by Chuck Wendig
And there, manning the .50 caliber bolted into the truck bed was the man himself, Benjamin Brickert.
Coburn tucked his head back behind the dumpster just as a flock of bullets tore the corner of the trash-bin to frayed metal ribbons.
Now, the question: did Brickert see him?
The answer came fast. He heard Brickert yell out, “Not our target. Don’t waste any more ammo. Go, go, go!” Engines revved, and the convoy of vehicles moved on, disappearing down the street toward the hangars and airstrip.
Brickert didn’t see him. Or, at least, didn’t identify him. Such was the joy of having a vampire’s night-vision: what Coburn could see, others often could not. That also meant Brickert hadn’t identified King Brutha Thuglow, either.
Small favors.
“I gotta get to my chopper, man,” Thuglow said. “I gotta bail. It’s over. The whole thing is over.”
“Chopper. What chopper?”
“I got a Bell Twin-Huey UH-1N.”
“Yeah. Great. You’re telling me you can actually fly that thing?”
“Shit yeah. I can smoke a blunt, drink a box of wine and still thread a needle with that bitch. I used to be a pilot.” He stared off at a distant point, maudlin. “Once.”
“Where’s the helicopter now?”
“Back near the hangars. Just off the first airstrip.”
Wonderful. Exactly where Brickert was going, by the looks of it. Still, an airlift out of this place? He didn’t know dick about helicopters, but he knew one could get them a lot further than hoofing it.
“Needs fuel,” Thuglow added. “I… kinda forgot to refuel last time.”
“Jesus Christ. Fine. You go and do that. Don’t fuck it up.” He handed him the dog, who growled. “Take Creampuff with you. You hurt him, I hurt you. Play nice, you two.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to find my herd.”
Kayla remembered how it was when the plague first took hold of the nation, and not long after, the world. She remembered long nights in her bedroom, holding a stuffed pink bear that was almost as big as the real thing and staving off nosebleeds with a box of Kleenex. It was bad enough that she’d only recently received the diagnosis of multiple myeloma—in effect, a death sentence. But now the rest of the world had its own walk down death row, and a much faster walk it was, too. At the time of diagnosis, they told her she had six months, maybe nine, but suddenly the world was going to Hell—or rather, Hell had come to the world—and just like that her six predicted months became a whole lot less.
It was the sounds outside their house in Raleigh, North Carolina, that told her the gig was up, that life in America was officially a thing of the past. Outside, she heard people screaming. Cars smashing into one another. Single rifle pops and later, the chatter of machine gun bullets—those accompanied by squelches from radios, police sirens, even helicopters overhead.
And in the distance, explosions. Gas mains, her father had said, but even she knew it was something far worse. The military were ‘quarantining’ in their own special way: with munitions, armament and big scary bombs.
This, now, was like that. They’d holed up here in the mess hall, a long building that had been subverted by Thuglow’s crew and turned into something that looked more carnival than cafeteria. Outside, bullets and bombs, the screams of men, the moans of the dead. And worse: the dissonant howls of the hunters that followed them here. But even in that, Kayla found a small modicum of hope: she believed that the hunters were not hunting them but, rather, Coburn. And if they were here, that might mean he was here, too.
It was a strange place to be, mentally: she’d written him off and put him aside as traitor to them all. And yet, was that fair? He’d always come through for them. He helped them get through the cannibal roadblock. He’d found them at the farmhouse. Why had she lost faith so quickly?
She wanted to believe. In no small part because Leelee believed. The veterinarian-turned-nurse had changed in these last days—maybe even weeks. Leelee showed bright eyes and a small smile. Like she knew something nobody else knew. Like she believed—no, knew—that things were going to work out just fine even if she was the only person who knew it. The look in her eyes, puckish, almost playful, said, I am the only sane person in this room.
Occasionally Leelee would reach over, stroke her hair, offer her a tissue. Because now, like before, her nose was bleeding something fierce.
Danny helped, too. He had his arm around her. He kissed her temple.
It felt nice.
Outside, the howls of the hunters grew in intensity and volume. They were closer, now. Everyone tensed. Hands seeking weapons. Just in case.
Just then: a sound above. Someone—something—on the roof. Crawling.
This is it, she thought. In the roof was a square of dirty plexiglass that served as a skylight: it had long been covered in dust and debris. A shadow appeared at the skylight, darker than the night beyond it. Gil settled in next to Kayla, gun in hand, taking careful aim—
A hand swept across the skylight, wiping a path through the greasy dust.
Coburn’s face pressed against the glass. Nose and lips smushed.
The smushed lips twisted into a grin. Kayla couldn’t help but smile herself.
“Is that…?” Gil asked. She nodded and eased the weapon down; the skylight lock popped and it swung open.
The vampire dropped down from the darkness.
“Hey now, brown cows,” he said, dusting himself off.
Kayla hurried to meet him but then stopped, mustered courage and spite, then stuck her chin out and crossed her arms.
“You left us,” she said.
His smile faded. “Did not.”
“Did too.”
“Did not.”
“Then where were you?”
“Under the Humvee. Sun was coming up. Didn’t think it’d be a real hot idea if those clowns caught a whiff that a vampire was among them.” He paused. “Though, thinking about it, those loons probably would’ve thought I was cool. Wouldn’t have been hard to depose that dope Thuglow and become the vampire king of Route 66. Well, fuck it. Roads not taken and all that.”
“Oh,” Kayla said. A pang of guilt struck her. She didn’t believe. Didn’t have faith in their shepherd. Leelee had faith. Why couldn’t she? “You were here all along.” Gil and Danny came up beside her. Her two men. Cecelia and Ebbie stayed back, uncertain.
“True that,” the vampire said. “But if we don’t move soon, we’re going to end up as either zombie chow or prisoners of the Sons of Man.”
The Sons of Man? Kayla was about to ask, but Coburn must’ve seen the look on her face: “I have no goddamn idea. They just showed up like a bunch of cowboys, shooting the place up. No time to worry about it. We got a helicopter ride waiting for us. Down by the hangar, Thuglow is fueling it up as we—”
A second shadow dropped down from the window, dangling there—Kayla saw a flash of pink as the hunter snatched up the vampire and drew him back up through the skylight. And just like that, he was gone.
The Bitch Beast slammed Coburn down on the mess hall roof, his body denting the aluminum. Above her, heat lightning flashed purple between clouds, and Coburn saw the horror of what she had become. The hunter—or huntress, as if sex mattered at this point—had changed since last he saw her up close. Flesh vented with ragged tears, eyes bulging and red with blood, layers of teeth like little needles bristling in her distended jaw. Everything was stretched, torn, toughened. She pinned him with claws, opening her mouth and ululating with a pair of serpent’s tongues that seemed to battle for supremacy.
Below, Coburn heard a pop as a rifle went off—the bullet came up through his chest and into hers. It hurt him. It annoyed her. Even still, it was enough of a distraction for her to loosen her grip on him, and quick as he could manage he rolled over on his belly and looked down through the skylight.
Gil stood below, smoking rifle in his hand. Coburn grunted, waved them on—“Go, go, g
o! Back to the hangar! To the helipad!”—just before the Bitch Beast dragged him back by the ankles, lifting him up in the air, and slammed him back down onto the roof. The whole mess hall swayed like a drunken sailor, and for half a second Coburn thought the damn building was going to collapse.
It didn’t.
Yet.
That changed when he tried to scramble away on his hands and knees, and the Bitch Beast leapt up in the air like a fucking crack-addled jungle tiger and hit him hard, claws-down. The roof couldn’t handle the stress. It buckled. And with her claws in his back and her mouth closing on his neck, he felt the whole thing give away in a clamor of tenting metal.
Thuglow’s hands fumbled with the keys as he unlocked the gun box he’d left on the helipad. The hose from the fuel truck was already in place, gurgling fuel into the belly of the chopper, and now Thuglow was popping his gun box and emptying weapons into the Twin Huey. Into the chopper he chucked a .45 ACP, an AR-15, a replica of a ninja short sword called a wakizashi, a switchblade, a camping hatchet, a hairspray can with a lighter duct-taped to it (homemade flamethrower for the motherfucking win, he thought), and a pair of grenades.
He tried to calm himself, tried to see this as a kind of Zen activity—focus on the grenades’ waffle-pattern, feel the cool metal of the pistol, imagine doing kick-ass ninja flips with the wakizashi. It wasn’t working. All around him were the sounds of his kingdom being dismantled—ripped asunder by the hands of the dead and shot to shit by Benjamin Brickert and his self-righteous asshole brigade.
Not far off, he heard terrible shrieks and wails, and a sound like a car forever crashing into another car: the tearing of metal, the shattering of glass.
He had no idea what was going on. Part of him thought, this is just some kind of flashback. Too much LSD in the desert. None of this is real. This is a nightmare.
But he couldn’t convince himself.
The little dog, who stood at his feet staring holes through him like suddenly he’d try something funny and the dog would have to tear his nuts off, turned from him and started growling. The hackles on the terrier’s back bristled.
“Oh shit,” he said, fumbling for the pistol. He raised the gun, then realized he forgot to jack the action, and suddenly he was trying to pull back the action but it was awfully stubborn and his hands were slick with sweat—
A hand shot out of the darkness and snatched the gun from his hand.
Then a fist cold-cocked him.
Thuglow tasted blood. He blinked back tears. A man moved over to him, picked him up, and as the tears cleared, he saw his opponent.
“You sonofabitch,” Gil said. The old man’s face looked like it had been run over by a motorcycle. “You mess with me and my family again, next time I’ll do more than break your druggie-device over your fool head.”
Thuglow smiled meekly and nodded. “It’s cool, man. It’s cool.”
Coburn stood, shouldering off a strip of corrugated metal, just in time to see the Bitch Beast come at him like a freight train. The vampire felt instinct take over, felt the monster inside him kick open the cage door. Blood fueled his limbs, burning hot and bright inside his body, like his heart was a fist of burning coal pumping lava to every extremity.
He stepped to the side as she tore past—but he wasn’t content to let her come back around. The bitch had to go. It was time. That meant, he figured, taking out the head. And that meant getting behind her.
As she passed, he hooked his arm out, caught her neck, and leapt up onto her back like a cackling monkey. He covered her eyes with the flat of his hand and blinded her as she bolted forward—straight into a telephone pole. Coburn planted his feet on the ground, slamming her head into the pole again and again—and, just as she was dizzy and howling, threw her down onto her back.
The concrete cracked as her skull hit.
It was time to end this.
He leapt upon her with the ferocity of a coke-addled puma.
She squirmed beneath him, twisting like a snake. Her claws embedded through his jacket into his side but he wasn’t having any of it. The rage was in him, red and wet. Fingers curled. His fist cocked. The hand felt hot and swollen as he channeled all the blood he could muster into that limb, turning it into a weapon, an instrument, a fucking sledgehammer.
Coburn began hitting her. Not fist-down—not like a punch. But like the way you’d pound on a door, wanting to be let in. He did want to be let in. He wanted to get inside her head. Not in a psycho-babble what-are-you-thinking way, but in an open-your-skull-to-turn-your-brain-to-treacle way. He smashed in her nose. He shattered the teeth in her mouth. He popped her forehead so hard the skin ripped, black blood bubbled out, the bone pulverized as the concrete beneath her had done.
He felt her skull give.
One more hit, and she was done.
But he didn’t see the other three coming.
He’d grown so focused on her that he didn’t realize—she was just the first out of the gate, the front line of the attack. The other three hunters came swiftly out of the shadows, loping like wolves. Ranger hit him like a bull, and the world went end-over-end as he rolled into the street. Rupture-Tit grabbed him by the arm and flipped him over—the bone snapped, the ligaments tore—as he crashed into the street, bones and asphalt both cracking. Rain-Slick struggled to get a taste, clawing past the other two to get at him.
And before he knew it, he was pinned to the earth, face up, nose to nose with the Bitch Beast. With ragged claw she dug deep into the meat of his chest and raked downward, leaving behind four fleshy furrows that burned like fire.
Then she receded into shadow as her progeny surrounded him.
And behind them all, a tide of zombies incoming.
The hunters howled, for they had taken their prey.
Leelee felt it in her gut. A tightness. An itch. She knew.
“Almost ready to rock,” Thuglow said, giving a thumbs-up from on the helipad. Gil stood behind him with the rifle, just in case. Cecelia stood behind him, rubbing the small of his back in gentle circles.
Kayla paced, chewing on her thumbnail while Danny and Ebbie watched, helpless. All of them—except maybe Thuglow—were tense, concentrating elsewhere. They heard the shrieks of the hunters. Heard the sounds of metal tearing, asphalt cracking. The predators had found the vampire.
Leelee knew it in her gut, in her heart, in every fiber.
She went to Kayla and held her hands, then kissed her cheek.
Fact was, Kayla was a special girl. So special, in fact, that a true monster—a blood-hungry thief-of-life, a vampire who had committed endless sins and depravities to support his own selfish solipsistic needs—had put all that aside to save her. Time and time again. He had his logic. Calling them moo-cows. Calling them his ‘herd.’ But Leelee knew that it was a show. A way to puff out his chest like a proud rooster and strut around like it wasn’t no thang, like none of this invalidated the power of who he was and what he’d done.
But the fact was, his monstrousness would not persevere. It wasn’t clear if there was any good in him. It perhaps didn’t matter. What mattered was that Kayla was good, was special, so much so that the vampire fought to save her again and again. Despite what he was. Despite what he’d done. Or maybe because of those things—on that point, Leelee was a bit fuzzy.
On everything else, though, she was clear as Waterford crystal.
She believed things in her heart differently now than she had before. Before, all the world’s questions were given over to a kind of shrugging agnosticism—belief was only so useful in the face of facts, of data. Now, though, things were different. The impossible was possible. And Leelee believed beyond the margins of all doubt.
Or maybe it was faith, not belief. Maybe the difference there was that belief was something you suspected, while faith was something you knew even without having the facts to back it up.
This, then, was what she knew: The vampire would not make it. Not this time. Some part of him had made those other monst
ers and now, as the saying went, the chickens had come home to roost. They would tear him apart. And his role in all this would be done.
But she also knew that if he was done, so were they. Not now. But eventually. They still needed him and now he was lost to them.
Unless one of them paid him back for all he’d done.
He’d come for them plenty of times. Now it was her turn to go to him.
The others weren’t paying attention. They were occupied with one another, and with the distant sounds of their keeper, their shepherd, being trounced and torn asunder by the hunters that found him.
When nobody was looking, Leelee reached into the helicopter and pilfered both grenades off the seat. Thuglow was crawling into the cockpit and starting to power up the chopper. That meant it was time.
It was dark. They’d never see her leave.
With one grenade in each hand, she sneaked away into the night, ready to do what needed to be done to save the monster.
The King was not in his castle. Not that he needed to be. Thuglow was, as his name suggested, just a low-class thug. A thug who had taken—or, rather, been given—power that he did not deserve. He was meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but that didn’t mean Brickert didn’t want to drag the fool back to Kansas and hold him up before the free council and hang him by the neck in front of all.
Shonda kicked over a pinball machine. The glass broke. A silver pinball rolled out and drifted across the hangar.
“What a mess,” she said. “It’s like a frat-house in here.”
Benjamin wrinkled his nose. Smelled like body odor and bong-water in here. He scratched his beard. “He’s not here. The rat found a hole. He’ll turn up. Meanwhile, we need to start rounding up some tanker trucks and capturing the fuel—after that, we can do a more thorough check, but the fuel is the—”