Gil started shooting.
“Shoot!”
She whispered, “Thank you.”
Then she pulled the trigger.
Gil found the hammer on his gun falling on dry rounds, click-click-click, but they kept coming, kept swarming, a room full of rotten, leathery flesh, of glistening mouths and blood-red eyes—
Then the gun went off in Kayla’s hand.
Coburn tumbled backwards.
The hunters all felt it at the same time. Some careened into cubicles, others merely fell onto their knees or curled up on their sides. Their flesh began to smolder and pop like the sound of water drops flicked into a pan of boiling oil. It was as if they’d all just taken a hot bath in bubbling acid: their flesh began to blister and erode, black blood erupting like motor oil. They disi
ntegrated with sputters and hisses until all that was left were foul stains and the moldering bones—and teeth, and claws—collapsed atop of them.
Gil went and hugged his daughter and felt the heat coming off her in waves. She cried. So did he. They held each other like that for a while.
Eventually Kayla looked up and put her hand on her father’s chest.
“You got shot.”
“I’m okay,” he said, though he didn’t really know how true that was. If the world were back together again, he’d say it wasn’t a killing shot. But this was a lab, not a hospital. Infection would set in soon enough. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t feel good.”
“We’ll get you all taken care of. Get you out of this place come morning. We’ll leave the city and…” His voice trailed off. He didn’t know what else to say. Gil didn’t have a plan. Didn’t even know if she was going to be okay.
Kayla smiled, then, a surprising gesture, and one that made him feel a little bit better. She reached up and kissed his brow. “You’re a good Daddy.”
“Thank you, baby. You’re the best daughter.”
“I guess we won’t ever make a cure, huh?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Not today.” Not ever.
But then—from across the room, a cough. Gil looked in that direction, saw that a woman with a lab coat lay there, shot in the chest, but there she was, lifting her head up. Blood coming from the corners of her mouth. For a second he thought, shit, she’s turning into a goddamn zombie, but then she spoke.
“This isn’t the lab,” she said, spitting up blood onto the floor.
“What?” Gil asked.
“Sorry, this isn’t the”—another cough—“only lab. Certainly not the main one. Other one’s in—” A coughing fit this time, and with it came a deep rattle that made Gil certain she didn’t have long before she tap-danced off this mortal coil. “Other one’s in San Francisco. In the bay. On one of the ferry boats.”
