by Chuck Wendig
He was about to say pretender, but then Lydia leaned forward, extended her jaw and tilted her head back, and let her fangs show.
As he did, she poked at each with a tongue.
“Satisfied?” she asked. “Good.”
Then she went back to setting up the kit.
She told you, boy, Kayla said.
He willed her to shut up.
“So why the kit if you could just drink me dry here and now?”
“The blood is not for me.”
She turned her gaze suddenly to the wall. Then to the beaded curtain. Back to Coburn, an unexpected moment of cageyness submerged now beneath that glassy exterior.
Something scratched at his mind like a crow clawing the earth.
“Not for you. Who’s it for?”
She didn’t answer.
“Who the fuck wants my blood, Lydia?”
Still silent. Only the click and squeak of her hands adjusting the apparatus.
What’s going on, Coburn?
“I don’t even have that much blood in me. If I did I’d be up off this table. I’d be tearing this place to pieces, commanding these freaks to eat one another alive.”
Lydia stopped. Finally seemed resolved to say something. “It’s not your blood that matters. It’s what’s inside it.”
He went cold. Like someone flushed his system with saline. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your blood is different now. You have a guest. I’m here to take her.”
Her. Kayla. The cure.
Shitfuck.
Coburn, how does she know that?
No time to think about that now. Panic settled into his supine body like sepsis; that cold feeling of saline turned to a hot rush of acid. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t want to do this.”
“Not used to this, are you? The begging. The pleading and wheedling. Usually it’d be your victim, wouldn’t it? Begging you for her life. Or begging you to take her life, depending on how badly you tweaked her brain. Trust me. I know.” Lydia screwed a massive needle onto the tip of the equally massive syringe. Looked like something used to deliver adrenalin to an elephant’s heart. Her gaze flicked again to the windows. Did Coburn sense a nervousness there? “But now you’re the one on the slab. You’re the one imploring another to save you. Or save the one inside your blood. I wonder what that must be like. To care about another as you do now. The good news for me is, I am not given over to such delicate compunction. It’s sad to see you like this, really. It’s like watching a wolf limp.”
“Are you done talking?” Coburn said. “Because I’m getting tired of hearing your fool mouth flap.”
“I am. A rare moment of gregariousness. I suppose I just savor the irony of your situation.” An icy smile. “Let us begin.”
She gave the needle one last tighten. Moved it toward his neck.
Then: outside, another keening banshee’s wail. The hunter, hunting.
Lydia tensed. Syringe held firm in her grip.
Coburn suddenly understood.
“The hunter,” he said, clucking his tongue as if to chastise a tardy student. “The hunter’s yours, isn’t it? You let your guard down. And when you did, some rot-fuck took a bite out of you—not out of your cheek, no, that’s from before you turned into the carefree killing machine you are now—and something happened that you didn’t figure on. The rot-fuck changed. And now he’s out there. Or she’s out there. Looking like something that kicked its way out of the Devil’s own dickhole. Like something that’s bringing Hell with it.”
“Shut your mouth,” she hissed.
“Oooh. Getting testy, now. It’s my turn to be the smart one and you don’t like that.” She turned the syringe downward and he uttered a quick tut-tut-tut. “Slow your roll, sister. That thing’s on the hunt. And it wants one thing: vampire blood. Yours, if it can manage it. But I suspect mine will do fine. You let one drop of my blood hit the air and that thing will be like a shark scenting prey. It’ll come. For you. For me. For all of us. That what you want?”
She hesitated. The needle tip hovering.
Coburn, on the other hand, did not hesitate.
He jerked his body toward—not away from—the needle, letting its tip pop a hole in the side of his neck. He didn’t have much blood left, but what he had beaded up at the puncture site like a blood-colored pearl.
It timed out well: only a moment later came another wailing, mournful—and righteously hungry—cry from the distant hunter.
Lydia staggered backward. She dropped the syringe.
Coburn laughed. A dry rasp. Way he saw it: whatever it was she wanted, he did not—and whatever she didn’t want, well, he’d make certain that came to pass. She was afraid of the hunter? Then he wanted to stoke the fires of that fear.
The other vampire hurried toward the curtain, poking her head through. He heard her barking orders: “Need to move him. Ready another hit of the ketamine. Someone get in there to watch him.”
He had little time.
The ketamine was finally gone from his system, leaving only a ghost of its effects behind—he wouldn’t be as fast or as capable as usual, but he still had a little of Gandalf’s blood left. Enough kindling to start a fire.
He let it burn. Let the blood reach through his system like claw-tipped fingers. He began to rock back and forth—the way they nailed him gave him little room to move, but enough to build momentum, and the table was built for quiet dinners, not rowdy, pissed-off bloodsuckers.
Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Riiiight.
Almost... almost...
Shit!
The table did not tip.
But then—it did something else. The table would not suffer the stress. Two of the legs on the right side of Coburn’s body suddenly snapped like shattered bones, splintering with loud cracks. The force of the table hitting the ground pulled some of the nails from Coburn’s flesh.
Not all of them.
But enough.
Coburn snarled, got his right arm free and felt his way underneath his tilted body—he reached out, grabbed the doorframe leading into the hall, and pulled. Pain shot through him, every nail popping free with the fresh hell of a cigarette burn, his guts still sloshing around half-outside his body, but then, with the sound of buttons tearing free from a shirt, Coburn freed himself from the table.
Two feet planted in front of him. Dirty feet. Bare. Nails painted neon green, the big toenails sporting anime cat faces.
The reedy sylph brought the bat down again.
But this time, Coburn shot up a hand and caught it in his palm.
Thwack.
“Hit me once,” Coburn said, rising to his feet, “shame on you. Hit me twice, I tear you open like a human piñata and feast on your blood candy.”
He tossed the bat aside. The girl turned to run and he caught her by the hair, snapping her back to him and holding her tight in a cruel embrace. He tilted her head to the side as she struggled, saw the pale freckled stretch of neck—
She’s on something, Kayla whispered in the hollows of his mind. Not ketamine, but something else. She’ll slow you down, not speed you up.
He roared, picked the sylph up, then threw her into the wall; she left a crater in the dry wall and tumbled down on the ground, her body still.
AS GIL MADE his way east through the streets of San Francisco, he heard the hunter’s cry echo over the buildings.
It made his blood turn to piss, made his piss turn to ice water. Creampuff darted between Gil’s legs, tail tucked low.
His heartbeat galloped like a spurred horse, remembering the lab in Los Angeles: the sound of those things crashing through the ducts, climbing up through the elevator shafts, scrambling up the outside of the building, screaming and wailing as they did so.
It occurred to him, then: they thought the rotters were the end of the world, but they weren’t the end. They were just the start of it. The hunters—wretched things of gnashing teeth and razor claw, of extended nec
ks and distended mouths—were the true end of the world. A hurricane of hunger belched up out of Hell.
But then the vampire put an end to them. By putting a bullet in his own brain, Coburn effectively put a bullet in all their brains—giving way to some undead vampire-zombie logic that Gil didn’t care to understand.
So now, to hear another hunter...
Thoughts ran wild through his head: Coburn had been bitten. He was too brash, too bold, and got himself in trouble. That was how the hunters were born, wasn’t it? One zombie gets a taste for vampire blood and that’s it, game over.
And if Coburn was gone, so was Kayla.
He’d already lost her body. Somehow, the vampire was home to her spirit, her soul—even her personality. To lose her again...
It felt like something ripped out of Gil’s middle. Like the empty space was filled with bugs and battery acid and a few rusted razors.
Worst of all, it made him feel alone.
This wasn’t like him. Gil was the backbone. The leader. The one who kept them all safe. Except now they were all dead and all he had was a red-muzzled rat terrier cowering between his ankles.
Above, the purple evening sky turned darker with the coming of night. The moon rose over the city and Gil pushed on, feeling like a scarecrow absolved of his stuffing. As darkness fell, Gil heard the scuffing of feet on sidewalks and the murmuring groans of the encroaching dead—shapes and silhouettes shuffled ahead and behind, moving faster than usual. They were massing. They’d caught his scent.
The rotters got uppity at night; they grew agitated, gained a very little speed and focus. It was time, then, to go to ground. To hide.
A small voice inside Gil urged him just to stop, to sit down here in the middle of Beach Street, by the white flower delivery van whose side was splattered with blood, by the Mission-style housing with boarded windows, by the pink flowering trees lining the avenue. Sit down—or better yet, lay down—and let the zombies come and eat what was left of him.
But he didn’t. Gil didn’t know why, didn’t even want to ponder it. Instead he hurried right, sticking along the houses, trying doors until he found one that opened to him.
COBURN STAGGERED THROUGH the beaded curtain.
Low-lit living room. Couches that didn’t match. Bean bags everywhere. Carpet torn asunder. Filth streaking the ceiling and everything smelling like hash and pot and patchouli and semen. Someone (with frankly middling amateur talent) had painted dioramas on all the walls: one of them showed someone that looked like Minister Masterson standing on a hill with his arms wide, a crowd of rotters and still-living humans kneeling in the golden showers of his glory. Another offered up a zombie crucified in a combination of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and a ‘cut of meat’ chart at a local butcher’s—ribs and fat back and prime cuts. A third image was just a painted ossuary of skeletons and loose bones and Mexican sugar skulls.
Coburn wasn’t sure of the narrative, but he could take a few guesses: the people here worshipped the Minister who somehow gave them power over death. That power was nothing fancy, but was a life-giving boon to those who could stomach it. Somehow, these barking moon-spiders had the ability to eat the flesh of the undead without the infection running rampant through them.
Just then: movement behind one of the couches.
A whiff of blood and fear sweat.
And sage. And lavender.
“Gandaaaalf,” Coburn said all sing-songy. “Or Jeeeeepers. Or whatever the fuck your naaaaame is. Please come out so I can break all the bones in your body.”
The old man arose from behind a couch. The movement introduced a new smell: fear urine that perfectly paired with the fear sweat. The old man’s ratty sweat pants showed a wet patch around the crotch and left thigh.
“Please,” Jeepers mumbled. “Don’t kill me. I’m just doing what I got to so I can stay alive, dude. I—I... you don’t know what it’s like.”
Coburn strode across the room. Confident. Hungry.
“No, no, I know,” Coburn said, smiling.
“I’m just an old man. My kids are dead. My grandkids are dead. Please, if you gotta kill me, just don’t make it hurt...”
The old man broke down in tears.
He was somebody’s Daddy, Kayla said. You could try to be nice.
To which Coburn decided: fuck that.
The old man had drugged him. Left him nailed to a table. So that Kayla and the cure could be sucked out of this vampire’s body by a different vampire.
Coburn reached Gandalf, lifted him up by his neck. The old not-wizard’s face turned red as tears soaked his cheeks and gathered in that wispy gray beard.
You showed mercy on my people once upon a time, Kayla reminded him.
He reminded her: We had an arrangement. I was just protecting my food source.
That excuse doesn’t hold up any more, JW.
To which he responded: Your people didn’t stick me with needles after attaching me to a dinner table with a hundred nails.
My Daddy did shoot you. And leave you for dead at a Wal-Mart.
Coburn growled.
Mercy bloomed within him like an ugly, shriveled flower. He detested it—he did not wear benevolence well. It afforded him only discomfort and self-loathing. But it was there, now, lurking inside him, hateful as it was. This old man wasn’t even worth the effort it would take to snap his neck, anyway.
But he still had blood, and Coburn still had needs.
Coburn bent to feed.
Bang.
A gun went off, behind the old man.
Gandalf’s chest sprayed red, his blood decorating Coburn’s shirt.
Dead blood was not the best blood. Which meant the vampire’s meal was... well, if not ruined, then certainly disturbed. Just because you can eat your hamburger, after it falls on the floor, doesn’t mean you want to.
Besides, now Coburn had a bullet lodged in his breastbone.
He threw the old man’s gurgling body forward at whoever had fired the shot—and the ’roided-out thick-necked Hispanic motherfucker stepped to the side as the body crashed against the hardwood floor, bringing up a boxy H&K .45 and peeling off another round at Coburn. The vampire didn’t have the speed or interest to move aside. The round clipped Coburn in the meat of the shoulder.
No mercy for this one, he told Kayla. She offered no dissent.
What little blood Coburn had left, he let it burn hot and fast inside the crucible of his body, giving him a preternatural burst of speed. He came up behind Flores, getting an arm around the man’s neck and pulling tight.
It was like trying to strangle a bison.
Flores whooped and hollered, began whirling about with Coburn on his back. The thick sonofabitch slammed his body backward, driving the vampire into an old TV stand that now served as home to a collection of bongs and pipes, all of which now crashed to the floor with the sound of tinkling glass.
Flores pistoned an elbow into Coburn’s midsection, rupturing the vampire’s dead bowels. Blood seeped. The intestines didn’t matter, but the blood did.
That’s when Flores brought up the .45—clumsy, the way he cocked it over his shoulder thinking to squeeze off a shot at the vampire monkey on his back. Coburn planted a foot back on the ground, got a little leverage, then captured the man’s wrist and twisted hard as he could.
He turned the .45 downward.
Got his finger around Flores’ trigger finger.
Then: squeeze.
The gun went off, popping a round through Flores’ upper thigh. Blood squirted from the hole. The man yowled like a cat whose tail just got run over by a push-mower, and Coburn was not going to waste the opportunity. He slapped the gun away and then planted his mouth on the wound like a thirsty kid at a water fountain, greedily slurping.
Everything was red and warm and beautiful.
With a sudden electric jolt of something else.
Oh, my, Kayla said. He really was juiced up, wasn’t he?
Flores batted at him, tried to wrench Cobu
rn off.
Coburn felt the burn. The jacked-up tweaked-out steroid rush kicked a hole in his soul. It felt like someone knocked a hornet’s nest out of a tree growing in the hollows of his mind. He felt Kayla retreat into shadow.
When Flores stopped batting at him, Coburn kept sucking, felt no more blood reach his mouth. He kept sucking anyway. Felt air and flesh and heard the cracking of bone and—
Frustrated, he pushed Flores backward, then stood quickly, and backhanded the body. The head snapped, spinning on the now-shattered pivot of Flores’ spine.
“Neck’s not so thick now,” Coburn said, chuckling.
Outside somewhere: another howl.
The hunter was coming.
No, Coburn thought. The hunter is already here.
CHAPTER SIX
Down Into The Dark
WITH FLORES’ BLOOD running rough-shod through his body like a pack of coked-up pit-bulls, Coburn felt his guts twist and clinch and ease back into his body as ribbons of ruined stomach-flesh sought each other out.
He felt like he could punch a hole in the heavens, like he could grab God by the ankle and drag that cruel sonofabitch down here to see what his callous and careless fuckery had wrought upon the world of man.
It was all very clarifying.
And what Coburn knew was that Lydia had to go.
The city was home to a hunter. Hopefully just one. If that thing figured out how to make more of itself—and, Coburn suspected, it would—then once again he’d have a plague of demons to deal with. Only way to ensure the hunter took a big long never-ending dirt-nap was to destroy the source: Lydia the vampire.
Besides, obliterating her into a red pulp would be a pleasure.
Because nobody hurts Kayla.
That thought surprised him.
How protective you’ve become of me, she said. He heard her giggle—it echoed in the cavern of his skull.
Coburn cracked his knuckles. Felt together again.
He stalked through the house. Hunting.
In the kitchen, he found zombie meat—arms, legs, clumps of unidentified gray flesh—hanging from hooks and hemp rope. Organs piled up in nested wire baskets. Filthy counters sat stocked with soda and liquor bottles filled to the brim with black dead blood and corked or capped. The smell should’ve been overpowering—strong enough to make a vulture puke. But the walls and cabinets were tiled with little pine-tree air fresheners. Nailed there, just as Coburn had been nailed to the table only ten minutes before.