Double Dead (5 page)

And before last night, getting fed had been easy.

The vampire led an easy, spoiled existence. The last fifty years had been an endless all-you-can-eat buffet. Manhattan had a population of almost two million, and that didn’t even count the millions who came in and out of the city each day as workers and tourists. Coburn sat in the midst of this like a glorious tumor, funneling fresh blood supply into his mouth night-in and night-out. He wasn’t really all that good-looking: his nose was a bit crooked, his teeth were a little fucked up. He was lean and lanky and had dark gray eyes that nobody in their right mind would’ve called ‘friendly.’

But being a vampire came with an unholy host of perks. With but a thought he could turn his voice into an angel’s song or a devil’s cry, he could blink and make his eyes as calming as a hot spring or as bleak and endless as a black hole. Didn’t hurt that he could snap even the toughest sonofabitch alive clean in half. Anybody got wise to his hypno-bullshit, he could break their necks easy as snapping a rib of celery.

Hell, most of the time none of his tricks were even necessary. The city that didn’t sleep was also a city that supped on sin. Drunk chicks. Meth-heads. Party-till-dawn-with-sex-drugs-and-techno-music. Blood thick with narcotic bliss.

God, he hated that fucking music. Didn’t anyone know how to play a goddamn
electric guitar
anymore? And the things they drank, the drugs they did. Nobody seemed to enjoy a good shot of cheap whiskey. Or a spoon full of black tar heroin. It was all
artisanal cocktails
and
designer drugs
. Made him sick. Made him want to puke up a bucket of blood.

This generation was the worst. Generation of weak-kneed hipster emo shitbags. A poor facsimile of their parents—and, frankly, those people were awful versions of their own parents, too. Generation after generation of bad duplicates. Like a letter run through the copier too many times. After a while, you couldn’t even tell what it was trying to say anymore.

That was why he didn’t feel bad about killing all those people. He went out of his way to select victims from the ranks of the douchebags, the asswipes, the hypocrites and bullies. Not because he had a conscience but rather because…

Well, it satisfied him.

Sure. Once upon a time he’d held onto some faint memory of a conscience. A glimmering, fragile little thing. Like a snowglobe or a porcelain pony.

That fragile thing had long been crushed under a black boot. The reality of what he did—of what he
was
—didn’t leave much room for guilt or shame.

Besides, it wasn’t like he killed
every
victim. Most of them he let go on their merry way. If only because disposing of bodies was an arduous task. Dumpster? River? Acid bath? Who had the time? Far better to drink a little, then send them on their way drunk and confused and without the memory of what they had done (or what had been done
to
them). Of course, sometimes they tasted so good…

At which point, well. Dumpster. River. Acid bath.

Now, though, everything was different. An obvious statement—what with the plants pushing up out of broken highway, the pile-up of rusted cars, the roaming hordes of slavering undead, only a mule-kicked blind dude could suspect that the world hadn’t pretty much shit the bed. But what struck Coburn was how it had changed for
him
. He had always been solipsistic, of course, occasionally convinced in the wee hours of the morning that all of the world was but a figment of his diseased imagination… but now it really hit home. The buffet had closed. The endless line of willing and drunken and drugged-up victims (
queue forms in the rear
) was done funneling their life source into his open and eager mouth.

No more gravy train.

No more chuck wagon.

Maybe it was just the warm glow of Carl’s blood talking, but that gave Coburn a sick little thrill. It was time once again to be the hunter. Before, he was like the spider grown fat in the center of the web. He let the flies come to him.

But now, if he wanted to eat, he needed to roam. He needed to
hunt
.

It was time to become the predator once more.

And it was with this thought that he saw something on the ground, something that caught a band of bright moonlight.

On the side of the road waited a wet puddle. Small—no bigger than a tea cup saucer. The dog whined in the back of his throat and Coburn shushed him as he knelt down and dipped two fingers into it.

His fingers came away black and sticky.

Motor oil.

Fresh, too. The wheel rut next to it was new. Someone had just been through here. Drove on the side of the road to avoid the gauntlet of wrecked-up cars.

Vehicle meant humans.

Humans meant food.

Maybe the gravy train wasn’t dried up just yet.

“Let the hunt begin,” Coburn said, and Creampuff yipped in agreement.

The
hausfrau
’s belly distended against the pink bathrobe, poking out past the frayed fabric belt. It was so bloated that the belly button stuck out, fat and shriveled as a dead man’s thumb.

Around her lay the bodies of her undead cohorts, all of them ripped asunder, bitten into with great gobbets of spoiled meat taken from their thighs, their guts, their brains. Some of them were still… well, not
alive
, not really, but animated, at least. They moaned and twitched and pawed at the earth, their bodies too ruined to get up and amble around in search of fresh meat. Each as dumb as a bag of sand.

Hausfrau
wandered among them, the taste of their foul flesh still lingering on her empurpled lips. It did nothing for her. It did not sustain her.

But the blood. The blood had changed her.

She moved her disintegrating fingers, the bony tips poking through puckered skin like a second fingernail—like an animal’s claw—and she used those fingers to feel along the inside of her mouth.

Her teeth came out in her hand.

That in and of itself was not unusual. They were, of course, rotten.

But they had been replaced. Beneath them: a row of razor sharp canines, one after the other. She could not count, but if she could, she would count dozens. Both in the top of her mouth and the bottom. Her bony fingertip clicked along—
tik-tik-tik-tik
—like a child’s stick dragging along the pickets of a fence.

She wanted more of that blood.

It wasn’t just need. It was want. Desire.
Agency
.

That was new. It was like parts of her brain—an organ which before now was just a lump of dead tissue sheltered by her misshapen skull—suddenly flared to life. Not the parts having to do with higher thought. Or rationality. Or intelligence.

But rather, the parts having to do with instinct and desire.

Right now, desire overwhelmed her: the desire to run, hunt, fuck, and kill. Her body ached for it. She ran her tongue along her razored teeth, and they cut clean through the muscle and severed the tip. But the
hausfrau
didn’t care.

She was hungry. She smelled the air. She wanted blood.

Coburn tracked the vehicle by the dots of lost oil and by the fading stink of exhaust caught on the wind. Whoever was driving the car—no, not a car, but a truck or something bigger—headed north on the highway away from town. Along the way, Coburn didn’t see much of the walking dead. Once in a while he caught sight—or scent—of them wandering around in a stumbling cluster, but the living dead were not capable hunters. They were merely reapers of opportunity, attacking when prey stumbled nearby.

At least, that seemed a pretty good theory. Coburn in turn stayed far away from them: any time he heard their distant groans or soggy gurgles, he kept to the shadows, creeping quietly. The dog, too, seemed to understand this, knowing that it didn’t want to become a late night snack for the horde of undead. (Though the dog did not seem to have that same sense about Coburn and had calmed down some since the river, perhaps because he was choosing the lesser of two evils.)

Coburn wandered the highway. Stars above. Moon often hidden behind bands of rheumy clouds, as if it refused to show its face or cast light onto such a broken, shameful world. He wasn’t alone out here: the dead milled around on the highway, sometimes staggering about in the bands of pine trees to either side of the road. They were slow. If they got in his way, he obliterated them. A new way each time: he put one through a car window, then jerked the dude’s head
just right
so the glass decapitated him. He stuck a branch through another fucker’s head. He beat a one-eyed little girl to death—or, rather, beyond death—with a hubcap, her skull in the end looking like a treacly blood pudding.

By day, Coburn slept in the trunks of abandoned cars, his jacket pressed up against the cracks in the trunk to ensure that no light would creep in and burn sun-touched scars across his body. Creampuff lay curled in the crook of his arm.

At night, he wandered. The first night, he forgot that the dog needed food. And bathroom breaks. The animal squirmed and whined and such an expression of weakness grated on the vampire. He thought about dashing the dog against a car bumper and cracking the pooch open like a can of bloody soda, but rationing food was wiser. And these hard days demanded a wisdom Coburn wasn’t used to. So he let the dog walk along with him and do his business off in the weeds. He wasn’t sure how to feed the animal, not exactly, but he suspected after surviving in a world gone mad the dog had his ways.

Sure enough, Creampuff returned with a fat bullfrog in his mouth. He trotted back, offered it to Coburn first.

“Fuck off,” Coburn said, shooing the animal. “What do I look like, a French chef? I’m not Escoffier over here. Go eat that somewhere else.”

The dog did as told. He sat down, ripping into the frog and eating the guts first. Coburn didn’t wait. The dog caught up five minutes later, muzzle slick with red, and the appearance of even that small amount of blood lit a fire in Coburn’s belly—he did think about licking the blood from the terrier’s snout, but decided against it. Coburn was not given over to great fits of shame, but making out with a skinny, dirty rat terrier would destroy what meager dignity he still possessed.

The end of the third night came, and Coburn was getting hungry.

“No food out here,” he told the terrier, who looked up at him with small, dark eyes. “I don’t smell anything good. Just the rot on the wind. And that trail of exhaust pushing farther away.”

Made sense, really. His prey had a vehicle. They could outpace him—not easily, as they had to navigate ruined roads and abandoned vehicles. Sometimes they had to double-back and take a different exit just to avoid a gummed-up highway blockade. Coburn, however, had no such limitation. He could walk over the tops of cars if need be. To a man on foot, the apocalyptic wreckage offered few transportational challenges.

Even still. They were steadily escaping.

And he was increasingly hungry. The terrier was starting to look like a stopgap measure: he carried the dog under his arm and with every hour was more keenly aware of the animal’s little fluttery heartbeat. A heartbeat that pumped blood—food, drink,
ecstasy
—through the beast’s wan body.

Fuck it, time to eat.

He opened his mouth, tilted the dog’s head back, and bit down.

But then, he paused—fangs not yet puncturing the dog’s hide. Creampuff panted, seemingly happy at the attention, as if this was tantamount to affection rather than an attempt to suck the pooch dry. He tasted the dog’s musky canine odor, tasted the dog’s desperation and hunger and loyalty, and then stopped. It wasn’t guilt that stopped him, or at least, that was what he told himself.

Rather, it was the fact that eating the terrier would provide so little food that it was almost not worth the energy: it would be like handing a starving man half of an old cookie. No satisfaction to be had.

When the terrier gave him a curious look—a damning, accusing glare—Coburn shot back: “Calm down, frog-muncher. I’m not going to eat you. Not tonight, at least. Tomorrow is a different matter.” The dog continued to stare, as if to lay blame. Then the animal looked at the cars around them and offered a sharp bark. “I can’t drive a car, you little shit. I’ve been dead for 50 years and I lived in Manhattan. Why the fuck would I learn to drive?”

He might’ve known once. He wondered about that, sometimes. His old life—meaning, the life he actually
lived
as opposed to this dead mockery—was lost to him, swallowed whole the night he awakened in an empty grave north of the city. Even still, that was so long ago, what did it matter? Cars were different now anyhow. All the buttons and fiddly bits. Kids watching cartoons about sponges on screens fixed to the backs of seats, turning their pliable little minds into the intellectual equivalents of sea cucumbers. This was the future, and the future was dumb.

So, no, Coburn didn’t drive. He took taxis and limos. Or, his preference, he walked. He liked the feel of the city under his feet, the people around him moving like cells in a bloodstream.

The terrier whined. Coburn said, “I hate you.”

They kept walking.

That night, after crossing from New Jersey into Pennsylvania along I-78, Coburn slept in the back of an overturned trailer. Before settling in for the night he cleared the area of the living dead—they reached for him, rotten teeth snapping at the air. He beat them all to death with a 4-way lug wrench he’d found in the last trunk—part of a tire-changing kit. They went down fast, and the last one—a bloated old man with his guts already hanging out, all twisted up in his shirt like a bundle of apples—dropped when Coburn flung the lug wrench at his head like a goddamn Chinese star. It lodged in the old man’s head, cracking through the forehead like it was brittle as an egg. Coburn reclaimed the weapon, then joined the dog in the back of the trailer.