Double Dead (24 page)

The days and nights passed in a way that made him feel like they had no borders—they oozed together like runny eggs in a hot skillet.

The pain of his fingers had never properly subsided, and it always nagged at him: with every heartbeat the pain radiated, a dull, drumming throb. Leelee had set them as best as she could, but that night back then at the farmhouse she was sick, feverish, on the verge of falling over into the void and becoming one of the starving dead—yes, Kayla’s gift had saved her, but that night when she set his fingers in a makeshift splint using some duct tape and a wooden spoon, the job was only so good and his fingers still felt crooked.

It amazed him how critical those two fingers are. Especially in a zombie apocalypse. Those two fingers helped him use a gun: the middle finger beneath the trigger guard and the doubly important index finger—to
pull
the trigger. Without them, it felt like he might as well have had his legs chopped off.

Of course, almost everyone around him was a cripple, these days. Leelee limped, still. Always would, she figured. Danny couldn’t talk. Ebbie had actually lost a dozen or so pounds, but he was still north of three hundred and would never run a sprint in record time. Cecelia was, well, an emotional cripple. And finally, his daughter—her left hand, numb, moving towards paralyzed.

Only one who wasn’t broken in some way was the vampire. Even though Gil knew it was absurd, he couldn’t help but imagine that the vampire had done this to all of them, not just him—like he was a vampire that drank more than blood. He drank their luck, maybe. Their spirit. Stole Danny’s voice. Robbed Kayla of her hand. It didn’t make sense but it didn’t have to. Monsters were real. Who knew what they could do?

Gil pictured how miners used to hobble slaves, chaining them up or breaking their feet so they couldn’t go far. Wasn’t this like that? Coburn keeping his ‘herd’ nearby so they couldn’t stray?

That was Gil’s fault, he knew. First bad decision was letting the vampire stay. Second bad decision was trying to get away.

Yes, indeed, Coburn saved them.

But sometimes, Gil thought, maybe being saved was worse than dying. Especially in a world like this.

The only glimmer of hope he had was for his daughter. He knew she was special. She could see things in her dreams sometimes. And then her blood—that was special, too. But it didn’t stop her being sick. That sickness was getting worse. Cancer was an insidious thing, a monster, like Coburn, that moved in and wouldn’t move back out again.

Sometimes
, Gil thought,
you just gotta cut the cancer out to be rid of it.

Ebbie was worried.

He was so worried, he could hardly eat. And there
was
food out there to be had. Sure, you’d think it’s the end of the world, all the food’s probably used up or spoiled outright, but this zombie thing happened fast. Lot of food left in the stores. No, you wouldn’t find a bag of spinach or a box of frozen hamburgers, and no matter how far you drove you’d never come across an operational KFC, but in stores and houses you could still find canned goods, bags of candy, sodas, even cereal. Amazing how good cereal tasted after two years. Must’ve been all that high fructose corn syrup, he thought. Which didn’t really help his diabetes, but the end of the world meant he didn’t have much time to think about his blood sugar levels, thank you very much.

What had him worried—well, besides everything else that was awful about the broken, zombie-infested planet—was the Winnebago.

This old beast had been with Gil and them since before they even picked him and Cecelia up. But the engine was starting to knock. Sometimes it sputtered.

Thing was, the RV—a 1994 Winnebago Itasca Suncruiser—was diesel, which, according to Gil, was a good thing since diesel fuel didn’t ‘expire’ like other gas. Ebbie didn’t even realize that gas expired in the first place, but the addition of ethanol cut its shelf life down to ninety days or so. Which explained why they couldn’t just go snatching up any car on the road even though they had gas in ’em: they wouldn’t even start.

Diesel was harder to find, but they managed: the highway was home to enough diesel vehicles (any time they caught sight of one of those little Volkswagen hatchbacks it was like playing a game of Punch Buggy, except
this
game had a lot higher stakes to it).

Still, Gil said that maybe this batch of diesel was no good. Maybe it had water in it. Or microbes. That could happen, he explained, but he explained it in a way like he just didn’t care. Like he’d given up the ghost.

That had Ebbie worried, too.

Gil went on to say that it might be that the filter or fuel injector was gummed up—this was, after all, a decades-old motor home with 115,000 miles on it. At this point it was like an old dog. Everybody knew it wouldn’t last forever, but they really didn’t want to think about putting the beast to sleep.

Along the way they’d been keeping their eyes out for something new—but not only had they not found anything, smaller vehicles just wouldn’t accommodate them all anyway. Back in Indiana, about ten miles south of Indianapolis, they found a motor home dealer. Lot full of RVs of all shapes and sizes.

And not one of them diesel.

Soon as the ’Bago died, Ebbie didn’t know what they’d do. He couldn’t walk long distances. He was too big. And then he really would have to worry about his diabetes. Walking made him sweat like a pig. They had bottled water, but not enough to keep him conscious.

Of course, walking had another issue: Them. Behind them, the monsters followed. They couldn’t catch up, Coburn said, because the RV was fast enough—while they were fast, too, they weren’t machines.

But once they started walking, well.

The monsters would surely catch up.

Cecelia was pissed.

Fuck all these assholes. Fuck ’em right in the eye. They treated her like a pariah, now. She got food last. Water last. Always had to hold her piss until Ebbie deigned to stop. That dipshit kid who faked being mute got better attention than she did. It just wasn’t right.

The tables, they had to turn. Only way that was going to happen was if she made them turn. Her mother always told her, “Cecelia, you want something in this life, you have to go out and get it yourself. Nobody’s going to give you shit, girl. The only way you get the cookie is if you reach in the jar and take it.”

Then the woman would suck her Parliament cigarette down to a sizzling nub and hand Cecelia—young as age twelve—a sip of her Gallo wine.

She was going to get Gil back.

She was going to show him how to teach his uppity bitch daughter what’s what.

Then she was going to send that vampire to Hell.

Leelee believed.

It was hard not to. She’d always been something of an agnostic, forever leaving room for God (or Buddha or the Goddess or whatever name the power of the divine had) in her life, but it was never something she thought too much about. Such an idea remained firmly abstract, outside her grasp, beyond any practical meaning in her life.

That had changed.

The dead walked. They had a vampire with them. They survived impossible situations. All those things were by themselves fantastic and strange and ostensibly served as proof of
something
beyond mortal ken.

Really, though, it was all about Kayla.

Kayla. The girl who should’ve been dead. The girl who dreamed. The girl whose blood was a curative for the rotten and wretched plague that destroyed… well, at least most of America, if not the rest of the world.

Leelee knew that she herself should be dead. It was just that simple. She should be dead, taken over by whatever parasite, virus or bacteria it was that not only undoes rigor mortis but forces the dead to get up, stumble around and hunger for flesh.

But a draught of Kayla’s blood had the power to change that.

Which meant it had the power to change the world. Just as it could reverse the zombie plague in a person, it could reverse the sickness that plagued the human condition.

Kayla could cure the world. Kayla wasn’t God—or Buddha,
or
the Goddess—but in her shimmered a spark of the divine.

That was what Leelee believed. And it gave her hope.

The hunters hunted.

Four of them stalked the wasteland.

They had changed. And the changes kept on coming, every night a new evolution. Long, curved claws like a vampire’s fangs but serrated on the inside. Legs broken, twice-jointed so that they could move and run faster. Their rotten skin tightened up—where it split, scabs formed and hardened like chitinous nodules, like hard caps of porous volcanic bone.

Their tongues elongated, narrowed, hollowed. All the easier to drink. Their teeth multiplied: rows upon rows growing in their widening mouths.

They were learning, too.

The Bitch Beast in the bathrobe—now just a tattered pink scrap draped over her neck and shoulders—was the one who learned things first, and then she taught the others: Ranger, Rain-Slick, Rupture-Tit.

They learned how to lure prey. Bitch Beast made a sound like a wounded fawn, and soon a doe came out of the woods.

They learned how to hold weapons. Ranger had a hunk of conduit. Rupture-Tit cradled a fire ax against her ruined breast. Bitch Beast and Rain-Slick preferred tooth-and-claw.

They learned how to taunt their enemies. Ranger found a lighter. Bitch Beast tore a gas pump off, left a trail of it. They set fire to the gas, let it ripple like a swiftly-squirming snake toward the pump, then—
boom
. A warning to their target, the one whose blood sated them like nothing else. A warning that said in a burst of fire and a dull roar,
we are coming for you
.

But most of all, they learned how to lead.

Before, they viewed those other staggering undead as lesser beings—which remained true. But, just like the fire ax or the lighter, that did not mean they could not be used. The zombies wanted to follow them. Once, Bitch Beast demanded they tear the undead limb from limb if only because it satisfied her need to destroy. Now, though, she gathered them to her. The others did the same.

They followed behind. Slowly, but surely. A growing, staggering mass of bodies—as single-minded and stupid as a plague of locusts, but infinitely more destructive. The four hunters had a kind of grim, awful gravity now. They pulled horror behind them in a rippling, putrid wave of undead bodies.

It was a beautiful thing.

And so they hunted.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Get Your Kicks

The way the Winnebago died was far from spectacular. It did not put on a show. There came few moments of suspense where they wondered,
will it make it? Could we get just… a little bit… further?
Instead, it just gave three good shudders like a dog ridding itself of fleas, then died with gas still in the tank. Ebbie tried the key, but the old Suncruiser wouldn’t turn over.

They emptied out of the RV. The sun had set not long before. A sign nearby told them they were in or near a town called Erick, Oklahoma, but far as anybody could see on the map or with their eyes, the town wasn’t so much a town as it was an intersection of highways.

Outside, a deep purple eventide band hung low across the horizon. The sky flashed with faraway lightning. It was good and warm right now, the heat rising up off the highway even in spring. But that would change. Daytime saw temperatures in the low eighties—hot enough to cook a frog on the road if he sat there too long—but at night, that same frog would freeze where he stood as the temperature plummeted into the low thirties.

Moaning nearby alerted them to a pair of rotters jogging up—well, not jogging, really, but maybe more ‘drunkenly lurching.’ Zombies so often seemed to be leaning forward when they walked, as if their movement was ever the product of almost falling face-down, their legs moving just in time to stop that from happening. Coburn didn’t bother wasting any ammo. He met them halfway to the ’Bago and bashed their skulls in with the butt of a shotgun.

“Nice job, Ebbie,” Cecelia said, casting eye-daggers in his direction.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not his fault, Cecelia,” Gil said, but Coburn noticed the old man’s vim and vigor—his
cantankerousness
, one might say—was gone. As if the vampire had broken his spirit the same time he broke those two fingers. Coburn was mostly pretty pleased with that, and the monstrous part of him was particularly tickled. Still, another part of him couldn’t help but worry. Gil was an asshole, but made of tough stuff. Couldn’t have him wilting like a pissed-on daisy. Needed his head in the game. Kayla went up to her father and rubbed his shoulder. Danny just stood around like he was ready to stick his thumb up his ass.

“Listen up, moo-cows!” Coburn called out, clapping his hands. “We’re going to have to hit the bricks, do some walking. Looking ahead, seems like there’s a town up a ways. How far on foot, Gil?”

Gil perked up, looking surprised anybody was asking him anything. “Uh. Well. Erick the town you’re talking about?”

“See any other towns around here, old man?”

“I’d guess about two, three hours.”