Double Dead (30 page)

But then they pulled into the base, and Coburn saw his opportunity. As they passed by rows of brick homes once used to house airmen, the vampire relaxed his fingers and slackened his legs and…

He hit the ground hard as the Humvee kept on going.

At that point, he knew he had maybe an hour, maybe two, before the sun came up. His skin wasn’t tingling yet; the hairs on the back of his neck hadn’t shot up like prairie dogs at the hole. These houses, people lived here. He could smell them.
Boy
, could he smell them. Booze. Coffee. Pot. The acrid cat-piss tang of methamphetamines. And… greasepaint.

Coburn didn’t know what was up with all this clown makeup. Best he figured was that the apocalypse had really done a number on people’s heads, scrambled their brains like eggs, made it seem that dressing up like Gothy ghetto clown-pimps was a fine idea, indeed.

Normally, he’d be more discerning with his food. But this wasn’t the time to play the picky gastronome, was it?

At first, he thought about just kicking down one of these doors and marching inside like he owned the place—feeding with the aggressive gusto of a man ripping the top off a package of Cheetos and shoving his whole head inside like it was some kind of gratuitous feed-bag. But last thing he needed was to draw undue attention at this wee hour of the morning, so it seemed as if a bit more
subtlety
was in order.

He found an unlocked window and slipped inside.

Found some shallow-chested shorn-skull jerkoff with purple lipstick, cerulean-blue eyeshadow and a DIY tattoo across his gut that turned his belly button into the Eye of Sauron. Jerkoff had his eyes closed and lay on a ratty mattress surrounded by empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and scented candles—if Coburn had the smell right, it was ‘mulberry.’ Pair of headphones sat snug against Jerkoff’s ears, thudding some kind of erratic bass. The house here didn’t have power, but he obviously had batteries for his MP3 player.

On the walls were posters of some white-boy rap duo that Coburn had never heard of, probably the same shit that was pumping into Jerkoff’s ears through the headphones. Appropriately, the white boys on the poster were dressed like, you guessed it, clowns.

Coburn clucked his tongue. What the hell was wrong with people?

Next to the mattress sat a sawed-off shotgun. He’d painted it green and purple, like it was something used by one of the Batman villains.

The vampire didn’t want any big booms to draw attention, so he kicked away the gun, then let his fangs slide to the fore of his mouth.

It was time to feed.

But then, her voice. Kayla’s voice. Not real, not even really her, but it came up out of his mind the same way his monster voice sometimes did—the angel on his shoulder instead of his devil, speaking in the voice of a teenage girl with a sort-of-Southern drawl.

You can’t just kill him. Take enough, leave him and go.

Shut up, he thought.

Coburn! You be nice
.

Shut up shut up shut up shut up. Not cool. Not at all cool. He wanted to kill this chump. Jerkoff was full of blood, blood he wanted in his body right now. And he deserved it! If only for that dick-brained tattoo.

Still. Something prevented him from doing the deed.

Coburn left Jerkoff and wandered around the house. The living room wasn’t much of a living room: furniture had been overturned and broken apart. The rug was scorched in places. The TV had been hollowed out and, in its center, a pair of plastic baby dolls were arranged in a lascivious 69 position.

He didn’t know what he was looking for, but roved about just the same, eyes peeled.

He went to the kitchen. Flies buzzed around a stack of empty MREs—Meals Ready to Eat, the self-heating rations of the military—and in the ceiling was stuck a bunch of silverware, as if Jerkoff lay on the floor, bored, throwing forks and knives (and probably spoons, the dumb-ass) to see if he could get them to stick in the drywall.

Nothing here, either.

Goddamnit.

And then, the bathroom.

Truth was, Coburn expected a horror-show. The rest of the house looked like a toilet, so that meant the toilet probably looked like some awful hybrid of a backstreet abortion clinic and a sewage treatment plant. But that wasn’t what it was. It was clean. Smelled a little of bleach. Jerkoff liked to be comfortable when he did his business. Handsoap. Nice towels.

And reading material.

Coburn didn’t need to look too long at it to know what it was. Soon as he caught a look of a little girl’s crying face—she couldn’t have been more than ten, this girl—the vampire figured out what Jerkoff was into.

Justification, achieved. Kayla’s voice inside went to the monster’s voice:
Destroy him. Wear his ribcage like a hat. Beat him to death with his own legs
.

Coburn didn’t do any of that. Instead, he stomped into the room, threw a hard knee onto Jerkoff’s chest, then bent down and buried his fangs into the dumb fucker’s neck like he was cradling a baby to burp. He drank, and drank, and drank some more until Jerkoff shuddered, gasped, went still, then went cold.

Then just to be sure, Coburn broke the pedophile’s neck.

With the sun coming up, he went down into the basement and slept.

And with the sun going down, he decided it was high-time to find his herd. Once more, his nose was essential—as the empurpled evening sky darkened, he found the trail of Humvee exhaust, the stink of Cecelia’s perfume, the poochy odor of Creampuff. That led him here. To the domain of King Brutha Thuglow.

Who now sat on his knees, blubbering.

“Don’t kill me, man,” Thuglow whimpered. “I’ve had a really bad day.”

“Tell me about it,” the vampire said.

“I know, right? Life sucks.”

“
No
. I mean, tell me about it or I rip your jaw off and use it like a boomerang.”

“Oh.
Oh
. Uh. These people came? Led by this old dude? And we were gettin’ along okay and shit and I was like,
welcome to my kingdom, I’d like to invite you stay and I will give you these jobs to perform
, and the old man was like,
fuck you, clown, I don’t respect the King’s laws
and next thing I know he’s breaking my goddamn bong over my fuckin’ head and shit.” Thuglow wiped a string of snot from his nose. “I thought I was being magnificent and whatever, giving them a place and a purpose.”

“Magnanimous. Not magnificent.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“So it was an old man. Let me guess: the others were a big ol’ heavyset guy, a black lady with a broken foot, a… I dunno, a trashy brat, and a teen girl who looked too skinny for her own good.”

Thuglow nodded. “That’s them, man. You got a beef with them, too?”

“Not
quite
.”

“Oh, shit. They were your peeps?”

“They are, at that. My herd, actually. That dog belongs to me, too.”

The King’s face fell. “You’re here to hurt me, then.”

“Not yet. Not if you help me.”

“Help you.”

“That’s right. I want to find them. I want your help in doing so. Then I want you to grant us safe passage through this insane tract of land you call your ‘kingdom.’ And while we’re at it, we’ll want our stuff back. Plus a little extra. Like, say, a pair of airman boots because goddamnit if I’m not tired of walking around in my bare feet.”

Thuglow’s eyes went wide. “I can do that. It’s just…”

“It’s just what.”

“I don’t know if your people are still here.”

Coburn hoisted Thuglow up under the armpits, threw him against some metal shelving. The King yelped in pain.

“Explain,” Coburn said, hunkering down and baring his fangs.

“I sent them to the motel for… processing. The old man, I sentenced to death. They were supposed to do it at sundown.”

Coburn didn’t much like Gil. They were two alpha dogs snarling and tussling over who got to control the pack. Even still, he respected the old bastard. And even more importantly, Gil was the girl’s father. Coburn still didn’t get what it was about the girl that made him think so fondly of her, but for now he didn’t have time to pick that apart.

The vampire reached for Thuglow. Planned to snap his neck. But the King cried out: “Wait! Wait. I can call. It may not be done yet. My posse… sometimes, y’know, they’re a little slow to get going. I just need my radio.”

Coburn stalked over, grabbed a two-way off a nearby card table.

He tossed it to Thuglow. “This one?”

The King nodded, then hit the radio button.

“Dope Fiend. Come in, dude. You read me? Dope Fiend. This is your King speaking.” Nothing. “Dude.
Dude
. Please please please.”

Coburn snarled.

“Hold up! Hold up. Let me try Loco.” He dialed another frequency. His voice was more panicked, now. “Loco, come in, Loco, shit, man, come on, this is Thuglow, bro. Do you read me?”

A burst of noise came out of the radio. It was Loco’s voice—Coburn recognized it from the night prior—but the words were indecipherable, what with all the machine gun fire in the background. Way Coburn heard it, he was pretty sure Loco was yelling. Or maybe ‘screaming’ was a better word for it.

Then the radio cut out.

Thuglow stared at the radio like it had just grown a dick.

“No, no, no no no,” he protested as Coburn stalked toward him, hissing, and Thuglow knew full well that whatever it was that came next, it wasn’t going to be pretty and it was likely to involve giving his hangar a new paint-job, with the
paint
being gallons of his own bodily fluids.

But then, outside:

Distant machine gun fire.

And worse, a sound that Coburn knew too well. A chorus of banshee wails—four of them threaded together, a terrible harmony born of Hell’s own misery.

They were here. The super-zombies. The uber-rotters. The four hunters.

“What the fuck was that?” Thuglow said.

“New plan,” Coburn snarled, heading over to unmuzzle and unleash Creampuff from the corner. “Got a vehicle around here?”

“
What the fuck was that
?” Thuglow asked again. Coburn smacked him.

“Vehicle! Moron! Do. You. Have. One?”

“Uh, a, a, a golf cart. Behind the hangar.”

Coburn grabbed Thuglow by the neck, forced him to stand. “Good. Hope you got the keys handy, because we need to take a ride.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Satan’s Carousel

Brickert stood atop the pick-up cab, legs apart, shoulders back, the binoculars up against his eyes. It was hard to make out what was going on down there, but he damn sure knew it wasn’t good. The bright flashes and staccato pops of machine gun fire. The screams of men dying. The
whumpf
of a grenade going off. And the howls of something terrible, something that to Benjamin sounded altogether
ancient
.

Someone lit a flare, god only knew why. It lit up the sky bright red, red the color of blood, red the color of Hell’s fire. And in that light Brickert saw the mass of bodies: a veritable tide of zombies. Hundreds of them. Now swarming an overturned Humvee the way army ants carpeted their prey, mandibles clicking and dissecting with unerring precision.

Shonda popped her head out of the cab. “Doesn’t look good from down here, Ben. It look any better up there?”

“No,” he said, sucking air between his teeth. “It does not.”

“The 66 States are lost,” she said. “Just wasn’t us that took ’em.”

He said nothing.

She made it even clearer: “We need to turn around. Head back.”

“No.” That word, heavy as a lead weight. “Altus AFB has weapons, but that’s not what makes them special. They hosted operations. Airlifting, but even more importantly, refueling. They’ve got jet fuel. And I want it.”

“Ben—”

“The zombies make our job harder in one way, but easier, too. Thuglow and his paint-faced mutants will be occupied by this threat and they won’t even see us coming. We must view this as an opportunity. For now, we go around the threat. Head southwest, then cut in hard to the east.”

Shonda said no more. No reason to. He’d laid down the word and the law and that was that. Sure, some folks wore those WWJD bracelets, but someone like Shonda had to be worried more about WWBD: What Would Ben Do?

He hopped back down off the top of the pick-up and went back to mounting the gun in the truck bed. He whistled, and the convoy began to move.

Gil felt a tight knot in his gut like a bundle of snakes. They should’ve been long gone by now. Once he shot Dope Fiend and took his keys, it seemed like an easy course to chart: free the others, find a vehicle, and high-tail it the hell away from what seemed to be the center of that lunatic Thuglow’s self-described kingdom. Kayla had hugged him and cried, and Cecelia came up and gave him a kiss on his busted-up bruised-as-hell cheek, and everybody was laughing and crying and feeling like they got a reprieve. Danny had shaken his hand but then gravitated right to Kayla, and that made her happy—which, to his surprise, made Gil happy, too.