by Chuck Wendig
There. The bitter tang. The medicine wrapped in a spoonful of sugar.
Kayla: They’re drugging you.
“Muhfuh!” Coburn muttered—it sounded better in his head—and once more the darkness found him, again touched by the faces of the dead and tinged by firelight cast through a curtain of blood.
HOURS. DAYS. WEEKS. Years.
Coburn could not say long the parade of the doomed and the dead lasted this time. When he finally awoke, it felt like leaving a too-loud, too-crowded party and walking out onto a balcony or sidewalk where the air is cool and everything is comparatively quiet and the clamor and clatter has been left behind.
That effect did not last.
When Coburn’s eyes adjusted, he found himself nailed to a dining room table. Dark cherrywood. The air smelled of—what was that? Hash. The crispy, pungent tang of hashish.
Gandalf stood at Coburn’s side. Whistling ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ as he worked. In this case, worked meant swaddled Coburn’s guts with a ribbon of duct tape. Gandalf wound the tape over the vampire, then under the table, then over the vampire and back under the table.
Above the vampire’s head, a water-stained ceiling. Cracks in the plaster like cracks in glass. To the right: a hallway. Toward his feet: a beaded curtain in rainbow colors, with no idea what lay beyond—though he saw figures moving. And smoke vented through the beads. Again: hashish.
Coburn tried to move. He felt weak. His body, still partially unmoored from his brain. The effort to move shot ragged cigarette burns of pain up and down each limb—hundreds of them.
I think they used a whole lotta nails, Kayla said. Owie.
“Sonofa...” Coburn growled. “Bitch.”
Gandalf, startled, danced away, dropping the duct tape. It rolled away.
“Hey, brother,” Gandalf said. Voice throttled by a frequency of fear. “You okay over there?”
“Fucking delightful.” Coburn noted that his voice sounded like he’d been smoking cigarettes full of ground-up glass for the duration of his long unlife. “I really enjoy it when some whacked-out moon-units kidnap me off the streets of a zombie-infected city and then nail me to their dinner table.”
“Cool,” Gandalf said, clearly not sure if it was cool.
Coburn helped him with that. “No, it ain’t cool, you old goaty wizard. Let’s make a deal, you and me. You start ripping these nails out and you let me up and I won’t kill you. But”—he interrupted Gandalf before the old fool spoke—“if you don’t let me out, then here’s my promise to you: I’m going to kill you first. And I’ll make it hurt. I’ll bring pain to you that before now was an impossible nightmare. That’s the deal I’m offering. One time. One time only.”
“I...” Gandalf thought about it. Coburn could see that. The dude stroked his long gray beard with nervous spidery fingers, and then finally he said: “I better go get Minister Masterson.”
The willowy old-timer darted through the curtain, the beads clattering against one another. Coburn snarled, yelled after him, but it was too late.
Kayla, of course, had to chime in, You’d think by now you’d realize: more flies with honey than vinegar, JW.
The beads whispered against one another once more.
A man came up to the foot of the table. Coburn craned his neck, put his chin to his chest to see.
Tall sonofabitch. Oily crow-black hair pulled back. Scraggly beard. Little teeth behind thin lips. Reached in past a shirtless vest and idly itched a nipple ringed in black hair. The guy had a distinct Charlie Manson vibe hanging around him—along with a gauzy haze of hash smoke.
“You must be Coburn,” the dude said. He had a familiar voice. Coburn recognized it as the one from the walkie-talkie. Like gravel under a wheelbarrow wheel. “Thanks for stopping by, vampire.”
Coburn seethed. “You know me?”
“Seems you’re a popular motherfucker, motherfucker.”
“Masterson, I presume,” Coburn said. Upstairs, he heard sounds: footsteps, people moving around. How many more are there?
“Presume away.”
From behind the so-called Minister came the rat-man, Fingerman. He came up on Masterson’s left, clinging to the Minister’s hip like a squirrel. On Masterson’s right came a reedy love-bombed sylph with pink puckered lips and a diaphanous gown with one wine-glass breast exposed as if she didn’t even realize it. She wasn’t looking at Coburn so much as through him.
“Nice place you have here,” the vampire growled.
“Thanks, man. It’s pretty well-defended. We got a cushy thing going.”
“I bet. What’d you dose me with?”
A voice to Coburn’s right: “Ketamine, bro.”
There stood the thick-necked Hispanic. Looking like some cracked out PTSD Marine.
He was eating something.
Chowing down on it like it was a big old turkey leg.
It was a human foot.
Coburn’s first thought was: oh, of course, I’ve been captured by a nest of drug culture cannibals, but then something else became clear: the man wasn’t eating a healthy human leg. Nor a cooked one. It was rotten. Skin pocked by red sores. Muscles mushy like the flesh of an overripe pear.
“Ketamine’s some bad-ass shit,” the Hispanic man said around a mouthful of what looked to be undead meat. He chewed noisily, tongue smacking. “It’s like a... a dog anesthetic or something. You give someone a good strong dose of it, they fall into the K-Hole. Total dissociation of body and mind. Great for putting the moves on a girl. Get her all loosey-goosey. Once you get her lubed up with that stuff, she’s like putty in your—”
“Flores,” Masterson said. “Enough, man. Enough.”
“Oh. Right, bro. Right.”
“You eat zombies,” Coburn said.
Masterson nodded. “We do. Some of us see it as a transubstantiation of the flesh thing. Some of us just figure we’ve got an easy meat source out there. Free range long pig.”
“It’s diseased meat. Which means you have the disease.”
Flores laughed. Masterson shot him a look, then said: “We have ways of keeping ourselves pure. Don’t you sweat it, man.”
“You and I have very different definitions of purity.”
Masterson shrugged. “This is the way. The new way. I’m leading people toward a symbiotic future. Where living man and dead man have a place in each other’s worlds. We can feed off of them as they feed off of us. Can’t you see the beauty in that? In the cycle of life to death to life again?”
“You’re fucking baked.”
“Baked on an idea. Baked by the power of our purity.” Masterson began pacing the room. “You know I used to be a banker? Down in the financial district. Packaging mortgages.”
“Shoulda stuck with it. I hear the foreclosure market is ripe for the picking.”
“Funny, man. Funny. I like you. But see, that’s the thing—you’re hitting on a real point. I was one of the guys who helped fuck things up for people. Did some naughty shit. I got rich as everyone got poor. I fiddled while Rome burned. Housing market collapsed like the house of cards that it was but we didn’t have long to nest on that, did we? Because that’s when the real shit hit the fan. And it showed me—and everybody—just what bullshit the system was. The system was a prison made of illusions, like, like endless walls of circus mirrors. It all crashed. The real crash. The crash of the dead against the living.”
“Great story. Can I go now?”
But Masterson ignored him. “But I don’t want it to be us versus them anymore. I want us to co-exist. Even if that relationship of coexistance is one based on food and need and hunger. That’s okay. Because those things are pure. Hunger is pure. I’m sure you understand that. Being who you are. What you are.”
Coburn struggled against the hundreds of nails puncturing his flesh and pinning him to the table like a butterfly on a corkboard. His strength still wasn’t there—given his guts hanging out of his body and the traces of what was apparently a veterinary anesthetic lingering
in his morbid veins, it didn’t seem like it would be in reach anytime soon.
“Struggle all you want,” Flores said. “We nailed you there pretty good.”
“You’re going to eat me,” the vampire said. That’s what this was. What this had to be. If the zombies were Grade-E-but-Edible—and hunger was pure, as Masterson put it—then a kidnapped vampire was like a fresh slab of filet-fucking-mignon hot off the grill. Though that still didn’t explain how they knew who Coburn was, or where he’d be...
Masterson laughed. “Nah. We could. But we won’t. The Doc wouldn’t like that. The Doc’s the one with the plans.” He snapped his fingers. “Get Jeepers back in here. Our friend needs another dose.”
“Dose? No. Don’t put me under again.” Those faces. The faces of those he damned—Coburn couldn’t abide another second with them. Hundreds of ghosts. Each trapped in a drop of blood. Hallucinations or specters, he didn’t know, he didn’t care, he just didn’t want to be locked away in the prison of his own diseased mind with them. He said something he never thought he’d say to these people: “Please.”
The wizard Gandalf—or Jeepers, for some reason that remained unclear to Coburn—moved up alongside Coburn with another syringe. Coburn caught a whiff of sage and lavender. Goddamn hippies.
“Doped blood,” Flores said, looking over Jeepers’ slumped shoulder. “We drugged up Fingerman the first time ’cause he loves the ketamine and he’s so goofy on it half the time he never falls into the K-Hole anymore. Drugs like that, you’re just chasing the dragon. No high is ever as good as the first. Ain’t that right, vampire man?”
“Fuck you.”
Suddenly Flores’ face tightened in a rictus of rage, eyes bugging out of his head in such a way that Coburn thought they might launch out of his head on wobbly springs. “Fuck you, man. Fuck! You! Time to go tits up, bitch.” Flores walked off in a huff, saying, “Dose him, Jeepers.”
The wizard shrugged, came at Coburn with the needle.
Soon as it got near Coburn’s mouth, he opened his mouth wide and bit down on the needle. It stuck in his tongue and snapped. Jeepers yelped, struggling to wrench open Coburn’s jaw—
Which was the wrong move. The vampire reopened his mouth, clamped down a pair of mean canines on the span of flesh between the old wizard’s thumb and forefinger—crunch—and began to guzzle. Fresh blood—if not entirely clean, as Coburn caught the trace of hash or marijuana hanging out in there somewhere—flooded his mouth as Jeepers screamed like a middle-aged housewife seeing a mouse run across her kitchen floor.
This was the way out. Fresh blood meant a shock to his system. Purge the drugs. He lurched forward with renewed vigor, the nails popping through his flesh and tearing it like ragged leather. Jeepers tried to back away as the monster rose anew, feasting, drinking, making good on his promise to kill Jeepers first (though at present not as painfully as he’d like). Masterson ducked through the curtain, rattling the beads. Flores disappeared down the hall. Fingerman dropped into a fetal crouch and rocked back and forth.
Flee, freaks, flee.
It didn’t matter.
All these assholes were going to die today.
Or so he thought.
But then, out of nowhere, came the reedy sylph girl.
She had a Louisville slugger in her hand and a crazy beaming smile on her face. The girl held the bat like she was swinging for the fences.
The bat connected with Coburn’s head.
Starbursts erupted in his vision. Streaks of smeary white.
He tried to get back up—
The bat came down on his chest. Then his chin.
Flores launched himself up atop Coburn’s body and took a knee. With hands as muscled as the rest of his ’roid-monkey body, Flores jacked open Coburn’s now-broken jaw and—
Squirt.
Into the mouth with another jet of bad blood.
Coburn slipped once more into the dark tide. He couldn’t tell if Kayla was laughing, or crying, or both. The faces renewed their assault, drowning him in a bucket of his own bilious guilt.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hunters Hunted
THE VAMPIRE WAS right. Soon as Coburn took off leaping from rooftop to rooftop like the shadow from a cloud moving overhead, the zombie throng slowly began shuffling up the street, leaving only a few stragglers behind.
Gil peered over the roof’s edge. Creampuff whined by his side.
He felt suddenly overwhelmed and alone. The city was silent. Same way that all the cities were, now: no cars, no helicopters, no constant rumbling murmur of voices and HVAC units and music. Nobody was here to care about him or have him care back. Dead streets, dead city, dead world. Who were they trying to save again, exactly? What was left of humanity? And how many of them were worth a shit?
“I feel alone,” he said to Creampuff. “And I miss my daughter.”
The dog sat down, stared up.
“Yeah, I hear you. Cut the pity party. Let’s hit the bricks, pooch.”
WHEN NEXT COBURN opened his eyes, night had fallen and he found himself nailed back to the dining room table. For a half moment he caught a whiff of something sweet and sour hanging in the air—the scent of jasmine mingling with an eerily-familiar odor of death. Familiar because...
Kayla filled it in for him: It smells like you.
At the same time the odor was crawling its way up his nose like a worm, a sound reached his ears that chilled his already cold body:
A howling screech. Containing within it a madness beyond life’s margins, a desperate ragged hunger that had no end and gave no quarter.
The scream was far away... but close enough to still be heard.
That sound set off a cascade of images in his mind: rotters drinking his blood, turning into monstrous hell-zombies, the hunters who stopped at nothing when it came to getting another taste of Coburn.
How could another hunter exist in the world? All the ones he inadvertently made—and then those that made each other—were gone now. Was there just one? Or had their unstoppable army begun to form anew?
Coburn lay there in the darkness for awhile, trying to parse what he’d heard. A figure drifted beyond the beaded curtain; a shadow upon the sea of shadows. Coburn willed his eyes to see better—normally, he could see in darkness like it was a cloudy day, but right now it seemed that either the ketamine or his day-long exposure to the bleary fireball known as the ‘sun’ had done his night-sight no good.
Again he smelled jasmine and death.
Stronger, this time.
The figure emerged from behind the curtain.
Now he could see her. She was Asian. Clad in a white doctor’s coat. The woman was tall, long limbed, with the elegance of a cellar spider. Flesh pale like a cave cricket and flawless like porcelain—except for the asterisk-shaped crater on her cheek below her left eye. Like someone had taken a chisel to a beautiful doll.
As she approached with confident step, the jasmine smell washed over him.
And so did the smell of death.
She’s one of you, Kayla said.
“I’ve come to take your blood,” she said.
“That’s awfully matter-of-fact, Doc.”
“I see no reason to obfuscate my intentions.” She walked the table at his feet, pacing in slow half-moons. He couldn’t hear shoes. Was she barefoot?
“You’re pretending to me like me.”
She frowned. “To be like you how?”
“You know.”
“Enlighten me.”
He opened his mouth, hissed, let his tongue play across the tip of two plainly-displayed fangs. “See what I’m getting at, China Doll?”
“I’m Korean, and why do you think I’m pretending?”
“Because I’m the only one out there.”
“I’m surprised you think so, though I suppose I see why.” She seemed done with the conversation. She waved someone on behind the beaded curtain, and here came itchy, twitchy Fingerman, pushing a metal cart with a wooden case atop it.
“Don’t you, uhh, need lights?” Fingerman asked.
The woman barely gave him a look. “I can see in the dark even if you cannot. Run along, little rat.”
Coburn snorted. “I thought he looked like a rat, too.”
But she didn’t respond. So much for being friendly.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Lydia.”
“Nice to meet you, Lydia. I’m—”
“Coburn, yes, I know.” She popped the latch on the case—a little brass hook—and opened it. Looked to be something out of medical antiquity. One giant metal syringe. A number of glass containers, each about the size of a stick of dynamite. Old surgical tubing. A shiny metal piece that looked like the head of an octopus with all of its tentacles chopped off at the half-way mark. She began hooking it all together efficiently, silently.
“What’s all this nonsense?”
“It’s a blood transfusion kit. From the era of the Great War. Would’ve preferred something more updated, but the hospitals remain host to a continuing plague of the undead.” She clipped the octopus head to the tubing, then the tubing to the syringe. Then she did the same the other way: connecting one glass jar to the tubing, and back to the octopus head. “Don’t worry. I tested it.”
“Tested it.”
“Mm. I have test subjects.”
“Pigs?”
“Humans. Children, actually.”
He laughed, though it was without mirth. “I’m a little confused here, honey. You know that if you were a real bloodsucker you don’t need all this fancy crap, right? You just... open your mouth. Let your fangs come out to play. Sink them into somebody’s skin like pushing your pinky through a stick of warm butter... mmm. Oooooh-ee. Nothing beats it. Not that you’d know, being a—”