Double Dead: Bad Blood

by Chuck Wendig

  Another sound. Not a bark.

  Again, the bellow of a distant hunter—a keening, high-pitched screech. The sound made the hairs on Gil’s neck reach for the stars. He could see that he wasn’t alone. All the kids shifted uncomfortably. They knew what they were hearing.

  Princess spoke: “Ellie.”

  The other kids said the same name in unison: “Ellie...”

  They bowed their heads, suddenly somber.

  Gil dared speak. “You... you know what made that sound.”

  “That’s Ellie.” Aiden nodded. “She was one of us.”

  COBURN SMELLED PEACHES and cigarettes. Heard Kayla laughing somewhere behind the high-pitched tone humming in his ears. Remembered that the last time he saw someone with a grenade, it was Leelee, Kayla’s best friend and almost-doctor and surrogate mother—the pin hit the ground and the grenade took out her and a pack of hunters. And that was the end of that.

  I miss her, came Kayla’s voice rising out of the fog.

  The vampire tried not to think about that.

  Instead, he put out his hand, tried to stand, but found that his arm was like that zombie who gutted him—missing below the elbow. He fell, leaning hard on a nub of bone. A barbed spear of white-hot pain shot up from the bone to his shoulder and all the way to his ear.

  He rolled over. Into something wet.

  Wincing, he sat up, felt along his back for whatever it was—came back with a smear of red. Nearby lay a bowl—no, not a bowl, but a chunk of skull-cap with hair on the bottom. Masterson.

  Masterson was everywhere.

  The grenade, silly, Kayla said. Remember that?

  Oh. Right.

  At the last moment, before the grenade went off, Coburn turned and dove away from Masterson, pushing that poor dumb human bomb backward. Which explained why Coburn’s arm was half-gone.

  Now, here he was. Missing an arm. Covered in dust and shattered brick and parts of Masterson. At least you’re not trapped in a Wal-Mart about to be eaten by a crazy super-obese lady, came Kayla’s voice. Yeah. You never said much about that, but I can see it here with all your other memories. That was pretty gross, JW.

  It was pretty gross.

  And this was not as bad as that.

  At least he had blood here. It was undignified and made him feel more than a little like a starving dog but...

  He bent down, and vacuumed up what was left of Masterson with his lips. Like he was slurping spilled soup from the floor. It was dingy and dirty and losing its nutritive value fast and occasionally he had to spit out spurs of bone or clumps of hair, but blood was blood and this arm wasn’t going to regrow itself. (Well, it would, but only with the proper urging.)

  While siphoning up the liquid parts of the exploded Minister Masterson, Coburn wondered just what the hell that guy’s deal was. Thought he was some kind of cult leader. Leading the people toward a—what was it he said? A symbiosis with living man and undead asshole. But the truth was, Masterson was just another parasite. This one clinging to Lydia the way a remora fish hangs off the belly of a shark—bottom-feeding scum-sucking trash-picker. Not a leader. Not a ‘minister.’

  When Coburn was done, he stood.

  Grunted. Flexed his toes. Gritted his teeth.

  Blood moved to wet the bony end of his arm. Muscle and tendon grew along with it, along with an unfurling flag of too-pink skin.

  It was miserable. Felt like his arm was covered in a thousand ants, then dunked in a bucket of boiling water to kill them. Then ants, then boiling water. Over and over again. Until a few minutes went by and he felt fingers—skinless fingers for the moment—wiggling in the open air.

  Time, then, to figure out where he was.

  He’d gone into the tunnel.

  Then used Lydia’s head like a bowling ball.

  Then Masterson, then boom.

  And the tunnel mouth closed. A rain of bricks and bone, of dust and dead guy. And now Coburn was looking down the mouth of the tunnel where Lydia had gone. Ahead he saw that this grotto broke into a smaller tunnel—an egg-shaped tunnel of old pale brick that cut across horizontally.

  Time to move.

  He reached the tunnel. Left or right?

  He willed his lungs to pull in air, get a good noseful—he smelled the memory of sewage, not fresh but still married to these walls the way cigarette smoke clings to a sport coat. And beneath it, that hint of jasmine, that touch of death and cold clammy skin. A smell he once thought reserved only for him.

  Left, then.

  The tunnel did not allow him to stand at full height. He had to crouch, an undignified way to travel if ever there was one. Doubly undignified is how he had to pull himself along, hands falling upon debris that had long lined the brick—much of it stuck there like a lollipop glued to a baby’s cheek. Fast food wrappers. Used condoms. He even saw an old red-headed wig plastered to the tunnel wall. None of it breaking down. In a hundred years—a thousand—these will be the remnants of human civilization. The question then became, would anyone even be around to find these things? Or was humanity’s ticket punched as its dead fed on its living?

  Coburn told himself he hoped humanity did stick around, if only so he had something—er, someone—to eat.

  Kayla just laughed in the back of his mind, as if she knew better.

  Whatever the case, that’s why he had to do what he was doing. Had to get to the lab. Had to have them analyze his blood—not just for his own restorative powers but for the healing blood of the very special miracle mystery girl. Her blood was curative. If they could make that into a cure for all mankind, well, that meant his food supply would once more be in good working order.

  This was all part of the original deal, he told himself—and told the girl in his head. Protect her. Shepherd her. Carry her forth. He did not keep her safe but he could keep what mattered safe: her blood.

  She laughed again—the sound of birds chirping, broken glass tinkling.

  He ignored her, and pushed on.

  Five minutes in, water began trickling past his feet. A silvery rivulet of scum-topped water. It smelled of—

  The tunnel vibrated. The growl of distant thunder.

  Rain. It smelled of rain.

  That was not great news. These sewers no longer worked like they were supposed to. Not that he knew exactly how a sewer system operated, but he was pretty sure that electricity figured into it somewhere down the line. And maintenance. He’d been down beneath New York enough times to know that run-off from the street moved from tunnels like this one into bigger spaces—and from those bigger spaces, the water was pumped away to treatment plants.

  No pumps meant the water had nowhere to go.

  It would just fill up the tunnels. Some of it might overflow into the bay. But the rest would drown him like a rat. Not that he needed to breathe, but he didn’t feel like getting washed into the bay like a dirty soda bottle, either.

  He put a little pep in his step. No need to urge his body to do anything crazy yet—he didn’t want to waste the blood. But still: faster was better.

  Another trembling tumble of thunder from above.

  And with it, the sound of a hunter’s scream.

  It was not as distant as he had hoped.

  As the tunnel bent east, Coburn saw ahead of him a murky band of light—a storm-drain looked out onto the streets of San Francisco as rainwater cascaded down in a shimmering sheet. Even as he approached, he heard the susurration of rain grow heavier—from a steady fall to an asphalt-battering downpour.

  He neared the storm drain.

  An arm shot out of that space. Reaching in from the outside—a lanky, scabby arm, the purple-gray of a faded bruise, the fingers long, too long, each tipped with not so much a claw as a curve of sharpened bone poking through the dead flesh. It swiped the air only a few feet in front of Coburn’s face, scratching across brick and leaving furrows in the stone.

  It was a child’s arm.

  The hunter shrieked into the storm drain. Coburn saw the beast’s
face: yes, a child’s face, stretched long and thin, the eyes set back in hollow sockets, the mouth a wide-open nest of shark’s teeth. Razors laid upon razors. Biting the air. Long tapered tongue licking along the edge of the storm drain the way a dog might lick the rim of his food bowl.

  Long dark dirty hair hung in stiff ringlets around her face.

  Oh, my god, it’s a girl, Kayla said. Coburn could feel the ghost in his head recoil in horror. But not just horror—sadness. And not sympathy, but empathy. As if Kayla saw some part of herself in this girl—dead, now a monster, or part of one.

  The hunter spit and licked the walls and gnashed her horrible teeth. A second arm reached in next to the first, both reaching for him.

  Coburn felt a stirring of something inside his own mind—a sepulchered carcass of grief and guilt and shame rising from its psychic tomb and shaking off decades of dead and thoughtless dust. Dead girls. Kayla. Rebecca. This one. All his fault. The zombies were him and though this hunter was not his, it still pointed back through time to when he gave the middle finger to the wrong man.

  No! No time for that. No time for sympathy or empathy or grief or any of those emotions. They were unproductive. Useless as a short-sleeved straitjacket, worthless as a vestigial organ.

  Just as Coburn started to wonder just how he was going to get past the slashing claws and flicking tongue of this child hunter, the creature withdrew her seeking arms and was gone. Whoosh. Leaving only the pouring rain and stomach-grumbles of thunder.

  No time like the present. He hurried past the open drain.

  Kayla issued an ominous warning: Remember, JW. Those hunters are smarter than the average rotter.

  It was then that, behind him, he heard an equally ominous noise:

  A manhole cover being ripped from its mooring.

  Coburn lit a fire in his blood and ran like a sonofabitch.

  THEY TOLD GIL about Ellie.

  Pete kept the pistol on him as he listened to Aiden tell the story.

  “Ellie was one of us. One of the kids who survived. I see the look on your face. You think we’d be the first to go. That we’re vulnerable. Well, fuck you, old man. You’re slow. You’re the weak one.”

  Gil wondered why everybody thought he was so old. Then again, he hadn’t looked in a mirror in a long time. His fifty-some years probably looked like seventy-some by now. All leather and stubble and raccoon rings around his tired eyes.

  Aiden continued: “Kids are quick. Adaptable. Smart in the right ways—doesn’t matter if we don’t know who the twenty-second president was—”

  Grover Cleveland, Gil thought.

  “—what matters is what we run faster than you. I’m not saying that all the kids survived. Some kids are real pussies. Their parents start turning to mush-mouthed, brain-eating fucktards and they still want to go and hug Daddy and hold onto Mommy. But those of us who knew the score knew to run. And hide. And we knew where to run and where to hide. This city has a lot of boltholes.”

  Gil shot a look at the kid’s dead parents on the bed. Shifting. Grunting. And his brother on the chair staring ahead. All preserved. Saved. As if a cure might appear one day and return them back to normal—a fairy tale. Or was it? Zombies. Vampires. His own daughter with her miracle blood. Maybe it wasn’t so crazy.

  It also suggested this kid was a lot more bark than bite.

  Wasn’t really a great time to say that, though, so Gil let the kid talk.

  “Ellie was one of us who made it until—” And here Aiden started to blink fast, like he was maybe trying not to cry. His hands formed into fists at his sides as if the grief were a real thing, as real as the zombies, and he could just knock its block off and send it packing. “Until she wasn’t. She got swamped. We pulled her out and up onto a fire escape, but not before they bit her leg. She turned.”

  “Ellie.” A griefstruck whimper from Princess. Who began to sob, crumpling in on herself like a flower dying in fast-forward. Aiden clapped his hands angrily at her and yelled:

  “Princess! Shut up! I’m telling a damn story.”

  The girl only wept harder.

  Gil moved over to her—Pete tensed his arm and pointed the pistol with greater and more panicked purpose—but he ignored the gun and went to the girl anyway, pulling her tight against him. She buried her face in his shirt, soaking it through with little-girl tears.

  “Go on,” Gil said, giving the girl comfort and stifling her tears. “Tell your little story.”

  “She’s crying. I don’t like her crying.”

  “I don’t like you being a bully, you little thug. Now keep talking.”

  Aiden seemed stung.

  But damn if it didn’t work. Cautiously, he resumed the story: “We... kept Ellie with us for a while. Had her held quick with a catch-pole somebody stole from one of the animal shelters. But over the last couple months, that’s when the doctor showed up. Wanting to take more of us away.”

  “The doctor.”

  “Uh-huh. She comes around every so often. At first she was nice. Offering us things if we went with her. She said she could take two or three of us on a boat and that she had this lab and there were people there, and it was safe and they had food. I never trusted her.”

  “You kinda trusted her,” Ashleigh said, twirling the chair leg like a slow-motion baton. “I mean, you said—”

  “God, Ashleigh, I changed my mind!” He scowled at her. “Fine. I sent some of us off with her at first. But then we never heard anything and I thought the doctor was strange anyway, and so next time she came by I said for everybody to stay here, that we were doing okay on our own and that the adults didn’t know safety from a sack of shit. Even still, Javier said he wanted to go with her and it didn’t help that she was waving a bag of M&Ms around.”

  Aiden sat on the edge of the bed, between the wiggling corpse-feet of his two dead parents, as if it was no big thing.

  “Wasn’t long after that Ellie got bit. And the next time the doc came around, she was pushy. Threatening us. Way she looked at you made you want to go with her even though you didn’t want to go with her.”

  “She had pretty eyes,” Pete said, as if lost in a dream.

  “But before any of us could follow her, Ellie broke free of the catchpole. Jumped on the doc’s back like a monkey. Bit down onto the lady’s neck and there was blood everywhere. The lady screamed. Threw Ellie against a dumpster. Ran off like a shot, like a... an Olympic runner. Weird thing was, didn’t even look like her neck was bit up. Blood, lots of blood, but no, y’know, wound.”

  Gil could’ve guessed the rest of the story, and it went about like he figured. “We got Ellie back with the catch-pole but she changed that night. Got all fuckin’ weird. She went from being a dumb zombie to... I dunno. It’s like she saw us again. But not in a good way. Like in the way a tiger watches you from behind the bars at the zoo. And she got still. Just sat down. Waiting. Zombies don’t wait. They smell you and they’ll come at you even if that means walking across a street full of broken glass to get at you. She wasn’t like that. Not anymore.

  “So. We let her go. Threw her behind a door and closed it, pulling the pole out. Then we ran like crazy.”

  “We still sometimes see her,” Booboo said, picking his nose with one hand and using the other to fidget with an ice pick.

  Aiden nodded. “We hear her out there. See her, too. She’s got a pack of zombos that follow her around like dogs.”

  Finally, Princess stopped sobbing, progressing to the sniffling-and-hitching-breath phase. She stood next to Gil and rested her dirty cheek on his shoulder. “I miss Ellie. She was a better princess than me.”

  Gil dared to ask: “This woman. One who Ellie bit. She say where she was taking you kids?”

  Aiden said, “Yeah. To Alcatraz. To her lab.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Drowned Rats In A Dead Maze

  THE VAMPIRE DARED not look, but the sounds told him everything he needed to know: the hunter dropped into the tunnel behind him, landing with
a splash, bone claws and talons clicking on the ancient brick. But the hunter was not alone: other bodies hit the tunnel like sacks of grain dropped out of the back of a pick-up truck. Zombies. Clumsily bumbling into the dark, likely following the focus of their fruitless attention span: the beast in dark ringlets.

  As noted, Coburn ran.

  You can take her, Kayla said as Coburn hunkered down, clawing his way through the tunnel like a rat driven mad by a parasite. C’mon, JW. Just one little girl. Remember how well you handled me once upon a time?

  The memory of holding Kayla aloft by her throat struck him. An almost physical blow. With it: another wash of guilt. Acid on the back of his tongue. Acid in the back of his mind. Guilt was for suckers. Shame was for chumps.

  Remorse was a line that separated the living and the dead.

  The dead had no remorse.

  And Coburn reminded himself: he was most certainly dead.

  Ahead, the tunnel split—a Y-shaped fork in the path. Coburn quickly sniffed the air, caught at first only the smell of rainwater and broken-down grease and other old chemicals washed from the streets into the sewers, but as he could feel and hear the hunter coming up behind him (a hundred yards, now? seventy-five?), panic twisted through his heart like a rusty screw—

  Jasmine. There.

  Coburn scrambled down the left-most path.

  She’s gaining on you, Kayla said.

  And she was. The wretched sounds of the pursuing hunter were closer now and closing in fast—the water beneath his feet was starting to form a heavier stream, six, seven inches deep, the walls were growing slick with moisture. His hands slipped, his feet splashed as the water slowed him just enough. It felt like being in a bad dream, except Coburn didn’t usually have bad dreams. Hell, Coburn usually was the bad dream.

  Turn. Face her. You’re not a runner, JW. You don’t flee what scares you. Kayla laughed. I didn’t think anything scared you.

  But this did. This terrified him. Curdled his blood.