Double Dead (23 page)

They disappeared around the side. The Winnebago door flung open and they came piling in. The teen girl hurried to the front.

“I knew you’d come,” she said, panting, but then she got a good look at Danny. Her face scrunched up and she cocked her head like a dog who just got asked a math problem. Danny still thought she was pretty. “Who the hell are you?”

Danny just smiled and shrugged.

“Who cares?” Gil said. “Get us the hell out of here, boy.”

Danny gave a thumbs-up and threw the RV in reverse.

Gil just wanted to do right by his daughter. Of course, he wanted to get laid, too. He didn’t mean for it to be that way. For the last several months he’d felt like a teen boy again, in ways good and bad. He liked getting the attention of a pretty girl. He didn’t so much like the effect she had on him, but he’d convinced himself that the world had gone and ruined itself and in times like these you did what you had to do to feel a little pleasure, to keep yourself going.

Fact was, he’d kept himself going for all the wrong reasons.

Kayla was his purpose. Not Cecelia. Cecelia was prettier than a blue sky in May, but she had a mean streak, too. He figured time would take that out of her; Lord knew that when he was a young buck he was brimming with piss and vinegar, too, and even some of that still sloshed around his head, his heart, his guts. But these days he’d found new focus, and not necessarily a good one. Cecelia was a part of that. Here he was, just shy of sixty years old and he was putting the pipe to a girl not much older than his own daughter.

Shame filled him.

He positioned himself by the RV’s door as the red-headed kid reversed up the driveway. Gil saw a trio of rotten bastards shuffling up. Took ’em out with a few shots.

This was his job, he knew. Protecting his people. Protecting his
daughter
. He’d lost sight of that. So when something
thumped
hard against the back of the RV, he leaned out, lifted the shotgun to his shoulders and took aim toward the tail end of the Winnebago.

He didn’t see anything.

Maybe they hit a zombie. Still, nothing went under the tires. Could be that the rotter spun away from the other side—they were about as sharp as a bowling pin and half as graceful, after all.

Above him: a fast shadow moving. A blur.

Feet kicked him hard in the chest, bounced him on his ass and punched the air right out of his lungs. With the wind knocked out of him, he gasped for breath.

The vampire Coburn stood above him. Grinning.

“Well, shit,” the monster said, tossing aside a machete. The terrier ran up to him and sat down by Coburn’s side. “Didn’t think I’d see you again, Gil.”

Finally, Gil caught a thread of air, pulled it into his chest.

The vampire offered a hand. “Get up, old man.”

Gil took the hand, was pulled forcefully to his feet.

Coburn held onto Gil’s hand like he was shaking it.

“You left me,” Coburn said.

“I know. And for that, I’m sorry. It… it was a mistake. I’ve made a few.”

The vampire’s grin spread. Gil didn’t like that look.

But what Coburn said surprised him: “It’s okay, Gil.”

“It is?”

“Sure.” The vampire tightened his grip, shook the old man’s hand.

“Thanks,” Gil said.

Coburn winked. Then broke two of Gil’s fingers.

He gripped them hard and twisted back. The
snap
was a sound Gil would never forget. The pain was hot, electric, it lanced up Gil’s arm, re-routing at the elbow and shooting all the way up his neck and into his head. His eyes watered as he fell to his knees. The vampire’s smile fell away.

“That’s me being nice,” the vampire said. Behind him, Kayla gasped, ran to her father. “Remember, I told you that you if dicked with me, I’d kill one of you. You’ll note that not only are none of you dead, but me and Ginger here, we saved your lives. Even still, I can’t let such treachery lie. You left me for dead—for
double
dead—and worse, you stole my goddamn dog. You were due worse. But I figured I had room in my wretched heart for a little mercy.”

“You sonofabitch,” Kayla said.

“It’s okay,” Gil said, pulling her close with his good hand. “Vampire’s right. I deserve worse.”

Cecelia said nothing. Ebbie just stared, shell-shocked. Leelee lay over on the bed, drifting in and out of consciousness.

“Daddy—”

“Shh,” he said, stroking her hair. “It’s okay.”

“Damn right it’s okay,” Coburn said, chuckling. “None of us are dead. Well. None of us beside me, anyway. And we got the old RV back. Frankly, you assholes should be throwing me a parade instead of staring at me like I’m Frankenstein’s monster. I didn’t drown a little girl or anything.” He plopped down on the edge of the kitchen pull-out table. “Somebody get me a map. It’s time to chart a new course. Need to move you moo-cows to the West Coast, I hear.”

His laugh was dark and deep and it filled the air.

PART THREE

PREY

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Herd Moves West

They were being hunted.

Down Route 70 ’til it turned into Route 44, through Indiana, Illinois, across Missouri, and finally into Oklahoma, they always felt that pressure at their backs. They never saw their predators, but Coburn knew who they were. Those rotters who had supped on his blood became different, somehow. Like his blood turned a dark key and unlocked something inside of them.

Sometimes, if the wind was right or if the road was flat, they’d hear it: a chorus of their cries carried long across the distance. It chilled even Coburn’s already cold marrow—the sound they made wasn’t animal, wasn’t human, but was somewhere in-between. It was the sound of the Devil on the hunt, the keening wail of a vengeful banshee driven by a terrible and unpredictable hunger.

The awful calls twined together, but if you listened hard enough, you could pull them apart and hear the four separate threads: a fearsome foursome out there wandering the highways and the hills, the long tracts of dead towns and empty forests.

Nobody knew what to call them: super-zombies? The uber-dead? The rotters, squared? Nothing sounded right. All the names seemed twee.

Mostly, they just thought of them as, well, Them.

Closest they came to seeing them was just a week back—they’d been traveling now for a month, winding their way low and slow through the highways, avoiding towns and cities wherever possible. But then, not far from Joplin, Missouri, they heard those keening wails rise up like a hurricane wind carrying with it a handful of ghosts, and this time it was closer than before.

Then—a bloom of fire and a distant
whump
shook the earth. Sky lit up before dying back to dark.

“We passed a gas station back there,” Ebbie said. “You think…”

Coburn nodded. “I don’t think. I know.”

“But why? Why would they do that? Why take out a gas station?”

“Because,” he said. “They want to fuck with us. It’s what I’d do.”

Coburn was hungry.

Out here, they’d found that, as expected, the dead weren’t as numerous, which made sense from a population standpoint: the entire state of Missouri had half the population of New York City. Fewer living folk made fewer dead folk. Of course, that also meant fewer survivors. Fewer survivors meant less blood.

To reiterate: Coburn was hungry.

He’d taken to supping off Ebbie, but that sonofabitch’s blood was so buttery-delicious that it took all his will not to crawl into the man’s gutty-works the way he had done with Ambrosia the Cannibal Queen. Plus, whenever he drank a little from Ebbie, Creampuff got it in his head to growl and bite at Abner’s pant-legs, sometimes nipping at any exposed flesh whenever the sock slipped down. That was just embarrassing for everybody involved.

During the day, Coburn slept in the RV. Seemed like the hunger made his dreams worse. Heightened them, sharpening his daytime visions to a dagger’s point. Damn if he didn’t have some rough dreams. Dreams of dead little girls. Dreams of starving. Dreams of the floor falling out from under him, of his middle finger cut off and spiraling down in the darkness, of a house on fire under a fat full moon.

Hunger made him more irritable, too. Sharpened to a brittle edge. Anxiety nibbled at him. Like piranhas biting. Back in the city, before waking up into the zombiepocalypse, he had everything he wanted. Having your wants filled up did a lot to curb worry. But out here, worry was suddenly all he had. Worry about whether or not he’d get fed. Worry over whether or not Gil would suddenly grow a pair of balls and come at him while he slept. Worry about Them: the monstrosities who were seeking his blood above all others’. Coburn didn’t think the humans in his herd understood that, yet, and he damn sure wasn’t going to tell them. The herd didn’t need to know that the wolves wanted a taste of the shepherd, not the sheep.

Worst of all, hunger gave volume to the awful voice inside him. It was a bullhorn for the monster’s monologue. In his head, a constant chatter encouraging any and all manner of atrocities.

At the very least, he was able to convince them to ditch the plan of heading through Sons of Man territory.
He
figured, go south. Curve low toward Mexico, maybe down what remained of old Route 66, take that path toward Los Angeles. No need to go messing with his old enemies, much as he’d love to be the maggot in their soup.

Still. Hunger. Fear. Dreams. Worry.

A bad combination.

Kayla was scared.

Nothing was going right anymore. Not since that night in the farmhouse. Their rescue and respite was anything but.

Coburn had changed. Up until that night when he broke her Daddy’s fingers, she’d thought that in him was a glimmer of something good, a tiny portion of his humanity left intact. She’d felt close, like she was unlocking something, but turned out all she was doing was uncorking a bottle filled with bile and blood and shadows darker than what had been there before. His dreams were no longer accessible to her; she tried to reach him in the space between sleep, but whenever she reached for him a wall slammed down. And when that wall slammed down, the dream turned into a nightmare.

The same nightmare.

A series of images played out: a fire in the desert, blood dotted across sandstone, the howls and gibbers of their hunters, city streets choked with the dead and the skies darkened by flies, hands reaching for her and pulling her apart.

One morning—late morning, when she would try to sleep and reach the vampire’s own day-dreams—she awoke from that nightmare and found herself feverish and sick to her stomach. Worse, her left hand was numb, it wouldn’t move. Leelee told her that it was the cancer. Getting into the bone marrow. Destroying the bone. But the numbness was more than that. That meant it was in her spine. Little tumors putting pressure on her nerves. Numbness. Paralysis. Soon it could—
would
, Leelee said—get worse.

After all this time, she was dying.

She tried to tell Coburn, but he didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t even want to talk about it. He was mean, too. What did she expect? She’d invited the monster into their life and now she wanted him to be her friend? Kayla reminded herself that she’d known the deal going into it.

Nobody seemed the same. Her father remained present, but distant. Like he was retreating from the world. Cecelia tried to talk to him, but he didn’t want any of it. And that only made her meaner, too. Like it was somehow Kayla’s fault.

Maybe it was.

The only upside was Danny. Danny, who Coburn still called ‘Ginger,’ was the one shining thing in her life. He couldn’t speak, he wrote for them, explaining. That was how he communicated: jotting notes down on paper. He wasn’t deaf. He could hear okay. He wrote down on the paper that his muteness was due to an ‘iodine deficiency.’ She didn’t know why that would happen, but it didn’t bother her. He let her talk most of the time, which was fine by her.

Of course, he was also really cute.

When she was with him, she didn’t feel scared. They’d take a break when the RV would pull over during the day, somewhere that Ebbie couldn’t see any zombies, and she and Danny would walk the dog, spend a little time together.

Whenever they were apart, though, the fear came back.

It was never gone for long.

Danny was in love.

Or, at least, that was what it felt like. He’d never been in love before. Whenever he was with Kayla—whenever he even saw her sleeping on the RV floor in a sleeping bag while he uncanned some food for breakfast—he got this happy tightness in his stomach. And everything seemed more alive. More awake.

It was either love or a stomach bug, he figured.

He preferred love.

Gil was lost.

Not physically lost, no, but spiritually, emotionally, mentally. Inside his head was a labyrinth built out of shame and failure, and he wandered it nightly—but at the center of this maze was not a minotaur. It was Gil. Gil was both the wanderer of the labyrinth and the monster at its heart.