by Chuck Wendig
Now, though, everything was different. An obvious statement—what with the plants pushing up out of broken highway, the pile-up of rusted cars, the roaming hordes of slavering undead, only a mule-kicked blind dude could suspect that the world hadn’t pretty much shit the bed. But what struck Coburn was how it had changed for him. He had always been solipsistic, of course, occasionally convinced in the wee hours of the morning that all of the world was but a figment of his diseased imagination… but now it really hit home. The buffet had closed. The endless line of willing and drunken and drugged-up victims (queue forms in the rear) was done funneling their life source into his open and eager mouth.
No more gravy train.
No more chuck wagon.
Maybe it was just the warm glow of Carl’s blood talking, but that gave Coburn a sick little thrill. It was time once again to be the hunter. Before, he was like the spider grown fat in the center of the web. He let the flies come to him.
But now, if he wanted to eat, he needed to roam. He needed to hunt.
It was time to become the predator once more.
And it was with this thought that he saw something on the ground, something that caught a band of bright moonlight.
On the side of the road waited a wet puddle. Small—no bigger than a tea cup saucer. The dog whined in the back of his throat and Coburn shushed him as he knelt down and dipped two fingers into it.
His fingers came away black and sticky.
Motor oil.
Fresh, too. The wheel rut next to it was new. Someone had just been through here. Drove on the side of the road to avoid the gauntlet of wrecked-up cars.
Vehicle meant humans.
Humans meant food.
Maybe the gravy train wasn’t dried up just yet.
“Let the hunt begin,” Coburn said, and Creampuff yipped in agreement.
The hausfrau’s belly distended against the pink bathrobe, poking out past the frayed fabric belt. It was so bloated that the belly button stuck out, fat and shriveled as a dead man’s thumb.
Around her lay the bodies of her undead cohorts, all of them ripped asunder, bitten into with great gobbets of spoiled meat taken from their thighs, their guts, their brains. Some of them were still… well, not alive, not really, but animated, at least. They moaned and twitched and pawed at the earth, their bodies too ruined to get up and amble around in search of fresh meat. Each as dumb as a bag of sand.
Hausfrau wandered among them, the taste of their foul flesh still lingering on her empurpled lips. It did nothing for her. It did not sustain her.
But the blood. The blood had changed her.
She moved her disintegrating fingers, the bony tips poking through puckered skin like a second fingernail—like an animal’s claw—and she used those fingers to feel along the inside of her mouth.
Her teeth came out in her hand.
That in and of itself was not unusual. They were, of course, rotten.
But they had been replaced. Beneath them: a row of razor sharp canines, one after the other. She could not count, but if she could, she would count dozens. Both in the top of her mouth and the bottom. Her bony fingertip clicked along—tik-tik-tik-tik—like a child’s stick dragging along the pickets of a fence.
She wanted more of that blood.
It wasn’t just need. It was want. Desire. Agency.
That was new. It was like parts of her brain—an organ which before now was just a lump of dead tissue sheltered by her misshapen skull—suddenly flared to life. Not the parts having to do with higher thought. Or rationality. Or intelligence.
But rather, the parts having to do with instinct and desire.
Right now, desire overwhelmed her: the desire to run, hunt, fuck, and kill. Her body ached for it. She ran her tongue along her razored teeth, and they cut clean through the muscle and severed the tip. But the hausfrau didn’t care.
She was hungry. She smelled the air. She wanted blood.
Coburn tracked the vehicle by the dots of lost oil and by the fading stink of exhaust caught on the wind. Whoever was driving the car—no, not a car, but a truck or something bigger—headed north on the highway away from town. Along the way, Coburn didn’t see much of the walking dead. Once in a while he caught sight—or scent—of them wandering around in a stumbling cluster, but the living dead were not capable hunters. They were merely reapers of opportunity, attacking when prey stumbled nearby.
At least, that seemed a pretty good theory. Coburn in turn stayed far away from them: any time he heard their distant groans or soggy gurgles, he kept to the shadows, creeping quietly. The dog, too, seemed to understand this, knowing that it didn’t want to become a late night snack for the horde of undead. (Though the dog did not seem to have that same sense about Coburn and had calmed down some since the river, perhaps because he was choosing the lesser of two evils.)
Coburn wandered the highway. Stars above. Moon often hidden behind bands of rheumy clouds, as if it refused to show its face or cast light onto such a broken, shameful world. He wasn’t alone out here: the dead milled around on the highway, sometimes staggering about in the bands of pine trees to either side of the road. They were slow. If they got in his way, he obliterated them. A new way each time: he put one through a car window, then jerked the dude’s head just right so the glass decapitated him. He stuck a branch through another fucker’s head. He beat a one-eyed little girl to death—or, rather, beyond death—with a hubcap, her skull in the end looking like a treacly blood pudding.
By day, Coburn slept in the trunks of abandoned cars, his jacket pressed up against the cracks in the trunk to ensure that no light would creep in and burn sun-touched scars across his body. Creampuff lay curled in the crook of his arm.
At night, he wandered. The first night, he forgot that the dog needed food. And bathroom breaks. The animal squirmed and whined and such an expression of weakness grated on the vampire. He thought about dashing the dog against a car bumper and cracking the pooch open like a can of bloody soda, but rationing food was wiser. And these hard days demanded a wisdom Coburn wasn’t used to. So he let the dog walk along with him and do his business off in the weeds. He wasn’t sure how to feed the animal, not exactly, but he suspected after surviving in a world gone mad the dog had his ways.
Sure enough, Creampuff returned with a fat bullfrog in his mouth. He trotted back, offered it to Coburn first.
“Fuck off,” Coburn said, shooing the animal. “What do I look like, a French chef? I’m not Escoffier over here. Go eat that somewhere else.”
The dog did as told. He sat down, ripping into the frog and eating the guts first. Coburn didn’t wait. The dog caught up five minutes later, muzzle slick with red, and the appearance of even that small amount of blood lit a fire in Coburn’s belly—he did think about licking the blood from the terrier’s snout, but decided against it. Coburn was not given over to great fits of shame, but making out with a skinny, dirty rat terrier would destroy what meager dignity he still possessed.
The end of the third night came, and Coburn was getting hungry.
“No food out here,” he told the terrier, who looked up at him with small, dark eyes. “I don’t smell anything good. Just the rot on the wind. And that trail of exhaust pushing farther away.”
Made sense, really. His prey had a vehicle. They could outpace him—not easily, as they had to navigate ruined roads and abandoned vehicles. Sometimes they had to double-back and take a different exit just to avoid a gummed-up highway blockade. Coburn, however, had no such limitation. He could walk over the tops of cars if need be. To a man on foot, the apocalyptic wreckage offered few transportational challenges.
Even still. They were steadily escaping.
And he was increasingly hungry. The terrier was starting to look like a stopgap measure: he carried the dog under his arm and with every hour was more keenly aware of the animal’s little fluttery heartbeat. A heartbeat that pumped blood—food, drink, ecstasy—through the beast’s wan body.
Fuck it, time to eat.
<
br /> He opened his mouth, tilted the dog’s head back, and bit down.
But then, he paused—fangs not yet puncturing the dog’s hide. Creampuff panted, seemingly happy at the attention, as if this was tantamount to affection rather than an attempt to suck the pooch dry. He tasted the dog’s musky canine odor, tasted the dog’s desperation and hunger and loyalty, and then stopped. It wasn’t guilt that stopped him, or at least, that was what he told himself.
Rather, it was the fact that eating the terrier would provide so little food that it was almost not worth the energy: it would be like handing a starving man half of an old cookie. No satisfaction to be had.
When the terrier gave him a curious look—a damning, accusing glare—Coburn shot back: “Calm down, frog-muncher. I’m not going to eat you. Not tonight, at least. Tomorrow is a different matter.” The dog continued to stare, as if to lay blame. Then the animal looked at the cars around them and offered a sharp bark. “I can’t drive a car, you little shit. I’ve been dead for 50 years and I lived in Manhattan. Why the fuck would I learn to drive?”
He might’ve known once. He wondered about that, sometimes. His old life—meaning, the life he actually lived as opposed to this dead mockery—was lost to him, swallowed whole the night he awakened in an empty grave north of the city. Even still, that was so long ago, what did it matter? Cars were different now anyhow. All the buttons and fiddly bits. Kids watching cartoons about sponges on screens fixed to the backs of seats, turning their pliable little minds into the intellectual equivalents of sea cucumbers. This was the future, and the future was dumb.
So, no, Coburn didn’t drive. He took taxis and limos. Or, his preference, he walked. He liked the feel of the city under his feet, the people around him moving like cells in a bloodstream.
The terrier whined. Coburn said, “I hate you.”
They kept walking.
That night, after crossing from New Jersey into Pennsylvania along I-78, Coburn slept in the back of an overturned trailer. Before settling in for the night he cleared the area of the living dead—they reached for him, rotten teeth snapping at the air. He beat them all to death with a 4-way lug wrench he’d found in the last trunk—part of a tire-changing kit. They went down fast, and the last one—a bloated old man with his guts already hanging out, all twisted up in his shirt like a bundle of apples—dropped when Coburn flung the lug wrench at his head like a goddamn Chinese star. It lodged in the old man’s head, cracking through the forehead like it was brittle as an egg. Coburn reclaimed the weapon, then joined the dog in the back of the trailer.
The next evening, good news awaited.
The stink of exhaust had grown stronger, not weaker, during the day.
“They’ve doubled back,” he told Creampuff. A smile spread across his face like butter in a hot pan. He licked a fang. “Let’s go eat.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fat is Flavor
Blood pumped into his mouth and down his throat, his tongue playing in the wound like a boy splashing in a kiddie pool, and as he drank, Coburn was reminded of something an old chef friend of his used to say: “Fat is flavor.”
Even in blood.
Salty. Sweet. Thick.
Equal parts milkshake and liver pate.
Fucking delicious.
The fat man wobbled and swayed but did not fall, his hand still idly fingering the button on his jeans as if he still might decide to stop and take a piss here along this overgrown fencerow, the tall needled pines on the other side playing home to an army of complaining nightbirds. Coburn cupped a steadying palm under the man’s chest—his tit, really—and dug in deeper, savoring the warm and buttery blood.
Only an hour before, Coburn and Creampuff came following the dots of oil and the trail of exhaust down a back country road until it wound down a gravel drive. A sign, choked by ivy and mold, read: Lake Towhee.
And there, parked on a knoll overlooking a scum-topped lake, sat a big, clunky RV. A low fire, now mostly glowing embers, lay smoldering, the smoke and ash drifting in whorls toward the pregnant midnight moon above.
Coburn could smell them. Not one, but several—used to be he could identify humans by the smell of perfume, the scent of leather, the odor of mouthwash or toothpaste. Now it was mostly just a gross mélange of body odors: sweat and bad breath and piss and scum. And maybe, just maybe, an undercurrent of soap.
Oh, and blood. Coburn could always smell the blood.
Must’ve been four or five people up there. The buffet, it seemed, was open once more. Good thing, too, because Coburn was on the edge of a keenly-honed hunger, and hunger made a vampire do very strange things.
He and Creampuff hid amongst a nest of dry reeds, watching. A fat man came out of the camper, a windbreaker as big as a four-person tent draped across his body. Coburn marveled at the man’s size. Here it was, the end of the world, the gates of Hell ripped open so that all of its rotting souls could come tumbling out, and this shit-heel somehow managed to remain morbidly obese.
But hey, the vampire thought, who cares? Big boy means big blood. Buckets of the stuff. Gallons. His toes curled just thinking about it.
The big dude had a rifle. He leaned it up against the RV, next to the door, then tottered off toward the forest’s edge.
He was going to take a piss.
Coburn looked to Creampuff, then pressed his finger to his lips. He thought again about trying to coerce the dog to do as commanded, but before he had to, the terrier hunkered down on his belly.
“Wait here,” Coburn said, and then he stalked the fat man.
And now, here he was. Dumb fuck came up. Coburn threw a stone to distract him—and as soon as big boy turned around to look (pivoting his prodigious mountain body), Coburn bit down from behind.
“Guh,” the fat man said. Way his lips worked made him look like a fish, gasping. The blood was wonderful. Oily and sweet. This was what the Japanese called umami, Coburn thought. The salty satisfaction of fish sauce.
Then—
The sky split with the sound of thunder.
Coburn felt struck, as if by a fist.
The sweet smell of the blood in his nose gave way to another odor: the acrid, rankling stink of gunpowder.
It took all his will, but he wrenched his fangs free of the fat neck and let the poor bastard bleed like a stuck pig.
Behind him, a fireplug of an old man. No—not old, not exactly. Late 40s, early 50s, maybe. Weathered face. Small dark eyes. Hair going silver even now and an ill-sculpted gray beard clinging to his chin.
In his hand: a lever-action rifle. A .30-30, by the look of it. Probably the same one that fat boy here left by the RV door.
Coburn grinned, licked a goopy drop of blood from his lip before it slid down his chin and he missed the chance. He released the fat man, let the corpulent bastard drop into the brush, moaning like one of those rotting fuckers.
Then he turned to face his attacker.
The silver-hair jacked another shell into the breach.
A woman hurried over—younger, with perfect hair and makeup, even in these mad times, even in this dead world (it was on her that Coburn had smelled the soap)—and stood by him, holding his hip protectively.
“Again,” she seethed, a fire in her eyes. Coburn knew that kind of rage. Didn’t expect it in a girl who looked like that, like a painted doll.
Rifle raised, the silver-hair stared down the sight. The barrel wavered.
“He doesn’t look like a rotter,” the older man said. “Pale. But not… coming apart at the seams.” Behind him, one of the windows of the RV—protected by a clumsily-cut chain link mesh bolted into place—showed movement. A white curtain parted. Another woman stared out: a black woman with fear in her eyes, drawn by the sounds outside.
More blood! Coburn thought. This buffet was bigger than he’d imagined.
“Shoot, Gil!” the girl hissed.
Gil winced, pulled the trigger.
Bang.
Coburn felt a hard tap on his shoulder,
not far from where the other bullet had gone in. He looked down, saw the hole in his leather jacket. Stuck a thumb through the fabric and into the wound, wiggled it around. Bummer.
“You’re a piss-poor shot, pal,” Coburn said, chuckling. “You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with the broad side of a barn.”
He popped out his thumb, thick with the black blood that populated his withered veins, then stuck it in his mouth like a lollipop.
“It’s a cannibal,” the girl said. “You saw what he was doing to Ebbie.”
The fat man—Ebbie, apparently—groaned in response to his name.
“That what you are?” Gil asked, the rifle quivering in his grip. He jerked the lever, put another bullet into play. “Goddamn man-eater? Like it isn’t bad enough we got the walking dead out there looking for a taste, we gotta worry about your type, too? You get the hell away from Ebbie. Go on. Move.”
Coburn didn’t move. Not yet.
Instead, he just shrugged. “Survival of the fittest, am I right?”
“You go to Hell.”
“Your big boy’s bleeding over here in the weeds.”
“Step away, I said.”
Coburn took one step toward Gil, grinning still. His words took on a sing-song quality: “I’m just saying. He’s going to waste.”
“Kill him!” the girl screeched. “Gil.”
Time collapsed in on itself. Coburn saw the man’s finger tighten around the trigger, saw it pull taut, saw the girl’s eyes go wide and the corner of her lip curl into a mean vulpine smile, saw the woman at the window close her eyes because she didn’t want to watch, saw a pair of moths dancing a herky-jerky tango in the headlights of the RV, saw the doorknob to the vehicle twist oh-so-slightly—
Coburn moved fast. Faster than any human could.
In the time it took to almost pull the trigger tight, Coburn was behind the silver-hair, jacking the rifle lengthwise up against the man’s throat. The plan was simple enough: gun was lateral, the mean end pointed toward the dolled-up darling, and she’d catch a bullet as Coburn helped the man pull the trigger. Then before the man could cry out at the loss of his cradle-robbed prize with the ruby-red lipstick, Coburn would yank back on the rifle and collapse the man’s trachea, turning it to a gurgling paste.
