Double Dead (12 page)

“Cancer,” she said. “Multiple myeloma.”

“Multiple what? C’mon, I’m not a doctor. Explain.”

Kayla sighed. “I have tumors inside my bones. In the bone marrow, actually. Makes it hard for my body to make new blood cells, I guess, which in turn makes me anemic, which
in turn
makes sure I get sick a lot. Colds, flus, whatever. Sometimes my hands and feet go numb. My back hurts a lot. It hurts in my actual bones, which, I gotta say, really freakin’ hurts. It’s like the way a cold wind makes a winter day a lot worse. Let’s see. What else? My kidneys might fail. My bones break easily. It’s a lot of fun.”

“Sounds like it’s the tits.” He took another inhale—the miasma of death hung about her like a perfume. “So, how long you have?”

“I’m living on borrowed time. They figured I wouldn’t make it long, six months, maybe a year. It’s been three years now.”

“So is that why everyone thought you were special? Because you’re the little cancer girl who wouldn’t die?”

She hesitated. “Not exactly.”

“So what is it?”

Kayla stayed quiet.

“Listen,” he said matter-of-factly, “I can make you tell me same way I made your Daddy stick that shotgun up under his chin. I’d much rather you tell me of your own free will because, frankly, I’m lazy.”

“It’s my blood.”

“Your blood.”

“It’s…”

“Go on, goddamnit. Spill.”

“It heals people. Well. Not of like, regular diseases or injuries or anything. But, like, it stops those bit by the zombies from turning.”

“So why’d everybody act all surprised that you healed up before?”

“Because I never got bit before now. So I guess they didn’t know. Guess they thought the miracle girl just got un-miracled.”

He cocked an eyebrow and smirked. “Uh-huh. Sure. And how’d you figure all this out? Bunch of half-zombies were sitting around, sipping on glasses of Kayla-juice for breakfast?”

“I… gave Leelee a little of my blood.”

“You just gave it to her?”

Kayla stared off at a distant point as if the wood paneling were a wide open sky. “She got bit about a year back. On the hand. We were in the grocery store salvaging some canned goods and the store was closed up pretty good so we didn’t think any had gotten in there. But one came up out of a busted freezer case like it was his coffin and, well. He got her.

“Later that night she was sleeping and we were all saying our final words and I had this vision of myself pricking my finger with the belt punch in my Swiss Army Knife, and putting my bloody finger in her mouth so she could nurse on it the way a baby sucks at a nipple and… next thing I knew, I was really doing it. Everyone looked at me like I’d lost my mind and I thought maybe I really had. Daddy pulled me away and wouldn’t even talk to me. But by the next morning, Leelee’s fever had broke. The bite mark on her hand didn’t heal, but it never became infected. And she never changed.”

“Huh,” Coburn said. “That’s pretty fucking weird.”

“Shut up! You’re a vampire.”

“I know. And that’s how I know it’s weird, because I’m a vampire. Saying that this is weird.” He shrugged. “Well. More things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, blah blah blah.”

“Okay. I guess. Whatever.” She didn’t look happy. In fact, she looked downright uncomfortable.

“Ain’t this some fascinating shit? I mean, here you are, a girl who should by all rights be in the ground, talking to a dude who should similarly be six feet under somewhere. And yet we keep on living. So to speak.” Each, he thought, with our own special blood disease. Good times.

“I should go.”

“Uh-huh. Before you go, I got a job for you. Your first official task as
Liaison For The Wolf, To The Sheep
.”

“What’s that?”

“Tell your Pop, I’m not sleeping here during the day. Tell him I don’t trust him well enough. You guys can drop me off before sun-up somewhere I can catch my Z’s, and then before night falls, just park the RV and I’ll catch up.”

“We can get pretty far during the day.”

He winked. “So can I, pretty little cancer princess.” As she stood to leave, he grabbed her arm. She winced—even that caused her some pain. “One more thing. Tomorrow night, when I catch up? I’ll want to feed.” The bitch in the pink robe took a lot out of him. “So, you better find me some food, otherwise I might take it out of the fat man again. Or maybe your Dad’s bratty ho-bag. Oh! And I’m going to leave Creampuff with you. He better be well-fed. If ever I see him starting to look extra-scrawny, I’ll break your Daddy’s neck.”

Kayla could not hide her horror.

“Toodles,” he said, waggling his fingers at her.

This might actually work out
, he thought.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Pretty Little Girlies

A thunderous drum of horse’s hooves, the world trembling under their trampling gallop, cups rattling in the cabinets, tickets burning hot in his pocket, plates clattering together louder and louder until—

Whack
.

Kayla slapped him awake.

“Wake up, dummy,” she said.

Coburn blinked, tried to catch her hand before she slapped him again, but somehow his coordination wasn’t working—her open palm connected again and left him reeling. In his nose: the smell of sour booze. Like Southern Comfort. Mixed with bad bile.

Two hazy frames of vision merged together until they formed a single picture, and there he saw Kayla standing over him—he was, after all, laying across a kitchen table—and she had her hair pulled behind her in a pony tail and sported a dress as blue as a robin’s egg, as blue as—

—
corpse-flesh
—

He shook his head and stood up off the table.

“We’re late,” she said.

“Let me guess, for a very important date.” It occurred to him then that it was his mouth that tasted like sweet liquor and bile. Jesus Christ on an ice cream cake, was he hungry. He staggered past the girl and went to the kitchen—appliances all in avocado green or mustard yellow (
harvest gold
, they called it, wasn’t that right?) and he threw open the fridge to see if there was any blood in there and there wasn’t—it was empty but for a pair of roaches wrestling with one another over a crusted marble of old food, food that looked like a dung ball.

“Hey,
vampire
,” Kayla said again, this time louder, meaner. “Those roaches are fighting over you, you dumb piece of crap, you dried-up nugget of somebody else’s shit. Look at me when I’m talking to you—”

Coburn did look, and he wished he hadn’t.

Blood trickled from her eyes and from her nose, and when she opened her mouth to speak once more, all that came out was a bubbling slurry of blood and—bits of lung? Swatches of esophageal tissue? The mess poured down the front of her dress, and he felt around on the countertop to find a towel but nothing was there and he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, and then a handful of words came bubbling up through that black blood:

“You couldn’t protect me,” she said, each word framed by a muddy burp of gore, and then he saw her: Kayla standing in the kitchen doorway
behind
herself, two Kaylas, one with the pony tail and the bloody dress and the other girl with the dirty white t-shirt and torn-up jeans from the RV.

That Kayla, the
second
Kayla, looked over at her blood-drooling doppelganger and then met Coburn’s eyes and asked:

“What’s happening? What does this mean?”

And then again with the rumbling, the vibrating, the thunderous tumble of horse hooves, a stampede, the cabinet doors juddering against the wood, a glass tumbling out and shattering, a hard and sudden crack across the windowpane looking out over a gravel driveway—

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Wakey Wakey, Blood and Bakey

A shotgun barrel prodded him in the shoulder.

“Sun’s down,” came a voice. Gil’s voice. “That means you get up.”

Coburn cocked one eye, didn’t see any sunlight coming in anywhere. Not that it mattered: when night came, he knew it in his blood. With the advent of day, he felt sluggish, his limbs going stiff like the start of rigor mortis, almost like he was more than half-dead. But at night, his body came alive—well, so to speak—once more.

He sat up on the toilet. They’d dropped him off at a rest stop come morning, then gone to park the RV somewhere. Didn’t see any of the moaning dead out and about, which made sense seeing as how they were between towns and most of what was out here on the turnpike was just trees and asphalt. What was it that people said? Pennsylvania: Philadelphia on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, and nothing but backwoods-nowhere-Kentucky in between. Pennsyltucky.

Sleeping in a rest-stop bathroom—curled up in the stall like a dead bug—was not his ideal configuration, and part of him wished he’d just sucked it up and stayed in the RV. But now, with the shotgun barrel once more pointed in his general direction, he remembered why he hadn’t.

“I’m up,” he said, winking, licking a fang.

“Mm-hnn,” Gil said. The shotgun didn’t swerve.

“We gonna do this again? Really? Third time’s the charm?”

Gil snorted, pulled the gun away, and then headed outside into the rain. Coburn followed and, sure enough, the air was crisp—wet and sharp like a cold bite into a raw apple, with rain speckling his face and loops of fog drifting close to the highway puddles.

The old man didn’t say a word as he stepped inside the RV. Coburn followed after, and soon as he set foot inside, the rat terrier came over and fell in line behind him like a good little soldier.

“Creampuff,” Coburn said, greeting the dog.

The dog didn’t pant or smile or do any of that doofy cute dog bullshit, but instead just looked up at him with fond, glassy eyes. This dumb little idiot had no idea that, if Coburn got even a
wee bit peckish
, he’d break him open like a bone and suck the marrow out. Least, that was what the vampire told himself as he scooped up the dog in his arms.

“I’m surprised,” Coburn said. “Didn’t expect you to actually come pick me up. I figured on the first night you’d make a run for it, and I’d have to come find you. Glad you didn’t. Shit, that would’ve been tedious.”

Gil set the shotgun down. “Kayla made clear the consequences last night.” He nodded toward the front of the vehicle. “I’m driving first stretch. Ebbie’s going to tell you the plan.”

“The plan?”

“You said you were hungry.”

Coburn smiled. “I’m always hungry.”

“Girls are still asleep. Kayla in the back bunk, Cecelia in the master. Leelee’s awake and with me up in the front.”

Ebbie sat down on the couch. It didn’t sag or bow, because it already looked like it had a space for him—a concave dip that fit his body in various configurations. Coburn eyed him up.

“Let me guess. This is where you sleep?”

“How’d you guess?”

“I have psychic powers,” Coburn lied.

Ebbie gazed at him in awe. His lips held an ill-contained smile. “Psychic powers! Wow. Just, wow. That must be amazing. Being what you are and all.”

“It
is
incredibly amazing,” he acknowledged, half-telling the truth, half peppering it with what he felt was his trademark sardonicism. “I am the luckiest boy in all of Mayberry. Fuck, fat man, it’s like a twenty-four-hour party for me. Well,
twelve-
hour party, I guess, seeing as how half the time I’d get burned to a greasy patch of ash if I hung out in the daylight. At least, that’s what I figure would happen. Not like I’ve ever gone through with it.”

“You don’t know what would happen? For real?”

“For real, Abner. By the way, I’m not calling you ‘Ebbie,’ because Ebbie sounds like a made-up name. It’s a name you’d give to a guinea pig or the name a child would have for his retarded grandmother.” He made a cranky baby voice: “Ebbie! Juice cup! Ebbie!” For added effect, he waggled his arms like the uncoordinated grabby-hands of a needy toddler.

Ebbie smiled. “It’s actually what my baby brother called me when he was, well, a baby.” The smile faded fast, though. His gaze turned down into his lap and Coburn knew that look: he had exploited his victims’ grief many a time. It wasn’t hard to follow the trail of tears: here was Ebbie and here was
not
a baby brother. Which meant that kid was probably an
amuse-bouche
for some zombie fuckwit out there. The fat man’s eyes slowly refocused and the smile returned, though now it was strained, forced, not really real. “Don’t you people gather in clans or families or something like that?”

“‘
You people
?’”

“Vampires. You know. Haemophages.”

“Haemo-who now?”

“Well, I just figured that would be the, ahh, scientific name for what you are?
Haemo
, for blood, and
phage
, for eat. Blood-eater.”

Coburn frowned. “No, you can just call me ‘vampire.’ Or, ‘hey, asshole.’ And no, we do not gather in…
clans
or tribes or some shit. In fact, there’s no
we
at all. It’s just
me
.”