Double Dead (10 page)

“Sorry,
sorry
,” Ebbie said, wincing.

Coburn peered out the back window of the RV, moving aside dusty, moth-eaten curtains. At first, all he saw in the darkness were the throngs of shifting, stumbling dead—moving in to fill the vehicle’s wake like a swarm of ants. But then, there it was: a flash of pink, a body moving faster than the others, moving with greater purpose and direction.

It was her. The
hausfrau
. The pink bathrobe. From before.

Except she had… changed.

Her neck was elongated. Her limbs, too—and now her arms dead-ended in something that looked altogether less
human
, more
animal
. In the moonlight he could see a mouthful of curved, needle teeth. Fangs.

Kayla snuck up beside him, looking ashen.

“We’re not supposed to hit the zombies with the ’Bago,” she said, explaining what her father was going on about. “Did that one time and one got caught in the back wheel well. Grinded him up good. Screwed up the tire, and we were out of commission for a couple days. Now we have a policy: no rotter roadkill.”

Coburn smelled the stink coming off her shoulder. Above the collarbone her shirt was stained red. Had none of the others seen yet? Gil was up there leaning out the window, taking shots with the rifle. Ebbie was driving. Leelee sat up in the passenger seat. And Cecelia, well, she was hunkered down crying at the piss-poor piece of laminated particle-board that passed for the dining room table.

“You got bit,” he said. He wondered then what he was feeling. Not sadness. He wasn’t even sure if he was capable of grief anymore. And yet something nagged at him—some dark, unseen tentacle tickling at his dead heart. Was this guilt? Seriously? Now, of all times? Couldn’t be.

She shrugged, swooning. Her eyes unfocused for a moment. “I think so.” Was this it for her? Was the bacteria racing through her veins, killing off the good tissue in order to animate the dead stuff?

“That, uhh, fucking sucks,” he said, and the words felt stupid coming out of his mouth. Empathy was not his strong suit.

“What are you looking at?”

What did it matter? He moved aside, let her see.

Kayla looked out there and she started to say something, but didn’t finish. Instead she remained staring out that back window, mouth forming a fearful ‘oh.’ Finally she looked at the vampire, wide-eyed, and said, “It’s gaining on us.”

Coburn shouldered the girl aside and took another look.

He wished he hadn’t.

She hit the back of the RV like a bull—soon as Coburn looked, there came the
hausfrau
, hurtling bodily through the air, arms and talons outstretched. And now she’d clamped onto the back of the vehicle, her face at the window. Needled teeth gnashing. Blood-filled eyes wide and without pupils.

Gil ducked back inside the vehicle. “What the hell was that?”

A hard butt of her head cracked the back glass.

Coburn imagined what would happen if she came in here—she wasn’t like the others. Soon as that freak of nature tore her way into this giant tin can, it’d be like a tiger let loose inside a daycare center. She’d tear these idiots to pieces. And if that happened, where did that leave him? Kayla’s description of the relationship between cattle and shepherd was apt, was it not? Coyote comes sniffing around the herd, you shoot that motherfucker before he gets a taste for hamburger.

The vampire pushed past Gil, but snatched the rifle out of his hands.

“Hey!” Gil protested, but it was too late.

The back window shattered inward. The beast pushed in up to her shoulders, her one arm inside, swiping at air—the claws left ragged marks across the paneled RV interior. But by this time Coburn had already crawled outside through the busted door (which now banged against the side of the vehicle), the rifle slung over his shoulder.

The air was cold. The RV shot down a dark back road lined with needles of blue pine. Coburn swung himself to the top of the vehicle and jacked a shell into the .30-30.

Sure enough, she’d pushed half her body in through the back window—frankly, the only reason the beast probably couldn’t get her whole ass through that space was because the pink bathrobe was plush (if filthy), and bunched up around her waist. Coburn took aim and fired.

Her back left foot came off easy as shooting a tin can off a fence. The bone splintered and the dead corpse-foot—the toes now topped with hook-like owl talons—spiraled off into darkness, thudding against the asphalt.

The vampire stomped on the RV roof. Just to let her know who it was that just blew her goddamn foot off.

It got her attention.

She shimmied backwards out of the hole just as a shotgun blast took a hunk out of her shoulder, leaving a gaping hole of ragged meat. The beast didn’t seem to care—she hung there at the back window, staring up at Coburn with those gummy red eyes, shrieking like some kind of hell-bat.

Coburn brought the rifle to his shoulder to take aim—but by the time he had cocked the lever and put another shell in the chamber, she leapt.

She moved fast. Faster than anybody that he had ever seen—except for himself, and the one who made him.

Before he knew what hit him, she already had him on his back. Only thing separating the two of them was the rifle. It didn’t last long; she broke it in half, Coburn’s hands now holding one useless rifle part each.

The beast lifted her head back.

Her mouth opened, curved teeth gleaming wet with saliva, tongue lashing, spraying a froth of curdled pus.

She bit down on his chest. Those teeth tore clean through the leather. He felt her tongue—rough like the wrong end of a cheese grater—stick deep into the wound.
The bitch is drinking my blood
, he thought.

Then he realized: in his hands, a broken gun. Metal. Wood. Not the original weapon, but still a weapon.

He brought each up against her head in turn, pushing blood to his limbs,
urging
them to beat her with as much strength as he could muster. The stock clubbed her in the ear. The barrel bludgeoned her in the back of the head. It was just enough to get her to pull her head away from the bite—it should’ve popped her head like a tick but mostly just served to piss her off.

She howled in rage.

And when she did, Coburn tucked his feet up and planted his boots on her chest. Then he kicked as hard as was humanly—or, rather,
inhumanly
—possible.

The bitch-beast launched off the side of the RV, disappearing into the pine trees with a crash and crackle of breaking branches.

Groaning, Coburn stood on wobbly legs and pitched the broken rifle parts into the darkness. He looked ahead and saw that the road was dark and empty. Then he tucked his legs back in through the side window and slid back into the vehicle with the rest of the fresh meat.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sharing and Caring

The one-footed
hausfrau
crawled free from the forest, with ragged vents like rotting gills torn in her flesh by the tree. Awareness bloomed inside of her. She could smell her prey fading fast, but the scent lingered like a thread of sweet perfume, sweet as befouled meat, sweet as fresh blood and dead flesh and cloying corpse-breath.

Inside, a pair of new—or, rather, old—emotions rose, two snakes twining around one another. In her mind’s eye she pictured the face of the one whose blood she took, and she was filled with a warm flush. She wanted him near her. She wanted his blood in her mouth. She wanted to hold him as mother and lover, her foul tongue in his ear, her wretched claws stroking his cheek.

And then she wanted to tear his ear off. And rip the skin free from his face. And crack his skull like a clam on a rock and eat what waited within.

She loved him so.

And she hated him dearly.

The blood inside her now was warm and empowering. The
hausfrau
rolled on her back, her mouth opening so wide that the jaw crackled and crunched. She looked down at her leg which now dead-ended in a putrid stump, bone shards jutting from the ruined meat like pins from a pincushion. It was then that instinct took hold, and she wished dearly for the foot to come back—within her, the blood began to stir, began to
move
, a slow and sluggish parade that felt like a hot rush through her body’s tangled channels.

The bone shards twitched. The meat around them swelled, then retreated.

With a sharp twist of pain, the bones shifted suddenly, clacking together—and, before her eyes, they began to merge: osseous crystals growing like coral until becoming one. Around the knitting bone, clumps of flesh rolled and stretched. Blisters rose and popped. Pus spattered against asphalt.

It wasn’t long before she could wiggle her new toes.

Toes that dead-ended in curved talons. Talons that would help her run, climb, and rend meat from bone.

The
hausfrau
stood, feeling the warm blood oozing around inside her body. She still had some left.

Around her, the moans of the lost and dispirited dead. Her rotting compatriots, each without the responsiveness and understanding she had recently come to know. They milled around, attracted by the commotion of the now-past RV, but uncertain what it even meant—they were operating on the simplest of urges, like moths drawn by flame.

The blood inside her demanded to be free.

One of the zombies stood near her, looking down at her with only the barest glimmer of curiosity—the park ranger outfit with the soaked-through nametag hung loose in some parts, where the flesh had retracted, and fit tight in others where the body had bloated with the gases of decay. Half his face seemed utterly unresponsive, disconnected from the other side.

She chose him.

The
hausfrau
moved fast. Her claws wrapped around the back of his head, twisting it hard toward her. She shoved him to the ground and as he moaned, she felt a squirming clot of blood come up out of her own throat and belch forth—a black slurry poured into his open mouth. Just to make sure, she held his unstable jaw open with her hand.

Later, when he stood up, his eyes flush with red, his tongue tasting the air, he looked at the gathered throng of undead.

He was no longer one of them. He was apart from them. He was
above
them.

Like her.

She had no more to give; if she did, she would’ve given it to others. But that was okay. She wasn’t alone now. And her prey was still out there, and the blood was inside him.

Together, the two creatures moved to hunt.

Coburn swung back inside the vehicle, and found himself face-to-face with the wide-mouth barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun. Gil’s face was tight with rage and his finger hovered right over the trigger.

“My daughter,” he said, voice shaking. “She got bit.”

The vampire craned his neck, felt the flesh and bone at his shoulder begin to knit—he moved to scratch it because
good goddamn
it always itched so bad whenever he had to heal up, but when he went to move his hand, the shotgun barrel pressed tight against his face. Almost up his nose, actually.

“Just notice that, did you?” he asked Gil.

“Did you do it?”

“Did I do what? Bite her? Ugh. No. I can smell whatever disease she has, and let me tell you, that does not make her all that appetizing.”

Gil’s jaw tightened. Tears burned hot at the edges of his eyes. Coburn tried to imagine what the man was feeling now—the certainty that his daughter was infected, that she was going to die, that all of life was hopeless. He thought for a moment about staring deep into the man’s eyes and twisting the knobs and pulling the levers behind the old man’s gaze, forcing him to fight against himself as he tilted the shotgun back, back, back… until the barrel rested under his own chin.

But something stopped him. Again, a little nagging pang, a
nibble
of perhaps not guilt but rather, the memory of guilt.

It was really fucking irritating, that feeling.

“You sonofabitch,” Gil said. From down near his feet, the terrier growled, teeth bared.

“The dog’s right, Gil. You’re mad at me, but why? She became zombie chow,” Coburn said. “Not my fault,
Dad
. Where the hell were you when some undead fuckwipe thought she looked like a tasty treat?”

Behind Gil, the nurse—Leelee, was it? What kind of name was that?—tended to the girl, who lay across a cock-eyed pull-out couch. Kayla didn’t look good. Sweat beaded on her brow. Her eyes rolled around in the sockets.

“I’m fine,” Kayla said, though it was clear how wrong she was.

“Shh,” Leelee said, wiping a damp sponge across the girl’s brow.

“This is all
your
fault,” Gil hissed at the vampire. “It was talking about you that made her run off half-cocked in the first place.”

“Sure,” Coburn said. “Let’s blame the blood-sucking monster.” He paused, shrugged. “Well, okay, a lot of the time that’s actually a good idea. This time, not so much, old man.”

Cecelia came up behind Gil, once again became the devil on his shoulder, her wild-eyed hateful face staring stakes right through the vampire’s heart.