by Chuck Wendig
He found an unlocked window and slipped inside.
Found some shallow-chested shorn-skull jerkoff with purple lipstick, cerulean-blue eyeshadow and a DIY tattoo across his gut that turned his belly button into the Eye of Sauron. Jerkoff had his eyes closed and lay on a ratty mattress surrounded by empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and scented candles—if Coburn had the smell right, it was ‘mulberry.’ Pair of headphones sat snug against Jerkoff’s ears, thudding some kind of erratic bass. The house here didn’t have power, but he obviously had batteries for his MP3 player.
On the walls were posters of some white-boy rap duo that Coburn had never heard of, probably the same shit that was pumping into Jerkoff’s ears through the headphones. Appropriately, the white boys on the poster were dressed like, you guessed it, clowns.
Coburn clucked his tongue. What the hell was wrong with people?
Next to the mattress sat a sawed-off shotgun. He’d painted it green and purple, like it was something used by one of the Batman villains.
The vampire didn’t want any big booms to draw attention, so he kicked away the gun, then let his fangs slide to the fore of his mouth.
It was time to feed.
But then, her voice. Kayla’s voice. Not real, not even really her, but it came up out of his mind the same way his monster voice sometimes did—the angel on his shoulder instead of his devil, speaking in the voice of a teenage girl with a sort-of-Southern drawl.
You can’t just kill him. Take enough, leave him and go.
Shut up, he thought.
Coburn! You be nice.
Shut up shut up shut up shut up. Not cool. Not at all cool. He wanted to kill this chump. Jerkoff was full of blood, blood he wanted in his body right now. And he deserved it! If only for that dick-brained tattoo.
Still. Something prevented him from doing the deed.
Coburn left Jerkoff and wandered around the house. The living room wasn’t much of a living room: furniture had been overturned and broken apart. The rug was scorched in places. The TV had been hollowed out and, in its center, a pair of plastic baby dolls were arranged in a lascivious 69 position.
He didn’t know what he was looking for, but roved about just the same, eyes peeled.
He went to the kitchen. Flies buzzed around a stack of empty MREs—Meals Ready to Eat, the self-heating rations of the military—and in the ceiling was stuck a bunch of silverware, as if Jerkoff lay on the floor, bored, throwing forks and knives (and probably spoons, the dumb-ass) to see if he could get them to stick in the drywall.
Nothing here, either.
Goddamnit.
And then, the bathroom.
Truth was, Coburn expected a horror-show. The rest of the house looked like a toilet, so that meant the toilet probably looked like some awful hybrid of a backstreet abortion clinic and a sewage treatment plant. But that wasn’t what it was. It was clean. Smelled a little of bleach. Jerkoff liked to be comfortable when he did his business. Handsoap. Nice towels.
And reading material.
Coburn didn’t need to look too long at it to know what it was. Soon as he caught a look of a little girl’s crying face—she couldn’t have been more than ten, this girl—the vampire figured out what Jerkoff was into.
Justification, achieved. Kayla’s voice inside went to the monster’s voice: Destroy him. Wear his ribcage like a hat. Beat him to death with his own legs.
Coburn didn’t do any of that. Instead, he stomped into the room, threw a hard knee onto Jerkoff’s chest, then bent down and buried his fangs into the dumb fucker’s neck like he was cradling a baby to burp. He drank, and drank, and drank some more until Jerkoff shuddered, gasped, went still, then went cold.
Then just to be sure, Coburn broke the pedophile’s neck.
With the sun coming up, he went down into the basement and slept.
And with the sun going down, he decided it was high-time to find his herd. Once more, his nose was essential—as the empurpled evening sky darkened, he found the trail of Humvee exhaust, the stink of Cecelia’s perfume, the poochy odor of Creampuff. That led him here. To the domain of King Brutha Thuglow.
Who now sat on his knees, blubbering.
“Don’t kill me, man,” Thuglow whimpered. “I’ve had a really bad day.”
“Tell me about it,” the vampire said.
“I know, right? Life sucks.”
“No. I mean, tell me about it or I rip your jaw off and use it like a boomerang.”
“Oh. Oh. Uh. These people came? Led by this old dude? And we were gettin’ along okay and shit and I was like, welcome to my kingdom, I’d like to invite you stay and I will give you these jobs to perform, and the old man was like, fuck you, clown, I don’t respect the King’s laws and next thing I know he’s breaking my goddamn bong over my fuckin’ head and shit.” Thuglow wiped a string of snot from his nose. “I thought I was being magnificent and whatever, giving them a place and a purpose.”
“Magnanimous. Not magnificent.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“So it was an old man. Let me guess: the others were a big ol’ heavyset guy, a black lady with a broken foot, a… I dunno, a trashy brat, and a teen girl who looked too skinny for her own good.”
Thuglow nodded. “That’s them, man. You got a beef with them, too?”
“Not quite.”
“Oh, shit. They were your peeps?”
“They are, at that. My herd, actually. That dog belongs to me, too.”
The King’s face fell. “You’re here to hurt me, then.”
“Not yet. Not if you help me.”
“Help you.”
“That’s right. I want to find them. I want your help in doing so. Then I want you to grant us safe passage through this insane tract of land you call your ‘kingdom.’ And while we’re at it, we’ll want our stuff back. Plus a little extra. Like, say, a pair of airman boots because goddamnit if I’m not tired of walking around in my bare feet.”
Thuglow’s eyes went wide. “I can do that. It’s just…”
“It’s just what.”
“I don’t know if your people are still here.”
Coburn hoisted Thuglow up under the armpits, threw him against some metal shelving. The King yelped in pain.
“Explain,” Coburn said, hunkering down and baring his fangs.
“I sent them to the motel for… processing. The old man, I sentenced to death. They were supposed to do it at sundown.”
Coburn didn’t much like Gil. They were two alpha dogs snarling and tussling over who got to control the pack. Even still, he respected the old bastard. And even more importantly, Gil was the girl’s father. Coburn still didn’t get what it was about the girl that made him think so fondly of her, but for now he didn’t have time to pick that apart.
The vampire reached for Thuglow. Planned to snap his neck. But the King cried out: “Wait! Wait. I can call. It may not be done yet. My posse… sometimes, y’know, they’re a little slow to get going. I just need my radio.”
Coburn stalked over, grabbed a two-way off a nearby card table.
He tossed it to Thuglow. “This one?”
The King nodded, then hit the radio button.
“Dope Fiend. Come in, dude. You read me? Dope Fiend. This is your King speaking.” Nothing. “Dude. Dude. Please please please.”
Coburn snarled.
“Hold up! Hold up. Let me try Loco.” He dialed another frequency. His voice was more panicked, now. “Loco, come in, Loco, shit, man, come on, this is Thuglow, bro. Do you read me?”
A burst of noise came out of the radio. It was Loco’s voice—Coburn recognized it from the night prior—but the words were indecipherable, what with all the machine gun fire in the background. Way Coburn heard it, he was pretty sure Loco was yelling. Or maybe ‘screaming’ was a better word for it.
Then the radio cut out.
Thuglow stared at the radio like it had just grown a dick.
“No, no, no no no,” he protested as Coburn stalked toward him, hiss
ing, and Thuglow knew full well that whatever it was that came next, it wasn’t going to be pretty and it was likely to involve giving his hangar a new paint-job, with the paint being gallons of his own bodily fluids.
But then, outside:
Distant machine gun fire.
And worse, a sound that Coburn knew too well. A chorus of banshee wails—four of them threaded together, a terrible harmony born of Hell’s own misery.
They were here. The super-zombies. The uber-rotters. The four hunters.
“What the fuck was that?” Thuglow said.
“New plan,” Coburn snarled, heading over to unmuzzle and unleash Creampuff from the corner. “Got a vehicle around here?”
“What the fuck was that?” Thuglow asked again. Coburn smacked him.
“Vehicle! Moron! Do. You. Have. One?”
“Uh, a, a, a golf cart. Behind the hangar.”
Coburn grabbed Thuglow by the neck, forced him to stand. “Good. Hope you got the keys handy, because we need to take a ride.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Satan’s Carousel
Brickert stood atop the pick-up cab, legs apart, shoulders back, the binoculars up against his eyes. It was hard to make out what was going on down there, but he damn sure knew it wasn’t good. The bright flashes and staccato pops of machine gun fire. The screams of men dying. The whumpf of a grenade going off. And the howls of something terrible, something that to Benjamin sounded altogether ancient.
Someone lit a flare, god only knew why. It lit up the sky bright red, red the color of blood, red the color of Hell’s fire. And in that light Brickert saw the mass of bodies: a veritable tide of zombies. Hundreds of them. Now swarming an overturned Humvee the way army ants carpeted their prey, mandibles clicking and dissecting with unerring precision.
Shonda popped her head out of the cab. “Doesn’t look good from down here, Ben. It look any better up there?”
“No,” he said, sucking air between his teeth. “It does not.”
“The 66 States are lost,” she said. “Just wasn’t us that took ’em.”
He said nothing.
She made it even clearer: “We need to turn around. Head back.”
“No.” That word, heavy as a lead weight. “Altus AFB has weapons, but that’s not what makes them special. They hosted operations. Airlifting, but even more importantly, refueling. They’ve got jet fuel. And I want it.”
“Ben—”
“The zombies make our job harder in one way, but easier, too. Thuglow and his paint-faced mutants will be occupied by this threat and they won’t even see us coming. We must view this as an opportunity. For now, we go around the threat. Head southwest, then cut in hard to the east.”
Shonda said no more. No reason to. He’d laid down the word and the law and that was that. Sure, some folks wore those WWJD bracelets, but someone like Shonda had to be worried more about WWBD: What Would Ben Do?
He hopped back down off the top of the pick-up and went back to mounting the gun in the truck bed. He whistled, and the convoy began to move.
Gil felt a tight knot in his gut like a bundle of snakes. They should’ve been long gone by now. Once he shot Dope Fiend and took his keys, it seemed like an easy course to chart: free the others, find a vehicle, and high-tail it the hell away from what seemed to be the center of that lunatic Thuglow’s self-described kingdom. Kayla had hugged him and cried, and Cecelia came up and gave him a kiss on his busted-up bruised-as-hell cheek, and everybody was laughing and crying and feeling like they got a reprieve. Danny had shaken his hand but then gravitated right to Kayla, and that made her happy—which, to his surprise, made Gil happy, too.
Ebbie wanted to know why they needed a vehicle, and for Gil, that answer was easy: outside the base was nothing. Crossing that dustbowl would not be an easy journey, and he didn’t feel like recreating The Grapes of Wrath. Besides, with him being all beat to shit and Leelee still (and likely forever) limping, they needed to get a ride.
Easier said than done, as it turned out. Base had plenty of vehicles lurking around, but most of them were junkers. Any time they found an old Jeep or a Humvee, it wasn’t gassed up—it was as if these clowns were treating them like single-use items, like a road flare or a juice box. Run out of gas? Leave it where it died. Pretty astounding that these clueless apes managed to hold onto a whole Air Force base with that kind of attitude.
As the sun fell, and they crossed the base on foot looking for something, anything, to get them out of Dodge, he found what he thought was the holy grail: a garage. With a fueling station on the side.
“There has to be a working ride in there, Daddy,” Kayla said, and he smiled and said yes, yes there probably was, little girl, and she held his hand and he held hers and for a moment, everything felt like it was finally coming together.
Then the garage became like a hive of bees that got kicked over. The doors rolled open. Thuglow’s ‘soldiers’ swarmed into the garage wearing ill-fitting body armor and carrying armament. The Humvees all revved up and started ejecting from the garage like popped zits, one after the other—hell, two drivers managed to smack into each other and treat it like it was nothing.
The vehicles all sped away. Gil’s heart fell, and then as he heard the discordant howls of the hunters in the distance, his guts rose to meet his wilting heart and he thought he might throw up the contents of his stomach (which at this point wasn’t much more than a shallow pit of acid).
Cecelia’s face wore a grim mask. “Oh, god. Is that what I think it is?”
“I suspect so,” Gil said. “I don’t think running is going to do much good. I think it’s time to hide.”
The first zombies had started to trickle in. And the howls had come again, and this time, they were much closer: somewhere on the base. Out there. In the darkness. Coburn wasn’t one to be afraid of the dark; after all, that would be like a great white shark being afraid of the ocean. Even still, he heard that sound, and the blood inside his body went chill and he felt a shiver grapple up his spine. The dog felt it too, tucked in his football grip: from Creampuff’s throat came a long, low whine.
The golf-cart—really a decked-out urban camo four-man transport with ruggedized tires and all-wheel-drive—whizzed down the main avenue that cut through the heart of Altus AFB. Thuglow drove, but he sure wasn’t keeping much focus. Two zombies held down a girl, chewing into her still-kicking legs like they were a pair of boneless chicken wings. In the distance, machine gun fire and the screams of men dying, swiftly followed by the sound of an explosion. A dead man lay in the streets. Zombies clawed at windows. They began emerging from the shadows on all sides; the avenue was still open, but for how long?
“It’s all falling to shit, man,” Thuglow said, wide-eyed, barely watching the road. Coburn could see it on the man’s face: he was watching his kingdom crushed like a child’s wagon under the tires of an 18-wheeler. “Game over.”
Coburn was about to smack Thuglow’s head hard enough to either knock some sense into it or knock his brain out of it (both represented a certain improvement), but then, down the way about a quarter-mile, the avenue lit up with headlights and the growl of engines as a convoy of trucks and cars came rounding the corner at breakneck speed.
“Those aren’t our trucks,” Thuglow said, and then, from the back of one of the trucks, a heavy caliber gun opened fire. Bright starburst flashes from the barrel: a guttural chug chug chug of bullets. Lead bumblebees dug into the street around them. One of the golf-cart’s tires popped. Bullets punched into the front of the vehicle, started taking off the roof in a way that called to mind invisible rats chewing ever-swiftly. A bullet clipped Thuglow’s arm, sending up a spray of blood, and another popped a hole in the back of his seat’s headrest where he’d been a fraction of a second before. Coburn, seeing that Thuglow was like a deer in headlights, had already grabbed him and was yanking him out of the cart and dragging him bodily toward an austere brick admin building.
Coburn carried Thuglow and the dog
around the side of the building in a small alley, and threw the stoner behind an oversized metal dumpster on which one of the King’s cronies had spray-painted a pair of cartoon breasts and, above that, the word Tits.
By now, the golf-cart—still in sight, about fifty yards off—had turned into a smoking wreck of bullet-riddled junk. The truck convoy barreled up to it, brakes squealing and gravel crunching under tires.
The vampire and the King of the 66 States ducked behind the dumpster.
“They shot me, man,” Thuglow said, pulling his hand away from his arm and seeing the palm wet with red. “I’m feeling dizzy.”
“That’s because you’re high as a Jewish holiday,” Coburn growled. “You got shot in the arm. Man up, Jennifer.”
“Am I going to die?”
“You are if you don’t shut that bear-trap you call a mouth.”
Then, Thuglow did the unthinkable—he stuck his head out from behind the dumpster. Instantly the machine gun barked bullets, and they spanged against the side of the metal trash-bin. Coburn grabbed the King by a fistful of hair and reeled him back in before one of those .50 cals ejected his brain a half-mile outside his skull. “Fuckface! What are you doing?”
“We’re invaded,” Thuglow said, shaking his head, looking genuinely sad. “I never thought they had the stones. Shoulda known. Shoulda known, bro. They sent that guy and we fucked with him, fucked with him real good, oh, hell.”
“Invaded? Guy? What guy? Who’s here?”
But Thuglow wasn’t answering. He had checked out. His brow heavy with sadness and regret, head shaking like he didn’t want to believe any of this, like he just wanted to go back to his hangar, roll a joint, and play pinball forever.
Which meant Coburn had to get a look on his own.
He wished he hadn’t.
The sign painted on the door of the lead pick-up was a symbol he’d seen before, though back then he’d seen it stitched on a patch on the shoulders of denim jackets and sports jerseys like they were fucking Boy Scouts earning badges for killing vampires. A hand spread open, palm out, and in the center of the hand, a blazing sun. The Sons of Man. Goddamnit.
