by Chuck Wendig
Bad Blood
Chuck Wendig
Abaddon Books
An Abaddon Books™ Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
[email protected]
First published in 2011 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver
Desk Editor: David Moore
Cover Art: Pye Parr
Design: Pye Parr & Luke Preece
Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley
Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley
ISBN (.mobi): 978-1-84997-358-8
ISBN (.epub): 978-1-84997-357-1
Tomes of The Dead™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
PART ONE
FREAKS
The Conversation: #1
Did you think it would end like this?
Nah. Not really.
I’m cold.
Me too. But fuck it, I’m always cold.
I’m slipping away. Mouthful by mouthful. Gulp by gulp.
Now we know where you live, I guess. You live in my blood. Not in my head.
Did you doubt? See, I knew you doubted me. I could feel it, JW. All up inside you, squirming like a handful of nightcrawlers.
Doesn’t much matter now, does it?
Guess not.
Sweet dreams, little girl.
Oh, but I’m not ready to go to bed just yet. Are you?
CHAPTER ONE
Now You’re The Cure, Coburn
COBURN’S GUTS SAT heavy in his hands, spilling out across his forearms like a heap of bloody kielbasa. He jacked his back up against the stairway and kicked both legs out, bracing his boots against the door as a wall of rotten flesh pressed against it. Through the octagonal window at the top of the door he caught glimpses of mouths like wet holes in turned dirt, splintered teeth, eyes the color of diabetic piss. Hands slapped uselessly against the glass—red blisters on gray flesh popped, leaving greasy streaks behind.
Nasty-ass motherfuckers, he thought.
In his head, a voice altogether not his own answered: Tsk-tsk, such bad language, Coburn. Naughty man.
Outwardly—and inwardly—he growled, gnashing his teeth so hard he thought they might snap. Turned out that Kayla the ghost girl—having taken up residence inside his skull like it’s a fifth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side of NYC—liked to chat. Chatty in life. Chatty in death (or what passed for it).
He told her to keep quiet.
She listened. For now.
“You don’t look good,” came a voice from behind him on the stairs. Gil. Kayla’s father. “Bad news when your insides are outside.”
“For you, maybe,” Coburn said. “For me, it’s just a stubbed toe. A bloody nose.” Bit of bravado, but it wasn’t entirely untrue. Not like he needed his guts for anything. They were dead as every other organ in his body: might even be better if he could rip them out and leave them behind. He’d travel a lot lighter. Move faster. Hell, stitch in a zipper and he’d have a storage compartment. Could keep Creampuff in there, maybe. As if sensing what Coburn was thinking, the rat terrier wriggled at his side, snarling and snapping at the air in the direction of the zombie horde.
Coburn blinked. Looked around. The window afforded them a little sunlight: a fact he still wasn’t used to, all this not burning to a blackened nub when the sun came up. But all that changed when he took in every last drop of Kayla’s blood, didn’t it? He hears her laugh inside his head.
Still. It let him see what he was dealing with. Here in San Francisco, all the houses sat crammed together in a dull array of pastels—that one there the color of Pepto Bismol, the one next to it looking like a sun-bleached robin’s egg, and this one they were in, looking like the petals off a daffodil.
All the colors made him a bit sick. He felt a pang of nostalgia for New York—the grays, the blacks and browns, all the steel, cement, glass.
This house—a crass mash-up of Victorian and Art Deco—had been split into apartments. A bank of four mailboxes hugged the tin-tile wall to Coburn’s right, with an apartment door to the left. The mailboxes were a good size, with lockers big enough to each accommodate packages: Coburn grunted, got his fingertips behind the box and tipped it over with a crash.
He wedged it under the apartment doorknob. Then eased off with his boots.
The rotters surged, but the door thunked dully against the fallen mailbox locker. They could not get through. Their frustration came through the door, in gassy hissing and soggy burbling. Rotten fingertips, some worn to the bone, searched around the door margins to no avail.
“Upstairs,” Coburn said to Gil. “Go, go, go.”
Gil turned, bolted up the steps.
The vampire grabbed his guts in one hand and the terrier in the other and marched up after the old man.
THEY KNEW SAN Francisco was going to be trouble. How could it not be? Be foolish to think that a city that once contained a stone’s throw from a million living human beings would not now contain a nearly equal portion of undead assholes. They had a plan, and it seemed like a good one.
Might’ve been the bridge that gave them a false sense of confidence.
They crossed the Golden Gate that morning. Bands of fog thick above their heads, like rain-soaked cotton swallowing the brick-red cables and towers. Ahead of them, the way lay packed with abandoned cars. And not a single rotter in sight.
Creampuff the terrier seemed suspicious. Sniffed the air with a muzzle still bloody from a freshly-killed squirrel only an hour before (a little bit of the squirrel’s tail hung from the small dog’s chin like a tiny dog beard) and growled.
Gil commented on the absence of undead assholes: “I don’t see any dead folk stumbling around. That seem right to you?”
“Sure.” The vampire shrugged. “Way I see it, the bridge is basically a really long, really fat tightrope. Whatever zombies get herded onto it end up fumbling and stumbling over to the railing and over the edge into the bay below.”
“I read that lots of people kill themselves here.”
“Beautiful way to die, if dying’s your thing.”
“Says the man who can’t die.”
“Says the man who’s already dead.” Coburn headed over to the ass-end of a Toyota Corolla. He snapped his fingers at Gil. “Map. C’mon.”
Gil set his crossbow down, fished a Rand McNally pocket atlas from his pocket. “You snap at me again, I might shoot one of those fingers off.”
“Just bring out the fuckin’ map, old man.”
Kayla, inside his head, admonished him: Apologize to Daddy.
As Gil slapped the map down on the filthy car trunk, Coburn told the girl inside his head no, he won’t apologize, she didn’t get to make demands—
He knew it was a lie and she called him on it fast. Suddenly the noise level in his head cranked up like someone just spun the volume knob, broke it off, and stabbed him in the eardrum with the shattered plastic. Kayla screamed senselessly inside his mind, a shrieking banshee wail, and behind it all a sub rosa thread of thought that said: I can do this all
day, all night.
Coburn curled his lip and muttered: “Sorry, old man.”
The psychic cacophony stopped.
“I’m not old. I’m barely into my fifties.” Gil cocked an eyebrow at him. “Was Kayla that made you apologize, wasn’t it?”
The girl’s father still wasn’t comfortable with the fact that Coburn had drunk the lifeblood of his daughter and that she was now taking up real estate inside the vampire’s blood, body and mind. He believed it; he just didn’t like it.
Coburn said nothing. Just grabbed the map and used his finger to trace their route through the city. “Look. We cross the bridge. We go south. Hug the water’s edge. Any dumbfuck zombies come after us, we snag a boat or just dive in the water. They don’t seem to do so well with the wet stuff. End to end, it’s not even six miles. If the lab’s on a ferry, it’s gotta be operating out of the wharf. There, or somewhere along the piers off the east side. We should be there by the afternoon.”
The wind kicked up. It had fangs. It whistled through the bridge cables. Gil didn’t say anything; he just stood there staring at Coburn, scratching at his salt-and-pepper beard with an idle hand.
“Can you see her?” Gil finally asked.
“No. I hear her.” Coburn thought about it, and clarified: “But I do feel her. She’s like a... well. It’s like when a TV is on somewhere in the house, and even if the sound is down you can still feel it. A white noise. An indiscernible buzz.”
Inside Coburn’s head: Aww, how sweet. Every girl just wants to be thought of as an indiscernible buzz.
Gil nodded. Satisfied or not, Coburn wasn’t sure.
“Let’s keep moving,” Gil said.
And they did. They trudged south. Found a few rotters stumbling around at the toll gate at the end of the bridge. One woman with no arms staggering around, a rat’s nest of bleach-blonde hair gathering flies the way a tree gathers crows. Two men with dark blood-poison striations up their necks—toll booth attendants, one fat and tall, one thin and small, both easy to fell. Coburn shattered their knees with hard kicks, then stepped on their heads like overripe honeydews. Gil dispatched the blonde with the crossbow, the arrow going clean through her eye and out the back of her head.
As they headed south down the 101, the fog thinned and the sun came out and again Coburn felt that old spike of fear and for a half a second it felt like ants were crawling under his skin trying to bite their way free—but then, once more, he realized it was just the warmth of that unfamiliar ball of fire in the sky washing over him. He didn’t much care for it.
They left the 101. Got off on Mason. A stretch of wet grass (and the distant bay) to their left. On the other side, whitewashed warehouses and the trees encroaching behind and overtop them. A rotter flopped around on the ground, his legs tangled in the chain and spokes of a bicycle. Coburn kicked its head off.
Seemed like a cakewalk.
The air grew warm.
The sun was out.
What few rotters they found were dumber than hammerstruck calves, and just as easy to dispatch. Even Coburn—not a naturally optimistic creature—started to feel pretty good about their chances. He could feel Kayla growing excited, too. Her voice in his head like a cool glass of sweet tea:
Remember: you’re the cure, Coburn.
Things went off the rails as soon as they entered the city proper. They started seeing the tall needle-like masts of boats bobbing there in the water, and the warehouses and trees gave way to the condos and duplexes and single homes.
And to the zombies.
The street ahead lay crowded with them. Jostling together like sluggish fetid molecules, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder, the stench of death pairing with the stink of brine from the bay.
Gil brought the crossbow to his shoulder.
Creampuff bared his teeth.
Watching a horde of zombies figure out you were there was an exercise in patience: they lift their heads, sniff the air with ruined noses, let their rot-clad skulls teeter on mushy necks until finally they turn toward you, their prey.
Coburn didn’t think to give them the time.
He grabbed Gil, nudged Creampuff with a boot. The vampire pointed to a side street—Baker—and ducked down it. In the distance he could see that the road tilted up sharply, which was unsurprising given how San Francisco basically sat atop an epic hill. This way wasn’t clotted with rotters, though it had a dozen or more milling about the street, pawing at one another and gurgling. A few more plodded along the sidewalk, collecting flies.
One zombie—face all but indistinguishable from a plate of raw meat except for the eyes staring out—started jogging toward them. Others caught sight, started coming at them, too.
“Coburn,” Gil warned.
“Follow me,” he said. The vampire scooped up the terrier and leapt up onto a parked car, helping Gil up after him. Then he hurried along the cars, jumping from one to the next. The zombies were slow, stupid. By the time they lurched forward against the car, Coburn and Gil were already moving onto the next one. The undead were not efficient hunters—they went where the prey was, not where the prey was going. Yet another difference between the bloodsucker and the rotter.
But they come from you, Kayla said. Never forget that.
How could he, with her reminding him like that all the goddamn time.
Of course, it was true. They were of his blood. Part of his grim legacy. Flipped the wrong motherfucker the middle finger, which lost him that finger. And that digit went on to spawn the undead menace, the zombipocalypse, the end of the world as they knew it. His fuck you to one man became a gigantic fuck you to the whole of the human race—and given the fact he needed their blood to survive, kind of a boomerang fuck you right back to him.
He was almost proud.
But then, as one zombie stumbled forward like a drunk and cracked its head into the passenger side window of a parked BMW, that pride dissipated like steam.
Coburn called to Gil behind him: “We work our way up to the next street, then we head east. You good?”
“You don’t need to worry about me. You just worry about yourself.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I just mean, you do what you do best: worry about you.”
“You saying I’m selfish?”
“What? No.” Gil followed Coburn, jumping from a Hyundai to the back of a Dodge pickup and into the truck bed. Coburn was already at the front. “Just go.”
“You think I’m a selfish asshole. You think I can’t keep your daughter safe.”
“Well,” Gil growled, “you did a bang-up job back in Los Angeles.”
Coburn stopped moving. He spun around on the roof of a Subaru Forester and showed his teeth. “Hey, I did my best. Besides, I wasn’t the one who led her into that goddamn deathtrap, now was—”
That’s the moment everything went pear-shaped.
The vampire had been seeing things on a horizontal playing field. And arguing with Gil, with his backup, made him miss what was coming.
And what was coming fell from above.
Bam!
A zombie tumbled off a roof and landed right on Coburn, knocking the vampire off the Subaru and onto the ground. Creampuff whined and tumbled under the car, claws scrabbling.
The rotter—a dead woman with skin the color and consistency of tar-paper—clambered atop him and put all her weight on his chin. Her rotten tooth-stubs sought out his throat, hankering for a taste of his blood. Coburn couldn’t let that happen. Last time he let rotters have a sip of his go-go juice it changed them. Turned ordinary zombies from brain-dead stumblers to smart super-predators. A condition they could spread, and that only ended when Coburn killed himself—or tried to, before Kayla brought him back to existence with that magic blood of hers.
Everything seemed to happen at once. Coburn got his hand under her cheek and pushed upward at the same time Creampuff darted out from under the car, snarling and nipping at her. She reared back, and only then did Coburn see that her left
arm had no hand—the arm dead-ended at the elbow, which was just a jagged, shattered spur of broken bone.
The zombie plunged that bone right into his belly.
It wasn’t an attack. The dumb cooze was trying to lean on a hand that wasn’t there. And now she was bone-deep in his guts, writhing like an animal caught in a trap. Which, as it turned out, was not all that great for Coburn’s interior.
The zombie struggled, wrenching her arm up—
Slicing a ragged tear across Coburn’s stomach.
Cool air blew across his exposed guts.
Well, shit.
The zombie saw his undead bowel and thought to dive in the way a porky kid goes at a pie-eating contest, but as she dove forth with zeal and hunger, he grabbed her head and racked it backward until the spine snapped and her dead eyes went deader. Other zombies were already shuffling forward, crossbow bolts sticking out of a few of their heads as they dropped.
Coburn, laying on the street looking up, saw something else.
More zombies. On the roof. Milling about.
Their attention had been gotten.
Coburn grunted, packed his viscera into the cavern of his body and yelled to Gil: “Up, up, up!”
Gil looked up to see the zombies start spilling over the edge, two stories up. He danced out of the way as one slammed hard into the Subaru, rolling off the back end. Another crashed into the boughs of a small tree growing out of the sidewalk, thrashing as it tangled itself in the branches.
They kept falling. One after the other. None of them landing with grace, but all of them getting up afterwards.
And now the zombies from the bottom of the street—the horde—had been alerted. A seething tide of corrupted unlife. Rotten as a tsunami of dead fish.
Coburn backed up to a house—a house the color of daffodils—and shouldered open the door, waving Gil and whistling for Creampuff.
