Princess kicked his shin. “We don’t need protecting. You do, mister.” Then she smiled sweetly once more and held up the blade fashioned from a sharpened license plate. She stared over its gleaming edge with mad eyes.
“Nobody’s going anywhere but him,” Aiden said. “You’re all staying here.”
“Nah. I think we’re going,” Pete said.
Booboo nodded. The little boy with the bowl-cut hopped up and down, apparently giddy at the notion of wading out into a rain-slick zombie-infested city after nightfall. Which made Gil wonder just how broken these children were.
“I said no,” Gil said.
“And
I
said no,” Aiden added.
But that didn’t seem to matter. The kids stood up and picked up their weapons—chair legs and bike chains and all—and seemed suddenly mobilized for war. All with faces that were either dead to fear or alive with excitement.
Everyone but Aiden. Who sat there. Face reddening.
“You follow me,” Gil said, sweeping his finger across the kids, “that’s on you. I’m not your father. I’m not your protector. I just want what I want.”
The thought struck him, suddenly:
You sound like Coburn.
Old man
.
H
EY
!
The voice inside his mind: Kayla.
Everything around him seemed slow. Shark teeth crashing together above his head. Descending. Zombies crawling up from both sides. Reaching. Moaning. Gibbering in the tunnel—all sounding like a record played on the wrong speed.
You’re not gonna punk out on me, JW.
You got this far.
I’m sorry you killed your daughter.
I’m sorry you killed hundreds of people.
I’m sorry that you’re just starting to realize what a terrible person you are.
But you getting dead again isn’t going to fix any of that.
All it does is take you out of the picture—and it’s a bad picture, JW, a real bad picture. Maybe you haven’t looked around, but this sewer may be the nicest place we’ve been in a while. Everything’s gone to hell. Maybe literally, for all I know—the Bible’s got some real bad juju in it that matches up pretty well with that happened. All I know is, the world fell down in its own puke. It may not be your fault it’s that way, not exactly, but it’s still on you. This is your mess. At least a little bit.
And I’m your mess, too. You killed yourself so that I could live, and then I killed myself so that the both of us could carry on.
You leave now, I get dead, too.
And the world just gets hella uglier.
So move your dead butt, JW.
It’s not your time. And it’s darn sure not mine.
He lurched up. Smashed the hunter to the side, into the brick. The beast cried out in rage and surprise—but no pain. Zombies reached for him as he got up in a low crouch. He put a fist through one. Smashed the other into six inches of rising water and kept pressing until the head caved in like a melon.
The hunter came at him with renewed vigor and he caught the child and smashed her left, and right, and left, and right—flipping her back and forth into the brick sewer tunnel, her arms clawing his, her teeth snapping closed on open air. The sound coming up out of her was like the howl of a tornado—equal parts metallic shriek and freight train bearing down on you.
It cut short, suddenly.
Because Coburn smashed her one more time into the wall.
That wall collapsed.
So did parts of the floor. And the roof.
The vampire and the hunter toppled through open space, along with gallons of hissing rainwater.
D
OWNSTAIRS IN THE
house was another boy named Charlie. Gil didn’t know if that was the kid’s real name or if they called him that because he had a very distinct Charlie Brown vibe—yellow shirt (no zig zag), round head with fawn-colored hair, a dopey look on his face.
He also had leg braces and a metal cane.
Oh. And a bayonet duct-taped to a broom handle.
Creampuff saw Gil, ran to him. Growled at everyone.
Gil decided to take the terrier with him. But he demanded that they leave the four-year-old behind with Charlie. As they paused at the door, ready to meet whatever waited them on the other side, Princess whispered in Gil’s ear that the four-year-old’s name was Samuel, and that he was Aiden’s little cousin.
And with that, Pete threw open the door.
Before them: a wall of gore-soaked clothing, rotten flesh, and hungry mouths. Zombies pressed forward, seeing a space and trying to fill it, the same way rainwater fills whatever holes and cracks it falls into—they groaned and grunted, their dead mouths filling the air with the stench of rot.
Gil barely had to do a thing. A mailman went down when a .22 bullet punched through its bulging eye and popped out the back of its head like a lead-bellied cricket. A fat lady with her jaw gone found an ice pick shoved up through her ruined sinuses and into her equally-ruined brain. A swift arc from a chair leg and a suit-and-tie rotter’s knee went sideways—as the dead man fell to his hands, Ashleigh collapsed his mushy head. Even Princess got in on the action, clambering up Gil like he was a tree and she was a monkey, then screeching with excitement as she slashed left and right with her razor-honed license plate. The top of an old dead man’s head came off and he expired with a gush of black blood.
The children were well-practiced at dispatching the dead. As they pushed forward through the pounding rain, clearing a path, Gil saw their system at play—one kid would bring the zombie low by taking out its legs, another would finish the job at the head. “Go for the knees!” one would yell. “Here’s the head!” another would cry—a cry born of glee and anger and childish madness.
The pop of bones. The crunch of heads.
The laughter of children.
It was impressive and sickening in equal measure.
And that was how they moved through the dead city. At night. In the rain.
C
OBURN FOUND HIMSELF
plunging deep into a channel of cold water. All was dark, a turbid murk that spoke of rust and shit and swirling brick dust—his hands thrust upward, found rough concrete and water going all the way to the ceiling. He sank down through the space, five feet, ten feet—and again his hands found concrete.
Air forced its way up out of his nose and mouth from the corners of his eyes—bubbles big and small. He didn’t need to breathe, and so as the stagnant water forced its way in past his many openings, he felt himself swell slightly—but it gave him no misery, caused him no pain.
He blinked, trying desperately to peer through the dirty channel.
Something moved to his right. Leaving a trail of oily bubbles.
We’re not alone.
His ears registered the sounds of movement above and around him. Bricks pirouetted in the murk, hitting bottom. Then came the rotters. Human carcasses given the rough semblance of life, flailing and wordlessly screaming as they sank to the floor, each the truest definition of “dead weight.” They could not swim. They could only sink.
But something out there
could
swim.
Another flurry of bubbles. Another fast-moving shadow.
The hunter was comfortable in water. As comfortable as a shark.
Coburn let his body lay flat, stomach-down, against the bottom of the concrete. Then he crept along the curves of the cement, dragging himself with his hands—he found the ankle or head of a sunken rotter, and he pulled himself past the living corpse as the thing floundered about, bubbles pushing out of the rotter’s old wounds as putrid flesh accordioned against putrid flesh.
Coburn had no sense of where he was. What was this place? Sewer tunnel above gave way to this below—storage for run-off? If the city still had power (and people), would this water be pumped to treatment stations?
Movement. Stirred water. Dark small shape searching.
She couldn’t find him here. Couldn’t smell his blood. The hunter was able to move in this space, and could swim with ease like some kind of
hell-dolphin
, but just the same, this was not her domain. That gave him an advantage. Small. But real.
He had to find a way out of here.
Coburn crawled along the bottom, seeking egress.
A
MOMENT OF
relative calm came to them.
Gil and the children stood under the awning of a laundromat, the rain hammering the ground around them as if the skies held a grudge against the earth. They’d cleared a swath through the rotters and here, on this side street running north to south, the undead herd had thinned—the few that shuffled close ended up with shattered legs and no heads. Gil held the rat terrier under his arm; he didn’t want to lose sight of him out here in the weather.
“Where are we going?” Pete yelled to Gil over the rain. Problem was, Gil didn’t really know. “My friend was... north of here somewhere. Said he was tracking some people.”
To eat
. Gil finished that thought only in his head.
Booboo nervously tapped his ice picks together—
clink-clink-clink
. “Maybe he was looking for those druggies down by Haight and Ashbury.”
“Yeah.” Pete nodded, taking a moment to pop a fresh magazine into his pistol. He filled Gil in: “There’s like, a few pockets of people left in the city—bunch of whackjobs hunkered down in the middle of the city. They’re always spaced out on something. Follow some weirdo calling himself the Minister, but he doesn’t look like any Minister I’ve ever seen. Tried to recruit us a while back to serve as runners for I dunno why. But we told them to suck it.”
Those must’ve been the ones Coburn was tracking.
Gil nodded. “Let’s go that way.”
D
ARK WATER, BLACK
concrete, shapes of struts and beams like bones. Coburn found it all eerily peaceful.
Time and space lost all sense down here. He pulled himself along the bottom for—well, he didn’t know. Ten minutes? Ten hours? Ten feet? Ten miles? He’d lost the hunter a while back, or so it seemed, at least. The vampire hadn’t spied the creature searching for him—he was free.
You wanted to die back there
, Kayla said.
He reminded her that he was already dead.
You know what I mean, JW. You wanted to die in Los Angeles, too. It wasn’t just to save us. It was to destroy yourself. Maybe that’s why you gave that man the finger way back when in the Big Apple, too. Maybe you wanted to die.
He explained that he was good at what he did—excellent, in fact, and if he wanted to ‘die’ then he’d jolly well have fucking died a long time ago. He liked who he was just fine, thanks for asking, now would you please shut the fuck up?
My Daddy always said someone who gets defensive like that is that way because they got something they want to hide. Something they ain’t telling.
Coburn was about to rebuke her, about to say—er, think—something about how her Daddy was an old grumpy fool, but then he caught movement.
A shape. A little girl’s shape.
The hunter.
No
, Kayla said.
Look closer
.
Coburn almost felt his heart start beating.
Rebecca.
His daughter.
Floating midway up the concrete wall. Pointing to an open hole—just big enough to wriggle through, head first.
Coburn tried to speak to her, but his voice was lost and all he tasted was the city’s polluted rainwater. And then she was gone in a flurry of bubbles; she didn’t swim away, but simply dissipated as if she’d never existed.
Starting to see ghosts, JW?
He stayed where he was. Searching the margins of the channel—it went forward and backward, deep into watery shadow, but he couldn’t see her anymore. Where had she gone? Was she even real? Or just a hallucination brought on by this sunken sewer pilgrimage?
You better move, dude. Daddy used to say: time waits for no man.
He didn’t bother mentioning that time
does
in fact wait for the vampire.
Coburn kicked off the bottom and swam to the hole.
P
OP-POP-POP
-
click.
Pete cried out, dropped the magazine out of the bottom of his pistol and searched for another at his waist—he yelled: “I’m almost out!”
They’d gotten swarmed crossing over Lombard. They couldn’t see shit and the rotters came out of nowhere. Didn’t help that the road had a lot of cars smashed into one another—made it hard to move, harder to see. Gil clambered up on top of the cars as he and the vampire had done before, but all that did was give him a sign of just how bad it was—they were surrounded, and more were coming, dragging dead legs and reaching out with ruined hands seeking live meat to shove in their hungry mouths.