Double Dead (9 page)

We have to take you Out West
.

Then, of course, times like these came along and she didn’t feel special at all. Matter of fact, she felt the opposite: she felt lower than a snake’s belly in a wheel rut. Her father treated her like a child. Leelee treated her like a fragile little thing, a snowflake that might melt with even the gentlest touch. Cecelia treated her like a bag of garbage. And Ebbie…

Well, Ebbie was the only one who was nice to her at all.

It was, in part, why she liked that vampire. It wasn’t that he treated her well—he insulted her, threatened her, choked her so hard the bruises made her look like one of the walking dead. But what she liked was that he shot straight: he told her what he was thinking, what he was feeling, and then he acted on it. He didn’t say one thing and do another.

For a monster, something about him felt utterly
honest
.

Refreshing, in a kind of horrible way.

Kayla leaned up against a tree, wiping her eyes. She’d been walking now for… how long was it? She didn’t even know. From time to time she’d hear her father calling, or Leelee (but never Cecelia), and when she heard their voices she either hunkered down and hid or traveled in what she could best surmise was the opposite direction. A part of her knew this was wrong—a bonafide
bad idea
—but even still, she wanted to punish them a little bit.

And another part of her just felt ashamed. Like her father said she should be. For getting him hurt. And Ebbie. For arguing with Cecelia—why couldn’t she just shut up and try to keep the peace?—and for breaking the door.

Didn’t help that she was just making it worse by being away. If her father was out here looking for her, who was back there fixing the door? Ebbie? Ebbie was an IT manager before the zombie guts hit the fan: the world no longer had much use for computers, and so Ebbie’s place in the food chain had been supplanted. Survivors knew how to identify edible plants and siphon gas from cars, not quarantine computer viruses and search for porn on the Internet. (Hell, the Internet wasn’t even
a thing
anymore. It had long gone away, as insubstantial as a distant wind.)

Shame dogged her. So did anger. And righteousness. And a whole other squirming bag of emotions—Kayla had crossed the puberty threshold and her body was a cauldron of warring hormones. It was like someone had overturned a bag of snakes inside her heart and mind and let them tangle all up together in one big crazy breeding ball.

It didn’t help that all this walking had made her sore—her back ached, her legs throbbed, her very
bones
seemed to radiate waves of pain. It sucked the energy right out of her. She could practically hear Leelee’s voice:
You’re sick, Kayla. You shouldn’t have strayed so far
.

With a follow-up bonus question:
How are you going to get home
?

She put her back against a tree and slid down to a sitting position, her elbows resting on her knees.

Here, the forest was quiet. The occasional rustle of leaves as a squirrel darted from tree to tree. A wind came along and shook the evergreens. Above, the oaks and maples were already starting to bud and uncurl the year’s new leaves.

She closed her eyes. For just a moment.

And when she opened them again, the sky was dimming. The horizon brightening, like a distant fire on the far side of the forest.

How long had she sat here, sleeping? How many hours, lost?

Sundown. That wasn’t good. The living dead were bad news any time of the day or night, but they seemed to become more active at night, more directed. During the day they might not even notice as you passed by, provided you weren’t within fifty feet or so and didn’t make much noise. One time, middle of the day, she saw one rotter just blankly orbiting a lamppost. Slack-jawed and murmuring.

At night, though, they stirred up more. Kayla didn’t know why and wasn’t sure it really mattered much; her father said he figured the sun either charged them up like batteries or instead maybe sucked the energy from them. Whatever it was, night-time wasn’t a good time to be out amongst them.

She had to get back to the camper.

She stood, her bones aching. Her blood rushed to her head—‘orthostatic hypotension,’ Leelee told her, also known as the common
head rush
. Took a moment to orient herself. From which way had she come?

Had to be that way, she thought. Past the fallen log.

She hurried in that direction, her muscles sore, her back throbbing from sitting in one position for so long. Everything about this disease tried to sap her strength, nibbling away at her. Sometimes she found herself wishing the cancer would kill her, like it was supposed to have over three years ago.

Kayla pushed through the forest, stepping over thorny tangles and big boulders that looked like turtle humps, the shadows of the trees stretching longer and longer until they began to disappear with the coming of evening. Kayla called out her father’s name, feeling panic and uncertainty: had she come this way before? Everything here looked like everything else. That tree looked like that other tree. This rock looked like that rock. She stepped over a muddy gully that she was sure she didn’t step over on the way here.

Where were they?
She was afraid to cry out—too much noise would bring
them
down upon her head, but even then it was as if her thought arrived too loudly…

Because behind her, a branch snapped.

She spun, hoping to see her father or Leelee coming through the trees, but she was not so lucky.

The rotter’s face suffered the undead version of Bell’s Palsy—half of the flesh drooped, like a piece of bologna thrown against the wall. Once, this zombie was a park ranger—he still wore the outfit, though it had long given way to tears in the fabric. The name-patch was so soaked through by the creature’s fluids—pink and yellow and red—that it was no longer legible.

Kayla didn’t bother screaming. She just turned and ran, no longer cautious, no longer caring about the branches or thorn-whips.

As she ran, she realized that she was no longer alone.

Other corpses shambled through the underbrush. They came in from all sides—dozens of them now. Kayla didn’t bother to get a good look. Instead she just picked up the pace and bolted through the trees like a spooked animal.

As the sun dropped behind the horizon, leaving the forest cast in the muddy tones of deepening twilight, Kayla heard gunshots in the distance.

Then her foot caught on a root and she tumbled forward, her head thumping dully against the hard earth.

As she rolled over, foul hands reached down for her, a palm that smelled of bile covering her face. The finger wormed into her mouth and she tasted bitterness and rot: the flavor of a spoonful of spoiled meat on her tongue. She tried to scream, but the hands held her down, covering her eyes.

Teeth sank into the meat just past her collarbone.

Blood wetted her shirt as the zombie hissed.

A terrible thought crossed through her mind:

I am infected
.

PART TWO

PROTECTOR

CHAPTER TEN

Feeding Frenzy

And like that, the pressure atop her was gone.

The zombie made a sound like one she’d never heard before: a kind of guttural bark, a chuffing belch. She clamped her hand to her bleeding collar and scooted back against a tree—the rotter who had bitten her, another park ranger (this one female, her scalp peeled back like the skin of a grape), stood there wearing a look more dumbfounded than usual.

The zombie began choking. Its foul tongue thrust out, stabbing at the air. It clawed at nothing. The sounds that emerged became more and more strangled—
grrk
,
gkkkt
,
kkkkklllkkk
.

Then its eyes popped. Like hot eggs jumping out of their shells. From the eye sockets ran fresh blood—not black, but red—and with each rivulet came a curling wisp of steam or smoke.

The zombie dropped, dead. Or, at least, deader than before.

Suddenly, Kayla found herself yanked upward violently. She cried out as she was thrown over someone’s shoulder—her face pressed into said someone’s jacket—and she smelled leather and blood.

“Don’t scream,” Coburn hissed. “Just shut up and keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle, unless you want them broken off.”

And then he began to run.

But he ran fast. Faster than fast. Branches whipped at her arms, cutting into them, drawing blood. She tucked them tight. She remembered once, way back when, seeing a nature video in school where they put a camera on some kind of hawk or falcon and recorded its flight through a tight forest—this was like that, the world rushing past, the trees nothing but blurry shadows.

Like
that
, Coburn emerged from the forest with her on his back.

She smelled gunpowder and rot. As if to punctuate the odor: a rifle shot split the air. Someone—Cecelia?—screamed.

Coburn dumped Kayla on the ground and then disappeared. Kayla propped herself up on her arms and legs, trying dearly not to vomit. And that was when she saw just how badly things had gone in her absence.

Night had fallen.

The rotters were everywhere.

They had surrounded the Winnebago.

Her father stood in the open doorway, firing off rifle rounds. Abner leaned out of the passenger side window in the cab, desperately swinging with a camping hatchet. Cecelia was at the window, screaming her fool head off even though she wasn’t in immediate danger.

Leelee, though,
was
in danger.

The nurse stood up on a picnic table with can of hairspray and a lighter—an easy homespun flamethrower that didn’t always do much to kill the undead but did a good job of keeping them at bay. She flicked the lighter, hit the button and set off plumes of chemical fire, like dragon’s breath. The rotters swatted at it the way you might at a cloud of mosquitoes. A few of them actually caught fire.

And then the fire died down to a limp, sputtering spray, a few glowing yellow drops falling to the earth before dying out completely.

The zombies swarmed her, pulling her down.

Kayla’s heart sank as Leelee’s body fell beneath the horde.

But before she knew what was happening, Leelee surged back out of the zombie throng—this time, buoyed by the hands of Coburn the vampire. He threw her back up onto the picnic table, stepped up and then stepped
down
hard onto the picnic bench, catching the see-sawing bench board in his hand.

Then he started swinging that bench like a baseball bat.

Zombie skulls caved in. Some heads bent at the neck at wrong angles. Others twisted around. A few launched off the shoulders, freed by the mighty strikes.

Coburn began to carve a path through the horde. He swung the bench—easily five feet long—before him in great, swooping reaper-like arcs. Leelee fell in behind him and when the board finally shattered, he stabbed the broken shard into some fat rotter’s pumpkin head and then went ahead and just used his hands. He grabbed skulls and smashed them together. He ripped faces clean from their skulls. He punched straight through mushy brains.

And when he looked to Kayla and waved her on, she felt what was certainly an unhealthy surge of happiness—
he came back to us, he will be our protector, thank you God Almighty for we are saved
.

It was almost enough to make her forget about the hunk of meat the zombie had bitten out of her shoulder.

She ducked a lurching zombie—as the rotter closed in, his head spun around and a spray of loose, decaying teeth peppered her cheeks like shotgun pellets.

Kayla darted in and clung to his side and she felt his arm around her. She felt Leelee’s hand grab her own and then on the ground she saw the small terrier from before, making deft figure-eights around the vampire’s feet… and for just a moment, all felt right in the world—even as black blood and zombie teeth rained down upon them.

Her father stood at the door and pulled her inside. The dog leapt in after her, and then Leelee followed.

Then she heard the sound.

It was an awful cry—a keening wail, a banshee’s scream. It was like nothing she’d ever heard. It cut to the bone. It sang in her marrow and she was sure then that if she ever slept again
that sound
would be what haunted her dreams.

Coburn pushed her the rest of the way inside. His eyes were wide, like he’d just seen a ghost—and the fact that a vampire, a
bloodsucking monster
, seemed rattled was not a good sign. He gritted his teeth and snapped his fingers.

“We need to go, and we need to go
now
.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Fresh Mutation

The RV bounced and bucked like a fat horse, barreling out of Towhee Park—rotters fell beneath the vehicle, and the Winnebago hit each one like a pus-caked speed-bump.

Gil yelled to Ebbie, who was driving: “Damnit, Ebbie! What’d I tell you about driving into those sonofabitches?”