CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Blood is the Life

 

Coburn kicked open the RV door, gazed up into a clear night full of stars, and emerged into the darkness.

The vampire smelled him before he saw him.

Ginger sat on the overturned front-end of the RV, his legs dangling over the side. When Coburn emerged, the kid offered a game little wave and a goofy smile.

“I hate you,” Coburn said.

The boy said nothing, but at least the smile died on the vine. The vampire had to take solace in small victories at this point.

Eat him, the monster’s voice said again. Coburn ignored it.

“Get up,” Coburn said. “Go on. Shoo, off the bumper.” The boy looked stung. “No, I’m not going to threaten you or chase you off but I need you to stop sitting on the goddamn Winnebago.”

Hesitantly, the kid hopped off.

Coburn stood on the highway. Underneath the RV, the trio of zombies still lay pinned, groaning, moaning, rotting fingers grabbing handfuls of loose stone to no effect. One by one, the vampire went to each and crushed their heads with his bare feet. It was like making wine, if wine were made with spoiled brains instead of grapes. He shook the gore off his feet and then assumed a Sumo pose.

“Here,” he said to the boy. “Check this shit out.”

Swift and sudden strength was one of the vampire’s tricks—the blood churned in his veins when he willed it to, and like Moses commanded the red seas to split he could push the blood to any part of his body he wanted. Push it to his tongue, he could lick the paint off a wall. To his jaw, he could bite a spoon in half. Move it to his hands or arms, he could snap necks like they were a bundle of cheap Chinese chopsticks.

This, though, was a feat perhaps beyond him.

Still, the vampire was nothing if not overconfident.

The blood inside him moved to his arms. The skin grew warm, then hot as his body burned through the blood. He squatted down and squeezed his hands underneath the RV.

What was it they said? Lift with your legs, not your back? Or was it the other way around? Whatever. He willed blood into both legs and back.

Then he lifted.

The RV moved a couple inches—and then it felt as if his leg tendons were going to snap like angry piano strings. His body trembled. His spine bowed.

Coburn moved more blood to his extremities. His brow felt hot, now.

His bones felt like they were cracking—and then he heard them crack. Like hairline fractures across the surface of a frozen pond.

But the RV moved again—two feet now instead of two inches.

Then, three feet.

Four.

And he stopped.

His legs were shaking so bad it felt like he was standing on a fault line as plate tectonics shouldered against one another. Felt like the DTs. Felt like Parkinson’s. His hands were bending back.

Coburn did a kind of shuffle—scuffing his feet forward until he could get more of his body underneath. Then it was time for more blood. He felt his body growing hollow. Hungry. He tapped into a deep well, moving deep into the final reserves of Ambrosia’s blood: like a mosquito who stuck his drinking straw into the jugular vein of a coked-up rodeo bull, there he found power.

He gave it his all.

He fell to the ground.

The RV shot forth, landed on all four wheels, gently rocking back and forth before finally staying still.

Ginger stood staring. Mouth agape.

“Told you I was the shit,” Coburn said, his voice hoarse. His body felt like a bridge embankment that had been hit by a tanker truck. Cracked and half-collapsed. He healed what he could.

Tried to ignore how fucking hungry he was now.

He pointed to the RV. “You can drive this thing?”

Ginger shrugged, but gave a weak nod.

“Good. Shove the dirt bike inside.”

 

Wasn’t hard to find the farmhouse. Coburn thought it might be, given the fact they were driving and not tracking the scent through the woods—but the rotters made it easy. The RV drove along a steady trickle of zombies all heading in one direction, like a bunch of stoned groupies stumbling toward Woodstock.

The farmhouse—a two-storey stone job with a slate roof and a big red barn next to it—sat down in the cradle of a misty valley.

And Sweet Jesus on a carousel were there a lot of zombies.

Maybe there weren’t any more than he’d seen at Wal-Mart, and it just looked worse because the farmhouse was comparatively so small. Or maybe they really did outnumber that other horde. Why did so many show? With more on the way? Were they smelling the blood the same way he did? Drop a Taco Bell chalupa on the floor in the middle of a thousand starving men and they’ll all come hungry.

He told Ginger to park away from the farmhouse—“Don’t go down the driveway. Keep moving down the road.” Some of the zombies noticed their passing and grabbed at the Winnebago like they actually had a chance. But then, seeing the opportunity fleeing, they continued to head down toward the house.

You asshole, the voice inside said. Don’t do this. Fuck those people. They’re just food. You wouldn’t wade into a swimming pool filled with sharks to get a bowl of rice. Let them rot with the rotters.

The voice was right.

Even still.

He remembered what he saw in that room in the dream. The dead girl on the floor. Her throat torn open. Her pigtails stuck to the gummy, coagulating blood which had crept along the lines between floorboards. It was the same girl from the other dream—the one who looked like Kayla but wasn’t. He didn’t know who she was, but he knew that to see her dead killed him inside, killed everything he was and had been. Emptied him out and stripped him bare.

Because of that, he had to do this. He didn’t understand why, not really. But the vampire mind is as much about instinct as anything, and this was something he felt in the labyrinth that was his long-dead guts.

Coburn rooted around the Winnebago, found some things he needed. A lighter, check. An old t-shirt of Kayla’s, check. No guns, as it looked like they took every last one, but he did find a camping machete that would have to do.

Finally, duct tape. God’s own miracle.

He patted the seat on the dirt bike, and then let Ginger in on the plan.

 

The attic window was waxy, a film of dust and age smeared across the warped glass that wouldn’t come entirely clean no matter how many times Kayla wiped her shirt across it. She lay on the floor, staring out, petting the rat terrier behind the head. The dog stared vigilantly, sometimes growling low.

Out there, in the moonlight, she saw their death.

The meadow surrounding the old farmhouse looked like an undulating sea—heads and shoulders of the hungry dead jostling against one another, surging toward the house. Downstairs came the loud bangs of their hands echoing against shuttered, boarded windows, slapping against the stone, shouldering against the door again and again. The danger of the undead menace was not that they were monsters, but rather that they were a kind of environmental hazard, the way that a hurricane or flood was. Go unprepared and the floods would come and sweep you away, drown you in the dark, make you one with the waters.

This attic, Kayla thought, might be their very last stand.

And what a last stand it was. Cobwebs everywhere. And junk, too. The couple that had lived here before—an older couple whom they’d found embracing in a clawfoot bathtub on the second floor, an empty pill bottle laying on the cracked tile—were maybe not hoarders, exactly, but they certainly used the attic as a dumping ground for all manner of forgotten antiques. Old photos, flea market paintings, a rocking horse, a child’s wagon, boxes of paperback books, chairs, you name it, it was up here. Atop everything, a thick rime of dust. It was aggravating Ebbie’s allergies; he kept sneezing again and again at the far end of the attic, blowing his nose into some Christmas wrapping paper.

Cecelia sat on a rocking chair in a corner, a handgun in her lap. Gil paced in front of her, thinking. Kayla could see him chewing over their options, but she could also see that he wasn’t coming up with anything good.

Not far from Kayla, sitting under a blanket between a stack of boxes of old photographs and a busted-up gumball machine, sat Leelee, pale and sweating and looking worse for wear. Soon as they all emerged from the overturned RV, she’d stepped down and hadn’t seen that the vehicle had pinned a trio of zombies underneath; one of them found an opportune target in the meat of Leelee’s ankle and took a good bite out of her Achilles’ tendon.

She’d screamed, and it had been enough to signal the other zombies.

When the rotters started coming, they’d fled. Over the hills and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go, Kayla thought. Except grandmother and grandfather are both long-dead in a tub downstairs, and now grandmother’s house might as well be our tomb. Oops. Kayla had given Leelee some of her blood, and it seemed to be helping. But while the blood seemed like it would fight off the undead infection, it still wouldn’t fix her ragged tendon. Leelee wasn’t hopeful that she’d ever walk right again, not without a hospital or real medical attention.

“She needs a doctor,” Kayla said.

“I’m fine,” Leelee said.

“Daddy, we need to do something.”

Gil worried at his lip. “I’m thinking.”

“Think harder.”

“Girl,” Cecelia spat. “Leave your Daddy alone. He needs to think through this and doesn’t need you nattering in his ear like a chipmunk. Leelee needs medical attention; well, we need a good way out of here. And Ebbie needs a Benadryl and a cheeseburger, probably.”

“Hey,” Ebbie protested, sniffling.

“Besides,” Cecelia added, “she is our doctor. Not like they’re out there growing on trees.”

“I’m not a doctor,” Leelee said.

“Whatever. A nurse, then.”

Leelee shrugged. “I’m not even a nurse.”

“She’s a veterinarian,” Kayla said. She guessed Cecelia never knew that. Never had reason to, she figured, but it seemed strange Daddy hadn’t told her the truth. Was he withholding anything else?

“A vet?” Cecelia was incredulous. “All this time we’ve been getting our medical advice from someone trained in taking the rectal temperature of golden retrievers? You’re kidding me.”

“Sorry,” Leelee said, lowering her gaze. “I thought you knew.”

“Leelee, no!” Kayla said, standing up. Downstairs, the zombies had grown louder, more insistent—boards creaking, groaning, shuddering. “Don’t feel that way. Cecelia, don’t you dare diminish what she does. You see someone better qualified in this room? Are you qualified, Cecelia? Heck, are you qualified to do anything except sleep with my Dad and be a big ol’ B-I-T-C-H?”

“Kayla,” Gil admonished with a growl.

“Oh, don’t you dare, Daddy. Don’t you pretend like you don’t have any dirt on you. It was you that put us here. You made us leave the vampire behind. You led us into the woods and to this farmhouse. You’re supposed to be the one we look to! You’re supposed to be the one I look to. How can we count on you to do anything for us when half the time you act like a horny teenager with Cecelia pulling on your—” She felt a blush rising to her cheeks. “Well, your you-know-what.”

Gil wasn’t one who liked to be backed into a corner. When he was, he reacted like a pit bull, hunkering down and baring his teeth.

That didn’t happen this time. Instead, he just looked crushed and crestfallen. His words were soft: “It is my fault.”

Cecelia reached for him. “Baby, no.”

“No, she’s right.” He pulled away—gently, but surely. “I made choices. Choices that led us here.”

“Gil, don’t you listen to that little girl. She is just being a poison pill.” Cecelia shot Kayla the look of a kicked dog, the gaze bundling up her disgust and hate and sadness in one septic little package. She leaned forward in the rocking chair. “Daughters don’t always know to respect their fathers, which means that someone should step in and give them a good smack across the face—”

“Cecelia!” Gil barked. “You watch your goddamn mouth. That’s my daughter you’re talking about, and I won’t have you speak that way to me, and most certainly not to her. This isn’t the time for your petty nonsense.”

Cecelia’s jaw dropped. He’d never spoken to her like this, least not as far as Kayla had ever witnessed. She collapsed back in the rocker and muttered, “Stupid old man.”

“We need to think,” Gil said. “Think of a plan.”

“It’s hopeless,” Ebbie moaned.

“Can’t be hopeless. Think. Think.”

The terrier’s persistent growl turned deeper. Wasn’t long before Creampuff began barking in earnest. Something caught Kayla’s eye out the window. A flicker of light, moving.

She pressed her face against the glass and saw something wholly unexpected: what looked to be some kind of motorcycle was bounding down the meadow hill toward the zombies gathered in the valley.

And, far as she could see, the bike was on fire.

 

The dirt bike gunned its way down the hill and hit the crowd of zombies just like Coburn had planned. Hit them hard, hit them fast. The bike was light, and soon as the front tire hit the first rotter the whole thing flipped up in the air.

It exploded. Better timing than he had anticipated.

It wasn’t much of an explosion, granted. Wasn’t nearly as impressive as the mushroom cloud that bloomed atop the cannibal Wal-Mart, but it didn’t have to be: it just had to have enough flash and pop to get the zombies’ attention.

And boy, did it.

From up here, it looked like a colony of ants had discovered a fallen spoonful of ice cream not far from the anthill. The zombies responded to this new stimulus the only way they knew how: to surge and swarm, driven by the most basic paramecium-level curiosity.

Coburn had stuck the t-shirt in the tank, got it wet with gas, lit it, then got the bike running with Ginger’s help. The accelerators were already duct-taped and the cycle shot off like a horse with a dart in its ass. Just in time to blow up, cascading flame down upon a dozen rotters and drawing the rest.

But it wouldn’t last. Soon they’d return their attention to the farmhouse and bog down the RV. Hence, phase two of the plan.

Machete in hand, Coburn ran screaming and cackling toward the zombie throng. It caught their attention.

They surged away from the burning bike and came toward him. As intended. Whenever one got close, he chopped with the machete, taking off hands and bisecting heads. Soon as he felt he had their attention, he took off running, away from the farmhouse, away from the RV. Most importantly, away from the driveway. Hopefully Ginger would do his part next.

 

The RV wouldn’t start.

They’d killed the engine because the vampire—Danny couldn’t believe he was dealing with a bonafide vampire but what else was to be expected with the world gone to Hell in a handbasket during the zombie apocalypse, and by this point he figured that werewolves and mummies were real, too—because the vampire had said it would draw the rotters.

And now the engine just turned over. And over. And over.

He didn’t really know how to drive this thing, didn’t know if it took any special training. Seemed like driving a car, and he’d long been driving cars even before he was supposed to—on the farm, it was important to know how to drive the tractor, drive the four-wheeler, drive the pick-up.

Heck, it was that pick-up he tried driving to the Wal-Mart. His parents had long succumbed to the plague, leaving him all alone on a farm whose fields had gone fallow without the attention needed. He used up everything that was in the root cellar and was running low on canned or jarred food, so he thought, hell with it, why not take a trip to Wal-Mart? He washed up by pumping water into a pail, used a little soap and shampoo, and headed out to the store wondering if he’d find anybody there. Well, he found people, all right. They seemed to find him potentially delicious.

Then the vampire—holy crap, a vampire!—showed up and everything went batshit. And now they were staging some kind of rescue?

And the RV wouldn’t start?

He wasn’t half the mechanic his Daddy was, but he was trying to noodle what might be stopping the darn thing from getting going when two things happened.

First, the RV rumbled to life.

Second, the headlights kicked on and illuminated the road in front of him. A road filled with zombies.

They’d found him. Maybe they smelled the exhaust or could somehow sniff out his shampoo. Right now it didn’t much matter how they found him, but they did. And they began swarming the RV.

Danny—who by now was almost thinking of himself as ‘Ginger’—gritted his teeth, closed his eyes, and punched the accelerator.

 

Turned out, it was impossible to lead a throng of zombies on a merry chase. They were just too damn slow; every time Coburn turned around, they were playing catch-up, staggering through the woods, tripping on fallen branches, disappearing into the carpet of fog. It was like leading a herd of old people.

Coburn, feeling cocky, danced up to the wall of oncoming rotters and took a swipe here, a hack there—the machete cleaved faces and separated limbs from the bodies. Drop a leg, the zombie falls and the others just walk over him. Drop an arm and they continue to try to use it, grabbing with the phantom limb that got left in the fog ten feet back. They hissed and groaned, expelling gases, baring teeth like rotten kernels of corn.

Being cocky was often Coburn’s downfall.

The mists were thick. So, too, the trees. He didn’t anticipate the nature of the undead swarm, that they tried to fill in any empty spaces.

And so it was that they flanked him. They probably didn’t mean to flank him, exactly. Big strategists, they were not. They came up behind him because it was their way, to occupy emptiness, to surround any potential prey, to make it their own and make it like them.

He heard the branch snap behind him. He wheeled with the machete, cut halfway through the spongy neck of a dead dude in a tattered ski jacket, the head still connected to the body by a rubbery swatch of dead flesh. The zombie pirouetted drunkenly before falling to the mossy earth.

And from behind him, the undead surged.

One grabbed his free arm and before he could shake the fucker off, the rotter bit down between his thumb and forefinger. Another pulled him backward, got teeth in his neck. A third bit his arm, but instead got a mouthful of leather jacket.

This isn’t happening again, the vampire thought. He snapped his head back, exploding—literally—one zombie’s nose. He jerked his arm, sending the hand-biter back into the throng. The one gnawing on his jacket got the machete—the blade bit between his cheeks popped the top of his head off the way you might slice a Champagne cork off with the swipe of a saber.

For a half-second, Coburn felt a surge of ass-kicking triumph—the zombies that had been surging suddenly backed away, moaning, flailing. Fuck you, rotters—that’s right, behold my awesomeness, gaze upon my rampant ass-kickery.

But that didn’t feel right. Zombies, as discovered, didn’t exactly have a great deal of self-awareness. They could barely put one foot in front of the other.

Something else was at work.

Then Coburn saw.

The two that had bitten him had fallen to the ground. Were thrashing about in the mist. The one wearing a mud-and-blood greased rain-slick rose above the mist, mouth wrenching open, the tongue elongating, the gray meat flapping about like a whipping possum’s tail. The other, a woman in a barely-there house dress with both tits out (one rotten and ruptured like a stepped-on bag of dogshit), began clawing at the earth in earnest, frenzying and keening. Coburn heard the bones snapping in her hands. Fingers tightened to arthritic claws. Her nails began growing to tapered, jagged points.

The zombies were afraid, all right. They just weren’t afraid of him.

Rainslick and Rupture-Tit both pivoted their heads toward him at the same time. He saw a mad glint, but worse, he saw in there a glimmer of intelligence. Same spark he’d seen in the eyes of the bathrobed beast.

It was time to go. He hoped like hell that Ginger was on the stick with this plan, because there was now no margin for error.

 

The zombie smeared his face across the RV’s windshield. It left a tar-like streak of blood and rot that reminded Ginger—or, Danny, rather—of squished spinach. Another rotter joined the zombie at the fore, and Danny couldn’t see anything. He’d made it onto the driveway, gravel popping beneath the RV’s tires, but with rotters climbing over every square inch of the RV, he couldn’t see how far down the driveway he’d come or how close to the house he was.

The first zombie at the windshield hissed. Opened his mouth, tried to bite the glass. Danny squeezed his eyes shut, slammed the brakes. That rotter went flying, but the other one held on just barely, using a now-busted windshield wiper as a lifeline.

The zombie reared his head back, triumphant.

And his head exploded. Danny about wet himself.

Suddenly, the sound of gunfire erupted. A zombie at Danny’s side window tumbled away. Another came rolling down the front, sans head, before spinning into the mist and out of sight.

That was when Danny saw them. Midway up the driveway came a handful of survivors: an older man and a young teen girl with a middle-aged black woman between them, and trailing after, a fat guy carrying a little dog and another woman who, in Danny’s eyes, matched what a prostitute might look like. Not that he’d ever seen a prostitute back on the farm.

They disappeared around the side. The Winnebago door flung open and they came piling in. The teen girl hurried to the front.

“I knew you’d come,” she said, panting, but then she got a good look at Danny. Her face scrunched up and she cocked her head like a dog who just got asked a math problem. Danny still thought she was pretty. “Who the hell are you?”

Danny just smiled and shrugged.

“Who cares?” Gil said. “Get us the hell out of here, boy.”

Danny gave a thumbs-up and threw the RV in reverse.

 

Gil just wanted to do right by his daughter. Of course, he wanted to get laid, too. He didn’t mean for it to be that way. For the last several months he’d felt like a teen boy again, in ways good and bad. He liked getting the attention of a pretty girl. He didn’t so much like the effect she had on him, but he’d convinced himself that the world had gone and ruined itself and in times like these you did what you had to do to feel a little pleasure, to keep yourself going.

Fact was, he’d kept himself going for all the wrong reasons.

Kayla was his purpose. Not Cecelia. Cecelia was prettier than a blue sky in May, but she had a mean streak, too. He figured time would take that out of her; Lord knew that when he was a young buck he was brimming with piss and vinegar, too, and even some of that still sloshed around his head, his heart, his guts. But these days he’d found new focus, and not necessarily a good one. Cecelia was a part of that. Here he was, just shy of sixty years old and he was putting the pipe to a girl not much older than his own daughter.

Shame filled him.

He positioned himself by the RV’s door as the red-headed kid reversed up the driveway. Gil saw a trio of rotten bastards shuffling up. Took ’em out with a few shots.

This was his job, he knew. Protecting his people. Protecting his daughter. He’d lost sight of that. So when something thumped hard against the back of the RV, he leaned out, lifted the shotgun to his shoulders and took aim toward the tail end of the Winnebago.

He didn’t see anything.

Maybe they hit a zombie. Still, nothing went under the tires. Could be that the rotter spun away from the other side—they were about as sharp as a bowling pin and half as graceful, after all.

Above him: a fast shadow moving. A blur.

Feet kicked him hard in the chest, bounced him on his ass and punched the air right out of his lungs. With the wind knocked out of him, he gasped for breath.

The vampire Coburn stood above him. Grinning.

“Well, shit,” the monster said, tossing aside a machete. The terrier ran up to him and sat down by Coburn’s side. “Didn’t think I’d see you again, Gil.”

Finally, Gil caught a thread of air, pulled it into his chest.

The vampire offered a hand. “Get up, old man.”

Gil took the hand, was pulled forcefully to his feet.

Coburn held onto Gil’s hand like he was shaking it.

“You left me,” Coburn said.

“I know. And for that, I’m sorry. It… it was a mistake. I’ve made a few.”

The vampire’s grin spread. Gil didn’t like that look.

But what Coburn said surprised him: “It’s okay, Gil.”

“It is?”

“Sure.” The vampire tightened his grip, shook the old man’s hand.

“Thanks,” Gil said.

Coburn winked. Then broke two of Gil’s fingers.

He gripped them hard and twisted back. The snap was a sound Gil would never forget. The pain was hot, electric, it lanced up Gil’s arm, re-routing at the elbow and shooting all the way up his neck and into his head. His eyes watered as he fell to his knees. The vampire’s smile fell away.

“That’s me being nice,” the vampire said. Behind him, Kayla gasped, ran to her father. “Remember, I told you that you if dicked with me, I’d kill one of you. You’ll note that not only are none of you dead, but me and Ginger here, we saved your lives. Even still, I can’t let such treachery lie. You left me for dead—for double dead—and worse, you stole my goddamn dog. You were due worse. But I figured I had room in my wretched heart for a little mercy.”

“You sonofabitch,” Kayla said.

“It’s okay,” Gil said, pulling her close with his good hand. “Vampire’s right. I deserve worse.”

Cecelia said nothing. Ebbie just stared, shell-shocked. Leelee lay over on the bed, drifting in and out of consciousness.

“Daddy—”

“Shh,” he said, stroking her hair. “It’s okay.”

“Damn right it’s okay,” Coburn said, chuckling. “None of us are dead. Well. None of us beside me, anyway. And we got the old RV back. Frankly, you assholes should be throwing me a parade instead of staring at me like I’m Frankenstein’s monster. I didn’t drown a little girl or anything.” He plopped down on the edge of the kitchen pull-out table. “Somebody get me a map. It’s time to chart a new course. Need to move you moo-cows to the West Coast, I hear.”

His laugh was dark and deep and it filled the air.