by Chuck Wendig
“And before that?”
“We’ll be circling in town here.”
“Good. Let me out, then.”
Up in the front, Gil hit the brakes. The RV lurched forward. Ebbie almost tumbled into Coburn, and the vampire gave him a foul look.
“Here we are,” Ebbie said, smiling sheepishly. “It’s three hours to sun-up, and—”
“Whatever.”
“How will we know when it’s safe to come through?”
“I’ll send a sign.”
“What sign?”
“Goddamn with the questions.” Coburn didn’t know what sign he would use, but that didn’t stop his bravado. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
“One more thing—”
“No more things. Time’s wasting.”
The vampire threw open the door. He petted Creampuff’s head, told the dog to stay put, then descended into the destroyed strip-mall purgatory of Lawson Heights.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Cannibal Abattoir of Lawson Heights
He walked, boots crunching on broken asphalt. The motor home rambled away, its tail-lights diffusing in the low-hung fog, looking like dragon’s eyes as it retreated back into its cave.
The zombies jogged after it, but it didn’t matter.
Soon enough, however, they noticed him.
Over there, a strip mall—pet store, bank, Korean nail place, Mexican restaurant. Over there, a different strip mall—Radio Shack, vitamin store, Gamestop, another Korean nail place. Cut between them a strip of gray macadam, many of the cars still sitting like grave markers along the way. He mused that it must’ve happened fast, the zombie apocalypse—people didn’t even have time to get home and board up their houses.
Funny, he thought. The zombies here weren’t really all that out of place, were they? Zombie shoppers. Zombie consumers. Isn’t that what zombies did? Consume? He felt proud of himself for putting that together (having never seen any zombie movies before), even as he winged a hunk of broken highway into the head of an approaching zombie, knocking the fucker’s head back on his neck like a Pez dispenser made of rotten meat.
“Welcome to America,” he said to the horde of approaching rotters. “Bad news. Don’t have time to buy what you’re selling or sell you what you’re buying. Don’t want your Blu-Ray player, and you don’t want my delicious cookies laced with high fructose corn syrup and weed-killer. But thanks for stopping by!”
He leapt up onto the shoulders of an approaching zombie—a jowly cop whose nose and ears had long rotted off (or were perhaps bitten off by another of his grotesque cohorts) and sprang over the throng into darkness. Not wanting to give them time to track him, he lit a fire to the blood within his body and moved so fast the zombies didn’t even know what happened.
The Wal-Mart rose out of the dark and the fog: it looked more like a prison than a shopping Mecca. And not a modern prison, either, but something out of antiquity: torchlight flickered behind boarded-up windows, and along the top of the store, rusted burn barrels glowed, one every ten feet or so.
Coburn saw movement up there—sentries.
Sure enough, the highway here cozied up nice and tight to the store. Once upon a time, Coburn knew you could tell what a town or village was like by looking at its highest building. The steeple of a church above all else? Then they were God-fearing folk. The top floor of a bank building? Then they loved money above all else. Over time, height stopped mattering—what mattered became how close a building sat to the major arteries. Like a tumor, redirecting blood-flow to itself. When that building was a Wal-Mart, you knew that the most important thing to these people was the ability to shop until they dropped. The zombie apocalypse should’ve changed all that, but then again, maybe not.
Just past the entrance into the lot, he could see the faint moonlight caught along the metal teeth of the spike strips laid down on the road. A pair of them, just to be sure. Past those, he could see the blown-tire wrecks of a dozen or more cars. They weren’t blocking the way entirely, but the passage was pretty narrow. The RV was going to have a helluva time squeezing through there. No time to think about that now.
The vampire eased along, wondering—where are all the zombies? He figured once they got a taste of a place like this, saw that it was home to a squirming gaggle of hot-blooded living humans, they’d be all over it like diabetics on a Whitman Sampler. This one’s filled with brain cream.
But then, as if to answer his question, he saw a lone zombie came shuffle-jogging up, the busted-out soles of his shoes dragging behind each foot. He could smell the rank stink, and it was overpowering enough that he almost didn’t see what was coming next: a thin red beam of light drifted across the lot—a wayward laser looking for a home. It found the zombie, crept up his leg, his chest, then centered on his head.
Bang. Shot from a rifle blew most of what was inside the zombie’s skull about ten feet back, leaving the rotter’s head an empty ‘O,’ faceless and devoid of life. The rotter dropped like a suit off a hanger.
The gunshot echoed out, the sound crawling over the highway and the trees the way thunder does.
The sentries were snipers. Good shots, too.
That wouldn’t do. They found him, they’d go for his head. They went for his head, well, he didn’t know that it would be his end, but he damn sure knew that he liked having a brain. Didn’t seem like a good idea to let it fall out of his skull.
Coburn figured, okay, better sidle up against the building.
He darted low, creeping through the fog.
One problem, though.
He found another way they kept the horde out:
A moat.
They’d dug a goddamn moat around the Wal-Mart. This really was starting to feel medieval. The trench was a good six feet out from the store and 15 feet deep—the massive gutter wasn’t filled with water, though. The walls and ground were lined with refuse: bent nails, rebar, broken glass. Wooden spikes thrust up out of the bottom of the trench and stuck out of the walls at various angles.
The moat worked. Coburn knew it worked because even now a half-dozen zombies moaned and gurgled down there in the trench. One was caught on a wooden spike, trying to pull herself away in what was clearly a futile effort. Another rolled around in broken glass, his face a cut up mess, a shard thrusting up out of his right eye. They must clean the thing from time to time because these rotters were fairly recent, he figured.
The moat worked because zombies were dumb. They didn’t seem the type to stop and think, Hey, look, a moat. They just kept on walking, moving ineluctably forward like floodwater.
Coburn wasn’t an idiot.
He crouched, took a hard jump, leapt to the other side of the moat. He only had a couple feet of clearance—part of a busted-up sidewalk—but it was enough.
Palms flat against the building, he wondered: just go right in the front? They were probably expecting that. Lone human travelers probably came up that way hoping to find help, thinking they’d found human civilization—and then once in the door someone probably came up from behind, hit them with a mallet, then dragged them in the back to become Thanksgiving dinner.
Nah, he figured. Better to go around back, find a way in there.
Back of the store was buttoned up tighter than the Pope’s asshole. Bay doors at the loading dock were shut, locked at the bottom. Side door, too, was locked. The moat extended back here, but was further out—and they’d built a drawbridge out of pallets, garbage cans, and plastic storage bins.
Coburn’s first impulse was to go in hard and fast, making as much noise as he could—rip open the bay door like the top of a tuna can, waltz in like one of God’s avenging angels. But as he knelt down by the door, he heard it—
On the other side, a rumbling snore.
Someone was just inside. Sleeping.
Coburn chuckled. This was going to be easy. “Kitty wanna come out and play?” he said, tickling and tapping against the bay door, then knocking louder and louder. “I am rap, rap, ra
pping on your chamber door, motherfucker.”
Sure enough, the snores cut short.
Feet shuffled. Chair legs stuttered against concrete.
On the other side, the fumbling of a lock.
Finally, the bay gate cranked open, ascending upward like a garage door.
The man who stepped out was tall, reedy, but with a pooching belly, almost as if he were three months pregnant. It strained his too-tight sweat-stained wife-beater. He looked about like Coburn expected some wild-eyed cannibal asshole to look: big bushy beard knotted with dried skin and gobbets of puckered meat, hollow cheekbones, mouth full of rotten teeth whose decay was so strong Coburn could smell it.
Man came out, sawed-off double barrel shotgun thrust up.
“Who’s out here?” the man said, his voice a gravel-choked smoker’s growl.
Coburn came up from the side, reached out and grabbed the man’s throat, then squeezed like he was trying to wring water from a tough sponge. His trachea collapsed like a Styrofoam cup. Problem was, soon as the man’s throat closed, his bowels opened and his finger tightened, he squeezed off a round—one of the shotgun barrels blurted out a clumsy, aimless shot.
The stink of shit and expended gunpowder hung in the air.
Well, Coburn thought, guess that’s it for the quiet entrance.
He bit down on the cannibal’s neck, guzzled a belly full of blood, then threw the malodorous hick down like a puppet whose strings just got cut. In a perfect world, Coburn could’ve been done for the night. His veins were fat with stolen blood. It would be no big thing to leave the body, disappear into the woods, then come back night after night, picking off stragglers like a huntsman spider.
But he had to create a distraction.
Besides, eventually they’d figure him out and mount a proper defense.
Plus, it was going to be fun killing all these hill-fuck man-eaters.
Coburn smiled, hummed the first couple bars of ‘Dueling Banjos,’ then sauntered inside the Wal-Mart, ready to gorge.
First thing he noticed: the flies.
Thick, fat flies filled the air, pinballing into one another, hovering about his head, looking for a draught of his blood. On a different night, he’d let one have a taste—mosquitoes and flies thought to bite him like any other human, but his body put stolen blood through its paces, transubstantiating it into a potent slurry. Skeeter or horsefly (or a rat, if he was brave) got a taste of that, it was too much. Killed the critters on contact: mosquitoes and flies would take a drink, then… pop. Like a tick under a match flame.
The smell hit him next: meat and blood.
Past the reloading dock, the inventory warehouse had been repurposed into an abattoir. The floor red with dried blood. Massive hunks of meat—some hanging and drying out on hooks, others in barrels of foul brine. Rusty saw in the corner. Gore-caked card tables.
He crept through the dangling meat. At first glance, could’ve been hogs or beef, but he knew better. A lingering glance showed the leg stumps that cut off mid-thigh, the arms chopped at the bicep.
A half-dozen humans hanging here, swinging gently, collecting flies.
They were doing a pretty solid business. That was good news for him. Meant people were still out there. People filled up with all that lovely blood.
It was then that he heard footsteps coming from within the store itself, fast approaching the loose double-doors connecting the store proper with this back warehouse area.
Coburn leapt, clambering up one of the bodies, and further up the chain the body hung on. As two figures entered the abattoir, Coburn was already up in the metal rafters, looking down.
Flashlight beams cut an arc through the room. A pair of them.
Man and a woman. He, younger—late teens, early twenties, head shorn. She, older, more haggard, her ratty hair gone to dirty dreads. There was a certain meanness to both their features, a familial resemblance. His elder sister? His young mother? Did it matter?
He held a machete. She, on the other hand, had a nice graphite crossbow—something she probably plucked right off the shelves here—and, upon thinking about it, it was a pretty elegant weapon in terms of dispatching human beings. No exit wound. Clean puncture. Didn’t ruin the meat.
Fact that she had the crossbow and he had the machete was telling. Maybe she was his mother.
“Charlie?” she hissed, flashing the beam this way and that. “Charlie.”
Charlie must’ve been the bearded yokel whose throat he’d crushed.
Oh well.
Soon as the two were beneath him, he dropped down—
Right between them.
The boy reacted first, swinging wildly with the machete. Bad move. Coburn tilted his body at the hips and the machete arced through empty air—but it still found a target.
The blade buried itself in the woman’s neck. She didn’t even scream, she was so shocked.
“Sue!” the boy cried out, suddenly unsure if he should wrench the blade free or keep it there. Instead he just let go of it and backpedaled.
It was the wrong move. Not that there were any right moves.
As Sue staggered in a circle, blood welling up around the machete, Coburn snatched the crossbow from her grip, then fired an arrow. He’d never used a crossbow before, and actually wasn’t really all that fond of guns, but having the blood within him gave him preternatural skill. He wasn’t one to miss. Mostly, he used it to win dart games and pool.
The crossbow bolt hit the man in the eye. His arms pinwheeled as he fell backward, dead.
The woman—Sue—stared at him, wide-eyed and full of fear.
“What… what are you?” she asked.
“I’m Batman.”
Her eyes went wider: full moons, each.
“I’m just kidding,” he said, then twisted her neck until it broke.
Coburn had never been inside a Wal-Mart. Never had much cause to go find one; the city didn’t have room for any, and why the hell would he ever need a wheelbarrow full of diapers, a ten-pound package of boneless chicken breasts, or a lime green Margarita machine?
Still, he had to admit—the cannibals of Lawson Heights had gone to great lengths to match Coburn’s vision of what the inside of a Wal-Mart looked like. The shelves had been stripped bare and battered to Hell, as if some super-important Christmas toy release had come and gone and an army of Super-Moms had ripped through the store, buying everything up like an all-consuming void. Didn’t hurt that many of the shelves were lined with piles of bones both human and animal. Torches flickered atop endcaps. Freezer cases were bashed open. Graffiti everywhere—spray-painted pictures of skulls, middle-fingers, dicks, tits, and encouraging messages such as ‘Fuk You,’ and ‘I Eat Yor Skin.’ Floor torn up. Lights torn down. Trash blew through open aisles, piled up in corners.
Yep. In Coburn’s mind, this was Wal-Mart in a nutshell.
He silently stalked the aisles like a wolf roaming through the rows of a cornfield, sniffing out prey. And oh, could he smell them. It wasn’t just the stench of body sweat. It was the rancid odor of human meat. With every breath they gave it off. Blood under their tongue. Long pork between their teeth. Eau de cannibal.
Guilt was rarely a factor in Coburn’s eating habits. (Rarely? More like never.) But sometimes, killing folks gave him pleasure. Felt like he was excising a cancerous tumor from the world—a pedophile, a crooked cop, a gaggle of cannibals? Made Coburn feel like an all-round Boy Scout, doing good deeds with his mighty fangs. Was there a badge for this? Something he could sew on the sleeve of his jacket?
Someone stepped into the aisle next to him. He couldn’t see the person—a shelf separated them—but he could hear him. A man, probably. Heavy boots. No effort to be quiet.
In the back of the store, he heard voices: they’d discovered the bodies. Well, the new ones, at least.
Coburn leapt up atop a shelving unit, perched there like a crow.
A man walked beneath him. Burly fucker. Long chin beard, hair in a greasy top-knot, no shir
t on. Coburn could see the gobbets and curls of meat dried in his chest hair. It wasn’t a good look. So he killed him.
That death came easy enough. He planted his feet on the fool’s shoulders, crouching down like he had atop the shelf, then put his hands in the man’s mouth. Grabbing his upper and lower jaws, he pulled like he was ripping open a bag of potato chips. Human Pac-Man.
The man dropped a weapon: an AR-15 semi-auto. Coburn caught it before it clattered to the floor, moving fast.
He wasn’t a big fan of guns, really. Wasn’t much point to them. They weren’t subtle. A vampire favored subtlety, unless he wanted to bring the world to his door, wondering why he’d got a bloodless body in his jet tub. You fired a gun, it drew attention—okay, not much attention, in New York City, but it at least merited a phone call from someone.
Coburn didn’t like drawing attention.
Now, though, that was the goal. He’d told Gil and the others to watch for his sign, and truth be told, he was just being blustery, but now, with a machine gun in his hands, he saw a way. Worse came to worse he could just start shooting out windows, but those torches gave him a pretty good idea. Torches meant fuel—you couldn’t just swaddle a stick in an old rag and light it on fire. The fire needed something to keep it going—gas, maybe, or motor oil. Something good and flammable.
That meant the cannibals had fuel.
Which further meant he was going to blow some shit up. Ideally by shooting it. The rat-a-tat of a machine gun? A bloom of unholy fire?
That would get Gil’s attention.
Now, he just needed to find the fuel source. Gas cans? Tanks of propane or kerosene? It had to be around here somewhere. He lifted his nose like a dog scenting prey on the wind.
The vampire wound his way through the store—as he did, a woman came out from behind a pile of ruined tires, screaming and running at him. In her hand? An old classic: a board with a bunch of nails sticking out of it. She swung. He ducked, jacked her in the face with the butt of the AR-15 (it was not yet time to earn unwanted attention) and drove her nose up into her brain.
