Double Dead (32 page)

The Sons of Man? Kayla was about to ask, but Coburn must’ve seen the look on her face: “I have no goddamn idea. They just showed up like a bunch of cowboys, shooting the place up. No time to worry about it. We got a helicopter ride waiting for us. Down by the hangar, Thuglow is fueling it up as we—”

A second shadow dropped down from the window, dangling there—Kayla saw a flash of pink as the hunter snatched up the vampire and drew him back up through the skylight. And just like
that
, he was gone.

The Bitch Beast slammed Coburn down on the mess hall roof, his body denting the aluminum. Above her, heat lightning flashed purple between clouds, and Coburn saw the horror of what she had become. The hunter—or huntress, as if sex mattered at this point—had changed since last he saw her up close. Flesh vented with ragged tears, eyes bulging and red with blood, layers of teeth like little needles bristling in her distended jaw. Everything was stretched, torn, toughened. She pinned him with claws, opening her mouth and ululating with a pair of serpent’s tongues that seemed to battle for supremacy.

Below, Coburn heard a
pop
as a rifle went off—the bullet came up through his chest and into hers. It hurt him. It annoyed her. Even still, it was enough of a distraction for her to loosen her grip on him, and quick as he could manage he rolled over on his belly and looked down through the skylight.

Gil stood below, smoking rifle in his hand. Coburn grunted, waved them on—“Go, go, go! Back to the hangar! To the helipad!”—just before the Bitch Beast dragged him back by the ankles, lifting him up in the air, and slammed him back down onto the roof. The whole mess hall swayed like a drunken sailor, and for half a second Coburn thought the damn building was going to collapse.

It didn’t.

Yet.

That changed when he tried to scramble away on his hands and knees, and the Bitch Beast leapt up in the air like a fucking crack-addled jungle tiger and hit him hard, claws-down. The roof couldn’t handle the stress. It buckled. And with her claws in his back and her mouth closing on his neck, he felt the whole thing give away in a clamor of tenting metal.

Thuglow’s hands fumbled with the keys as he unlocked the gun box he’d left on the helipad. The hose from the fuel truck was already in place, gurgling fuel into the belly of the chopper, and now Thuglow was popping his gun box and emptying weapons into the Twin Huey. Into the chopper he chucked a .45 ACP, an AR-15, a replica of a ninja short sword called a
wakizashi
, a switchblade, a camping hatchet, a hairspray can with a lighter duct-taped to it (
homemade flamethrower for the motherfucking win
, he thought), and a pair of grenades.

He tried to calm himself, tried to see this as a kind of Zen activity—focus on the grenades’ waffle-pattern, feel the cool metal of the pistol, imagine doing kick-ass ninja flips with the
wakizashi
. It wasn’t working. All around him were the sounds of his kingdom being dismantled—ripped asunder by the hands of the dead and shot to shit by Benjamin Brickert and his self-righteous asshole brigade.

Not far off, he heard terrible shrieks and wails, and a sound like a car forever crashing into another car: the tearing of metal, the shattering of glass.

He had no idea what was going on. Part of him thought,
this is just some kind of flashback. Too much LSD in the desert. None of this is real. This is a nightmare.

But he couldn’t convince himself.

The little dog, who stood at his feet staring holes through him like suddenly he’d try something funny and the dog would have to tear his nuts off, turned from him and started growling. The hackles on the terrier’s back bristled.

“Oh shit,” he said, fumbling for the pistol. He raised the gun, then realized he forgot to jack the action, and suddenly he was trying to pull back the action but it was awfully stubborn and his hands were slick with sweat—

A hand shot out of the darkness and snatched the gun from his hand.

Then a fist cold-cocked him.

Thuglow tasted blood. He blinked back tears. A man moved over to him, picked him up, and as the tears cleared, he saw his opponent.

“You sonofabitch,” Gil said. The old man’s face looked like it had been run over by a motorcycle. “You mess with me and my family again, next time I’ll do more than break your druggie-device over your fool head.”

Thuglow smiled meekly and nodded. “It’s cool, man. It’s cool.”

Coburn stood, shouldering off a strip of corrugated metal, just in time to see the Bitch Beast come at him like a freight train. The vampire felt instinct take over, felt the monster inside him kick open the cage door. Blood fueled his limbs, burning hot and bright inside his body, like his heart was a fist of burning coal pumping lava to every extremity.

He stepped to the side as she tore past—but he wasn’t content to let her come back around. The bitch had to go. It was time. That meant, he figured, taking out the head. And that meant getting behind her.

As she passed, he hooked his arm out, caught her neck, and leapt up onto her back like a cackling monkey. He covered her eyes with the flat of his hand and blinded her as she bolted forward—straight into a telephone pole. Coburn planted his feet on the ground, slamming her head into the pole again and again—and, just as she was dizzy and howling, threw her down onto her back.

The concrete cracked as her skull hit.

It was time to end this.

He leapt upon her with the ferocity of a coke-addled puma.

She squirmed beneath him, twisting like a snake. Her claws embedded through his jacket into his side but he wasn’t having any of it. The rage was in him, red and wet. Fingers curled. His fist cocked. The hand felt hot and swollen as he channeled all the blood he could muster into that limb, turning it into a weapon, an instrument, a fucking
sledgehammer
.

Coburn began hitting her. Not fist-down—not like a punch. But like the way you’d pound on a door, wanting to be let in. He
did
want to be let in. He wanted to get inside her head. Not in a psycho-babble
what-are-you-thinking
way, but in an
open-your-skull-to-turn-your-brain-to-treacle
way. He smashed in her nose. He shattered the teeth in her mouth. He popped her forehead so hard the skin ripped, black blood bubbled out, the bone pulverized as the concrete beneath her had done.

He felt her skull give.

One more hit, and she was done.

But he didn’t see the other three coming.

He’d grown so focused on her that he didn’t realize—she was just the first out of the gate, the front line of the attack. The other three hunters came swiftly out of the shadows, loping like wolves. Ranger hit him like a bull, and the world went end-over-end as he rolled into the street. Rupture-Tit grabbed him by the arm and flipped him over—the bone snapped, the ligaments tore—as he crashed into the street, bones and asphalt both cracking. Rain-Slick struggled to get a taste, clawing past the other two to get at him.

And before he knew it, he was pinned to the earth, face up, nose to nose with the Bitch Beast. With ragged claw she dug deep into the meat of his chest and raked downward, leaving behind four fleshy furrows that burned like fire.

Then she receded into shadow as her progeny surrounded him.

And behind them all, a tide of zombies incoming.

The hunters howled, for they had taken their prey.

Leelee felt it in her gut. A tightness. An
itch
. She knew.

“Almost ready to rock,” Thuglow said, giving a thumbs-up from on the helipad. Gil stood behind him with the rifle, just in case. Cecelia stood behind him, rubbing the small of his back in gentle circles.

Kayla paced, chewing on her thumbnail while Danny and Ebbie watched, helpless. All of them—except maybe Thuglow—were tense, concentrating elsewhere. They heard the shrieks of the hunters. Heard the sounds of metal tearing, asphalt cracking. The predators had found the vampire.

Leelee knew it in her gut, in her heart, in every fiber.

She went to Kayla and held her hands, then kissed her cheek.

Fact was, Kayla was a special girl. So special, in fact, that a true monster—a blood-hungry thief-of-life, a
vampire
who had committed endless sins and depravities to support his own selfish solipsistic needs—had put all that aside to save her. Time and time again. He had his logic. Calling them moo-cows. Calling them his ‘herd.’ But Leelee knew that it was a show. A way to puff out his chest like a proud rooster and strut around like
it wasn’t no thang
, like none of this invalidated the power of who he was and what he’d done.

But the fact was, his monstrousness would not persevere. It wasn’t clear if there was any good in him. It perhaps didn’t matter. What mattered was that Kayla
was
good,
was
special, so much so that the vampire fought to save her again and again. Despite what he was. Despite what he’d done. Or maybe because of those things—on that point, Leelee was a bit fuzzy.

On everything else, though, she was clear as Waterford crystal.

She believed things in her heart differently now than she had before. Before, all the world’s questions were given over to a kind of shrugging agnosticism—belief was only so useful in the face of facts, of data. Now, though, things were different. The impossible was possible. And Leelee believed beyond the margins of all doubt.

Or maybe it was faith, not belief. Maybe the difference there was that belief was something you suspected, while faith was something you
knew
even without having the facts to back it up.

This, then, was what she knew: The vampire would not make it. Not this time. Some part of him had made those other monsters and now, as the saying went, the chickens had come home to roost. They would tear him apart. And his role in all this would be done.

But she also knew that if he was done, so were they. Not now. But eventually. They still needed him and now he was lost to them.

Unless one of them paid him back for all he’d done.

He’d come for them plenty of times. Now it was her turn to go to him.

The others weren’t paying attention. They were occupied with one another, and with the distant sounds of their keeper, their shepherd, being trounced and torn asunder by the hunters that found him.

When nobody was looking, Leelee reached into the helicopter and pilfered both grenades off the seat. Thuglow was crawling into the cockpit and starting to power up the chopper. That meant it was time.

It was dark. They’d never see her leave.

With one grenade in each hand, she sneaked away into the night, ready to do what needed to be done to save the monster.

The King was not in his castle. Not that he needed to be. Thuglow was, as his name suggested, just a low-class thug. A thug who had taken—or, rather, been given—power that he did not deserve. He was meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but that didn’t mean Brickert didn’t want to drag the fool back to Kansas and hold him up before the free council and hang him by the neck in front of all.

Shonda kicked over a pinball machine. The glass broke. A silver pinball rolled out and drifted across the hangar.

“What a mess,” she said. “It’s like a frat-house in here.”

Benjamin wrinkled his nose. Smelled like body odor and bong-water in here. He scratched his beard. “He’s not here. The rat found a hole. He’ll turn up. Meanwhile, we need to start rounding up some tanker trucks and capturing the fuel—after that, we can do a more thorough check, but the fuel is the—”

Somewhere outside, the whine of an engine, the slow-but-certain whirr of rotors. Brickert’s sphincter tightened.

“Is that a goddamn helicopter?”

They pinned him against the street. Ranger knelt by his wrist, his twin tongues frolicking in the rent flesh. Rupture-Tit hunkered down by his foot, the pant-leg rolled up as her teeth bit open his skin and drank the blood with surprising delicacy, like a Doberman gently chewing open a roll of Lifesavers candy. Rain-Slick lay on the asphalt, belly down, playfully gnawing at the meat of his neck, not so much drinking as
playing
, lapping at it hungrily, giddily.

All the while, his chest burned where the Bitch had marked him.

The Beast watched. A proud mother, perhaps. Waiting for her lessers to feed before she filled her own belly. Whenever the surging tide of zombies tried to get close, she roved and roamed, hissing and clawing at the air to keep them back. And by god, they listened.

Everything Coburn had was fading fast. Blood and energy ebbing.

The hunters were strong. Stronger than he could have ever imagined.

Given that they came from him, he was almost proud. Almost. He wasn’t like the Bitch Beast, though, who seemed to be a very good mother. He was a certifiably bad daddy, because he hoped these rotten children of his would catch fire and die.

He had no idea how close his desires hewed to reality.

Maybe twenty feet away, he heard a sound—almost like a full can of soda hitting the asphalt. Zombies turned toward it, moaning. The hunters had little interest.