Double Dead (34 page)

The vampire struck. He moved fast, like a praying mantis, his hands around her neck, his fingers ripping open her throat, a gush of red blood on the shag—

“No.”

A voice in Coburn’s ear. Rebecca was gone. So was Blondie. The blood, however, remained. The TV continued to flicker, now gone to static.

Blondie stood behind him, now. Hands on his shoulders.

“You don’t get away that easily,” Blondie whispered into his ear. “Is this how you remember it? Is this what you find when you start moving dirt? You’re hiding behind a stalking horse, John. Let’s keep moving dirt. Let’s try this again.”

The world lit up. Bright. White. Hot.

The flash receded like a nuclear tide.

There, again: Rebecca by the TV. Rock candy. The window opened. Liquid shadow turns to Blondie.

A new wrinkle: Coburn was there, too. He could see himself. Sitting at the back of the room in a recliner. Reading a newspaper whose words are gibberish, letters shifting like nervous ants, the corners of the pages wet with red (
what’s black and white and red all over—a newspaper
).

Things moved differently this time. Blondie walked not to Rebecca but to the Coburn in the chair—to John Wesley Coburn. Gently, Blondie pulled down the newspaper with an index finger. John Wesley looked shocked, but only for a moment. Blondie’s gaze met John Wesley’s gaze. Blondie murmured something: hushed, like a prayer.

And then it all leapt forth in terrible fast-forward. Blondie dragged John Wesley off the chair. Bit him. Arc of blood. Rebecca screaming. She ran at him. Beating at Blondie’s back. He threw her across the room. Into the TV. John Wesley thrashed on the ground. Blondie tore open his own throat with a twist of his thumb and forefinger, the way you might uncap a cola, then pressed John Wesley’s face to his neck.

Fast-forward again. Rebecca sat bound to a kitchen chair. Clothesline pulled taut across her mouth, pulling back her cheeks. Blondie’s hand rested gently on John Wesley’s back. Blondie pushed him forward.

John Wesley didn’t look right. Eyes unfocused. His own neck wound already healed up. When he opened his mouth, two fangs flicked forward. He wasn’t John Wesley anymore.
That
was the difference. Now he was Coburn. Just Coburn. Life lost. Identity gone but for a name. The girl in front of him not his daughter, not really, not his blood so much as merely full of blood.

Rebecca screamed.

Coburn tore out her throat and drank.

Again, the world lit up. Bulbs popped, rained sparks. Floorboards groaned as nails bent. Everything white, wiped out, tabula rasa.

A low sound keened across the open expanse as the moon sat pregnant above, the stars twinkling, and for just a moment, Coburn thought:
it’s them, it’s the hunters, they’re back from the dead again and they’re coming to make me pay for what I’ve done.
But then he realized, it was just the wind.

He smelled blood. Tasted it, too. About ten feet away, the Twin Huey helicopter sat on its haunches, the uneven and rocky ground giving it a crooked look. The rotor above gently turned, moved by the wind.

The front window lay shattered. A hand draped out. Blood, thickened like syrup, collected at the fingertips, drops hanging there but never falling.

A cold feeling ran through Coburn. He felt full. He’d fed.

Oh no
.

Coburn found Danny first. He lay draped across a rock like a sacrifice. His throat, torn out. Not far away, Cecelia. Her head had been bashed in. Hair matted with blood and brains. Coburn looked to his hands, saw the fingers and palms flecked with dried blood that flaked away like old paint.

Ebbie was face-down toward the front-end of the chopper. Both wrists, opened. Blood pooling out across dead earth.

The hand sticking out of the helicopter was Thuglow’s. In his neck, a gaping hole. In death his head had fallen onto his shoulder; the blood drizzled down his arm and to his fingers.

On the far side of the chopper Coburn found Gil, Kayla and Creampuff. Arranged like a loving father and daughter, with their little terrier. Gil’s arm had been draped across Kayla’s shoulder. Her head, tilted gently so she rested on her father. The terrier, curled up and sleeping in their lap.

But the scene was imperfect. Gil’s mouth was stretched open in a horrible smile, his tongue missing. Creampuff’s head was turned too far inward, the neck plainly broken—his body thin, ribs exposed, drained of blood.

And Kayla. Her throat torn out. Like Rebecca’s.

Coburn collapsed onto his knees. Inside him, the monster’s voice chuckled, then the chuckle rose to a manic cackle, a breathless, riotous laugh that went on and on—above him, the moon looked too bright, the stars seemed to shift and swim, leaving trails of light. He felt the grim humming and buzzing in his own heart as the earth split open and swallowed him whole.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Blood Drive

Voices bubbled up out of the darkness. Incomprehensible at first. Like hearing them underwater. But soon, they became clear—

“—coming out of it.” A man’s voice. Deep. Bass. “I’m almost impressed.”

A woman’s voice: “Nobody can take that much voltage.”

“The Devil has many powers.” That voice, he recognized.

Benjamin Brickert.

Coburn opened his eyes. The world swam in and out of focus. Someone—a woman, thick, tough, broad shoulders—shined a bright flashlight into his face.

Beyond her stood two other men. One a gone-to-pasture biker-looking dude in a leather vest. A bit of gut showing from beneath a dusty white wife-beater. Next to him? Brickert. Older. Leaner. Gaunt. Gone was the well-fed whatever-he-was—plumber, brick-layer, dick-sucker, Coburn never knew. His black goatee had gone to a full beard and was now shot through with gray.

“The vampire awakens,” Brickert said.

“Fuck you,” Coburn said, his words slurring.

“Fuck me? Sure. You want to flip me off again? First time you gave me the bird, I cut off your finger. And boy, didn’t that turn out real interesting. Second time you flipped me off, I shot down your chopper. But I guess you can’t show me all that piss and vinegar with your hands bound up behind your back.”

Coburn tried to move: it was true. His hands were bound up. Tight. Maybe with zip-ties, he didn’t know. His feet—barefoot, since he’d never found a goddamn shoe to fit him in the 66 States—were sitting in a tub of water. Not far away, he saw a couple car batteries, wires, alligator clips. They’d been electrocuting him. Brickert learned that trick long ago.

He sat in an alcove made of boxes. The ground bucked and bounced beneath him, beneath everyone. They were in a truck. A moving truck, by the looks of it.

“Do what you want,” Coburn said. He shut his eyes, found a cascade of images behind the lids: his daughter Rebecca dead on the floor, Leelee blowing herself to pieces, Kayla sitting propped up with her father and the dog. Plus, a whole host of corpses with Coburn’s name on it: dead on bed, dead in tubs, dead in shallow graves. All that blood. His eyes shot open. “I deserve all of it.”

Brickert laughed. A genuine laugh. He wiped tears from his eyes.

“I killed them,” Coburn said. “I killed them all.”

“Who’s that?” Brickert asked.

“My daughter, Rebecca. Kayla. Gil. The whole lot of them.”

Brickert and Shonda shared a look. “You did, at that. That was a messy scene. You’re one mean mother, Coburn.”

Brickert backed up. “Redbone,” he said to the biker-type. “Let’s hit the bloodsucker again. Light him up like Christmas.”

Redbone did as told. Came over, got Coburn in the neck with alligator clips. Coburn’s world lit up as his body seized. Redbone yanked the clips, bringing a bit of the vampire’s flesh with them.

“Shonda,” Brickert said to the woman. “Did I ever tell you the story of how me and the vampire met? How he gave me the middle finger, and I chopped that finger off and took it away?”

She nodded. “You did. But good stories like that one, I’ll listen to again and again.”

“That finger of yours,” Brickert said, “wasn’t something I meant to take. But it happened and in that moment before I hurried away and the bombs went off, I had what some people call an epiphany. So I snatched up the finger. Bombs went boom. And I thought you were really for-real dead.

“That finger. I wrapped it up nice and tight. Put it on ice and dropped it in a cooler, then took it down the next morning to a friend of mine who worked for a little lab that got a bunch of freelance work from Big Pharma. I gave your finger to my buddy, and, hell, I guess I had some bullshit science-fiction idea in my head that he’d be able to, I dunno,
clone
you or something. That way, we’d be able to find your weaknesses. See what makes you tick-tock, Mister Clock. Like I said: bullshit.

“But my buddy—who belonged to our group and so he was excited to have vampire tissue under his microscope—said he could do experiments at the cellular level. Said your dead cells came back to life, or almost, at least, when put in the presence of red blood cells or blood plasma. He said the mitochondria, which looked inert, would suddenly swell up and go crazy soon as red blood cells even got
near
to them.

“My friend gets this idea. Decides to… I don’t know the correct term here, so forgive me, but he decides to ‘infuse’ the vampire DNA into a simple bacteria. Bacterium? Whatever. Interesting thing: it kills the bacterium. Or seems to, at least. Bacteria stops moving. Cell structures rupture. Mitochondria shrivel up to nothing. And yet—suddenly, the bacterium started to move again. And when put in the presence of other non-infected bacteria, it infects them, and the same thing happens there: pseudo-death, then revivification.”

Brickert walked behind Coburn, now. Hiding in the shadows offered by the alcove of boxes. “Now, maybe you know where this story is going, maybe you don’t, but like people used to say on the Internet when there
was
an Internet:
spoiler warning
, this is how the zombie apocalypse was born.”

“You’re a shitty liar,” Coburn said. But it was just bravado: Brickert wasn’t lying, was he?

“My buddy was the first to get infected. Be honest with you, I don’t know how it happened. I wasn’t there. None of us were. Maybe he didn’t follow procedure like he was supposed to. He always was a little sloppy. Or maybe someone else fucked up. All I know is that lab was ground zero for the infection. And I know that the first zombie I put in the ground was my friend. From that point, it was all over after a couple days. Nobody knew it was coming. Nobody but us. This was the kind of thing we prepared for.”

Coburn almost laughed. What a horrible thing to discover, so horrible it was absurd. His middle finger. The progenitor of the zombie apocalypse. A little
fuck-you-attitude
can really change everything. “So when you say you should thank me, you’re being sarcastic, that right?”

“What?” Brickert said. “No, no, Coburn. I mean it. Thank you.
Thank you
. When a thing’s a little bit broke, you can do a patch-up job to fix it. Table leans a little, you put something under the leg to set it straight again. When a thing’s a
whole lot
broke, well. Table has a crack down the middle, only thing you can do is put something better in place. Sometimes, you fix something, you first have to destroy it. That’s what happened. The world was getting too awful for its own good, Coburn. It’s like before, when God sent the deluge to drown out the iniquities of man.”

“Does that mean that God sent me, then?”

Another laugh. “Maybe He did. Mysterious ways and all that.” Brickert mussed up Coburn’s hair—a crass, almost fatherly gesture. “Jeez, Coburn. This has been a real bad night for you. Chopper crashed. Killed your friends. Realized that you killed most of the known world just by flipping it the bird. There’s an old myth that vampires can’t see themselves in mirrors. It’s not true, obviously, as I’m sure you know. At least, it’s not true in the technical sense. But you look a little deeper, maybe it is true. Maybe the vampire isn’t supposed to see what he really is, because then what does he become? What happens when the monster sees himself in the mirror for the first time?” He got right up in Coburn’s face, unafraid. “Now you see yourself? That right? Bet you don’t like what you see, vampire. Bet you don’t like the Devil staring back.”

Coburn could’ve moved. Could’ve lurched forward, bit him right in the face, got a taste of blood. But he didn’t have it in him. He hated Brickert. But that hate had a softer edge than he expected. Almost like his heart just wasn’t in it. The man detested Coburn for what he was: a monster. It was certainly earned.

He was, after all, the creature that killed the world.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Putrid Frequencies

Down in the dark once more. They tortured him with electricity. They beat him. They cut on him. When day came they shoved him in a box; sometimes they pulled his hand and held it out the door, let it burn up, let it char to a stump that looked like a marshmallow held too long over the campfire. Mostly, though, Coburn drifted down in the murky depths of his own mind. Horrors and nightmares waited down there. Faces swimming up: Kayla, Blondie, Rebecca. A distant dog—the yips and yaps of a rat terrier—barking. The darkness turned red as blood before clouding back to squid-ink black.