Tomes of the Dead (Book 1): Double Dead

by Chuck Wendig

  Coburn put together a picture of what happened.

  Looked like they were driving along, maybe even at a good clip since the highway here wasn’t gummed up with too many broken cars. Then… something happened. Zombies, probably. Came out of nowhere. Smart money said Ebbie was driving and Ebbie knew the rules that Gil put forth: thou shalt not make roadkill of the living dead lest they get all wedged up under the tires.

  And so big boy panicked. Cut the wheel hard.

  Overestimated. RV wobbled. Maybe he cut the wheel back the other way. Again, too hard, too far. And with that, the RV tipped, hit, skidded.

  Loud sound. Fast movement. The zombies came, then.

  Gil or someone shot a handful and they fled, knowing that more would come.

  “They got away,” Coburn said to Ginger, who stood there straddling the bike. “But the fools didn’t take the highway. They left it. Went over the guardrail here. Hightailed it into the woods, near as I can tell. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Out there in the dark, they could get lost, ambushed. They might be out there right now, wandering in circles. Or maybe the whole lot of them turned to the stumbling, mumbling dead.”

  Other problem was, the sun wasn’t long away. Half-hour, no more. The hairs on his neck stood to attention.

  And then a little voice inside him spoke up, a mean little voice, the voice of the bully, the addict, the monster:

  Cut bait and run.

  There it was. The solution.

  Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em right in the ear. The cattle had wandered too far astray and disappeared into the badlands and best thing a shepherd could do was say hasta la vista and move on to greener pastures. Besides, Coburn wasn’t a shepherd. He wasn’t a protector. He was a predator. Deciding to become that other thing was shoving a square peg in a circle hole, like cramming the fat end of a Louisville slugger up some poor fucker’s poop-chute. An uncomfortable fit all around.

  “I’m done with this,” he said, smiling, laughing. Snapped his fingers. Did a little Michael Jackson twirl. “No more protecting the food supply.”

  Ginger looked worried. As he should.

  Eat him, that monster’s voice said, louder now than before. Almost back to the volume it had been before this had all begun. Grab that mute moron, break his back over the dirt-bike and drain him dry.

  Coburn grinned, sauntered over to the boy.

  Ginger’s face wore a mask of concern, but he wasn’t yet frightened—no pheromones of fear, no stink of scaredy-sweat. Kid really was stupid.

  With a flick of his tongue, Coburn pushed his fangs to the fore.

  Feast, the voice said.

  Instead, Coburn pushed the kid.

  “Go,” he said, not believing the words coming out of his mouth. “Go, get the hell out of here, drive that dirt-bike so far I never have to see you again.”

  Ginger shook his head.

  Coburn slapped him in the face. “I said, go.”

  Again, Ginger shook his head. The vampire grabbed the kid and kneed him in the gut once, twice, then thrice for good measure. The boy made a sound—no words, but an audible groan. Then came the stink of fear. Sweat, not piss, but whatever: the fright-fueled uncertainty was growing.

  “I’ll count to three,” Coburn said. “You’re not gone by the time I finish, I will rip you apart and do a step-dance on your entrails.”

  The boy nodded. Slow, hesitant, but a nod just the same.

  “One,” Coburn said.

  Ginger stepped back, revved the dirt-bike.

  “Two.”

  But before the vampire could get to three, Ginger gave it gas and the dirt-bike launched forward. Coburn watched it disappear, heard the Doppler sound of the engine’s mosquito whine fade until finally, he could hear it no more.

  You’re an asshole, the voice inside him said. The monster, ever-mocking.

  “Yeah, I know, sue me.” But the voice was right. He’d let a perfectly good meal go in the same moment he decided to relinquish his attention on his other food source. It was like he wanted to give up the ghost or something.

  He actually thought about it. Thought about staying out here while the sun came up, see how far it could burn him down. Would it burn him to cinders this time? On the roof of the Wal-Mart, he presumed he lived—or, rather, ‘lived’—because they brought him inside before his crispy ass could turn to ash. Or maybe he just had it wrong. Maybe the sun didn’t kill him. Maybe it just turned him into the vampiric equivalent of a house fire—but he didn’t think so. He figured that the sun would get him eventually. The damn thing was like the eye of God, ever-vigilant and forever punishing.

  But for now, Coburn decided that this morning would not be the one where he met his maker. Still, though. As he crawled inside the RV to get his daysleep, he came to realize that seeing the sun those mornings before was something he hadn’t done in a long, long time. The sunrise sure was beautiful. Even if it would turn him into a greasy soot-stain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Perchance to Dream

  The vampire felt his heart thudding dully in his chest. A red roar of sound in his ears. A feeling of tightness in his chest and neck: the pressure of blood, the fullness of an overworked circulatory system.

  You’re human again, he thought.

  Which meant this was a dream. A daydream.

  “I’m dreaming too often,” he said to no one, his voice quiet, soft, no echo. He got louder, shouting into the void: “I don’t dream! I die during the day. I want that back. I want to shut it all out.”

  Somewhere, everywhere, a girl crying.

  “Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up.”

  Sweat beaded on his brow. It trickled into his mouth. Salty and sweet. His pits, damp. His palms, slick. Human, indeed.

  “Hell with this,” he said. “I’m walking out of here. This dream has to have an end. I’ll find it. Every dream ends.”

  And with that, a door appeared. A red door. Old. Paint faded. Above it, hanging in the darkness as if by fishing wire, a window. Across the panes of that window? Streaks of blood. Wet. Flies dotting the red, hungry, buzzing.

  Seeing that, his heart kicked in his chest like a bucking mule. Adrenalin cut through the fog. Was this what being alive felt like? This constant pressure? The jerking up and down like on a puppet’s strings? Feeling alive felt uncertain. It was not a pleasurable memory.

  Well. He’d asked for an end to the dream, and here was a door.

  He opened it.

  And walked into an old farmhouse. Floorboards creaking underneath dusty runner rugs. Country décor: wooden chickens on the wall, an Amish hex over a wooden stove, iron heating grates, borders with mallard ducks. It smelled of must and mold. The air felt heavy.

  Kayla stepped out into the hallway.

  “You’re here,” she said. Smiling. Wiping away tears.

  But for this moment, Coburn didn’t care. He wanted to see past her. Something in that room. Flies buzzed over her head.

  “What’s in that room?”

  “You don’t want to see,” she said.

  “I do want to see. Get the hell out of my way.”

  Kayla stood in front of the door. “Coburn. I swear. You don’t want to see this. Not now.” Her eyes were puffy. Cheeks wet.

  He bent down, got nose to nose with her, and showed his teeth. With his tongue he went to flick forth his fangs—but all that he had was a pair of regular old human canine teeth. Good for chewing steak. Not so good for perforating necks or wrists.

  “I don’t need to listen to you,” he hissed. “You left me.” He tried to see over her shoulder, but she waved her hand in the way.

  “It wasn’t me. It was my father.”

  “Gil.” The name dripped off Coburn’s lips like so much bile.

  “He thought he was doing the right thing.”

  “Well, he didn’t. Because now I’m gone. And you’re… God knows where, and only God cares.”

  She held up her hands as if to offer a clumsy ta-da. “We’re here, Coburn. Here
in this farmhouse.”

  He tried to see past her again, but somehow, couldn’t. Didn’t make any sense. Kayla wasn’t a big girl. He was a tall dude. But somehow, every time he peered past her, something moved in the way—her hair, her hand, a shadow.

  “I can’t see into the goddamn room,” he seethed. “Move!”

  “We’re here,” she said, ignoring his pleas. “It’s not far from the highway. Not even a mile. You can find it.”

  “I don’t believe you. Just another lie. Besides, this is my dream.”

  “And your dream is telling you to find us. It let me in. You let me in.”

  “Go to Hell.”

  “Help us. Help me.”

  Coburn looked around. “You don’t need my help. Perfectly nice farmhouse. Love the chickens. Now fuck off and move.”

  “We’re surrounded,” Kayla said, her voice cracking. Fresh tears ran. “Leelee got bit and I gave her some of my blood but I feel weak. And now outside they’re everywhere. I don’t know why. I don’t know where they came from. Hundreds of them. Maybe more. The house is weak. They’re going to get in eventually. Got the windows boarded up but it won’t hold. We don’t have much food. Don’t have any water. We’re dead before dawn.”

  “So die already.”

  Her hands trembled, like she wanted to hit him. “You’re an awful person.”

  “Not a person, sweetheart,” he offered her his winning smile, but it was devoid of mirth and contained a tight thread of anger tucked between his clenched teeth. “Can’t say it enough. Not human. Not alive. Total monster. Go to Hell.”

  “Please…” she said, a spit bubble blowing on her lip.

  Coburn sensed opportunity. It was as if the dream shifted somehow—as if Kayla had been in control all along and had relinquished (or, rather, lost) some of that control. It came back to him, fell back to his hands, and he picked her up and moved her aside and then Coburn saw what was in that room.

  His heart stopped beating. He felt it die, puckering and shriveling into the peach pit it should’ve been. The tightness at his chest loosened. The pressure at his neck, his jawline, his temples—it faded like a dying man giving up one last breath, one final exhalation where his life left in a single sigh.

  This was how it felt to no longer be alive. To be alive was an awful sensation, Coburn had thought before—and, in many ways, it was. But he had forgotten how truly wretched it was to feel dead. To have nothing inside.

  He blinked, turned away from the room. Couldn’t unsee that.

  Kayla crumpled to the floor, crying. Coburn offered her his hand. Helped her up and said, “Hold out as long as you can. I’ll find you. Farmhouse got a driveway?”

  She nodded. “But it’s full of them.”

  “I’ll figure something out.”

  And then he awoke.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Blood is the Life

  Coburn kicked open the RV door, gazed up into a clear night full of stars, and emerged into the darkness.

  The vampire smelled him before he saw him.

  Ginger sat on the overturned front-end of the RV, his legs dangling over the side. When Coburn emerged, the kid offered a game little wave and a goofy smile.

  “I hate you,” Coburn said.

  The boy said nothing, but at least the smile died on the vine. The vampire had to take solace in small victories at this point.

  Eat him, the monster’s voice said again. Coburn ignored it.

  “Get up,” Coburn said. “Go on. Shoo, off the bumper.” The boy looked stung. “No, I’m not going to threaten you or chase you off but I need you to stop sitting on the goddamn Winnebago.”

  Hesitantly, the kid hopped off.

  Coburn stood on the highway. Underneath the RV, the trio of zombies still lay pinned, groaning, moaning, rotting fingers grabbing handfuls of loose stone to no effect. One by one, the vampire went to each and crushed their heads with his bare feet. It was like making wine, if wine were made with spoiled brains instead of grapes. He shook the gore off his feet and then assumed a Sumo pose.

  “Here,” he said to the boy. “Check this shit out.”

  Swift and sudden strength was one of the vampire’s tricks—the blood churned in his veins when he willed it to, and like Moses commanded the red seas to split he could push the blood to any part of his body he wanted. Push it to his tongue, he could lick the paint off a wall. To his jaw, he could bite a spoon in half. Move it to his hands or arms, he could snap necks like they were a bundle of cheap Chinese chopsticks.

  This, though, was a feat perhaps beyond him.

  Still, the vampire was nothing if not overconfident.

  The blood inside him moved to his arms. The skin grew warm, then hot as his body burned through the blood. He squatted down and squeezed his hands underneath the RV.

  What was it they said? Lift with your legs, not your back? Or was it the other way around? Whatever. He willed blood into both legs and back.

  Then he lifted.

  The RV moved a couple inches—and then it felt as if his leg tendons were going to snap like angry piano strings. His body trembled. His spine bowed.

  Coburn moved more blood to his extremities. His brow felt hot, now.

  His bones felt like they were cracking—and then he heard them crack. Like hairline fractures across the surface of a frozen pond.

  But the RV moved again—two feet now instead of two inches.

  Then, three feet.

  Four.

  And he stopped.

  His legs were shaking so bad it felt like he was standing on a fault line as plate tectonics shouldered against one another. Felt like the DTs. Felt like Parkinson’s. His hands were bending back.

  Coburn did a kind of shuffle—scuffing his feet forward until he could get more of his body underneath. Then it was time for more blood. He felt his body growing hollow. Hungry. He tapped into a deep well, moving deep into the final reserves of Ambrosia’s blood: like a mosquito who stuck his drinking straw into the jugular vein of a coked-up rodeo bull, there he found power.

  He gave it his all.

  He fell to the ground.

  The RV shot forth, landed on all four wheels, gently rocking back and forth before finally staying still.

  Ginger stood staring. Mouth agape.

  “Told you I was the shit,” Coburn said, his voice hoarse. His body felt like a bridge embankment that had been hit by a tanker truck. Cracked and half-collapsed. He healed what he could.

  Tried to ignore how fucking hungry he was now.

  He pointed to the RV. “You can drive this thing?”

  Ginger shrugged, but gave a weak nod.

  “Good. Shove the dirt bike inside.”

  Wasn’t hard to find the farmhouse. Coburn thought it might be, given the fact they were driving and not tracking the scent through the woods—but the rotters made it easy. The RV drove along a steady trickle of zombies all heading in one direction, like a bunch of stoned groupies stumbling toward Woodstock.

  The farmhouse—a two-storey stone job with a slate roof and a big red barn next to it—sat down in the cradle of a misty valley.

  And Sweet Jesus on a carousel were there a lot of zombies.

  Maybe there weren’t any more than he’d seen at Wal-Mart, and it just looked worse because the farmhouse was comparatively so small. Or maybe they really did outnumber that other horde. Why did so many show? With more on the way? Were they smelling the blood the same way he did? Drop a Taco Bell chalupa on the floor in the middle of a thousand starving men and they’ll all come hungry.

  He told Ginger to park away from the farmhouse—“Don’t go down the driveway. Keep moving down the road.” Some of the zombies noticed their passing and grabbed at the Winnebago like they actually had a chance. But then, seeing the opportunity fleeing, they continued to head down toward the house.

  You asshole, the voice inside said. Don’t do this. Fuck those people. They’re just food. You wouldn’t wade into a swimming pool filled w
ith sharks to get a bowl of rice. Let them rot with the rotters.

  The voice was right.

  Even still.

  He remembered what he saw in that room in the dream. The dead girl on the floor. Her throat torn open. Her pigtails stuck to the gummy, coagulating blood which had crept along the lines between floorboards. It was the same girl from the other dream—the one who looked like Kayla but wasn’t. He didn’t know who she was, but he knew that to see her dead killed him inside, killed everything he was and had been. Emptied him out and stripped him bare.

  Because of that, he had to do this. He didn’t understand why, not really. But the vampire mind is as much about instinct as anything, and this was something he felt in the labyrinth that was his long-dead guts.

  Coburn rooted around the Winnebago, found some things he needed. A lighter, check. An old t-shirt of Kayla’s, check. No guns, as it looked like they took every last one, but he did find a camping machete that would have to do.

  Finally, duct tape. God’s own miracle.

  He patted the seat on the dirt bike, and then let Ginger in on the plan.

  The attic window was waxy, a film of dust and age smeared across the warped glass that wouldn’t come entirely clean no matter how many times Kayla wiped her shirt across it. She lay on the floor, staring out, petting the rat terrier behind the head. The dog stared vigilantly, sometimes growling low.

  Out there, in the moonlight, she saw their death.

  The meadow surrounding the old farmhouse looked like an undulating sea—heads and shoulders of the hungry dead jostling against one another, surging toward the house. Downstairs came the loud bangs of their hands echoing against shuttered, boarded windows, slapping against the stone, shouldering against the door again and again. The danger of the undead menace was not that they were monsters, but rather that they were a kind of environmental hazard, the way that a hurricane or flood was. Go unprepared and the floods would come and sweep you away, drown you in the dark, make you one with the waters.