by Chuck Wendig
It was hard to say when she died.
And it was hard to determine how long it took him to feed—and feed, and feed some more. For a while, all was quiet. Her booming canned ham of a heart eventually shuddered one last shudder and then gave out like an old motor.
In the distance, gunshots. Zombie moans. Cannibal screams.
Ambrosia’s stomach—hidden beneath a ‘shirt’ made from diaphanous bedsheets—rippled. Like water disturbed by fish feeding beneath.
Then, another ripple—this one, stronger. The flesh tented.
Finally, a bone erupted. A sharpened rib, actually, broken from within.
It was enough of a hole. Coburn stuck his fingers in the fleshy tear, got his hands around the skin, then tore it open.
He emerged, the reverse birth itself reversed, emptying out of her midsection like the contents of a shark’s stomach after having its belly cut open.
Coburn slid down off the dais, naked as the day he was born. He had new legs. Fresh flesh. Real arms.
Everything was back.
He sat up, and saw Grandpaw sitting there in his chair, a shotgun across his lap. The old man’s hands shook as he looked beyond the vampire to the woman, a mound of flesh who in places looked less like a human and more like a microwave-exploded hot dog.
“Ambrosia,” the old man said, his voice a hoarse whimper.
Then he turned his gaze, now hateful, toward Coburn.
“You,” the old man hissed.
“Me,” Coburn said, grinning, his teeth slick with blood. Hell, all of him slick with blood.
“It’s not possible. You aren’t human.”
“Nope.”
“You’ll pay for this.”
Coburn laughed. “Fuck you, you old man-eater.”
The old man thought he had the drop again. Thought he was fast. He grabbed for the shotgun but his hands found nothing. Coburn stood, leaving the man weeping. Somewhere toward the front of the store, Coburn heard the windows shattering, boards splintering. Bodies tumbled inside like so many sacks of dirt. He couldn’t see them yet—too many aisles, too much store between them—but they’d be here soon enough.
“They’re coming for you, Grandpaw.”
“Go to Hell.”
“Not today.”
And then, for giggles, Coburn swung the shotgun like a hard-slicing golf club into the side of the wheelchair. The wheel dented in hard, giving the chair a mean front lean. The old man tried to wheel away, but now couldn’t.
Coburn chuckled, then wandered off in search of some clothes.
Wyatt sat huddled up against a display case that once must’ve held fishing rods or pen-knives or something. He had a pistol held in a prayer grip, his hands shaking as the moans of the dead come ever closer.
And then suddenly, all went topsy-turvy. He felt himself lifted up across the counter, hard and heavy hands wrestling with him as the leather jacket he’d stolen from the vampire was pulled over his head. All was dark until it wasn’t. And when once more he could see, he found himself deposited onto his butt-bone.
Standing there, on legs he shouldn’t have, was the vampire.
Naked and unabashed.
He shook the jacket at Wyatt.
“This is mine, you goddamn yokel.”
“The zombies—” Wyatt started to say.
But then the vampire kicked in his kneecap. Pain exploded up and down his leg.
“Enjoy being one of ’em,” the vampire said, slipping on the jacket. Coburn wandered off, whistling.
The moon rose above the Wal-Mart, bandied in rheumy clouds. Coburn wrestled with Cookie’s torn-up jeans, since the ‘chef’ had about the same build as him. The vampire had figured he’d have to fight for them, but found instead that Cookie had taken his own life: a small two-shot derringer under the chin. Bullet never exited. Probably just ricocheted around up there like one of those motorcyclists riding in the circle cages at the circus. Scrambled brains so he’d never turn into one of the hungry undead.
The others, the sentries, well. Those assholes, he had to kill. Four of them, their bodies laying draped across sandbags and the AC unit. He didn’t bother taking a nibble from any of them: Ambrosia’s blood had filled him to the brim. Every time he took a step he expected to hear a spongy squish squish squish.
As Coburn was tugging on Cookie’s jeans (not the underpants—he didn’t want that man’s soiled boxers, and decided instead to go commando), he looked over and saw the trio of dog kennels.
The Charlie Manson wannabe was dead. All-day-dead. Burned up probably when Coburn ignited the explosion with the AR-15.
But the teen boy remained alive. Hunkered in the back of his cage, eyes as big as the moon above.
“I must be getting soft,” Coburn said as he plodded over in bare feet (Cookie’s shoes were too damn small) and twisted the lock off the cage.
Then he went to each of the sentries, looking for something to put on his feet. Nothing. Nada. Boots too big. Sneakers too small.
He missed his Fluevogs. They had to be around somewhere.
But already the store was flooded with the hungry dead. Shit, though, those boots were worth it, weren’t they?
An answer came howling across the parking lot. Somewhere—not close, but not too far—came the banshee’s wail of that bitch in the pink bathrobe. The one who had tasted Coburn’s blood. With it came a second howl: not hers, but the keening of another. Two of them?
The boots weren’t worth it.
He had to get the fuck out of here. Fast. But how? He looked out across the parking lot: more and more rotters staggered out of the darkness, heading toward what was now the center of their universe: the Wal-Mart. Could he just jump it? Take a long run and leap and hope he landed strong and could clear the horde?
Then, from behind him: a snapping of fingers. Coburn turned to see the teen boy waving him over. The kid pointed to a ladder down.
Coburn walked over, sneering. “Don’t snap at me, kid. I’m not your kept monkey.”
The boy gestured again toward the ladder.
“Use your words.”
The kid just stared.
“Let me guess, Ginger. You can’t talk.”
The boy shrugged.
“Fine. Talking’s overrated anyway. What is it you want to show me?”
Just then, another pair of howls. Closer, this time.
Coburn felt the hot blood in his dead body go suddenly cold. He peered over the edge of the Wal-Mart roof, saw that the ladder led to a concrete pad. A ratty looking lime green dirt-bike sat down there.
“Sorry, Ginger, I don’t drive.”
The boy mimed riding a bike. Or, in this case, driving a dirt bike.
“You can drive it?” Coburn asked.
The kid nodded.
Coburn looked out over the sea of rotters.
Before he slid down the ladder, he looked to the kid and poked him in the chest, hard. “If you crash us, Ginger, I’m going to eat your heart.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Abandonment Issues
This, to Grandpaw, was a fact: zombies were fucking stupid. Dumber than the average possum because, hell, even a possum knew he had to go scare up his own food. Rotters were like water, just moving to fill in the gaps. Sure, they had basic responses down—big noise or bright flash meant ‘stagger on over in the hopes of catching a meal’—but beyond that, the living dead didn’t possess the capability of higher thought. It was why the moat worked. Mostly.
Grandpaw once heard a story about a town out West, Colorado somewhere, where they kept a headless chicken alive for a year and a half. Was in all the record books. Story was that the chicken killer’s cleaver missed a reasonable nub of the brain-stem (like the tip of a man’s pinky), taking the head but not that critical bundle of nerves. It was enough to keep the chicken running around, scratching the dirt, being a dummy. The chicken’s keepers fed the bird with an eyedropper, squeezing nutrients into the chicken’s neck stump.
That, th
en, was how Grandpaw thought of zombies: each one a headless chicken, only thing remaining being that final bundle of nerves that just wouldn’t quit. It was why he knew that he was going to make it through this alive.
Because he was hiding in the men’s restroom.
Grandpaw had abandoned the destroyed wheelchair and dragged his way to the bathroom—while his legs were for shit, he’d used the wheelchair long enough to build up some pretty good arm muscles over the years.
The others here at the Wal-Mart were all dead. Ambrosia—well, Martha—was gone, that sweet girl. Sure, she was a megalomaniacal brat who weighed as much as a subcompact car, but she was his megalomaniacal brat. His granddaughter couldn’t have lasted long in this world, anyway. If the zombies didn’t get her, her heart would’ve given out. If her heart didn’t give out, eventually the cannibals she trained to eat human meat would’ve gone through a dry spell and realized, oh hey, that chick is made of enough meat to keep us fed for weeks. And they would’ve killed her and cooked her up and tanned blankets from her skin.
Grandpaw, though, he was a survivor. Survived Viet Nam. Survived a car accident in the late ’eighties. Survived a bout of prostate cancer that hit him hard at the turn of the millennium. And he survived into the end of the world when the dead began to get up and shuffle around like a bunch of mule-kicked ninnies. Hell, he survived whatever the hell it was that ate its way out of Ambrosia’s body—that man was no man. Couldn’t be killed. Like something out of a movie. Maybe he was some kind of robot? Grandpaw didn’t know, didn’t care.
All he knew was, he survived all that, and he’d survive here, too. In this bathroom. The door was locked. The stall was locked. He had a little bundle of jerky—strips of ‘long pork’ dried and braided. The zombies would come. They’d clean the place out. And then they’d move on, like locusts. That was when Grandpaw would emerge.
Eventually, the door to the bathroom rattled on its hinges. That was them. The rotters. Just testing things out. They’d do this, then move on. He wondered, did their disease-eaten brains contain the barest ghost of a memory? Like, they realized somewhere, this is a door, but they couldn’t remember exactly how to work the damn thing?
But then came a sound that wasn’t right, wasn’t right at all.
Sounded like—well, not a wolf howling. Not really. Maybe if you took a woman’s scream and merged it with a wolf’s howl, that might’ve been almost right, but it would be missing a certain shrieking-bat-out-of-Hell factor.
Grandpaw’s bowels turned to ice water.
Then: other noises.
The moans of the dead. And the sounds of a scuffle. Not just a scuffle, but a knock-down-drag-out fight. Sounded like whole shelves were being toppled. Then came another one of those pterodactyl hell-shrieks. Closer. Just outside the door.
As if on cue, the restroom door was ripped from its hinges. Grandpaw didn’t see it—he was, after all, hidden in one of the stalls—but he knew what he heard.
Then: footsteps. Wet. Hard toenails clicking on tile.
Two sets of feet—foul, filthy, the flesh cracked and blistered—appeared outside the stall. Grandpaw couldn’t get a real good look since it was dark in here, but he knew this wasn’t right, wasn’t right at all. First the one man ripped his big fat granddaughter in half and now a pair of rotters found him locked away in the men’s shitter?
The last cogent thought that went through Grandpaw’s head was: the world is home to more monsters than I imagined. Then the stall door shoved inward off its hinges, crushing his head. His last sensation was being dragged outside. He was pretty sure he saw a flash of pink fabric, which didn’t make much sense at all.
The dirt bike idled nearby, the teen that Coburn had christened ‘Ginger’ sitting on top of it, the moonlight above highlighting the confused look on his face.
“They were supposed to be here,” the vampire growled, pacing the side of the highway in his bare feet. They’d driven up the highway by a half-mile, not seen anything, then kept going. Kept going for another two miles, and still, nothing. Coburn could smell the exhaust, though, from the RV. And it didn’t stop here. Didn’t stop anywhere. It just kept on going.
He tried to excuse it. They must’ve been attacked by zombies. But that didn’t make a lick of sense. Weren’t any rotters out here. Saw a few on the way here, but those were dragging their putrescent asses toward the Wal-Mart.
Which meant only one thing: the herd had abandoned the shepherd.
“I’ve been through some shit over the last several nights,” he said, lips in a twisted sneer, fangs out. “Woke up. Ate a deer. Found myself in the zombie apocalypse. Fell off a building. Got chewed up by some zombie bitch in an ugly bathrobe. Got shot by an old man and then taken in by his sickly daughter. Got chewed up again by the same bitch-in-a-bathrobe except now said bitch is some kind of undead demon, then got shot by a totally different old man—those old men sure love their rifles—before I got burned up by the sun and had to eat my way out of a morbidly obese cannibal queen. But you know what, Ginger? This hurts worst of all.”
Coburn didn’t—or wouldn’t, or maybe even couldn’t—articulate the truth behind this sentiment. It wasn’t just that his pre-apocalyptic existence had been full of endless pleasurable meals where he felt like the King of New York and now he was just another hungry wastrel in the ruined vista of God-fucked America. It wasn’t just that he’d been through the grinder.
It was that moment back on the roof of the Wal-Mart.
Gun in his hand. Mouth full of blood.
He’d picked up a gun. He could’ve turned that weapon on his captors. But he didn’t. His first thought—his only thought—was to shoot the fuel tanks and send up a bloom of mighty fire to serve as a signal to his herd. To his people.
That was a choice he made. It was a choice based on—well, he told himself it was based on a sense of pragmatism, but that wasn’t it at all. He’d made a choice because he wanted those people to be safe. He wanted Kayla above all others to be safe, to get the signal, to get through the cannibal’s roadblock.
It was the first time he’d ever cared about someone more than he cared about himself. Coburn hadn’t even realized this was something he was capable of feeling, much less willing to feel. And that was the key word, wasn’t it? Willing. Up until now, he’d enjoyed pretty much ultimate control over his feelings. He jerked the strings, and his emotions (or what remained of them) did a dance.
But this thing he felt for the others, for the girl, wasn’t under his control.
He put himself out there.
And now they left his ass hanging out in the wind. Pants down, waiting for the zombies to come eat his bowels for brunch.
He wasn’t supposed to feel this way. He didn’t even want to feel the way he did for the dog, for Creampuff—
Goddamnit.
Goddamnit.
“Goddamnit!” he snarled. Ginger blinked. Incredulous, he explained: “They took my dog, Ginger. They stole my terrier.” He popped each of his knuckles. “They didn’t just abandon me after I got them through, after I kept them alive. They rubbed salt on the wound while they pissed in my eyes. I can’t believe they stole my dog.”
Coburn grabbed the kid by his too-clean shirt and shook him like a baby. “Listen. You’re going to drive me to go get Creampuff, my terrier. And then you’re going to watch as I break bad on the people who abandoned me. I’m going to hurt them. I’m going to hurt them so good. And then I’m going to eat one of them, for good measure.” Ginger’s eyes went wide. “I’m a vampire, kid. Can’t you see the fangs? Weren’t you weirded out that I had no legs and now, ta-da, legs?”
The boy just shrugged. He must be retarded, Coburn thought. Whatever. Kid could drive a dirt-bike and right now, that was all that mattered.
Coburn realized his mistake was that he’d started to care about the herd. Shepherd doesn’t have emotions about his cows. They’re just that: cattle. A cow’s just a very advanced meat-containment unit, and that was how he had
to think of these humans again: as bags of blood that went astray. Fine. It was time, then, to find those dumb animals and lasso their duplicitous disloyal necks until they went where he wanted and did what he said.
“Let’s go rope some calves,” Coburn said.
Cut to:
The RV, overturned.
Couple zombies underneath, still thrashing—well, sluggishly shifting, perhaps. Their soft decayed heads thumping dully against the macadam. Coburn stepped off the bike. Told Ginger to kill the engine.
He and the boy had been riding the highway now for a handful of hours, zipping through defunct towns, passing by zombies that groped at the air ten, twenty feet away, as if that would somehow matter. Coburn scented the Winnebago like a hound and had the boy turn the bike off Lincoln Highway and down to Route 70—in the distance, Coburn could make out the shadowy hills and buildings of Pittsburgh, and no way was he going to brave wading into the middle of a city again. That way, the streets were surely choked with the living dead, like rats and roaches in the walls of a ruined building. Thankfully, the RV didn’t go that way, which meant he didn’t have to, either.
But now, here it was, laying on its side like a dead, beached whale.
Hollow. Gutted. Nobody inside.
Two rotters jogged up—literally a pair of joggers in full jogger regalia, tracksuits with the line running top to bottom, shoulder to ankle—and Coburn grabbed for both and smashed their heads together. They fell, unmoving.
Beyond them, though, lay other zombies. Dead. Extra dead. For real dead. Shot in the head so as never to move again.
Two there. Five over there. Another half-dozen in a clumsy circle.
Somebody’d made short work of these undead.
He sniffed the air. Smelled blood. Not sure whose, though—he cursed himself, wished he had taken a moment to become acquainted with the scent of each human’s blood, because right now he couldn’t differentiate Gil from Ebbie, Leelee from Cecelia. But he also smelled their sweat and desperation. And mingled in there, the odor of a rat terrier named Creampuff.