Bad Blood (6 page)

And if Coburn was gone, so was Kayla.

He’d already lost her body. Somehow, the vampire was home to her spirit, her soul—even her personality. To lose her again...

It felt like something ripped out of Gil’s middle. Like the empty space was filled with bugs and battery acid and a few rusted razors.

Worst of all, it made him feel alone.

This wasn’t like him. Gil was the backbone. The leader. The one who kept them all safe. Except now they were all dead and all he had was a red-muzzled rat terrier cowering between his ankles.

Above, the purple evening sky turned darker with the coming of night. The moon rose over the city and Gil pushed on, feeling like a scarecrow absolved of his stuffing. As darkness fell, Gil heard the scuffing of feet on sidewalks and the murmuring groans of the encroaching dead—shapes and silhouettes shuffled ahead and behind, moving faster than usual. They were massing. They’d caught his scent.

The rotters got uppity at night; they grew agitated, gained a very little speed and focus. It was time, then, to go to ground. To hide.

A small voice inside Gil urged him just to stop, to sit down here in the middle of Beach Street, by the white flower delivery van whose side was splattered with blood, by the Mission-style housing with boarded windows, by the pink flowering trees lining the avenue. Sit down—or better yet,
lay
down—and let the zombies come and eat what was left of him.

But he didn’t. Gil didn’t know why, didn’t even want to ponder it. Instead he hurried right, sticking along the houses, trying doors until he found one that opened to him.

C
OBURN STAGGERED THROUGH
the beaded curtain.

Low-lit living room. Couches that didn’t match. Bean bags everywhere. Carpet torn asunder. Filth streaking the ceiling and everything smelling like hash and pot and patchouli and semen. Someone (with frankly middling amateur talent) had painted dioramas on all the walls: one of them showed someone that looked like Minister Masterson standing on a hill with his arms wide, a crowd of rotters
and
still-living humans kneeling in the golden showers of his glory. Another offered up a zombie crucified in a combination of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and a ‘cut of meat’ chart at a local butcher’s—ribs and fat back and prime cuts. A third image was just a painted ossuary of skeletons and loose bones and Mexican sugar skulls.

Coburn wasn’t sure of the narrative, but he could take a few guesses: the people here worshipped the Minister who somehow gave them power over death. That power was nothing fancy, but was a life-giving boon to those who could stomach it. Somehow, these barking moon-spiders had the ability to eat the flesh of the undead without the infection running rampant through them.

Just then: movement behind one of the couches.

A whiff of blood and fear sweat.

And sage. And lavender.

“Gandaaaalf,” Coburn said all sing-songy. “Or Jeeeeepers. Or whatever the fuck your naaaaame is. Please come out so I can break all the bones in your body.”

The old man arose from behind a couch. The movement introduced a new smell: fear urine that perfectly paired with the fear sweat. The old man’s ratty sweat pants showed a wet patch around the crotch and left thigh.

“Please,” Jeepers mumbled. “Don’t kill me. I’m just doing what I got to so I can stay alive, dude. I—I... you don’t know what it’s like.”

Coburn strode across the room. Confident. Hungry.

“No, no, I know,” Coburn said, smiling.

“I’m just an old man. My kids are dead. My grandkids are dead. Please, if you gotta kill me, just don’t make it hurt...”

The old man broke down in tears.

He was somebody’s Daddy
, Kayla said.
You could try to be nice
.

To which Coburn decided: fuck that.

The old man had drugged him. Left him nailed to a table. So that Kayla and the cure could be sucked out of
this
vampire’s body by a
different
vampire.

Coburn reached Gandalf, lifted him up by his neck. The old not-wizard’s face turned red as tears soaked his cheeks and gathered in that wispy gray beard.

You showed mercy on my people once upon a time,
Kayla reminded him.

He reminded her:
We had an arrangement. I was just protecting my food source.

That excuse doesn’t hold up any more, JW.

To which he responded:
Your people didn’t stick me with needles after attaching me to a dinner table with a hundred nails.

My Daddy did shoot you. And leave you for dead at a Wal-Mart
.

Coburn growled.

Mercy bloomed within him like an ugly, shriveled flower. He detested it—he did not wear benevolence well. It afforded him only discomfort and self-loathing. But it was there, now, lurking inside him, hateful as it was. This old man wasn’t even worth the effort it would take to snap his neck, anyway.

But he still had blood, and Coburn still had needs.

Coburn bent to feed.

Bang
.

A gun went off, behind the old man.

Gandalf’s chest sprayed red, his blood decorating Coburn’s shirt.

Dead blood was not the best blood. Which meant the vampire’s meal was... well, if not ruined, then certainly disturbed. Just because you
can
eat your hamburger, after it falls on the floor, doesn’t mean you want to.

Besides, now Coburn had a bullet lodged in his breastbone.

He threw the old man’s gurgling body forward at whoever had fired the shot—and the ’roided-out thick-necked Hispanic motherfucker stepped to the side as the body crashed against the hardwood floor, bringing up a boxy H&K .45 and peeling off another round at Coburn. The vampire didn’t have the speed or interest to move aside. The round clipped Coburn in the meat of the shoulder.

No mercy for this one
, he told Kayla. She offered no dissent.

What little blood Coburn had left, he let it burn hot and fast inside the crucible of his body, giving him a preternatural burst of speed. He came up behind Flores, getting an arm around the man’s neck and pulling tight.

It was like trying to strangle a bison.

Flores whooped and hollered, began whirling about with Coburn on his back. The thick sonofabitch slammed his body backward, driving the vampire into an old TV stand that now served as home to a collection of bongs and pipes, all of which now crashed to the floor with the sound of tinkling glass.

Flores pistoned an elbow into Coburn’s midsection, rupturing the vampire’s dead bowels. Blood seeped. The intestines didn’t matter, but the blood did.

That’s when Flores brought up the .45—clumsy, the way he cocked it over his shoulder thinking to squeeze off a shot at the vampire monkey on his back. Coburn planted a foot back on the ground, got a little leverage, then captured the man’s wrist and twisted hard as he could.

He turned the .45 downward.

Got his finger around Flores’ trigger finger.

Then: squeeze.

The gun went off, popping a round through Flores’ upper thigh. Blood squirted from the hole. The man yowled like a cat whose tail just got run over by a push-mower, and Coburn was not going to waste the opportunity. He slapped the gun away and then planted his mouth on the wound like a thirsty kid at a water fountain, greedily slurping.

Everything was red and warm and beautiful.

With a sudden electric jolt of something else.

Oh, my,
Kayla said.
He really was juiced up, wasn’t he
?

Flores batted at him, tried to wrench Coburn off.

Coburn felt the burn. The jacked-up tweaked-out steroid rush kicked a hole in his soul. It felt like someone knocked a hornet’s nest out of a tree growing in the hollows of his mind. He felt Kayla retreat into shadow.

When Flores stopped batting at him, Coburn kept sucking, felt no more blood reach his mouth. He kept sucking anyway. Felt air and flesh and heard the cracking of bone and—

Frustrated, he pushed Flores backward, then stood quickly, and backhanded the body. The head snapped, spinning on the now-shattered pivot of Flores’ spine.

“Neck’s not so thick now,” Coburn said, chuckling.

Outside somewhere: another howl.

The hunter was coming.

No,
Coburn thought.
The hunter is already here.

CHAPTER SIX

Down Into The Dark

W
ITH
F
LORES’ BLOOD
running rough-shod through his body like a pack of coked-up pit-bulls, Coburn felt his guts twist and clinch and ease back into his body as ribbons of ruined stomach-flesh sought each other out.

He felt like he could punch a hole in the heavens, like he could grab God by the ankle and drag that cruel sonofabitch down here to see what his callous and careless fuckery had wrought upon the world of man.

It was all very clarifying.

And what Coburn knew was that Lydia had to go.

The city was home to a hunter. Hopefully just one. If that thing figured out how to make more of itself—and, Coburn suspected, it would—then once again he’d have a plague of demons to deal with. Only way to ensure the hunter took a big long never-ending dirt-nap was to destroy the source: Lydia the vampire.

Besides, obliterating her into a red pulp would be a pleasure.

Because nobody hurts Kayla.

That thought surprised him.

How protective you’ve become of me
, she said. He heard her giggle—it echoed in the cavern of his skull.

Coburn cracked his knuckles. Felt together again.

He stalked through the house. Hunting.

In the kitchen, he found zombie meat—arms, legs, clumps of unidentified gray flesh—hanging from hooks and hemp rope. Organs piled up in nested wire baskets. Filthy counters sat stocked with soda and liquor bottles filled to the brim with black dead blood and corked or capped. The smell should’ve been overpowering—strong enough to make a vulture puke. But the walls and cabinets were tiled with little pine-tree air fresheners. Nailed there, just as Coburn had been nailed to the table only ten minutes before.

The rat-man—Fingerman—crouched in the corner. Whimpering. Hiding.

Leave him be
, Kayla said.

This time, mercy came easy. If only because Coburn wasn’t hungry.

Still. The rat-man could be useful.

The vampire grabbed the ketamine addict by his greasy locks, hoisted him high. “The woman. Tell me where she is, you can keep your face.”

“The Doc.”

“Yes.
The Doc
.”

“She can hook you up,” Fingerman said, eyeballs roving, corneas shaking. He was high right now, wasn’t he? Jesus. “Whatever you need, man. Vet drugs. Hospital drugs. Whatever. Oxy, vics, morphine, horse tranqs—”

Coburn shook him so hard the man’s teeth clacked together.

“I just want
her
. Where is she?”

Fingerman pointed toward the ground. “Basement, man. Tunnels.”

Tunnels?

The vampire tightened his grip around the oily horsetail of hair, demanded to know where the basement was. The rat-man pointed the way: “Around the—
ow
—around the corner.” Coburn grunted, which was the closest thing the freak was going to get in terms of gratitude—that and Coburn didn’t break a bottle of rancid zombie blood over his head, too. That had to count for something.

Coburn found the basement door. Tried the knob—wouldn’t open. Locked, probably. Like that could stop him now. He raised his leg, brought the heel of his boot down on the door-knob, knocking it to the ground.

Then he kicked the door open.

Darkness awaited.

But that was all right. Coburn liked the dark.

Grinning, the vampire descended.

T
HIS WAS THE
wrong damn house to walk into
, Gil thought. As the undead pawed at the door and boarded-up windows outside, Gil stared at the inside with disgust.

The style was cold, modernist—everything in whites, blacks, grays, with only the occasional splash of bright red (mantle, painting, broken vase, toaster). All hard angles. Nothing soft. Tile and glass and steel.

It echoed how Gil felt about, well, everything right now. Hell, he wanted to commit suicide just being here and having to look at the place.

Strange thing was, it was clean. Dusty, sure. But most houses they’d seen looked like bombs went off. Overturned furniture and dead cats and busted pipes bringing ceilings down to meet the floor. Not this place.

But one thing was troubling: the smell.

It smelled like a rotter’s armpit. Wet. Fetid. Above all else: dead.

And yet, no signs of—