Double Dead (35 page)

Somewhere down there, a thread. Down below everything else, it flicked and twitched like loose fabric from a fraying sweater hanging out to dry in a hard wind—and when Coburn reached for it, he discovered that it was familiar.

It was pink.

He pulled on it, and he felt the darkness swivel toward him. Like a pair of wolf’s eyes noticing its prey.

There she was: the Bitch Beast. Not bodily. He couldn’t even see her. But he could
feel
her. Searching for him. At first he didn’t understand, but then the connection, which felt so intimate, like a coil of intestine shared between two bodies, became clear.

She’s mine. I made her.
Then, to her:
I made you
.

In the darkness, she howled in protest.

He could feel her anger. It rose up like bile in a thermometer. Her scorn, her hatred, her hunger. The ragged wound she left him across his chest suddenly felt like it caught fire, like someone had upended a pot of scalding water there—her rage made manifest, her mark on his skin alive with pain. She wanted to tear him apart the way her own brothers and sisters had been torn asunder. He saw in her mind, saw her eating the other hunters, gaining their power and then sharing it with others in turn: tilting back zombie heads, vomiting black blood and dead flesh into their mouths, making more of them, giving of herself as much as she could give.

Coburn could feel them, too—though not as completely. They were hard to grasp, like seed motes floating through the air, evading touch.

But the Bitch Beast, she was as bright as a bonfire.

Her desperation was laid bare like a bone stripped of meat. When he had fled, she had lost the trail: Coburn’s scent had been on the ground before, but now it was in the air, dispersed, and when the time came for her to hunt him she was unable to find the trail. She did not know of the thread.

Not before now.

Coburn looked at what had become of everything. He’d sown so many seeds of horror. And now, the worst of it all lived in his dead heart. Guilt. Shame. Grief. These were not things he understood, and now that he was feeling them it was like being burned for the first time—it was a child’s first comprehension of pain, and that made it a thousand times worse. He could not dull the sensation. It throbbed, as alive as anything, certainly more alive than he.

Everything was lost.

And so Coburn reached and grabbed a hold of that pink thread that tied around the Bitch Beast’s primitive mind like a string around a pinky finger, and he pulled on it hard. He told her:

Here I am. You want me, you come and get me. You can have me. You can have my blood. You can tear me and the rest of the world to pieces
.

She howled in response. Not a howl of rage, but a howl of desire, of celebration, a signal that the hunt was back on.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

City of the Dead

Coburn awoke to the sound of gunfire. Not steady. Just a few shots:
pop, pop, pop.
He didn’t know how long it had been. How long he had been down in the dark with her. Did that just happen? Was it hours ago? Days? Years? As a vampire, that was something he genuinely had to worry about: theoretical eternity made such lapses in time-keeping possible.

He lay on his side in the moving truck, still surrounded by boxes. At his back he heard the clomping boot-steps of someone big: probably Redbone, by the sound of it. Redbone, the fat biker in the too-tight wife-beater, was his constant companion, a steady presence whenever he rose from consciousness.

Coburn tried to crane his neck to see—his hands were still bound behind his back, and his feet were similarly trussed with zip-ties, obliterating any mobility he hoped to have—and as he did, the skin around his neck and jawline cracked. It sounded like a rib of celery bending and snapping.

It was his skin. His whole body was drying out like a corpse under the vigilant eye of the desert sun. He was a man without fluids, a creature without blood: the end of that road was clear. Soon he’d dry out entirely, turn crispy as a Kafka roach, and then be naught but a shattered husk, an exoskeleton on par with the remnant shell of a seventeen-year-old-cicada. It wasn’t a total death, but the transformation would still strip him down, his existence turned inert. Just as he had been beneath the collapsed floor of that theater back in Manhattan.

He still managed to crane his head—despite sounds that called to mind someone chewing through crunchy fried chicken—and look at whoever was moving around behind him. Sure enough, it was Redbone. Coburn saw his boots: they were steel-toe workboots, like you might see on a construction site.

“Those look about my size,” Coburn croaked.

Redbone looked down at him, grunted.

“I’m just saying. Nice boots.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Redbone warned. He heaved another car battery up onto one of the boxes, then patted it the way you would a good dog.

Coburn tried to laugh, but what came out sounded like he was gargling glass. “I got ideas, but no way to work ’em. I haven’t eaten in forever. Don’t suppose you feel like giving me a taste.”

“Fuck your mother.”

“Guess that’s a
no
.” Something tickled at the back of Coburn’s mind. A little scratching finger, entreating him forward. His head was too foggy to make much sense of it. He ignored it. Outside, more gunshots popping off. “Hell are we?”

Redbone stared down at him, not sure he should answer, but Coburn could see the acquiescence cross the man’s face, an attitude of
eh, fuck it
. “Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles.”

“Did I stutter?”

“Might as well have. I thought we were going to Kansas.” He noticed then that the truck wasn’t even moving anymore. They’d stopped. Again, that tickle at the back of his brain.

“We’ll drag you back to Kansas soon enough, vampire. Gonna make an example of you in front of all our people. Let them know that the authority of the Sons of Man is total and complete.”

“Uh-huh. But why are we in Los Angeles?”

“Not your business. Curiosity killed the cat, you know.”

“And what’d it do to the vampire?”

Redbone grinned. “Got his ass electrocuted.” He held up the two alligator clips, tapped them together, got a few sparks arcing. More gunshots outside: these coming faster, more frequent, before cooling off.

The tickle at the back of Coburn’s head became more insistent, so much so that it was more like an irritating
flick
or even a swat.

A question suddenly entered his mind:

Why am I hungry
?

He shouldn’t have been. He’d had a last meal. Kayla, Gil, the others: a blood-gorging orgy. The undead crucible that was his flesh should’ve been
bloated
with the red stuff. When he’d awoken in the truck with Brickert, and even now, his flesh in places was still disrupted where the hunters took him: neck, wrist, foot. He hadn’t healed up properly yet. But why? If he killed those others and guzzled their blood like fruit punch, those wounds should be all closed up.

Further, the ragged wound across his chest—his reward from battling the Bitch Beast—remained open and suppurating.

Frankly, he shouldn’t even
be
in this situation if he had consumed such a
grand guignol
meal like that. That chest wound especially should have long healed over. In fact—did he even have the wound when he killed the others?

When he
remembered
killing the others?

Through his veins, an icy blast of realization. No, he didn’t.

In his vision, that wound was healed.

Which meant—

They weren’t dead. Were they? Kayla. Gil. Ebbie, Cecelia, Creampuff, maybe even Thuglow. That vision of them—it was just that. A vision. A dream. No. A
nightmare
.

Hope, sickly sweet, gurgled in his dead heart.

He was then forced to contemplate the other puzzle piece: Los Angeles.

Why here?

It was where they’d been headed all along. To Los Angeles. To find the lab. To take Kayla, to make her blood part of the cure. Brickert brought them here. He was their escort. He did what Coburn could not: he shepherded them forth, got them to where they needed to go. The vampire had been wrong all along. The Sons of Man weren’t trying to hurt them. Well, they were trying to hurt
him
, okay, sure. But their interests were human interests. Not like him. Him with his selfish hungers and callous games. Brickert was doing the right thing.

Of course, it all made sense: the Sons of Man were fighting for people this whole time, weren’t they? They were trying to help Kayla. Help her by keeping the monster out of the equation.

Well, shit.

He was about to explain to Redbone just how funny—not funny
ha-ha
, exactly, but funny
ironic
—all of this was, but he didn’t get the chance.

Outside, a familiar shriek, a banshee’s cry:

The Bitch Beast was here. But not just her. Other monstrous howls rose up after hers: one, then two, then three, and soon there were so many keening all at once that Coburn couldn’t even count.

He had summoned her here. And she had brought friends.

Her body, an infinite sacrament. It was a thing she learned, not a thing she realized from the beginning when she was once again gifted with a kind of life on the streets of New York City. Then, and for long after, she believed that to sustain herself, to ease the hunger within,
to create more like her
, it was necessary to have the blood of her maker: the vampire.

But then came the night when her three siblings were eradicated by that weak, limping
human
. That vile act was a secret blessing, for she learned that she was able to eat of their flesh and feel sustained. It helped to heal her. It was like a key turning in a difficult lock, and suddenly it opened to her.

The next night, when she had healed up entirely, she took her claws and ripped a piece of meat off her own body—a pound of flesh in the form of one of her bloated, blistering teats—and fed it to one of her lesser cousins, the stumbling, shambling fools unaware of their own potential for greatness. That zombie—a woman in medical scrubs—hit the ground writhing, her body shifting, the bones popping, her eyes opening, no longer as a mere rotting thing but as one of the hunters, with long claws and needled teeth.

Her body began to heal the flesh she’d stolen from herself.

She could take her meat. Feed it to others. Make more of herself. And heal the void. The others could do the same.

Her body was therefore infinite. Their potential ranks, innumerable.

It was then that she began to move, to hunt the vampire once more: no longer only to take his blood (for she still desired it, its taste unparalleled in her mouth) but also to punish him and tear him apart. It was as primitive as man’s need to blaspheme God, this urge to spit in the face of one’s maker.

Ah, but his trail was gone.

Her and her growing army of undead, inhuman hunters roamed without a meaningful direction, but then came the night in the Sonoran that she heard the vampire calling to her in the void of her mind. They were connected. Another thing she had not known but needed to learn.

She no longer needed to scent his trail. Once he pulled that thread and brought her awareness to him, she could suddenly
sense
him out there. Like a fly buzzing in a far-off room.

The fever was getting worse. Not like Kayla had a thermometer or anything, but she could tell that it was hitting her a lot harder than it had even a few hours before, when they first rolled into the city. Everything hurt. Her legs trembled. Her spine felt like it was an antenna drawing to it a signal composed only of electric misery.

Inside the building at 1100 Wilshire, she stood propped up between Danny and Gil. Her head felt like a skillet. Her brain, a slow-cooking egg.

Outside, one of the Sons of Man sentries popped off some rounds from one of the .50 calibers bolted to the back of a pick-up truck as Benjamin and Shonda worked to pull the metal gate back down behind the door.

Somewhere up above them, in the top of this tower of glass and steel, waited the GeneTech lab. Or so Kayla hoped. Though the way she was feeling, she didn’t even know if she was going to make it up there—the elevators were damn sure out of commission, which meant walking thirty-seven flights. That was a lot of stairs, and Kayla didn’t know if she’d have been able to walk them two years ago, much less today.

Brickert had popped the padlock on the door-gate with a pair of heavy gauge bolt cutters, but had nothing to replace it with. “Don’t want any rotters taking advantage of the opportunity,” he said. Even though they had a semi-circle of Sons of Man vehicles—half the convoy that invaded Altus AFB—protecting the front, it still behooved them, he said, to keep this building locked tight.

He called for a screwdriver, then used that to stick through the hole. It was enough to keep the gate shut. A living human would be able to figure out how to remove the screwdriver, he said. Hell, a monkey could’ve done it. But a rotter didn’t have the presence of mind to consider it, not even by accident.