Bad Blood (9 page)

T
HEY TOLD
G
IL
about Ellie.

Pete kept the pistol on him as he listened to Aiden tell the story.

“Ellie was one of us. One of the kids who survived. I see the look on your face. You think we’d be the first to go. That we’re vulnerable. Well, fuck you, old man.
You’re
slow.
You’re
the weak one.”

Gil wondered why everybody thought he was so old. Then again, he hadn’t looked in a mirror in a long time. His fifty-some years probably looked like seventy-some by now. All leather and stubble and raccoon rings around his tired eyes.

Aiden continued: “Kids are quick. Adaptable. Smart in the right ways—doesn’t matter if we don’t know who the twenty-second president was—”

Grover Cleveland
, Gil thought.

“—what matters is what we run faster than you. I’m not saying that all the kids survived. Some kids are real pussies. Their parents start turning to mush-mouthed, brain-eating fucktards and they still want to go and hug Daddy and hold onto Mommy. But those of us who knew the score knew to run. And hide. And we knew
where
to run and
where
to hide. This city has a lot of boltholes.”

Gil shot a look at the kid’s dead parents on the bed. Shifting. Grunting. And his brother on the chair staring ahead. All preserved.
Saved
. As if a cure might appear one day and return them back to normal—a fairy tale. Or was it? Zombies. Vampires. His own daughter with her miracle blood. Maybe it wasn’t so crazy.

It also suggested this kid was a lot more bark than bite.

Wasn’t really a great time to say that, though, so Gil let the kid talk.

“Ellie was one of us who made it until—” And here Aiden started to blink fast, like he was maybe trying not to cry. His hands formed into fists at his sides as if the grief were a real thing, as real as the zombies, and he could just knock its block off and send it packing. “Until she wasn’t. She got swamped. We pulled her out and up onto a fire escape, but not before they bit her leg. She turned.”

“Ellie.” A griefstruck whimper from Princess. Who began to sob, crumpling in on herself like a flower dying in fast-forward. Aiden clapped his hands angrily at her and yelled:

“Princess! Shut up! I’m telling a damn story.”

The girl only wept harder.

Gil moved over to her—Pete tensed his arm and pointed the pistol with greater and more panicked purpose—but he ignored the gun and went to the girl anyway, pulling her tight against him. She buried her face in his shirt, soaking it through with little-girl tears.

“Go on,” Gil said, giving the girl comfort and stifling her tears. “Tell your little story.”

“She’s crying. I don’t like her crying.”

“I don’t like you being a bully, you little thug. Now keep talking.”

Aiden seemed stung.

But damn if it didn’t work. Cautiously, he resumed the story: “We... kept Ellie with us for a while. Had her held quick with a catch-pole somebody stole from one of the animal shelters. But over the last couple months, that’s when the doctor showed up. Wanting to take more of us away.”

“The doctor.”

“Uh-huh. She comes around every so often. At first she was nice. Offering us things if we went with her. She said she could take two or three of us on a boat and that she had this lab and there were people there, and it was safe and they had food. I never trusted her.”

“You kinda trusted her,” Ashleigh said, twirling the chair leg like a slow-motion baton. “I mean, you said—”

“God, Ashleigh, I changed my mind!” He scowled at her. “Fine. I sent some of us off with her at first. But then we never heard anything and I thought the doctor was strange anyway, and so next time she came by I said for everybody to stay here, that we were doing okay on our own and that the adults didn’t know safety from a sack of shit. Even still, Javier said he wanted to go with her and it didn’t help that she was waving a bag of M&Ms around.”

Aiden sat on the edge of the bed, between the wiggling corpse-feet of his two dead parents, as if it was no big thing.

“Wasn’t long after that Ellie got bit. And the next time the doc came around, she was pushy. Threatening us. Way she looked at you made you want to go with her even though you didn’t want to go with her.”

“She had pretty eyes,” Pete said, as if lost in a dream.

“But before any of us could follow her, Ellie broke free of the catchpole. Jumped on the doc’s back like a monkey. Bit down onto the lady’s neck and there was blood everywhere. The lady screamed. Threw Ellie against a dumpster. Ran off like a shot, like a... an Olympic runner. Weird thing was, didn’t even look like her neck was bit up. Blood, lots of blood, but no, y’know, wound.”

Gil could’ve guessed the rest of the story, and it went about like he figured. “We got Ellie back with the catch-pole but she changed that night. Got all fuckin’ weird. She went from being a dumb zombie to... I dunno. It’s like she
saw
us again. But not in a good way. Like in the way a tiger watches you from behind the bars at the zoo. And she got still. Just sat down. Waiting. Zombies don’t wait. They smell you and they’ll come at you even if that means walking across a street full of broken glass to get at you. She wasn’t like that. Not anymore.

“So. We let her go. Threw her behind a door and closed it, pulling the pole out. Then we ran like crazy.”

“We still sometimes see her,” Booboo said, picking his nose with one hand and using the other to fidget with an ice pick.

Aiden nodded. “We hear her out there. See her, too. She’s got a pack of zombos that follow her around like dogs.”

Finally, Princess stopped sobbing, progressing to the sniffling-and-hitching-breath phase. She stood next to Gil and rested her dirty cheek on his shoulder. “I miss Ellie. She was a better princess than me.”

Gil dared to ask: “This woman. One who Ellie bit. She say where she was taking you kids?”

Aiden said, “Yeah. To Alcatraz. To her lab.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Drowned Rats In A Dead Maze

T
HE VAMPIRE DARED
not look, but the sounds told him everything he needed to know: the hunter dropped into the tunnel behind him, landing with a splash, bone claws and talons clicking on the ancient brick. But the hunter was not alone: other bodies hit the tunnel like sacks of grain dropped out of the back of a pick-up truck. Zombies. Clumsily bumbling into the dark, likely following the focus of their fruitless attention span: the beast in dark ringlets.

As noted, Coburn ran.

You can take her
, Kayla said as Coburn hunkered down, clawing his way through the tunnel like a rat driven mad by a parasite.
C’mon, JW. Just one little girl
.
Remember how well you handled me once upon a time?

The memory of holding Kayla aloft by her throat struck him. An almost physical blow. With it: another wash of guilt. Acid on the back of his tongue. Acid in the back of his mind. Guilt was for suckers. Shame was for chumps.

Remorse was a line that separated the living and the dead.

The dead had no remorse.

And Coburn reminded himself: he was most certainly dead.

Ahead, the tunnel split—a Y-shaped fork in the path. Coburn quickly sniffed the air, caught at first only the smell of rainwater and broken-down grease and other old chemicals washed from the streets into the sewers, but as he could feel and hear the hunter coming up behind him (a hundred yards, now? seventy-five?), panic twisted through his heart like a rusty screw—

Jasmine. There.

Coburn scrambled down the left-most path.

She’s gaining on you
, Kayla said.

And she was. The wretched sounds of the pursuing hunter were closer now and closing in fast—the water beneath his feet was starting to form a heavier stream, six, seven inches deep, the walls were growing slick with moisture. His hands slipped, his feet splashed as the water slowed him just enough. It felt like being in a bad dream, except Coburn didn’t usually
have
bad dreams. Hell, Coburn usually
was
the bad dream.

Turn. Face her. You’re not a runner, JW. You don’t flee what scares you.
Kayla laughed.
I didn’t think anything scared you
.

But this did. This terrified him. Curdled his blood.

Didn’t matter now. The hunter was upon him.

She shrieked as she scuttled up behind him, running up the wall on her hands and knees like a spider. Coburn pivoted, spun to meet her as she leaped for him.

The child hunter slammed into his chest, claws digging deep as she shrieked, flecks of rancid spit dotting his face. The pain of her claws was vibrant, alive, an electric misery. As Coburn’s head slammed back into the water, rushing into his ears and up the back of his shirt, he saw the little girl up close: a wretched mockery of a child’s innocent face, mouth twisted into a shark’s grin, eyes the color of infection, neck elongated as if the vertebrae had multiplied.

But that’s not the face he saw.

He saw his daughter.

Blinking sweetly as she lay atop him, humming a song.

Light filtering in through gauzy curtains.

A TV going in the background. Something about Ovaltine.

A hard slash of four jagged bone-tip fingers across Coburn’s cheek—turning his face into a loose fringe—returned him to reality.

You can’t hurt her
, Kayla said.
Can you
?

He wanted to. But couldn’t. He couldn’t hurt this thing that was plainly no longer a child, that had been gutted out by the zombie disease and replaced with the virulent demon borne by the vampire blood—the girl was no longer
in there
.

But you’re still in here
, Kayla said.
And you’re becoming a real boy, Pinocchio.

Go to hell, Kayla, he thought.

Behind the hunter, the zombies that had fallen in through the manhole were starting to catch up. Crawling on all fours like an old man looking for his fallen glasses. Dragging themselves forward.

They came to feed, too. Vultures hungry for scraps.

Coburn decided to let them have a meal.

G
IL STRUGGLED WITH
all of it.

The little girl had bitten a—well, what else could it have been? A vampire. Another vampire. Even imagining a world with
two
Coburns damn near made Gil pass out. Doubly troubling was that this vampire seemed somehow connected with the lab they were seeking. What other lab could it be?

All of that didn’t add up. Separate puzzle pieces that refused to click together. Only an incomplete picture formed; other parts remained missing.

Just the same, that was bad news. Coburn was out there. So was a hunter. And a second bloodsucker. His daughter’s soul caught in the middle.

He remembered what those hunters could do. A vampire biting you was one thing, but zombies biting a vampire—that changed the equation. Things were bad enough with one hunter out there. Gil didn’t care to see another rising tide of razor maws and bone claws.

“I’m going out there,” Gil said, standing up. “Gimme my arrows back.”

Princess clung to his leg.

“Hell I will,” Aiden said.

“Kid, I will redden your backside with the back of my hand. You already deserve a good hide-tanning the way you talk to me and your so-called friends here. Now, like I said: arrows. Now.”

“Fuck off.” The boy lifted his chin toward Pete. “Shoot this turd-farmer.”

But Pete didn’t move. “I dunno, Aiden.”

“Pete!” Aiden whined.

“Just let him go.”

Aiden crossed his arms over his chest. Stuck out a pouty chin. “Why you wanna go out there, anyway? Get yourself killed by a swarm of zombos? It’s raining like crazy. You won’t see ten feet in front of you. And if I guess it right, you’re not even from this city. So why go at all?”

“Because I have a...”—he hesitated saying it, but it came out anyway—“
friend
out there. I thought he would’ve found me by now, but he hasn’t. And hearing about your friend Ellie and that... strange woman gives me no comfort. Plus, my... friend is carrying something very important to me.”

“
Fine
,” Aiden said, kicking over the belt with the crossbow bolts in the loops. “Take ’em and go, you shriveled old douche.”

Gil snatched up the belt. Hooked it around his waist.

“I wanna come,” Princess said, jumping up and down.

“We could help,” Pete said, idly popping the pistol’s safety on, off, on, off. Which made Gil increasingly nervous. “We could take you down some of the side-streets where the zombos don’t usually hang. They like to gather in the big streets and intersections more than the alleys. For some reason.” He shrugged.

“No,” Gil said. “
Hell,
no. It’s hard enough out there without me having to keep an eye on a pack of little kids.”