by Chuck Wendig
Like her.
She had no more to give; if she did, she would’ve given it to others. But that was okay. She wasn’t alone now. And her prey was still out there, and the blood was inside him.
Together, the two creatures moved to hunt.
Coburn swung back inside the vehicle, and found himself face-to-face with the wide-mouth barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun. Gil’s face was tight with rage and his finger hovered right over the trigger.
“My daughter,” he said, voice shaking. “She got bit.”
The vampire craned his neck, felt the flesh and bone at his shoulder begin to knit—he moved to scratch it because good goddamn it always itched so bad whenever he had to heal up, but when he went to move his hand, the shotgun barrel pressed tight against his face. Almost up his nose, actually.
“Just notice that, did you?” he asked Gil.
“Did you do it?”
“Did I do what? Bite her? Ugh. No. I can smell whatever disease she has, and let me tell you, that does not make her all that appetizing.”
Gil’s jaw tightened. Tears burned hot at the edges of his eyes. Coburn tried to imagine what the man was feeling now—the certainty that his daughter was infected, that she was going to die, that all of life was hopeless. He thought for a moment about staring deep into the man’s eyes and twisting the knobs and pulling the levers behind the old man’s gaze, forcing him to fight against himself as he tilted the shotgun back, back, back… until the barrel rested under his own chin.
But something stopped him. Again, a little nagging pang, a nibble of perhaps not guilt but rather, the memory of guilt.
It was really fucking irritating, that feeling.
“You sonofabitch,” Gil said. From down near his feet, the terrier growled, teeth bared.
“The dog’s right, Gil. You’re mad at me, but why? She became zombie chow,” Coburn said. “Not my fault, Dad. Where the hell were you when some undead fuckwipe thought she looked like a tasty treat?”
Behind Gil, the nurse—Leelee, was it? What kind of name was that?—tended to the girl, who lay across a cock-eyed pull-out couch. Kayla didn’t look good. Sweat beaded on her brow. Her eyes rolled around in the sockets.
“I’m fine,” Kayla said, though it was clear how wrong she was.
“Shh,” Leelee said, wiping a damp sponge across the girl’s brow.
“This is all your fault,” Gil hissed at the vampire. “It was talking about you that made her run off half-cocked in the first place.”
“Sure,” Coburn said. “Let’s blame the blood-sucking monster.” He paused, shrugged. “Well, okay, a lot of the time that’s actually a good idea. This time, not so much, old man.”
Cecelia came up behind Gil, once again became the devil on his shoulder, her wild-eyed hateful face staring stakes right through the vampire’s heart.
“This is awfully familiar,” Coburn said. “Didn’t we do this last night? With the gun and the threatening and the bullshit? If I remember correctly, that didn’t go so well for anybody. You really think you got the jump on me?”
Gil blinked back tears. “Damn right I do. Not a half-inch between this gun barrel and your head. You willing to take that risk?”
“He saved me,” Leelee said, looking up from Kayla’s tomb-white face. “That has to count for something. He didn’t have to.”
“He only saved you so he could use you like a snack, later. Ain’t that right, vampire?”
Coburn didn’t say anything. He didn’t see any reason to lie.
“Kayla wants him to stay,” Leelee protested.
Gil barked back: “Kayla’s a kid. A sick girl. She doesn’t get a say.”
“You’re very angry, Gil,” the vampire said. “Your daughter’s over there, only hours from becoming one of those moaning, mumbling mule-kicked assholes, and you won’t throw the girl a bone and let her pet vampire stay the night?”
Gil pulled the trigger.
Or, rather, tried to.
Coburn knew it was coming. It wasn’t so much a precognitive thing as it was a preternatural sense of everything that went on around him. That simple, tiny act—the motor mechanism of a finger tightening around a trigger—was preceded by a number of little clues. Gil’s eyes narrowing. His heart beating faster. His jawline tightening, the tendons in his arm drawing taut. As if upon pulling the trigger he knew that it was going to make a big boom and a messy result, and his body flinched before it happened.
But the vampire couldn’t have that. The girl had convinced him of a good thing, and he wasn’t going to let some cranky old fucker ruin it. Fuck it, he hoped it wouldn’t come to this—this being messy and all—but he couldn’t have this old man shooting him in the face, either.
Gil struggled to pull the trigger and couldn’t. He also couldn’t look away from the vampire’s unswerving gaze.
“Shoot him!” Cecelia said.
“I’m… trying,” Gil said through clenched teeth.
“It’s like this,” Coburn said, smiling. “The real story here isn’t how this is my fault but rather, how you’re a bad Daddy. First, you’re obviously not very nice. Second, you’re totally kidding yourself if you think this cradle-robbed brat cares anything for you besides the fact you’re the silverback with the guns and the food—” At this, Cecelia bristled, screaming at him to shut up, but he did no such thing. “Third, you want to blame me but really, the fact your daughter’s dead meat—I mean that literally, dead meat—is because you let her out of your sight. You could’ve tagged me last night, if you were fast enough. If you were strong enough. But you’re not. You’re old. Which makes you slow. And weak. I can’t imagine how that feels. Probably pretty shitty. So shitty, in fact, that I wonder if it’s me you really want to shoot right now.”
As if on cue, Gil struggled against himself—but the man’s puppet strings were tight in the monster’s grip. Gil tilted the gun back, back, back…
“Oh, my God,” Leelee said, suddenly. She wasn’t even talking about the whole situation with the shotgun. The nurse made a sound somewhere beneath a stifled sob and a laugh, looking down at Kayla. The wet sponge fell out of her hand. “She’s healing. She’s healing.”
Coburn decided to end the charade, snatching the shotgun out of Gil’s hands and pushing the old man and the girl aside. He stood over Leelee and, sure enough, the bite on the girl’s shoulder was healing up.
Before their eyes.
The purple striations and red tendrils of infection retreated. The flesh slowly rebuilt itself. Scabs dried up and tumbled away like rust off metal.
Coburn knew how it went, because he’d seen it enough times with his own flesh. Even now, his own shoulder—like hers—was healing up.
Except she wasn’t dead. Kayla was very much alive.
Well. This was new. Quite the curious wrinkle, actually.
“I think she’s going to be okay,” Leelee said.
Ebbie peered back from the driver’s seat. He laughed, ebullient.
Inside, Coburn’s dead heart shuddered. It did that whenever he felt a moment of pleasure—breaking an enemy’s neck, guzzling the blood of a difficult victim, eating fine food or drinking a rare wine. But this had none of the earmarks of such an occasion, and it felt odd. He decided to ignore it, and tamp that feeling down. It was of no use to him in this situation.
Coburn instead brushed a sweaty lock of hair away from the girl’s forehead. Her eyes stopped rotating in their sockets and she found his gaze.
“Hey, vampire,” she said.
“That’s me.”
“Thanks for saving me.”
“I’d say you saved yourself.”
He stepped away then and let Gil reach his daughter. The man bent over her, holding her. Her weak arms hugged him right back.
Leelee smiled at the vampire. Cecelia just scowled. At him, maybe. Or maybe at the fact that her lover’s irritating daughter wouldn’t be tap-step-shuffling off this mortal coil and that chapped her ass. He hoped it was a mixture of both.
Now that everybody was feeling warm and fuzzy about this sudden turn of events, it seemed like a good time to set the agenda.
Coburn cleared his throat, thumped the butt of the shotgun against the floor of the RV. All eyes fell upon him.
“The vampire has the floor,” he said, winking. “Okay. Now that the girl isn’t going to immediately expire and try to eat all our brains, I’ll tell you how this is going to go. The girl convinced me of her plan. I was skeptical at first, but hell with it, she’s right. The world’s shit the bed and I need food. Further, it’s increasingly clear that you weak-kneed blood-bags are going to get yourself nibbled to death by zombies if you don’t have someone like me watching over you. So, that said, here’s the scoop: you’re my herd. I’m your shepherd. But we’re not friends. I’m a higher being. An ascended creature. You’re the dumb cattle. I’m the smart—and if I may say, handsome—cowboy. I’m with you for the duration. Don’t like it? Don’t care. You talk back to me, I will break your fingers. You try to run from me, I will break your legs. You try to hurt me”— and with this, he looked right at Gil—“then I will hurt something or someone you love. Kayla invited me to join your little posse, and I accepted. That means I’m not going anywhere except where all you cats and kittens are going.”
“You’re a monster,” Gil said, but his words were toothless, without the fire behind them that he’d previously stoked.
Coburn shrugged. “And water is wet, old man.”
The vampire scooped up his rat terrier. Creampuff licked his hand, the little dummy. He headed toward the back of the RV. “During the day, the main bedroom is mine. When she’s up for it, send the girl back.” He saw them all tense up. “Don’t give me those looks, I don’t mean what you think. She’s going to be the liaison between you dumb animals and me, your ever-charming keeper.”
He whistled as he closed the accordion door behind him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Special K
Admittedly, these quarters were not up to his usual standards.
His Manhattan apartment was, for all its luxury, small as a coffin, admittedly—but this ‘room,’ if it could be called that, was basically a doll’s bedroom. His Fluevog-clad feet hung over the edge. Sure, he was a tall, lanky sort, but even still—this bedroom made him feel like a giant. And not in a good way.
Plus? Paneled walls? Did someone really think paneling was a good idea inside a recreational vehicle? This was not high-class travel. This was not, ‘I’ll put on a suit and a fedora and sip a dirty vodka martini while we fly the friendly skies.’ This was more like, ‘This city bus smells like dead hobo.’
Well, whatever. It was what it was. And what it was was the relative extinction of the human race.
The accordion door pulled open. Kayla poked her head in.
“Hey,” she said, looking wobbly. He waved her in with the curl of a finger. She entered, closed the door with a rattle.
For the last couple hours, they’d been murmuring about him and what to do. Did they really think he couldn’t hear them? If he concentrated real hard he could hear a koala bear fart all the way around the world. He heard the clank of cans and the crisp tk-tk-tk of the can-opener. He heard their sloppy eating. He heard Leelee defend him, heard Cecelia call for his drawing and quartering time and time again. He heard Ebbie, of all people, say that this was better than what they had before, and given that ‘better’ apparently included getting ambushed and blood-sucked while trying to take a piss, that was really saying something. Gil kept mostly mum on the subject, saying little more than, “We’ll deal with it when we need to deal with it.” That was perhaps the most concerning reaction of them all. Cecelia was an empty threat, but Gil, he was the sit-and-let-it-simmer type. Coburn decided he couldn’t lose sight of that.
Kayla, meanwhile, didn’t say a word for him or against him. All he heard from her were weak little mouse noises as she supped—well, slurped really, the way humans ate food was always somewhat disgusting to Coburn—on some broth.
She came into the room and stayed at its margins.
“You can sit down,” he said, patting the bed. It was like patting a granite slab—thud thud thud. She shook her head. “No, really. Sit down or you’re going to fall down.” She was still gray-faced, the capillaries in her eyes half-burst.
The girl hesitantly came and sat next to him.
“What?” he asked. “You scared of me still?”
“You said some pretty rough stuff out there.”
He waved it off. “The sheeple gotta know what they’re up against.”
“Still. You didn’t need to threaten them like that.”
“You kidding me?” He laughed. “Sweet little girl, what did you think you were getting, exactly? You asked a wolf to protect the sheep. I’m equal parts serial killer and demon from Hell. I’m not, uhh—” He tried to think of something opposite of that, some polar example.
“Big Bird?”
“What the fuck is a Big Bird?”
“You never saw Sesame Street?”
“That in Queens?”
She wrinkled her nose, gave him a look like a cute-but-constipated rabbit. “No, it’s a TV show for kids.”
“If wasn’t on before sunrise, then I didn’t watch it. Besides, New York City? Greatest city in the world. I didn’t spend my nights watching the idiot box. I spent it out there, on the streets, in the clubs. Eating, drinking, dancing.”
“Drinking blood, you mean.”
“I can drink more than blood. I can drink anything you can drink. Gimme a shot of bourbon and I’m in heaven. Thing is, I don’t need it like you do. Not like I gotta hydrate or anything. I can eat a steak and have a glass of Petit Verdot, but it doesn’t do shit for me nutritionally speaking. Milk, in this case, does not ‘do a body good.’ It’s all about the red stuff. Can’t go without it.”
She was quiet for a little while, obviously noodling this. Or maybe she was just dizzy and trying to get her balance. He looked over and saw that, despite the blood-stained shirt, the wound had completely healed up. A scar was left in its place: an archipelago of puckered skin like pink leather bunched up together and clumsily stitched. That was interesting. He didn’t scar. But she did.
He was about to ask her about it, but she spoke first.
“How long you been a vampire?”
“Fifty years, give or take a few.”
“What were you like before? Did you have a family? A job?”
That was a fun question. Even in her asking it, shadows scurried away from the light of scrutiny—his mind searched for answers but they were fast to move, like rats or roaches. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, this thing that I am, when you become it, it hollows you out. Like a spoon scraping the last curls of ice cream from the carton. Whoever I was before, I’m not that now. It replaces you. Remakes you in its image.”
“That’s sad.”
“Says you. Way I see it, human life is an endless line of dominoes toppling from one tragedy to the next. Not me, sweetheart. I just keep on going. Happy as a pig in the proverbial shit.”
Again with the scrunching of the nose. “So you have, like, superpowers?”
“No, no, no, this is give and take time. Enough about me. Time to talk about you. You suffer what should’ve been a life-and-soul-ending bite—instead, the wound heals up nice and tight. Well, not nice—that’s a pretty gnarly scar you got.”
“It is ugly, isn’t it?”
“Chicks dig scars.”
She just stared at him, grossed out.
“So,” he said, persisting. “The fuck is your deal?”
“I’m sick.”
“I know you’re sick. I can smell it on you like nicotine on wallpaper. What flavor of sickness are you, exactly?”
“Cancer,” she said. “Multiple myeloma.”
“Multiple what? C’mon, I’m not a doctor. Explain.”
Kayla sighed. “I have tumors inside
my bones. In the bone marrow, actually. Makes it hard for my body to make new blood cells, I guess, which in turn makes me anemic, which in turn makes sure I get sick a lot. Colds, flus, whatever. Sometimes my hands and feet go numb. My back hurts a lot. It hurts in my actual bones, which, I gotta say, really freakin’ hurts. It’s like the way a cold wind makes a winter day a lot worse. Let’s see. What else? My kidneys might fail. My bones break easily. It’s a lot of fun.”
“Sounds like it’s the tits.” He took another inhale—the miasma of death hung about her like a perfume. “So, how long you have?”
“I’m living on borrowed time. They figured I wouldn’t make it long, six months, maybe a year. It’s been three years now.”
“So is that why everyone thought you were special? Because you’re the little cancer girl who wouldn’t die?”
She hesitated. “Not exactly.”
“So what is it?”
Kayla stayed quiet.
“Listen,” he said matter-of-factly, “I can make you tell me same way I made your Daddy stick that shotgun up under his chin. I’d much rather you tell me of your own free will because, frankly, I’m lazy.”
“It’s my blood.”
“Your blood.”
“It’s…”
“Go on, goddamnit. Spill.”
“It heals people. Well. Not of like, regular diseases or injuries or anything. But, like, it stops those bit by the zombies from turning.”
“So why’d everybody act all surprised that you healed up before?”
“Because I never got bit before now. So I guess they didn’t know. Guess they thought the miracle girl just got un-miracled.”
He cocked an eyebrow and smirked. “Uh-huh. Sure. And how’d you figure all this out? Bunch of half-zombies were sitting around, sipping on glasses of Kayla-juice for breakfast?”
“I… gave Leelee a little of my blood.”
“You just gave it to her?”
Kayla stared off at a distant point as if the wood paneling were a wide open sky. “She got bit about a year back. On the hand. We were in the grocery store salvaging some canned goods and the store was closed up pretty good so we didn’t think any had gotten in there. But one came up out of a busted freezer case like it was his coffin and, well. He got her.