Double Dead (19 page)

That, in retrospect, seemed strange.

Teeth clamped down on her tongue. She screamed. The fangs sank deep. Blood filled her mouth—but then was vacuumed away, sucked into the carcass cradled at her bosom. The corpse made hungry, happy noises.

This, then, was how the vampire imagined it:

What lurked before him was a massive puffed pastry, its pillowy dough filled with a salty-sweet umami karate kick from its unctuous blood filling. He was like a little boy and this meal awaiting him was like a bean bag chair—no! Something even bigger, like a moon bounce full of coppery icing, like a piñata one could shatter and live within.

He was going to eat his way through.

And that was precisely what he did. He had no arms, so he chewed like a worm boring to the heart of an apple. First, her tongue—then, his head stuffed into her bulging cheeks, he drank deeper, chewing downward until he felt her ragged face-flesh flapping at his shoulders. Her screams long-dead, Coburn wormed his way into what must’ve looked like some kind of bizarre reverse birth—

What remained of his body disappeared within her hulking flesh.

She was still alive, of course, flailing about—but where could she go? Her legs had long atrophied beneath her.

It was hard to say when she died.

And it was hard to determine how long it took him to feed—and feed,
and feed
some more. For a while, all was quiet. Her booming canned ham of a heart eventually shuddered one last shudder and then gave out like an old motor.

In the distance, gunshots. Zombie moans. Cannibal screams.

Ambrosia’s stomach—hidden beneath a ‘shirt’ made from diaphanous bedsheets—rippled. Like water disturbed by fish feeding beneath.

Then, another ripple—this one, stronger. The flesh tented.

Finally, a bone erupted. A sharpened rib, actually, broken from within.

It was enough of a hole. Coburn stuck his fingers in the fleshy tear, got his hands around the skin, then tore it open.

He emerged, the reverse birth itself reversed, emptying out of her midsection like the contents of a shark’s stomach after having its belly cut open.

Coburn slid down off the dais, naked as the day he was born. He had new legs. Fresh flesh. Real arms.

Everything was back.

He sat up, and saw Grandpaw sitting there in his chair, a shotgun across his lap. The old man’s hands shook as he looked beyond the vampire to the woman, a mound of flesh who in places looked less like a human and more like a microwave-exploded hot dog.

“Ambrosia,” the old man said, his voice a hoarse whimper.

Then he turned his gaze, now hateful, toward Coburn.

“You,” the old man hissed.

“Me,” Coburn said, grinning, his teeth slick with blood. Hell,
all
of him slick with blood.

“It’s not possible. You aren’t human.”

“Nope.”

“You’ll pay for this.”

Coburn laughed. “Fuck you, you old man-eater.”

The old man thought he had the drop again. Thought he was
fast
. He grabbed for the shotgun but his hands found nothing. Coburn stood, leaving the man weeping. Somewhere toward the front of the store, Coburn heard the windows shattering, boards splintering. Bodies tumbled inside like so many sacks of dirt. He couldn’t see them yet—too many aisles, too much store between them—but they’d be here soon enough.

“They’re coming for you, Grandpaw.”

“Go to Hell.”

“Not today.”

And then, for giggles, Coburn swung the shotgun like a hard-slicing golf club into the side of the wheelchair. The wheel dented in hard, giving the chair a mean front lean. The old man tried to wheel away, but now couldn’t.

Coburn chuckled, then wandered off in search of some clothes.

Wyatt sat huddled up against a display case that once must’ve held fishing rods or pen-knives or something. He had a pistol held in a prayer grip, his hands shaking as the moans of the dead come ever closer.

And then suddenly, all went topsy-turvy. He felt himself lifted up across the counter, hard and heavy hands wrestling with him as the leather jacket he’d stolen from the vampire was pulled over his head. All was dark until it wasn’t. And when once more he could see, he found himself deposited onto his butt-bone.

Standing there, on legs he shouldn’t have, was the vampire.

Naked and unabashed.

He shook the jacket at Wyatt.

“This is mine, you goddamn yokel.”

“The zombies—” Wyatt started to say.

But then the vampire kicked in his kneecap. Pain exploded up and down his leg.

“Enjoy being one of ’em,” the vampire said, slipping on the jacket. Coburn wandered off, whistling.

The moon rose above the Wal-Mart, bandied in rheumy clouds. Coburn wrestled with Cookie’s torn-up jeans, since the ‘chef’ had about the same build as him. The vampire had figured he’d have to fight for them, but found instead that Cookie had taken his own life: a small two-shot derringer under the chin. Bullet never exited. Probably just ricocheted around up there like one of those motorcyclists riding in the circle cages at the circus. Scrambled brains so he’d never turn into one of the hungry undead.

The others, the sentries, well. Those assholes, he had to kill. Four of them, their bodies laying draped across sandbags and the AC unit. He didn’t bother taking a nibble from any of them: Ambrosia’s blood had filled him to the brim. Every time he took a step he expected to hear a spongy
squish squish squish
.

As Coburn was tugging on Cookie’s jeans (not the underpants—he didn’t want that man’s soiled boxers, and decided instead to go commando), he looked over and saw the trio of dog kennels.

The Charlie Manson wannabe was dead. All-day-dead. Burned up probably when Coburn ignited the explosion with the AR-15.

But the teen boy remained alive. Hunkered in the back of his cage, eyes as big as the moon above.

“I must be getting soft,” Coburn said as he plodded over in bare feet (Cookie’s shoes were too damn small) and twisted the lock off the cage.

Then he went to each of the sentries, looking for something to put on his feet. Nothing. Nada. Boots too big. Sneakers too small.

He missed his Fluevogs. They had to be around somewhere.

But already the store was flooded with the hungry dead. Shit, though, those boots were worth it, weren’t they?

An answer came howling across the parking lot. Somewhere—not close, but not too far—came the banshee’s wail of that bitch in the pink bathrobe. The one who had tasted Coburn’s blood. With it came a second howl: not hers, but the keening of another.
Two of them
?

The boots weren’t worth it.

He had to get the fuck out of here. Fast. But how? He looked out across the parking lot: more and more rotters staggered out of the darkness, heading toward what was now the center of their universe: the Wal-Mart. Could he just jump it? Take a long run and leap and hope he landed strong and could clear the horde?

Then, from behind him: a snapping of fingers. Coburn turned to see the teen boy waving him over. The kid pointed to a ladder down.

Coburn walked over, sneering. “Don’t snap at me, kid. I’m not your kept monkey.”

The boy gestured again toward the ladder.

“Use your words.”

The kid just stared.

“Let me guess, Ginger. You can’t talk.”

The boy shrugged.

“Fine. Talking’s overrated anyway. What is it you want to show me?”

Just then, another pair of howls. Closer, this time.

Coburn felt the hot blood in his dead body go suddenly cold. He peered over the edge of the Wal-Mart roof, saw that the ladder led to a concrete pad. A ratty looking lime green dirt-bike sat down there.

“Sorry, Ginger, I don’t drive.”

The boy mimed riding a bike. Or, in this case, driving a dirt bike.

“
You
can drive it?” Coburn asked.

The kid nodded.

Coburn looked out over the sea of rotters.

Before he slid down the ladder, he looked to the kid and poked him in the chest, hard. “If you crash us, Ginger, I’m going to eat your heart.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Abandonment Issues

This, to Grandpaw, was a fact: zombies were fucking stupid. Dumber than the average possum because, hell, even a possum knew he had to go scare up his own food. Rotters were like water, just moving to fill in the gaps. Sure, they had basic
responses
down—big noise or bright flash meant ‘stagger on over in the hopes of catching a meal’—but beyond that, the living dead didn’t possess the capability of higher thought. It was why the moat worked. Mostly.

Grandpaw once heard a story about a town out West, Colorado somewhere, where they kept a headless chicken alive for a year and a half. Was in all the record books. Story was that the chicken killer’s cleaver missed a reasonable nub of the brain-stem (like the tip of a man’s pinky), taking the head but not that critical bundle of nerves. It was enough to keep the chicken running around, scratching the dirt, being a dummy. The chicken’s keepers fed the bird with an eyedropper, squeezing nutrients into the chicken’s neck stump.

That, then, was how Grandpaw thought of zombies: each one a headless chicken, only thing remaining being that final bundle of nerves that just wouldn’t quit. It was why he knew that he was going to make it through this alive.

Because he was hiding in the men’s restroom.

Grandpaw had abandoned the destroyed wheelchair and dragged his way to the bathroom—while his legs were for shit, he’d used the wheelchair long enough to build up some pretty good arm muscles over the years.

The others here at the Wal-Mart were all dead. Ambrosia—well, Martha—was gone, that sweet girl. Sure, she was a megalomaniacal brat who weighed as much as a subcompact car, but she was
his
megalomaniacal brat. His granddaughter couldn’t have lasted long in this world, anyway. If the zombies didn’t get her, her heart would’ve given out. If her heart didn’t give out, eventually the cannibals she
trained
to eat human meat would’ve gone through a dry spell and realized, oh hey, that chick is made of enough meat to keep us fed for weeks. And they would’ve killed her and cooked her up and tanned blankets from her skin.

Grandpaw, though, he was a survivor. Survived Viet Nam. Survived a car accident in the late ’eighties. Survived a bout of prostate cancer that hit him hard at the turn of the millennium. And he survived into the end of the world when the dead began to get up and shuffle around like a bunch of mule-kicked ninnies. Hell, he survived whatever the hell it was that ate its way out of Ambrosia’s body—that man was no man. Couldn’t be killed. Like something out of a movie. Maybe he was some kind of robot? Grandpaw didn’t know, didn’t care.

All he knew was, he survived all that, and he’d survive here, too. In this bathroom. The door was locked. The stall was locked. He had a little bundle of jerky—strips of ‘long pork’ dried and braided. The zombies would come. They’d clean the place out. And then they’d move on, like locusts. That was when Grandpaw would emerge.

Eventually, the door to the bathroom rattled on its hinges. That was them. The rotters. Just testing things out. They’d do this, then move on. He wondered, did their disease-eaten brains contain the barest ghost of a memory? Like, they realized somewhere,
this is a door
, but they couldn’t remember exactly how to work the damn thing?

But then came a sound that wasn’t right, wasn’t right at all.

Sounded like—well, not a wolf howling. Not really. Maybe if you took a woman’s scream and merged it with a wolf’s howl, that might’ve been almost right, but it would be missing a certain
shrieking-bat-out-of-Hell
factor.

Grandpaw’s bowels turned to ice water.

Then: other noises.

The moans of the dead. And the sounds of a scuffle. Not just a scuffle, but a knock-down-drag-out fight. Sounded like whole shelves were being toppled. Then came another one of those pterodactyl hell-shrieks. Closer. Just outside the door.

As if on cue, the restroom door was ripped from its hinges. Grandpaw didn’t see it—he was, after all, hidden in one of the stalls—but he knew what he heard.

Then: footsteps. Wet. Hard toenails clicking on tile.

Two sets of feet—foul, filthy, the flesh cracked and blistered—appeared outside the stall. Grandpaw couldn’t get a real good look since it was dark in here, but he knew this wasn’t right, wasn’t right at all. First the one man ripped his big fat granddaughter in half and now a pair of rotters found him locked away in the men’s shitter?

The last cogent thought that went through Grandpaw’s head was:
the world is home to more monsters than I imagined
. Then the stall door shoved inward off its hinges, crushing his head. His last sensation was being dragged outside. He was pretty sure he saw a flash of pink fabric, which didn’t make much sense at all.