Double Dead (13 page)

“You don’t know any other of your kind?”

“Nope.” It wasn’t a lie, either. Coburn had never met another of, in Abner’s words,
you people
. Well, okay, that might not be entirely true: someone made him what he was. It was not an accident or a disease or a curse from God; his first memory as a hollowed-out, replaced-by-the-demon-of-blood-hunger vampire dude was a dark shape—a man, he believed—walking away and standing in a doorframe before finally turning and leaving. Forever. Coburn followed a set of bloody boot-prints for a while, but after 20 feet or so the tracks dried up. And that was the only thing he knew of another like him. Once in a while in the city he caught a smell of something—something familiar, something sinister, a little like blood and a lot like death—but then it was gone again, more a ghost than anything.

“Wow. So that means—”

Coburn felt the RV grumble to life and start to move, and he used that as a chance to interrupt Ebbie. “Listen. Abner. I don’t really want to talk about this, and while I’m happy you feel
so comfortable
around me despite the fact our first introduction had me using you like a ham sandwich, what I really want is for you to tell me about whatever plan you hairless monkeys have concocted. You picking up what I’m laying down, fat boy?”

The man looked stung. It was what it was. Coburn wasn’t here to protect their feelings, he was here to protect the food supply.

Abner, now quiet and meek like a wounded mouse, pulled out a road atlas and flipped it open to the Pennsylvania map. He opened a red plastic cup, the kind that must’ve once contained the plastic toys known as a Barrel of Monkeys, and upended it. Pieces from a different toy—the pewter game pieces and green plastic houses of Monopoly—spilled out.

With pudgy fingers, Ebbie began to move most of the pieces to the margins of the map, but then moved the Scotty dog game piece to the East end of the state.

“This is us,” he said, tapping the dog on the map to drive the point home. “We’ve been in and around this area for a long time. But we’ve been wanting to go West because we keep hearing that out West is where society’s started to rebuild. The plague didn’t hit them like it did here, so they had fewer zombies and had a chance to mobilize. But there’s a problem.”

He took a number of the little green houses and started plunking them down at the West end of the map, each at the mouth of various highways and interstates.

“This is what we call the Cannibal Nation.”

“A
nation
. Of cannibals.” Coburn almost laughed. “So you’re saying that a bunch of man-eater motherfuckers have organized. Like a political party. Or like the Boy Scouts.”

“I dunno what you’d call it, I just know that they got smart about it. They figured out that the East Coast had a whole lot of people. And that it was like a plague zone: lots of rotters making fast work of a big population—New York, Philadelphia, DC, Baltimore, Boston. It’s the megalopolis of the Eastern seaboard. Lot of people trying to migrate West to get to the safe zone, to be with the rest of humanity. The cannibals know that it’s like a cattle chute, though, and so they set up their camps along those roads and wait for people to come through. Sometimes they lure them in, other times they just attack like a kicked-over hive of killer bees. They’re preying on the dream. The dream of going West.”

Something about this smelled goofy. Maybe it was that these idiots didn’t know how to think like predators, and that was one thing Coburn knew very well. He knew how to mess with people’s heads. How to plant ideas to get them to do what he wanted. He’d tell a couple of club chicks about some new VIP lounge, he’d even make up some tickets with a bullshit address on them—oh, that sweet smell of exclusivity—and they’d come-a-running. There’d be no club. Just him. Waiting in the darkness of the warehouse or walk-up or whatever it was. Fangs out.

Like a roach motel—they check in, but they don’t check out.

“It’s probably bullshit,” Coburn said. “C’mon, Abner. Use your goddamn head. These cannibals? They set up the story. About the safe zone and going West and all that garbage. The myth of Western expansion died with the gold rush, there’s no magic white tower in Wichita or Minneapolis. Those places are dead, just like here. You were sold on a lie.” A cold realization struck him: “And that means that
I
was sold on a lie, too.”

He stood up and set Creampuff down.

He didn’t like being lied to. Didn’t like being duped.

It was all bullshit.

He was going to kill them all. Right now. There were no pockets of humanity Out West. They got sold on a rumor, and now they were dragging him along toward some mythical Wizard of Oz Shangri-La fol de rol. If the so-called Cannibal Nation really existed, then that
right there
was his food supply. He could graze off those man-eating idiots for months, even years.

It was time to wet his fangs.

Abner had no idea what was coming. He just stared up at the vampire, his plump, cherubic face a mask of innocence and naiveté. Coburn was going to rip that face off its mooring and throw it to the dog.

“It’s real,” Abner asserted, as Coburn’s fangs crept out over his lower lip. “We met some people who’d been there.”

The vampire hesitated. He wanted to drink, but still: “…You did? You met people who’ve seen this with their own eyes?”

“Yeah. About three months back. They called themselves missionaries. They said it was their job to go back into the infested states, find the lost sheep and steer them Westward—to put them on a ‘pilgrimage,’ that’s what they called it.”

Coburn sat back down. Still suspicious. He pushed the fangs back with his tongue. “Uh-huh. And you’re sure these weren’t just a bunch of cannibal assholes pretending to be some kind of holy travelers? How do you know?”

“If it was a lie it sure was a convoluted one.” Ebbie shrugged. “They told us how they snuck back through the woods and didn’t use the roads, they told us to do the same—”

“And why didn’t you?”

“We’d lose the RV, and it’s kind of been our home.”

“Uh-huh. Go on.”

“They told us about how they had set up farms and had livestock and crops growing and even had power in some places, and they said that they were bringing in new folks every day and they had about ten thousand people now and that they belonged to this group, this group that had set all this up, these folks called the Sons of Man—”

At this, Coburn felt the blood drain from his face and move fast toward his dead heart—there the surge of blood gave the crumpled muscle a little kick and the heart shuddered once, twice, and then gave a third spasm before once more going inert.

“The Sons of Man,” he said, hands balling into fists, his nails biting hard into the flesh of his palms. “Shit.
Shit
.”

And then it all came back to him.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Sons of Man

He thrust up his middle finger, a fuck-you flagpole flying the colors of the I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit nation. Coburn licked blood off his teeth. The camping hatchet—sharpened to a paper-thin edge—swept through the air and lopped the finger off at the base. A boot kicked him in the chest. Footsteps fleeing. Struggling to get up, get out. It was then that the bombs went off—boom, boom, boom, boom.

Coburn once heard about something called ‘chaos theory,’ which sounded pretty cool and was, at least until you got into the math. At its core, it went a little like this: a butterfly flaps its wings over here, and halfway across the world a typhoon hits. The tiniest motion could, over time, have tremendous and unexpected results. A butterfly was one thing, but a human? A living human with emotions and obsessions and opposable thumbs? Well. That was a whole other bag of tricks, wasn’t it?

Human beings were dumb, but persistent. They just wouldn’t leave shit alone. Everything was a hangnail and they couldn’t stop obsessively nibbling at it, picking at it, not until a thread of skin pulled like a rip-cord all the way down to the fucking elbow.

So it was that whenever Coburn acted like a vampire—the monster being
monstrous
—it was a pebble pitched in the pond, a butterfly fluttering his stupid little wings. He drank from some club girl and left her dizzy in a bathroom? He killed some gang-banger thug and drained the body and left it on a garbage scow? He moved too fast in front of witnesses, leaving them wondering what they just saw? Each of these things: an opportunistic hangnail. A loose thread that, when pulled, might unravel the whole of the sweater.

Once a human got a look at the other side, there always came the chance that they wouldn’t—
couldn’t
—let it go.

Most of the time, fuck it, didn’t matter. About ten years back, some girl came sniffing around Coburn’s hot spots looking for her fiancé. Some douche-rag Wall Street moneyman, some cocky rich prick in a tailored suit. Frankly, Coburn barely remembered killing him. He wasn’t one to linger, after all.

Of course, just because Coburn didn’t give a rat’s ass didn’t mean she felt the same way. This was her fiancé. And now he was gone. Void like that needs to be filled. And there it was: the hangnail. Pick, pick, pick.

Night in, night out, he saw her asking questions. Bartenders. Bouncers. Doormen. Dancers. Strippers. She even came up to him one time, flashed a photo, and that was when he remembered killing the dumb fuck. The suit gave Coburn lip for bumping into him and spilling his whisky, and that’s something you just don’t do. You don’t look into the monster’s eyes and call him a—what was it? A low-class worm? Maggot? Something like that? Watch where you’re going, you blah blah blah? No. That flag won’t fly.

So Coburn found his driver. Broke his neck. Drained him dry. Then waited for Mister Moneybags with the pomade hair and the shiny watch to show up, which he did—some blonde on his arm. The vampire killed him in front of her, then put the voodoo to her, convinced her to get the hell out and forget what she saw.

The suit’s blood tasted like the good life. Unctuous, like foie gras. Coppery, like a mouthful of pennies. Sweet, like diabetes.

So when the woman came, flashed a photo, Coburn almost laughed.

He told her, no, nope, sorry, no idea.

But she just wouldn’t let it go. Kept asking around until someone—Coburn still didn’t know who or he would’ve ripped them a dozen new assholes—said that, sure enough, the suit got into an altercation with
him
. Described him to the nines: the boots, the jacket, the crooked nose.

Few nights later, she found Coburn in an alley and thrust a pawn-shop .38 snubnose in his face with a trembling hand. Said she’d been asking around and
she
heard that he was a real bad dude. Said she needed answers right then, right there, or she’d put a bullet in him.

He let her. Just to make her feel better. It wasn’t that he felt bad, but hey, that night he was feeling particularly magnanimous. She got in a good shot, too. Hit him right in the side of the neck. Had he been alive, it would’ve been a kill-shot, would have left him bleeding out in the oil-slick puddles next to the dumpster that stank of rancid curry.

Instead, he put an end to such foolishness and mayhem.

Her mind twisted easily. His voice, soothing. His eyes, mesmerizing. He found out that her name was Caitlin. Wasn’t hard to sell her on the story that her affianced fuck-stick boyfriend had run off with some anorexic high-dollar escort. Eyes watery, lip trembling, snot bubbling up out of her nose, he could see that he hooked her. She bought it. Game over, goodbye.

Or so he thought.

Who knows what it was that put Caitlin back on the path? Bad dreams, maybe? His mesmerism left cracks and holes—hairline fractures and pin-pricks only, but enough to let a little light back in—and that might’ve been what set her off. Hell, maybe it was just that she loved her dickhead fiancé
oh so much
that she couldn’t let him go. It was love, which is to say, it was obsession.

Caitlin was smart this time. She didn’t just come back to see him, didn’t just follow the same dark trail of blood-soaked breadcrumbs. No, Caitlin looked for help. She found the Sons of Man, which is when the Sons of Man found Coburn.

Bunch of fucking Jersey asshole do-goodniks—handful of amateur hour monster-hunters led by some plumber named Benjamin Brickert. Janitors and car mechanics and volunteer firemen. Not quite a dozen of them. All of them
thought
they had brushes with the supernatural, and hell, maybe they did: ghostly interventions and Jersey Devil sightings and demonic possessions. They weren’t a bunch of eggheads, though. They were church-going boys and girls, all of them: god-fearing greaseballs who didn’t want to study and find evidence of the supernatural so much as they wanted to
destroy
it.

Caitlin probably found their number on Craigslist; that was where Coburn saw it, but for all he knew those dipshits put up flyers. Whatever it was that she told them, it put them on his trail.

And for the next three years, they fucked with him.

He’d be putting the swerve on some slag in the club and there they’d be, telling her that he was some kind of monster—or, when that wording failed, rapist—and unless she wanted to end up on the back of a milk carton, she’d better hit the bricks. Of course, nobody ended up on the back of milk cartons anymore, did they? Assholes.