CHAPTER TEN

Feeding Frenzy

 

And like that, the pressure atop her was gone.

The zombie made a sound like one she’d never heard before: a kind of guttural bark, a chuffing belch. She clamped her hand to her bleeding collar and scooted back against a tree—the rotter who had bitten her, another park ranger (this one female, her scalp peeled back like the skin of a grape), stood there wearing a look more dumbfounded than usual.

The zombie began choking. Its foul tongue thrust out, stabbing at the air. It clawed at nothing. The sounds that emerged became more and more strangled—grrk, gkkkt, kkkkklllkkk.

Then its eyes popped. Like hot eggs jumping out of their shells. From the eye sockets ran fresh blood—not black, but red—and with each rivulet came a curling wisp of steam or smoke.

The zombie dropped, dead. Or, at least, deader than before.

Suddenly, Kayla found herself yanked upward violently. She cried out as she was thrown over someone’s shoulder—her face pressed into said someone’s jacket—and she smelled leather and blood.

“Don’t scream,” Coburn hissed. “Just shut up and keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle, unless you want them broken off.”

And then he began to run.

But he ran fast. Faster than fast. Branches whipped at her arms, cutting into them, drawing blood. She tucked them tight. She remembered once, way back when, seeing a nature video in school where they put a camera on some kind of hawk or falcon and recorded its flight through a tight forest—this was like that, the world rushing past, the trees nothing but blurry shadows.

Like that, Coburn emerged from the forest with her on his back.

She smelled gunpowder and rot. As if to punctuate the odor: a rifle shot split the air. Someone—Cecelia?—screamed.

Coburn dumped Kayla on the ground and then disappeared. Kayla propped herself up on her arms and legs, trying dearly not to vomit. And that was when she saw just how badly things had gone in her absence.

Night had fallen.

The rotters were everywhere.

They had surrounded the Winnebago.

Her father stood in the open doorway, firing off rifle rounds. Abner leaned out of the passenger side window in the cab, desperately swinging with a camping hatchet. Cecelia was at the window, screaming her fool head off even though she wasn’t in immediate danger.

Leelee, though, was in danger.

The nurse stood up on a picnic table with can of hairspray and a lighter—an easy homespun flamethrower that didn’t always do much to kill the undead but did a good job of keeping them at bay. She flicked the lighter, hit the button and set off plumes of chemical fire, like dragon’s breath. The rotters swatted at it the way you might at a cloud of mosquitoes. A few of them actually caught fire.

And then the fire died down to a limp, sputtering spray, a few glowing yellow drops falling to the earth before dying out completely.

The zombies swarmed her, pulling her down.

Kayla’s heart sank as Leelee’s body fell beneath the horde.

But before she knew what was happening, Leelee surged back out of the zombie throng—this time, buoyed by the hands of Coburn the vampire. He threw her back up onto the picnic table, stepped up and then stepped down hard onto the picnic bench, catching the see-sawing bench board in his hand.

Then he started swinging that bench like a baseball bat.

Zombie skulls caved in. Some heads bent at the neck at wrong angles. Others twisted around. A few launched off the shoulders, freed by the mighty strikes.

Coburn began to carve a path through the horde. He swung the bench—easily five feet long—before him in great, swooping reaper-like arcs. Leelee fell in behind him and when the board finally shattered, he stabbed the broken shard into some fat rotter’s pumpkin head and then went ahead and just used his hands. He grabbed skulls and smashed them together. He ripped faces clean from their skulls. He punched straight through mushy brains.

And when he looked to Kayla and waved her on, she felt what was certainly an unhealthy surge of happiness—he came back to us, he will be our protector, thank you God Almighty for we are saved.

It was almost enough to make her forget about the hunk of meat the zombie had bitten out of her shoulder.

She ducked a lurching zombie—as the rotter closed in, his head spun around and a spray of loose, decaying teeth peppered her cheeks like shotgun pellets.

Kayla darted in and clung to his side and she felt his arm around her. She felt Leelee’s hand grab her own and then on the ground she saw the small terrier from before, making deft figure-eights around the vampire’s feet… and for just a moment, all felt right in the world—even as black blood and zombie teeth rained down upon them.

Her father stood at the door and pulled her inside. The dog leapt in after her, and then Leelee followed.

Then she heard the sound.

It was an awful cry—a keening wail, a banshee’s scream. It was like nothing she’d ever heard. It cut to the bone. It sang in her marrow and she was sure then that if she ever slept again that sound would be what haunted her dreams.

Coburn pushed her the rest of the way inside. His eyes were wide, like he’d just seen a ghost—and the fact that a vampire, a bloodsucking monster, seemed rattled was not a good sign. He gritted his teeth and snapped his fingers.

“We need to go, and we need to go now.”