CHAPTER TWO

The Vampire Reflects

 

Sitting slumped up against a deer corpse, framed by two rotting pumpkin-heads, his mouth rimmed with gluey red, Coburn had time to reflect.

His first reach for memory was a stunted attempt: in the shadow of his own mind he found only broken pieces, like a photograph sliced into ribbons by a razor blade. He saw a flash of blonde hair: pigtails twisting, evading his grasp. The sound of a television announcer: gonna be a rilly big shoe. A shadow crawling in through the window. Then, time shifted, leapt forward suddenly, showcasing another flurry of images: a camping hatchet, an upturned middle finger, a bearded man, a gout of flame.

Didn’t make any sense, and whenever he tried to look deeper, those images turned to roaches and scattered from the light.

But beyond those…

Blood. Excess. A woman laughing. A woman screaming. Limousines that stank of money and leather, and dark alleys that smelled like rotten garlic and stinking curry. The stars and moon above, always dark, never the sun, the provenance and kingdom of Coburn the vampire. These were the images he knew. These came back to him comfortably. Like a warm blanket felt for in the dark.

It was a life—or an unlife, or whatever it was you cared to call it—bloated to the gills with the most wonderful of sins: gluttony and lust and revenge and all those glorious transgressions. An existence of endless pleasure.

And now, this.

Waking up in a ruined movie theater. Feasting on a dead deer. Attacked by—what? Homeless degenerates? Meth-addled plague victim freakshows who were too stupid or too jacked to know that they were a hair’s breadth from death?

“Ain’t exactly the—” His throat crackled. He coughed, and ptoo-ed a bloody wad of whitetail fur out of his dead throat. “Ain’t exactly the Four Seasons.”

Coburn stood. Walked over to a faux-gilded movie poster frame. The poster within was no longer recognizable, covered as it was with rampant mold, but the glass was still surprisingly intact. The vampire examined his reflection.

He didn’t look so hot. Cheekbones, sunken. Eyes, too. His skin had started to soften—but some of it still lay cracked, like the skin around his eyes or the flesh betwixt each finger. His hair, once slicked back and lacquered to his skull, was now a hot, frizzled mess. Hell, all his roguish good looks had been run through the gauntlet. Coburn’s lips curled into a sneer below his crooked nose.

His time below had ruined a perfectly good thing.

He swatted a fly away from his head, and in doing so, called to attention a curious fact.

“I’m missing a fucking finger,” Coburn said, not sure who he was talking to. Did he always talk to himself? Or had his time underground tweaked his psyche? He didn’t know and didn’t care, and was instead more interested in his hand.

He held up his right hand, waggled all of his fingers except the middle one. That finger dead-ended in a shriveled stump.

It would regrow. Eventually. Once he had some real blood sitting in his gut and churning through his dead heart. The deer blood wouldn’t do it. Not strong enough stuff—like light beer or wine coolers, it was a thinned-down version of the real thing. Worse, it wouldn’t last long. Give it a couple of nights and he’d be back to starving, and when starvation was on the line, reason and higher thinking were out the window. Go without for too long and it was back to the crispy body, the muscles-gone-rigid.

Which meant it was time to hit the town. Would be easy pickings in this city: it always was. Head down to Times Square or Penn Station, wait for some tourist drunk off the newest Broadway fiasco, sweep them up, do a little of that voodoo-that-you-do-so-well, and drink them dry in an alley or a restroom. Then Coburn could clean up a little, because damn if he wasn’t nasty-looking.

At least he still had his leather coat—a ratty, weathered thing worn by David Johansen of the New York Dolls, Christmas Eve, 1971. Band’s first performance. And his boots: pair of derby swirl Fluevogs with soles that read: ‘Resists alkali, water, acid, fatigue, and Satan.’

He looked back over the theater. Tried to remember how he got there. Something moved in the back of his thoughts, like a moth fluttering against a darkened window. But it refused to be pinned.

Coburn would remember. It would just take time.

And blood. It always took blood.

He marched toward the theater’s front double doors and threw them open, ready to step into the bright lights, big city, and feast like a fucking king.

 

The average vampire had the nose of a pregnant woman: the olfactory sense was dialed up to 11, then the knob was broken off. Truth be told, all of a vampire’s senses were ratcheted up, but right now the one that mattered most was smell.

The city stank of death.

A crowd gathered outside, as it always did here in the Big Apple. But this crowd wasn’t like any other crowd.

This crowd was not alive.

A woman with a missing nose and hair like the tail of a dead horse dragged a broken foot, the bones jutting awkwardly from ruined flesh, a clutch purse still in hand.

A man in construction gear stumbled around in circles, his fat belly bloated with foul gases, his skin marred with the purple striations of death. With a rotten hand—literally rotten, so rotten it was just a mush of meat with bleached finger bones sticking out—he scratched divots in his cheek.

A little boy, his lower half just a squid’s beard of guts and meaty fringe, dragged himself across an open manhole, then fell down into the dark.

And it wasn’t just them. Dozens right here. Hundreds down the street in every direction. The city, thick with them.

The air, fat with flies.

The city lay dark and still but for the shuffling and mumbling of the damned. No power anywhere. No car horns. No music playing. Coburn couldn’t smell food cooking, couldn’t feel the subterranean rumble of the subway, couldn’t even hear the scurrying of the rats or the fluttering of pigeon wings.

Only the swarm of flies and the slow dance of the dead.

The construction worker pivoted his head toward Coburn. His lower jaw unhinged—not like a snake’s jaw but rather like a jaw whose tendons had long turned to mush—and he hissed.

Coburn pirouetted back inside, gently shut the door behind him.

As he closed the door, one final realization crossed his mind.

The city no longer offered a bounty of expected smells: burger grease, exhaust, cologne. But that wasn’t the troubling omission.

Coburn couldn’t smell blood, either.

No life, no blood.

No blood, no food.

That was not good news.