by Chuck Wendig
Somewhere outside, the whine of an engine, the slow-but-certain whirr of rotors. Brickert’s sphincter tightened.
“Is that a goddamn helicopter?”
They pinned him against the street. Ranger knelt by his wrist, his twin tongues frolicking in the rent flesh. Rupture-Tit hunkered down by his foot, the pant-leg rolled up as her teeth bit open his skin and drank the blood with surprising delicacy, like a Doberman gently chewing open a roll of Lifesavers candy. Rain-Slick lay on the asphalt, belly down, playfully gnawing at the meat of his neck, not so much drinking as playing, lapping at it hungrily, giddily.
All the while, his chest burned where the Bitch had marked him.
The Beast watched. A proud mother, perhaps. Waiting for her lessers to feed before she filled her own belly. Whenever the surging tide of zombies tried to get close, she roved and roamed, hissing and clawing at the air to keep them back. And by god, they listened.
Everything Coburn had was fading fast. Blood and energy ebbing.
The hunters were strong. Stronger than he could have ever imagined.
Given that they came from him, he was almost proud. Almost. He wasn’t like the Bitch Beast, though, who seemed to be a very good mother. He was a certifiably bad daddy, because he hoped these rotten children of his would catch fire and die.
He had no idea how close his desires hewed to reality.
Maybe twenty feet away, he heard a sound—almost like a full can of soda hitting the asphalt. Zombies turned toward it, moaning. The hunters had little interest.
They had little interest, at least, until it exploded.
The ground shook and a half-dozen undead hit the street, torn to rotten ribbons by hot, angry shrapnel. That got everybody’s attention. The hunters did not want to share their kill. They did not want to be attacked while feeding. Each leapt free from their prize, snarling, spitting, crouching low to the ground, claws clicking on the macadam.
Coburn, weary, lifted his head, tried to summon his strength.
That was when he saw Leelee. She marched forward despite her limp, chin held high. They always said that pregnant women had a kind of glow about them, and Coburn didn’t think she was pregnant, but she damn sure had that glow.
Her hands were clutched to her chest. Almost as if she were praying.
The zombies did not go near her. It was like she’d been marked. Marked for Them, for the four hunters.
Her eyes met his. In her face: an eerie look of peace. Like a lake whose waters sat completely undisturbed.
The hunters moved toward her. Slow at first, but then with greater speed.
The Bitch Beast strode on two legs. The others loped on all four.
Coburn’s hearing picked up a faint sound—a ting noise, like a bullet casing hitting the street—but when Leelee smiled and opened her hands a little he knew that the sound was from a grenade’s pin being loosed and dropped.
The hunters leapt for her. Unaware. Unrealizing.
Leelee closed her eyes.
The grenade went off.
They heard the whumpf of the first grenade go off in the distance. Kayla stopped pacing, turned. It was then she knew.
“Where’s Leelee?” she asked, but her voice was drowned out in the rising noise of the whirring rotors. All around them, dust and papers and debris swept around as the blades of the chopper gained momentum.
This time she yelled it: “Where’s Leelee?” But just then: the second grenade detonated.
Suddenly it was chaos.
“We got company!” Thuglow yelled, pointing at headlights growing brighter, fast approaching from the other end of the airstrip. Gil turned, raised his weapon and started firing. Bullets responded in kind, stitching across the ground and coughing up chips of concrete. Gil danced out of the way and leapt into the chopper, waving everyone else in. He helped Kayla in with a hand, and together they started getting everyone on board.
Everyone but Leelee and Coburn.
Thuglow pulled himself into the cockpit with his one good arm. Danny held Kayla close. Between them, Creampuff growled and barked, a steady stream of canine invectives.
Kayla yelled, “We have to wait! For Leelee! For Coburn!” But again her voice was drowned out. Her father tried to hand her a head-set to protect her from the noise but suddenly the helicopter lurched upward like a drunken pelican, and the head-set fell from his hands and went out the open door.
The headlights brightened. Bullets thunked into the side of the helicopter.
Thuglow was screaming something, but Kayla couldn’t hear what.
Someone sat down next to her hard, pushing her into Danny. Creampuff scrambled over her lap, and when she turned to see who had shoved her…
Coburn was sitting next to her. He looked like he’d been run through a grain thresher. Neck torn open. Hand in tatters. Foot looking like a pound of ground beef.
Kayla mouthed a word: “Leelee?”
He just shook his head.
Creampuff snuggled into his lap. For a moment, things felt right. A tiny moment in time where all felt okay. Kayla to his right. Dog in his lap.
But it was fast swept away by the undercurrent of imagery that played out in his head. Leelee. Beatific. Happy. At peace. And then erased in a flash, the grenade taking out her legs and ruining her face and without warning she was just a piece of meat and so were the monsters with which she’d surrounded herself.
Coburn had seen lots of bad shit. He’d been the engineer of most of it. He’d seen blood and horror aplenty and it didn’t mean squat. To him, the human population of the world comprised nothing but meat-puppets and blood-bags: people to manipulate and motherfuckers to eat. And that was that and never would it be different. Or so he thought.
And then Leelee went and blew herself up.
For him.
That was the part that needled him. That stuck in his mind like a blade. Somebody did something… well, to call it nice was the understatement of the year, wasn’t it? Like saying ‘the ocean is pretty big’ or ‘Hitler had some issues.’ Leelee died to save his very existence. He didn’t have to twist her mind to do it. He didn’t have to threaten her. She destroyed herself so that he could live.
Or, whatever you called the rough approximation of ‘life’ he possessed.
She was crazy, said the monster’s voice inside of him.
But that wasn’t it at all. It may have been true; he had no idea and didn’t care to speculate on the state of her sanity.
Coburn leaned out of the chopper, feeling the air rush through his hair with rough fingers. The ground began to move away from them as lead thunked into the metal hull of the chopper.
Out there, in a pickup truck, he saw him.
Benjamin Brickert. Long beard. Hollow eyes. Eyes that met his own. Eyes that flashed recognition and echoed rage.
Coburn gave him the finger.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The End Begins Again
That fucking vampire.
Brickert felt the air sucked out of him. He couldn’t catch a breath. His temples pounded. His heart felt like it was ready to kick its way out of his chest.
That motherfucking piece-of-shit vampire.
Coburn was supposed to be dead and crispy, crushed by the collapsed floor of that old theater in New York. That was years ago. And now? He was here?
It didn’t seem possible. For a moment, Brickert seriously entertained the notion that he had died years ago and that this was Hell. To see that clown-king fleeing in a Twin Huey chopper was one thing. To see that God-forsaken vampire up there with him felt like it was designed to punish him personally.
Brickert manned the .50 cal and again lifted it skyward.
He put the vampire in his sights.
And then he moved the gun to the left. He fired a fusillade of .50 rounds into the ass-end of the chopper. He prayed that those bullets did their job, and it wasn’t long before he saw that they did. Out of a trio of holes in the back, fluid sprayed even as the chopper lifted up and g
ained distance, pressing forward like an eager hummingbird. The bitch was leaking fuel.
Brickert finally found his breath and sucked in a lungful.
“No,” he said, grinning. “Fuck you, vampire.”
The Bitch Beast lifted her broken body, rising up out of the carcasses of her brothers, her sisters, her children—what they were she had no name for, no deep understanding, she only realized that once they had been connected, but now they were scraps of meat perforated by searing shards of angry metal.
She, too, had been torn ragged. But they had taken it head-on. Their heads and faces hung on shoulders only barely, turned to pulp and splinters of bone.
They were gone from this world.
She, however, was not. But she needed sustenance, and feeling no more loyalty toward her ruined companions, she knelt down and began to eat of their flesh and drink of their black blood. A glorious and wretched sacrament.
The sun was coming up, soon.
Coburn could feel it.
So when the warning began going off in the helicopter—an insistent beeping that they could hear even over the chopper’s rotors—the vampire did not know what the hell was going on.
But he learned soon enough. Thuglow leaned over the seat, pale, sweaty, and he mouthed a phrase that nobody else could hear but Coburn.
We’re leaking fuel.
Shit.
PART FOUR
PENITENT
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Down in the Dark
After a certain point, it all went away.
Coburn remembered giving Brickert the finger. He recalled the helicopter rising and with it, a deep and thriving hunger deep within him, a hunger for blood and the realization that he was surrounded by blood on all sides, blood in pink skin, blood pushed by pulsing drum beats, blood sticky and wet.
He remembered the fuel alarm. Remembered going down—not a crash landing, not really, but definitely a controlled accelerated descent down into what Thuglow said was Texas but what looked to Coburn like the fucking moon (a wide open expanse, no plants, no trees, just ground cracked and pale like dry skin).
Coburn remembered the sun. A bright liquid lava line at the edge of forever, and then it was all blankets as they swaddled him like some big bloodsucking baby, then dimness, then darkness, then everything went still.
It was then that it all went away.
It was then that he woke up here. In a kitchen. With Rebecca.
Rebecca. With her pig-tails. And the freckles on the bridge of her nose. And a too-big-for-her men’s flannel robe—his robe—so big, then, that she almost disappeared inside of it.
“You like my robe?” she asked. “It’s yours. You let me wear it.”
“You look like Kayla,” he said, his hand inadvertently touching a highball glass of Scotch made cool by a trio of ice cubes gently drifting within.
“Actually,” Rebecca said, “she looks like me. Isn’t that how it works? The someone after is the one who looks like the someone before.”
He nodded and smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s it.”
“So. What are we doing here?”
“I don’t know.” He lifted the Scotch to his lips. It tasted like blood.
“You remember my name, at least.”
“Is that a good thing?”
She smiled. “No, probably not.”
The room swiftly brightened: the bulbs in the fixture in the ceiling and above the sink hummed and glowed white hot, blinding him, the humming turning to buzzing, and then as fast as it had come, they dimmed once more.
Someone stood behind Rebecca.
A tall man. Standing in darkness. He emerged from shadow.
Blonde hair slicked back and pressed to his pale scalp. Nose, smashed flat to the left. The upper lip, sneering to the right thanks to a puckered scar from what might’ve been a cleft lip. He grinned. His teeth were smeared with red, like he’d been eating raspberries.
“Hi, John,” Blondie said.
Coburn winced like he’d been stuck with a needle. John. John. “John?”
“John Wesley Coburn. We’ve met before.”
“Have we? You know… my name. So what’s yours?”
“That, you don’t know. That you may never know. I’m still out there, though. Passed through the bowels of life and out on the other fucking side, pushed out like a kidney stone through a tight pisser.” Blondie smiled, came up behind Rebecca, started playing with one of her pigtails. Coburn wanted to launch himself across the table, rip his head off. But he couldn’t.
“How do I know you’re still out there?”
“Easy.” The word came not from Blondie but from Rebecca, who was leaning into Blondie’s touch like it pleased her. “Because you’re still around.”
“I don’t follow.”
“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.”
“You’re my maker.”
“Could be, rabbit. Could be.”
“The one who turned me into a—”
But then the lights brightened again, everything lost behind a searing white curtain. The ground shook this time. Coburn’s—John’s—body seized tight. But then, like before, it passed.
Rebecca and Blondie were gone. He heard sounds coming from the living room. Coburn grabbed the Scotch. Heard the ice clink around the perimeter of the glass. He stepped into the living room. Saw Rebecca lying on her belly, the robe splayed out like a blanket, her face bathed in the black-and-white glow of the television. Looked like Ed Sullivan. But his face was different: the grin too wide, the eyes black like tar. Every time Ed spoke, flies poured from his mouth.
Rilly big shoe.
The window by Rebecca gently shook, then slid open with nary a sound. A shadow slid into the room, almost liquid, and it became a person: formlessness found shape. Blondie stood behind her.
Coburn tried to move, tried to cry out, but couldn’t.
Blondie eased behind her. She popped something into her mouth: rock candy on a wooden stick. Her head bopped left and right. Pigtails bouncing.
The vampire struck. He moved fast, like a praying mantis, his hands around her neck, his fingers ripping open her throat, a gush of red blood on the shag—
“No.”
A voice in Coburn’s ear. Rebecca was gone. So was Blondie. The blood, however, remained. The TV continued to flicker, now gone to static.
Blondie stood behind him, now. Hands on his shoulders.
“You don’t get away that easily,” Blondie whispered into his ear. “Is this how you remember it? Is this what you find when you start moving dirt? You’re hiding behind a stalking horse, John. Let’s keep moving dirt. Let’s try this again.”
The world lit up. Bright. White. Hot.
The flash receded like a nuclear tide.
There, again: Rebecca by the TV. Rock candy. The window opened. Liquid shadow turns to Blondie.
A new wrinkle: Coburn was there, too. He could see himself. Sitting at the back of the room in a recliner. Reading a newspaper whose words are gibberish, letters shifting like nervous ants, the corners of the pages wet with red (what’s black and white and red all over—a newspaper).
Things moved differently this time. Blondie walked not to Rebecca but to the Coburn in the chair—to John Wesley Coburn. Gently, Blondie pulled down the newspaper with an index finger. John Wesley looked shocked, but only for a moment. Blondie’s gaze met John Wesley’s gaze. Blondie murmured something: hushed, like a prayer.
And then it all leapt forth in terrible fast-forward. Blondie dragged John Wesley off the chair. Bit him. Arc of blood. Rebecca screaming. She ran at him. Beating at Blondie’s back. He threw her across the room. Into the TV. John Wesley thrashed on the ground. Blondie tore open his own throat with a twist of his thumb and forefinger, the way you might uncap a cola, then pressed John Wesley’s face to his neck.
Fast-forwar
d again. Rebecca sat bound to a kitchen chair. Clothesline pulled taut across her mouth, pulling back her cheeks. Blondie’s hand rested gently on John Wesley’s back. Blondie pushed him forward.
John Wesley didn’t look right. Eyes unfocused. His own neck wound already healed up. When he opened his mouth, two fangs flicked forward. He wasn’t John Wesley anymore. That was the difference. Now he was Coburn. Just Coburn. Life lost. Identity gone but for a name. The girl in front of him not his daughter, not really, not his blood so much as merely full of blood.
Rebecca screamed.
Coburn tore out her throat and drank.
Again, the world lit up. Bulbs popped, rained sparks. Floorboards groaned as nails bent. Everything white, wiped out, tabula rasa.
A low sound keened across the open expanse as the moon sat pregnant above, the stars twinkling, and for just a moment, Coburn thought: it’s them, it’s the hunters, they’re back from the dead again and they’re coming to make me pay for what I’ve done. But then he realized, it was just the wind.
He smelled blood. Tasted it, too. About ten feet away, the Twin Huey helicopter sat on its haunches, the uneven and rocky ground giving it a crooked look. The rotor above gently turned, moved by the wind.
The front window lay shattered. A hand draped out. Blood, thickened like syrup, collected at the fingertips, drops hanging there but never falling.
A cold feeling ran through Coburn. He felt full. He’d fed.
Oh no.
Coburn found Danny first. He lay draped across a rock like a sacrifice. His throat, torn out. Not far away, Cecelia. Her head had been bashed in. Hair matted with blood and brains. Coburn looked to his hands, saw the fingers and palms flecked with dried blood that flaked away like old paint.
Ebbie was face-down toward the front-end of the chopper. Both wrists, opened. Blood pooling out across dead earth.
