by Chuck Wendig
Where were they? She was afraid to cry out—too much noise would bring them down upon her head, but even then it was as if her thought arrived too loudly…
Because behind her, a branch snapped.
She spun, hoping to see her father or Leelee coming through the trees, but she was not so lucky.
The rotter’s face suffered the undead version of Bell’s Palsy—half of the flesh drooped, like a piece of bologna thrown against the wall. Once, this zombie was a park ranger—he still wore the outfit, though it had long given way to tears in the fabric. The name-patch was so soaked through by the creature’s fluids—pink and yellow and red—that it was no longer legible.
Kayla didn’t bother screaming. She just turned and ran, no longer cautious, no longer caring about the branches or thorn-whips.
As she ran, she realized that she was no longer alone.
Other corpses shambled through the underbrush. They came in from all sides—dozens of them now. Kayla didn’t bother to get a good look. Instead she just picked up the pace and bolted through the trees like a spooked animal.
As the sun dropped behind the horizon, leaving the forest cast in the muddy tones of deepening twilight, Kayla heard gunshots in the distance.
Then her foot caught on a root and she tumbled forward, her head thumping dully against the hard earth.
As she rolled over, foul hands reached down for her, a palm that smelled of bile covering her face. The finger wormed into her mouth and she tasted bitterness and rot: the flavor of a spoonful of spoiled meat on her tongue. She tried to scream, but the hands held her down, covering her eyes.
Teeth sank into the meat just past her collarbone.
Blood wetted her shirt as the zombie hissed.
A terrible thought crossed through her mind:
I am infected.
PART TWO
PROTECTOR
CHAPTER TEN
Feeding Frenzy
And like that, the pressure atop her was gone.
The zombie made a sound like one she’d never heard before: a kind of guttural bark, a chuffing belch. She clamped her hand to her bleeding collar and scooted back against a tree—the rotter who had bitten her, another park ranger (this one female, her scalp peeled back like the skin of a grape), stood there wearing a look more dumbfounded than usual.
The zombie began choking. Its foul tongue thrust out, stabbing at the air. It clawed at nothing. The sounds that emerged became more and more strangled—grrk, gkkkt, kkkkklllkkk.
Then its eyes popped. Like hot eggs jumping out of their shells. From the eye sockets ran fresh blood—not black, but red—and with each rivulet came a curling wisp of steam or smoke.
The zombie dropped, dead. Or, at least, deader than before.
Suddenly, Kayla found herself yanked upward violently. She cried out as she was thrown over someone’s shoulder—her face pressed into said someone’s jacket—and she smelled leather and blood.
“Don’t scream,” Coburn hissed. “Just shut up and keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle, unless you want them broken off.”
And then he began to run.
But he ran fast. Faster than fast. Branches whipped at her arms, cutting into them, drawing blood. She tucked them tight. She remembered once, way back when, seeing a nature video in school where they put a camera on some kind of hawk or falcon and recorded its flight through a tight forest—this was like that, the world rushing past, the trees nothing but blurry shadows.
Like that, Coburn emerged from the forest with her on his back.
She smelled gunpowder and rot. As if to punctuate the odor: a rifle shot split the air. Someone—Cecelia?—screamed.
Coburn dumped Kayla on the ground and then disappeared. Kayla propped herself up on her arms and legs, trying dearly not to vomit. And that was when she saw just how badly things had gone in her absence.
Night had fallen.
The rotters were everywhere.
They had surrounded the Winnebago.
Her father stood in the open doorway, firing off rifle rounds. Abner leaned out of the passenger side window in the cab, desperately swinging with a camping hatchet. Cecelia was at the window, screaming her fool head off even though she wasn’t in immediate danger.
Leelee, though, was in danger.
The nurse stood up on a picnic table with can of hairspray and a lighter—an easy homespun flamethrower that didn’t always do much to kill the undead but did a good job of keeping them at bay. She flicked the lighter, hit the button and set off plumes of chemical fire, like dragon’s breath. The rotters swatted at it the way you might at a cloud of mosquitoes. A few of them actually caught fire.
And then the fire died down to a limp, sputtering spray, a few glowing yellow drops falling to the earth before dying out completely.
The zombies swarmed her, pulling her down.
Kayla’s heart sank as Leelee’s body fell beneath the horde.
But before she knew what was happening, Leelee surged back out of the zombie throng—this time, buoyed by the hands of Coburn the vampire. He threw her back up onto the picnic table, stepped up and then stepped down hard onto the picnic bench, catching the see-sawing bench board in his hand.
Then he started swinging that bench like a baseball bat.
Zombie skulls caved in. Some heads bent at the neck at wrong angles. Others twisted around. A few launched off the shoulders, freed by the mighty strikes.
Coburn began to carve a path through the horde. He swung the bench—easily five feet long—before him in great, swooping reaper-like arcs. Leelee fell in behind him and when the board finally shattered, he stabbed the broken shard into some fat rotter’s pumpkin head and then went ahead and just used his hands. He grabbed skulls and smashed them together. He ripped faces clean from their skulls. He punched straight through mushy brains.
And when he looked to Kayla and waved her on, she felt what was certainly an unhealthy surge of happiness—he came back to us, he will be our protector, thank you God Almighty for we are saved.
It was almost enough to make her forget about the hunk of meat the zombie had bitten out of her shoulder.
She ducked a lurching zombie—as the rotter closed in, his head spun around and a spray of loose, decaying teeth peppered her cheeks like shotgun pellets.
Kayla darted in and clung to his side and she felt his arm around her. She felt Leelee’s hand grab her own and then on the ground she saw the small terrier from before, making deft figure-eights around the vampire’s feet… and for just a moment, all felt right in the world—even as black blood and zombie teeth rained down upon them.
Her father stood at the door and pulled her inside. The dog leapt in after her, and then Leelee followed.
Then she heard the sound.
It was an awful cry—a keening wail, a banshee’s scream. It was like nothing she’d ever heard. It cut to the bone. It sang in her marrow and she was sure then that if she ever slept again that sound would be what haunted her dreams.
Coburn pushed her the rest of the way inside. His eyes were wide, like he’d just seen a ghost—and the fact that a vampire, a bloodsucking monster, seemed rattled was not a good sign. He gritted his teeth and snapped his fingers.
“We need to go, and we need to go now.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Fresh Mutation
The RV bounced and bucked like a fat horse, barreling out of Towhee Park—rotters fell beneath the vehicle, and the Winnebago hit each one like a pus-caked speed-bump.
Gil yelled to Ebbie, who was driving: “Damnit, Ebbie! What’d I tell you about driving into those sonofabitches?”
“Sorry, sorry,” Ebbie said, wincing.
Coburn peered out the back window of the RV, moving aside dusty, moth-eaten curtains. At first, all he saw in the darkness were the throngs of shifting, stumbling dead—moving in to fill the vehicle’s wake like a swarm of ants. But then, there it was: a flash of pink, a body moving faster than the others, moving with greater purpo
se and direction.
It was her. The hausfrau. The pink bathrobe. From before.
Except she had… changed.
Her neck was elongated. Her limbs, too—and now her arms dead-ended in something that looked altogether less human, more animal. In the moonlight he could see a mouthful of curved, needle teeth. Fangs.
Kayla snuck up beside him, looking ashen.
“We’re not supposed to hit the zombies with the ’Bago,” she said, explaining what her father was going on about. “Did that one time and one got caught in the back wheel well. Grinded him up good. Screwed up the tire, and we were out of commission for a couple days. Now we have a policy: no rotter roadkill.”
Coburn smelled the stink coming off her shoulder. Above the collarbone her shirt was stained red. Had none of the others seen yet? Gil was up there leaning out the window, taking shots with the rifle. Ebbie was driving. Leelee sat up in the passenger seat. And Cecelia, well, she was hunkered down crying at the piss-poor piece of laminated particle-board that passed for the dining room table.
“You got bit,” he said. He wondered then what he was feeling. Not sadness. He wasn’t even sure if he was capable of grief anymore. And yet something nagged at him—some dark, unseen tentacle tickling at his dead heart. Was this guilt? Seriously? Now, of all times? Couldn’t be.
She shrugged, swooning. Her eyes unfocused for a moment. “I think so.” Was this it for her? Was the bacteria racing through her veins, killing off the good tissue in order to animate the dead stuff?
“That, uhh, fucking sucks,” he said, and the words felt stupid coming out of his mouth. Empathy was not his strong suit.
“What are you looking at?”
What did it matter? He moved aside, let her see.
Kayla looked out there and she started to say something, but didn’t finish. Instead she remained staring out that back window, mouth forming a fearful ‘oh.’ Finally she looked at the vampire, wide-eyed, and said, “It’s gaining on us.”
Coburn shouldered the girl aside and took another look.
He wished he hadn’t.
She hit the back of the RV like a bull—soon as Coburn looked, there came the hausfrau, hurtling bodily through the air, arms and talons outstretched. And now she’d clamped onto the back of the vehicle, her face at the window. Needled teeth gnashing. Blood-filled eyes wide and without pupils.
Gil ducked back inside the vehicle. “What the hell was that?”
A hard butt of her head cracked the back glass.
Coburn imagined what would happen if she came in here—she wasn’t like the others. Soon as that freak of nature tore her way into this giant tin can, it’d be like a tiger let loose inside a daycare center. She’d tear these idiots to pieces. And if that happened, where did that leave him? Kayla’s description of the relationship between cattle and shepherd was apt, was it not? Coyote comes sniffing around the herd, you shoot that motherfucker before he gets a taste for hamburger.
The vampire pushed past Gil, but snatched the rifle out of his hands.
“Hey!” Gil protested, but it was too late.
The back window shattered inward. The beast pushed in up to her shoulders, her one arm inside, swiping at air—the claws left ragged marks across the paneled RV interior. But by this time Coburn had already crawled outside through the busted door (which now banged against the side of the vehicle), the rifle slung over his shoulder.
The air was cold. The RV shot down a dark back road lined with needles of blue pine. Coburn swung himself to the top of the vehicle and jacked a shell into the .30-30.
Sure enough, she’d pushed half her body in through the back window—frankly, the only reason the beast probably couldn’t get her whole ass through that space was because the pink bathrobe was plush (if filthy), and bunched up around her waist. Coburn took aim and fired.
Her back left foot came off easy as shooting a tin can off a fence. The bone splintered and the dead corpse-foot—the toes now topped with hook-like owl talons—spiraled off into darkness, thudding against the asphalt.
The vampire stomped on the RV roof. Just to let her know who it was that just blew her goddamn foot off.
It got her attention.
She shimmied backwards out of the hole just as a shotgun blast took a hunk out of her shoulder, leaving a gaping hole of ragged meat. The beast didn’t seem to care—she hung there at the back window, staring up at Coburn with those gummy red eyes, shrieking like some kind of hell-bat.
Coburn brought the rifle to his shoulder to take aim—but by the time he had cocked the lever and put another shell in the chamber, she leapt.
She moved fast. Faster than anybody that he had ever seen—except for himself, and the one who made him.
Before he knew what hit him, she already had him on his back. Only thing separating the two of them was the rifle. It didn’t last long; she broke it in half, Coburn’s hands now holding one useless rifle part each.
The beast lifted her head back.
Her mouth opened, curved teeth gleaming wet with saliva, tongue lashing, spraying a froth of curdled pus.
She bit down on his chest. Those teeth tore clean through the leather. He felt her tongue—rough like the wrong end of a cheese grater—stick deep into the wound. The bitch is drinking my blood, he thought.
Then he realized: in his hands, a broken gun. Metal. Wood. Not the original weapon, but still a weapon.
He brought each up against her head in turn, pushing blood to his limbs, urging them to beat her with as much strength as he could muster. The stock clubbed her in the ear. The barrel bludgeoned her in the back of the head. It was just enough to get her to pull her head away from the bite—it should’ve popped her head like a tick but mostly just served to piss her off.
She howled in rage.
And when she did, Coburn tucked his feet up and planted his boots on her chest. Then he kicked as hard as was humanly—or, rather, inhumanly—possible.
The bitch-beast launched off the side of the RV, disappearing into the pine trees with a crash and crackle of breaking branches.
Groaning, Coburn stood on wobbly legs and pitched the broken rifle parts into the darkness. He looked ahead and saw that the road was dark and empty. Then he tucked his legs back in through the side window and slid back into the vehicle with the rest of the fresh meat.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sharing and Caring
The one-footed hausfrau crawled free from the forest, with ragged vents like rotting gills torn in her flesh by the tree. Awareness bloomed inside of her. She could smell her prey fading fast, but the scent lingered like a thread of sweet perfume, sweet as befouled meat, sweet as fresh blood and dead flesh and cloying corpse-breath.
Inside, a pair of new—or, rather, old—emotions rose, two snakes twining around one another. In her mind’s eye she pictured the face of the one whose blood she took, and she was filled with a warm flush. She wanted him near her. She wanted his blood in her mouth. She wanted to hold him as mother and lover, her foul tongue in his ear, her wretched claws stroking his cheek.
And then she wanted to tear his ear off. And rip the skin free from his face. And crack his skull like a clam on a rock and eat what waited within.
She loved him so.
And she hated him dearly.
The blood inside her now was warm and empowering. The hausfrau rolled on her back, her mouth opening so wide that the jaw crackled and crunched. She looked down at her leg which now dead-ended in a putrid stump, bone shards jutting from the ruined meat like pins from a pincushion. It was then that instinct took hold, and she wished dearly for the foot to come back—within her, the blood began to stir, began to move, a slow and sluggish parade that felt like a hot rush through her body’s tangled channels.
The bone shards twitched. The meat around them swelled, then retreated.
With a sharp twist of pain, the bones shifted suddenly, clacking together—and, before her eyes, they began to merge: osseous crystals growing like coral
until becoming one. Around the knitting bone, clumps of flesh rolled and stretched. Blisters rose and popped. Pus spattered against asphalt.
It wasn’t long before she could wiggle her new toes.
Toes that dead-ended in curved talons. Talons that would help her run, climb, and rend meat from bone.
The hausfrau stood, feeling the warm blood oozing around inside her body. She still had some left.
Around her, the moans of the lost and dispirited dead. Her rotting compatriots, each without the responsiveness and understanding she had recently come to know. They milled around, attracted by the commotion of the now-past RV, but uncertain what it even meant—they were operating on the simplest of urges, like moths drawn by flame.
The blood inside her demanded to be free.
One of the zombies stood near her, looking down at her with only the barest glimmer of curiosity—the park ranger outfit with the soaked-through nametag hung loose in some parts, where the flesh had retracted, and fit tight in others where the body had bloated with the gases of decay. Half his face seemed utterly unresponsive, disconnected from the other side.
She chose him.
The hausfrau moved fast. Her claws wrapped around the back of his head, twisting it hard toward her. She shoved him to the ground and as he moaned, she felt a squirming clot of blood come up out of her own throat and belch forth—a black slurry poured into his open mouth. Just to make sure, she held his unstable jaw open with her hand.
Later, when he stood up, his eyes flush with red, his tongue tasting the air, he looked at the gathered throng of undead.
He was no longer one of them. He was apart from them. He was above them.