CHAPTER THIRTY

Mojo Rising

 

Kayla sat on the bed, trembling. Morning light, bright and white, came in through the blinds of the motel room, hurting her eyes.

As they said in the military, things had gone AWOL. SNAFU. FUBAR. The idiot ‘King’ of the 66 States sentenced them all to roles—and soon as he told Kayla and Cecelia what they were going to be doing, Gil moved faster than an old man should. He snatched up the glass bong and cracked it over Thuglow’s head—he screamed, backpedaling with shards of glass stuck in his head, the air filled with the sudden skunky stink of the spilled water. Loco, Dope Fiend and Jester were suddenly knocking Gil to the ground, kicking him and pistoning their rifle butts into his curled-up body.

Chaos reigned. Kayla and Cecelia attacked back, both singling out the muscle-head, Dope Fiend. Loco raised his rifle but found himself hoisted off the ground by a charging Ebbie. The wiry Jester started to get into the fight, but Danny stepped in his way, fists balled up. They had no chance, of course—Ebbie wasn’t anything close to a gladiator, and with Kayla’s cancer in play she and Cecelia had the combined upper body strength of a wilted daisy. Danny put up the best fight of the bunch and turned out to be quite the scrapper, but even still, he got dropped, his lip split and bleeding, a gun thrust up against his throat.

Didn’t matter anyway—eventually the hangar filled with the chatter of machine-gun fire. Ears ringing, Kayla rolled over and saw that King Thuglow stood there, a small submachine gun in his grip, gunsmoke climbing up out of the barrel like a pair of snakes wrestling.

Thuglow looked like he was crying. Like he just didn’t get it.

“You don’t appreciate me, man,” he said, blowing a snot bubble and wiping tears away with the back of his scrawny arm. “I thought I was doing you cats a favor, but this is how you repay me? My hair stinks! I got glass in my head!”

Then he swept his arm—“Take ’em away, Loco”—and turned to pout.

And now, here they were. In a place called the Friendship Motor Lodge. The sign out front made up in the motif of a giant teepee, for some reason. It was draped with tinsel and toilet paper. The power lines around it were hung with bloody sneakers, baby dolls hung together with makeshift nooses, and other morbid accoutrements.

They’d been separated. Ebbie, Gil and Leelee were off somewhere. Kayla and Cecelia were here in a room done up in a mid-century-modern meets the desert look. Thuglow had decided to take the dog, Creampuff. And Coburn…

…well, he was gone.

“I hope Gil’s all right,” Cecelia said. The face she wore was either sincere in its worry or a very convincing mask. Not that Kayla was in a real good position to know. “Those motherfuckers.”

“Daddy’s tough. He got beat up pretty good but…” She couldn’t finish it. He did get beat up pretty good. His face looked like a horror show, bruised and bloody and one eye already swelling shut.

“It wouldn’t be so bad, you know.”

“What wouldn’t be so bad?”

“Being… you know. Whores.”

“Ew. Cecelia. Ew.”

Cecelia knelt down in front of her. Desperate for something, all of a sudden.

“The word whore, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. Way back when, the Romans or Greeks or whoever, they didn’t mean that word in a bad way like we do now. It meant something different. Whore meant to desire, or be desired. There’s nothing wrong with that. Is there?”

Kayla paled. “You used to be a damn hooker, didn’t you?”

“What?” Cecelia said, suddenly incredulous. But she couldn’t keep it up. “We preferred to be called escorts.”

“Oh, god, Cecelia!” Kayla said, suddenly grossed-out. She stood up from the bed and started pacing by the window, squinting in the bright daylight. “That is nasty. And you and my Dad? That’s gross. Was he paying you? Is that how you saw this whole thing? As a business transaction? Just… ew.”

“It’s not gross,” Cecelia said. “It’s the way men and women are. Men do nice things for women so they can sleep with them. It’s just biology. Being an escort just cuts out the middle-man. A guy doesn’t need to buy me drinks or a meal. He just… has to buy me.”

“That is cynical as… well, that’s cynical as hell, Cecelia.” Kayla wasn’t used to using curse words like that, but it felt right.

“That’s why Danny is being nice to you.”

Kayla’s jaw dropped. What was worse was that Cecelia wasn’t saying it out of malice—when she was being mean, her face twisted up like a fox who just caught a whiff of some possum shit or something. This wasn’t malice. She was being sincere.

“You shut up about Danny,” Kayla said. “Danny’s just a nice boy, is all. He doesn’t have that kind of poison in his head. We haven’t even kissed yet! And I don’t know if we’re gonna. I don’t know if it’s like that. He probably doesn’t even feel that way. I don’t know if I feel that way. I just know…” Her words drifted off. “I just know that I hope he’s okay.”

“I hope Gil’s okay.”

Kayla plopped back down on the bed. “I’m tired. I need a cigarette.”

“Me too.”

 

Locusts sang.

Somewhere above, two crows circled, complaining to one another.

A rattler crawled across the hot broken macadam, accompanied by serpents made of dust, creeping along as the wind blew.

And then, the locusts quieted. The crows shut up and took wing away. The rattler hurried off, found somewhere else to be.

Loco had left the I-40 gate last night in the Humvee, taking Dope Fiend and Jester with him. That left Big Money Jigalo—AKA Pete Sorvin—as the one guard at this gate, which wasn’t that big of a deal. They didn’t see humans all that often, and mostly the zombies stayed away because there wasn’t much out here for them. Thuglow’s crew had cleared out Erick and all the surrounding towns.

Still. Pete—er, ‘Big Money’—liked having his rifle handy. A Ruger Mini-14 with a long-looking Leupold scope on it and chambered for .223 Remington. Any zombies thought of hiking it up the highway, they’d find their skulls evacuated by a bumblebee made of hot lead.

Killing zombies was one of the only things that gave Pete much happiness anymore. Everything else was gone. His wife. His boy. Swept away by the zombie horde. Turned into… well, God didn’t even know. Only the Devil had a clue.

Pete didn’t much like the other survivors here. Bunch of lunatics, they were. Taking their dopey names. Dressing like clowns and like the jokers in a deck of cards. All because of, what? Some white rap group the King liked? They gave everybody dumb names—‘Skull Hustla.’ ‘Pimp Killa Z.’ And him, ‘Big Money Jigalo.’ He didn’t have any money. He damn sure wasn’t a jigalo. The name didn’t make any sense. It was like they picked it out of a hat.

In this way, the apocalypse was a lot crazier than Pete imagined it would be.

But that was okay. He had his rifle.

He leaned up against the top of the fence, laying atop an old beater Oldsmobile, and pressed his eye against the scope.

Heat vapors rose up off the highway like the sizzle off a hot pan. Way those vapors worked was, they distorted things a good bit, and sometimes in there you’d think you saw a zombie when really it wasn’t anything at all.

So when he saw the four dark shapes come up at the horizon’s edge, heading down the highway, at first he thought, this can’t be real. They didn’t look right. Taller than they should’ve been, maybe. Longer arms, too. And necks he could see. He caught a flash of pink fabric.

But they kept coming. They weren’t a mirage.

And behind them, Hell’s own army followed.

They rose up from the horizon’s edge like the first dark wave of a coming tide, a black tide, a dead tide—zombies. And not just a handful of them, either, but dozens. Maybe hundreds. They just kept coming, following behind the four like an ineluctable force. Pete felt his hands shaking. Remembered seeing his Mary—with their son Owen in her arms—swept beneath a crowd of zombies a fraction of this size. He lined up a shot. Cranked the magnification.

The four in the front weren’t like the others at all.

Their mouths, bigger. Filled with tiny teeth. Hands curled with claws. He let one of their wretched faces fill the scope.

Thumbed off the safety.

Took a deep breath.

Steady.

Just before he pulled the trigger, he was sure the thing looked right at him. The monster hit the ground just in time for the bullet to sail over its head, clipping one of the zombies in the back in the neck. A jet of black blood arced up and that zombie dropped.

“Shit!” he said, moving the rifle to rediscover his target in the scope. The monster was nowhere to be found. Neither were the other three.

He pulled his gaze away from the rifle, and with his bare gaze he could see them: they were loping like animals, like wolves launched straight out of Satan’s womb, and they were headed toward the fence.

It all happened so fast.

The one draped in scraps of pink launched herself up over the fence like it wasn’t but a knee-high hurdle. Pete stood, staggered backward, tried to get off a shot—but this wasn’t a shotgun and that wasn’t a clay pigeon.

She struck him in the chest. It felt like he was hit by a bull. Launched him off the Oldsmobile and down to the ground, to the dust.

He tried to get his rifle between them, either to shoot her or to shoot himself, but she tossed it away. Then she buried her face in the crook of his neck and began to chew. Everything felt wet, hot, cold, electric.

The other three hit the gate like sharks headbutting a diver cage.

As Pete’s life drained away, he saw the front fence denting, bowing, crashing inwards. The cars behind it jumped the tracks as the hunters struck them again and again, pushing them back with the groan of metal.

The way was open.

Hell’s army was here. The 66 States were breached.

Pete saw blood in darkness.

 

Gil stood in the motel room bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror. He looked about as good as a shovel full of road-kill. His left eye was shut behind two swollen lumps competing for attention. Half his face looked like a roadmap of broken capillaries. In his palm he held two bloody teeth.

He upended them into the sink with a clatter.

He hadn’t felt more alive in a long time.

Seemed strange, really. Even he couldn’t quite justify it. All things considered, they were pretty well screwed. Held captive by a kingdom full of mad-men in greasepaint. His daughter on the path to prostitution. His other friends—they were that, he reminded himself—held against the wall for their own strange fates. He had been resigned to the motor pool, which sounded fairly benign, but apparently attacking that dope-smoking dickweed who called himself ‘King’ was frowned upon, and about an hour ago they’d come in to tell him that his sentence was set: they’d drag him out into the firing range, stick a grenade in his mouth, and a bunch of stoned clown-faced fuck-wits would take shots at him until one of them managed to blow him to pieces like a scarecrow with dynamite up its ass.

So, no, things weren’t looking so hot.

And yet: he felt good.

Maybe it was the beating. Pain had a way of clarifying things. Probably a brain-thing. Adrenalin. Dopamine. Endorphins. Something. He’d been in a fight before. Hell, he’d been in dozens of fights. As a younger man—and, frankly, sometimes as an older one—he had quite a temper. Anybody said something to him he didn’t like, he’d make sure to give them a good whipping. Sometimes he took the whipping instead, but way he figured it, he’d won more than he lost.

Really, though, it came back to something Leelee said to him. As they were being dragged into the Friendship Motel, as Kayla and Cecelia were thrown into their room and Leelee was being moved into hers, she bent over and said something to him, something that stuck with him.

“Your daughter is special,” she said. “She is protected. Fight for her and she will be free.”

Fight for her and she will be free.

“Okay,” Gil said now, to his busted jack-o-lantern face in the mirror.

He knew he couldn’t go out the window: they’d been smart enough to bolt wrought iron bars (really, old garden gates) against the frames.

They weren’t that smart, though. They’d left the trappings of the motel in place. Like, say, the bedside lamp. It didn’t work—the motel didn’t have power, not like Thuglow’s hangar did. But the lamp didn’t need to work.

He grabbed it. Pulled the cord taut.

He cleared his throat, sauntered over to the motel room door, then pounded on it and yelled out in his best tortured voice:

“Oh shit. Oh shit. I think something’s broken inside me! I’m hemorrhaging. Help! Help.”

He stood to the side of the door. Out there, he knew, stood two guards: his favorite buddies, Dope Fiend and Jester.

The older fellow, Jester, was first through the door. He caught the lamp right under his chin and he went down like a stack of teacups. Dope Fiend—the human wall—was close behind but slow to react. Probably, Gil figured, because he was dumb as a wrench.

With the cord pulled taut, Gil stepped in behind the muscle-bound freak and pulled against his throat.

It didn’t go as planned.

Dope Fiend started whirling around, carrying Gil with him—suddenly Kayla’s father felt like he was stuck on the back of a mechanical bull, smashed into the door, into a closet, into a bedside table.

Gil couldn’t hold on. He hit the ground hard on his butt. He reached for Jester’s fallen rifle, but Dope Fiend was already firing his own—the bullets stitched across the floor and juggled the other machine gun out of Gil’s reach.

He saw no choice: as the room filled with machine-gun fire, Gil bolted out of the room, catching a face full of splinters as bullets chewed through the doorframe.

 

They tried to play nice.

They sent an emissary to talk diplomacy, trade, to make a deal. That emissary—Tom Fichter—came back after having been beaten with phonebooks. They branded a symbol in the meat of his ass: a three-pointed crown.

Fucking animals. Or clowns.

It was time to do something about it. Benjamin Brickert stared out at one of the northern gates of Thuglow’s territory. The Route 54 entrance, coming down out of Goodwell, Oklahoma, with the gate preceding Texhoma. It was the easiest way in—come down out of their own territory in Kansas and hit them from the top. No need to come in from the side. Here, he figured Thuglow would’ve been better protected, figuring that Brickert and his people would stage an attack one day—but, nope, not really. Not much defense at all, and easy enough to remove. Thuglow wasn’t any kind of strategist. Just an idiot king idling time.

His ears were ringing from the shot. He snapped his fingers, told Shonda to hand him the glasses. Benjamin pressed the binoculars to his face, saw in the distance the dead man hanging half-out of a repurposed lifeguard station. Something red dripped from his skull. A crow had already alighted on his chin, was starting to pick at the meat.

Brickert gave the thumbs-up to his sharpshooter: Carlos Gonzalez. Carlos twiddled a toothpick with his tongue and winked. Then he hopped off the top of the moving truck, the Remington 700 slung over his shoulder.

“Chain her up,” Brickert whooped, turning his finger in a circle, telling everyone to move, move, move. At his back waited a small invasion force: pick-up trucks with DIY-mounted armament, armor-plated Cadillacs, a few moving trucks (to reap any loose bounty), and a shitload of the Sons of Man. Capable men. Men who knew what it was to shoot straight, take a life, and thank God for the privilege of being alive.

These were hard times. But they were good times, too.

The men moved heavy gauge chains, looped them around the gate leading into Thuglow’s bullshit kingdom. Shonda—Brickert’s own second-in-command, a tough woman built like a mailbox filled with bricks—went over and supervised. Chains were connected to the back of one of the pick-ups: the diesel (all the vehicles were diesel, as they had to be) gunned it, kicking up a dragon’s plume of dust.

The tires spun at first. But then the gate started to bend and buckle, making a sound like a submarine about to be crushed by the pressure of the sea.

Then: the truck leapt forth like a bull with a burr in its ass, bringing the gate with it. Some of his soldiers hurried through the gate, clambering up over the remaining roadblock. They found the crank-wheel that moved the cars and moved the mechanism aside with the grinding clamor of metal on metal.

Brickert snorted, spat into the dust, gazed out over the long ribbon of highway ahead of them. Noontime sun high above, baking the macadam. Up in Kansas, the sky was blue as his daughter’s eyes, but here, the sky had taken on a bleached, bleary quality. Like someone had taken the whole canvas and dunked it quick in a tub of bleach.

South was Thuglow’s kingdom, then. Brickert pretended like this was a course of action he did not want to take. He had to offer that to his people, to project that sense of gravitas, in order to be a real leader to them. Real leaders did not delight in the conquering of their neighbors: they acted as if it were a burden, a regret, a terrible choice but the best terrible choice.

It was a lie. Brickert wanted to drive this mobile invasion force right up Thuglow’s bony stoner ass. He was a polluted human, impure of thought and body. Not to mention a fucking moron. The Sons of Man took their territory and made something of it: they had working farms. Running water. Electricity in some places. It was clean. Safe. Sane. Sure, it was necessary for folks to make sacrifices. The laws were strict. Disease was not tolerated. Dissent was punished swiftly: there came a time for opposing opinions, for a little bit of revolution, but now was not that time, not as they were just getting a foot-hold on civilization’s rebirth.

But Thuglow? Chaos reigned in the ‘66 States.’ Thing was, they had resources. They had Altus AFB. They had jet fuel. They had a helicopter. And that was just one part of the territory. Abilene? Amarillo? Austin? They had taken those cities but now were squandering what they found. That was how the country fell apart in the first place: mankind had long-forgotten that yes, he was the master of nature, but being its master did not mean being its abuser. Humanity didn’t give a fuck. Trees? Cut them down. Fossil fuels? Burn through it all. Hell with clean skies. Piss in the clean water. The natural world meant nothing.

And when the natural world failed, the supernatural took hold.

That was how Brickert saw it. You tore enough vents in nature’s fabric with careless claws, eventually something would come through. Something sent by God to punish you, or by the Devil to ruin you. They saw it first with the monsters hidden in the shadows: vampires, spirits, the Jersey Devil, the blind troglodytes they found in the tunnels beneath Manhattan.

But those were just the initial wave. Those monsters were only a warning.

And mankind did not pay attention. Did not see the signs.

And so, the zombies came. An emblem of man’s own selfish subversions. Just as man ruined nature and turned it to his will, the zombies ruined man, and made man just like them. It was a second, deeper subversion: a subversion of life, of free will. Zombies were rotten flesh and lizard brains and not much else. They took and they took and they took, never giving anything back. They were, in that way, a perfect expression of man’s worst instincts.

Thuglow was a zombie. Or close enough. Zoned out on drugs. Ready to take, never to give back. That meant he had to go.

That meant the 66 States were now the property of the Sons of Man.

“We ready?” Shonda asked him. Brickert blinked, wondering how long he’d been standing there. All the vehicles—all two-dozen of them—were sitting, engines rumbling. He nodded, and hopped in the back of a Chevy Silverado with an old Vietnam-era .50 cal bolted into the back.

Brickert manned the gun, and whistled for the invasion to begin.

 

A motor lodge wasn’t like some motels or hotels—its doors opened right to the parking lot. They were a staple of old highway travel. You’d park. Go get your keys. Then walk right from your car to the door of your room. Easy-peasy, Japaneezy. No hassle. Good privacy.

Gil burst out of his room as machine gun bullets gnawed at the frame, darting left out of the door. Across the street was an old Applebee’s, and down the way was a handful of fast food joints and gas stations. But it was all open. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide—soon as he bolted for the highway, Dope Fiend would be emerging into the light like the goddamned Terminator, and it wouldn’t matter how bad a shot he was with that thing. You let fly with enough bullets, one of them is going to hit home.

For a split-second, Gil knew that this was it. It was all over. His escape had failed. Dope Fiend was going to run him through the wringer.

But then he looked back on all the fights he’d ever fought: in bars, in alleys, at work. It was a myth that men fought with honor. Honor was for the boxing ring, but when it came time to teach another man a lesson or, even more importantly, just stay alive, you fought however you had to fight. Not like a punch to the face was particularly honorable: you hit the nose, the eyes teared up and stopped your opponent from seeing. Hitting them in the gut wasn’t much different from hitting them in the nuts: pain shot through their middle, they doubled over, they groaned.

You fought how you fought. You fought to win.

And sometimes, that meant using your environment.

 

Dope Fiend was going to kill that old man.

Dope Fiend was built like an M1 Abrams tank. He wasn’t no pussy. What, he stuck a steroid needle in his ass-meat every couple of days just to let some scrawny old cocksucker get away from him? Oh, hell no.

Dope Fiend was good at beating the shit out of people. Shooting them, not so much, but that was why he had Little Kim, here. His M-16. Fully fucking auto.

Dope Fiend stepped out of the hotel room. Jaw muscles so tight, he could’ve bitten through a steel girder. And just for a lark, he did some kegel exercises, too—keeping his pubococcygeus muscle nice and tight so he could hold in his orgasms and really give the whores the what-for.

Dope Fiend looked around for the old man.

Dope Fiend found him.

A half-second before Gil smashed him in the head with a tricycle.

 

Gil had no idea why a tricycle was sitting there in the parking lot. He didn’t know that life here in the 66 States grew tedious, and that these clowns—in many cases, literal, actual clowns—resorted increasingly to dumb, Jackass-style stunts to keep themselves from keeling over dead from boredom. Had Gil known this, that would’ve explained why the tricycle had a faint dusting of black carbonization over the frame, and why it smelled a little like burnt vinyl and kerosene: just a few days before, one of Thuglow’s idiot soldiers lit the thing on fire and tried to ride it around the parking lot for as long as he could—some insane variant of rodeo, staying on the bucking beast as long as you could. Except, instead of a thrashing bronco it was a fiery tricycle.

That soldier—‘The Beava Smasha’—now was laid up in an infected hospital bed with third-degree burns up and down his ass and legs. He wasn’t expected to live. Darwinism had proven its mettle yet again.

Gil didn’t know any of that.

What he also didn’t know—but was swift to realize—was that a tricycle was basically a tangle of metal with lots of empty air. That meant, instead of just hitting Dope Fiend in the head, his head actually tangled inside the tricycle, trapping him within the metal frame.

Dope Fiend cried out, fired the gun. Recoil juggled the gun upwards, bullets tossing through open air. The muscle-head was like a giant ape with his head in a bucket, crying out and trying desperately to shake his cranium free from his tricycle prison.

Gil stepped aside, kicked the inside of the man’s leg. The knee popped—it didn’t break, but it didn’t have to. Dope Fiend went down.

And so did the gun. It clattered free of his grip.

“Please,” Dope Fiend said.

Gil picked up the gun and shot the man. Blood blossomed across Dope Fiend’s chest, but still he didn’t fall. He looked up at Gil and spat at him.

“Fuck you,” Dope Fiend hissed, spraying blood and froth.

One more bullet to the head, and Dope Fiend dropped.

It was time to rescue his daughter, his friends.

 

He just didn’t get it, man. “I’m a good leader,” Thuglow said to Babette, who stood behind him, her breasts pressing into his shoulder blades. She reached over his shoulder and, with two pairs of tweezers, delicately picked purple bong glass out of his head.

Outside, evening had fallen. He’d stayed in the hangar all day, totally bummed out. He’d got his back-up bong. Smoked some vicious medicinal marijuana from California he’d been saving for just such an occasion (so much better than this Texas ditchweed he’d been using). Eventually Loco had come back, told him their new ‘guests’ were lined up at the Friendship Motel on the far side of the base. Then Loco had asked him if he wanted to, uhh, you know, pick the broken glass shards out of his face? “Oh, damn,” Thuglow had told him. “I forgot about that.”

Loco asked him if he wanted one of the nurses. Thuglow told him to get one of the whores instead. Steadier hands, he told him with a wink, but really, the King’s heart wasn’t in it.

Times like this, he didn’t feel much like King Brutha Thuglow of the 66 States.

He felt like Johnny Ludlow, of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He felt like the 30-year-old who was still living in his parents’ basement. Or the helicopter pilot who lost his license because he was stoned. Or the guy who put crazy Youtube videos on the Internet of him rapping or ramping a BMX bike off a Gamestop roof or playing pranks on his other 30-year-old-and-probably-still-living-at-home buddies.

Out here, though, he commanded respect. Turned out, the world was home to any number of miscreants and deviants looking for a guy who could lead them. No, he wasn’t a leader by choice—mostly, he was just dumb enough to forge ahead, no matter the consequences. But to others, that looked like the real deal. And before too long he had a whole host of other weirdos and cast-offs who followed behind him like he had some kind of nutso gravity.

And somewhere in that, Brutha Thuglow was born.

Most of the time, he felt like the King. He could have whatever he wanted. Guns. Ditchweed. A threesome.

But then along came a handful of people who broke a bong over his head, covered him in skunk-water and made him feel less like Brutha Thuglow, King of the 66 States, and more like poor Johnny Ludlow, King of a Big Pile of Dogshit.

“It’s hard out there for a pimp,” he said, forlorn.

Equally forlorn was the dog he’d stolen, some squirmy little terrier who sat leashed over in the corner with a piece of clothesline from one of the residences. The animal’s jaws were muzzled with a belt because, what a surprise, the dog was a biter. Just another hunk of crap on the steaming pile of feculence that Thuglow felt was his life: what the hell was he going to do with a dog? Why did he steal it?

Babette licked the back of his neck just like he liked.

It made him feel a little better.

Well, a whole lot better, really.

He turned around—she still hadn’t gotten the last piece of bong glass out of his forehead, but hell with it, it was time to feel like a king and fuck his queen, or at least the queen of right now—so he pulled the tweezers out of her hand and dropped them to the floor. His spidery fingers snaked along the small of her back and he reached in and started kissing her neck…

And then he looked up.

Emerging from the shadows: a pair of eyes and the whitest teeth he’d ever seen. Not just teeth, though: fangs.

“You took my dog,” Coburn said, grinning.

 

The girl shrieked and came at him with her painted nails out, but Coburn wasn’t going to be put in his place by some trollop with an amateurish above-the-ass tattoo that looked like an evil clown’s wicked grin— or would do if it hadn’t been drawn by some shaky-handed meth addict. He caught her by both wrists, spun her around, then gave her a little eyeball-to-eyeball voodoo.

“You go now,” he said, patting her on the head. Her lips moistened with saliva. Her empty stare came complete with a numb, game nod. And then the girl tottered off like a scurrying mouse.

Coburn turned around to find Thuglow whimpering, clumsily trying to thumb .44 shells into a big ol’ hand cannon—Smith & Wesson Model 29a, by the looks of it. The vampire didn’t have to do much. He just stomped his foot and said ‘boo’ and the King fumbled the shells. They hit the hangar floor with a metallic tinkle and went rolling away.

Then he grabbed the gun and smacked Thuglow in the face.

“Settle down, your highness,” Coburn said, a growly chuckle in his throat. “I’m not going to eat you.”

It was true. He had no intention of eating this buffoon. Sure, the blood would give him a bit of a ‘contact buzz’ for maybe ten, fifteen minutes, but that wasn’t what he was looking for. Plus, he was full. Blessedly, blissfully full.

Last night, when the three assholes in the Humvee came up, guns out, Coburn slipped into the shadows and crawled under the vehicle when nobody was looking. And it was there he dangled—the bottom of his jacket scraping hard against shattered macadam—as they headed southwest to the airbase. He had to admit, he was starting to feel some deep worry that they were going to be driving too long, that he’d be under the Humvee when the sun started to come up, which meant at some point he’d drop out from underneath the vehicle like a burnt hot dog that got stuck to the underside of the grill.

But then they pulled into the base, and Coburn saw his opportunity. As they passed by rows of brick homes once used to house airmen, the vampire relaxed his fingers and slackened his legs and…

He hit the ground hard as the Humvee kept on going.

At that point, he knew he had maybe an hour, maybe two, before the sun came up. His skin wasn’t tingling yet; the hairs on the back of his neck hadn’t shot up like prairie dogs at the hole. These houses, people lived here. He could smell them. Boy, could he smell them. Booze. Coffee. Pot. The acrid cat-piss tang of methamphetamines. And… greasepaint.

Coburn didn’t know what was up with all this clown makeup. Best he figured was that the apocalypse had really done a number on people’s heads, scrambled their brains like eggs, made it seem that dressing up like Gothy ghetto clown-pimps was a fine idea, indeed.

Normally, he’d be more discerning with his food. But this wasn’t the time to play the picky gastronome, was it?

At first, he thought about just kicking down one of these doors and marching inside like he owned the place—feeding with the aggressive gusto of a man ripping the top off a package of Cheetos and shoving his whole head inside like it was some kind of gratuitous feed-bag. But last thing he needed was to draw undue attention at this wee hour of the morning, so it seemed as if a bit more subtlety was in order.

He found an unlocked window and slipped inside.

Found some shallow-chested shorn-skull jerkoff with purple lipstick, cerulean-blue eyeshadow and a DIY tattoo across his gut that turned his belly button into the Eye of Sauron. Jerkoff had his eyes closed and lay on a ratty mattress surrounded by empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and scented candles—if Coburn had the smell right, it was ‘mulberry.’ Pair of headphones sat snug against Jerkoff’s ears, thudding some kind of erratic bass. The house here didn’t have power, but he obviously had batteries for his MP3 player.

On the walls were posters of some white-boy rap duo that Coburn had never heard of, probably the same shit that was pumping into Jerkoff’s ears through the headphones. Appropriately, the white boys on the poster were dressed like, you guessed it, clowns.

Coburn clucked his tongue. What the hell was wrong with people?

Next to the mattress sat a sawed-off shotgun. He’d painted it green and purple, like it was something used by one of the Batman villains.

The vampire didn’t want any big booms to draw attention, so he kicked away the gun, then let his fangs slide to the fore of his mouth.

It was time to feed.

But then, her voice. Kayla’s voice. Not real, not even really her, but it came up out of his mind the same way his monster voice sometimes did—the angel on his shoulder instead of his devil, speaking in the voice of a teenage girl with a sort-of-Southern drawl.

You can’t just kill him. Take enough, leave him and go.

Shut up, he thought.

Coburn! You be nice.

Shut up shut up shut up shut up. Not cool. Not at all cool. He wanted to kill this chump. Jerkoff was full of blood, blood he wanted in his body right now. And he deserved it! If only for that dick-brained tattoo.

Still. Something prevented him from doing the deed.

Coburn left Jerkoff and wandered around the house. The living room wasn’t much of a living room: furniture had been overturned and broken apart. The rug was scorched in places. The TV had been hollowed out and, in its center, a pair of plastic baby dolls were arranged in a lascivious 69 position.

He didn’t know what he was looking for, but roved about just the same, eyes peeled.

He went to the kitchen. Flies buzzed around a stack of empty MREs—Meals Ready to Eat, the self-heating rations of the military—and in the ceiling was stuck a bunch of silverware, as if Jerkoff lay on the floor, bored, throwing forks and knives (and probably spoons, the dumb-ass) to see if he could get them to stick in the drywall.

Nothing here, either.

Goddamnit.

And then, the bathroom.

Truth was, Coburn expected a horror-show. The rest of the house looked like a toilet, so that meant the toilet probably looked like some awful hybrid of a backstreet abortion clinic and a sewage treatment plant. But that wasn’t what it was. It was clean. Smelled a little of bleach. Jerkoff liked to be comfortable when he did his business. Handsoap. Nice towels.

And reading material.

Coburn didn’t need to look too long at it to know what it was. Soon as he caught a look of a little girl’s crying face—she couldn’t have been more than ten, this girl—the vampire figured out what Jerkoff was into.

Justification, achieved. Kayla’s voice inside went to the monster’s voice: Destroy him. Wear his ribcage like a hat. Beat him to death with his own legs.

Coburn didn’t do any of that. Instead, he stomped into the room, threw a hard knee onto Jerkoff’s chest, then bent down and buried his fangs into the dumb fucker’s neck like he was cradling a baby to burp. He drank, and drank, and drank some more until Jerkoff shuddered, gasped, went still, then went cold.

Then just to be sure, Coburn broke the pedophile’s neck.

With the sun coming up, he went down into the basement and slept.

And with the sun going down, he decided it was high-time to find his herd. Once more, his nose was essential—as the empurpled evening sky darkened, he found the trail of Humvee exhaust, the stink of Cecelia’s perfume, the poochy odor of Creampuff. That led him here. To the domain of King Brutha Thuglow.

Who now sat on his knees, blubbering.

“Don’t kill me, man,” Thuglow whimpered. “I’ve had a really bad day.”

“Tell me about it,” the vampire said.

“I know, right? Life sucks.”

“No. I mean, tell me about it or I rip your jaw off and use it like a boomerang.”

“Oh. Oh. Uh. These people came? Led by this old dude? And we were gettin’ along okay and shit and I was like, welcome to my kingdom, I’d like to invite you stay and I will give you these jobs to perform, and the old man was like, fuck you, clown, I don’t respect the King’s laws and next thing I know he’s breaking my goddamn bong over my fuckin’ head and shit.” Thuglow wiped a string of snot from his nose. “I thought I was being magnificent and whatever, giving them a place and a purpose.”

“Magnanimous. Not magnificent.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“So it was an old man. Let me guess: the others were a big ol’ heavyset guy, a black lady with a broken foot, a… I dunno, a trashy brat, and a teen girl who looked too skinny for her own good.”

Thuglow nodded. “That’s them, man. You got a beef with them, too?”

“Not quite.”

“Oh, shit. They were your peeps?”

“They are, at that. My herd, actually. That dog belongs to me, too.”

The King’s face fell. “You’re here to hurt me, then.”

“Not yet. Not if you help me.”

“Help you.”

“That’s right. I want to find them. I want your help in doing so. Then I want you to grant us safe passage through this insane tract of land you call your ‘kingdom.’ And while we’re at it, we’ll want our stuff back. Plus a little extra. Like, say, a pair of airman boots because goddamnit if I’m not tired of walking around in my bare feet.”

Thuglow’s eyes went wide. “I can do that. It’s just…”

“It’s just what.”

“I don’t know if your people are still here.”

Coburn hoisted Thuglow up under the armpits, threw him against some metal shelving. The King yelped in pain.

“Explain,” Coburn said, hunkering down and baring his fangs.

“I sent them to the motel for… processing. The old man, I sentenced to death. They were supposed to do it at sundown.”

Coburn didn’t much like Gil. They were two alpha dogs snarling and tussling over who got to control the pack. Even still, he respected the old bastard. And even more importantly, Gil was the girl’s father. Coburn still didn’t get what it was about the girl that made him think so fondly of her, but for now he didn’t have time to pick that apart.

The vampire reached for Thuglow. Planned to snap his neck. But the King cried out: “Wait! Wait. I can call. It may not be done yet. My posse… sometimes, y’know, they’re a little slow to get going. I just need my radio.”

Coburn stalked over, grabbed a two-way off a nearby card table.

He tossed it to Thuglow. “This one?”

The King nodded, then hit the radio button.

“Dope Fiend. Come in, dude. You read me? Dope Fiend. This is your King speaking.” Nothing. “Dude. Dude. Please please please.”

Coburn snarled.

“Hold up! Hold up. Let me try Loco.” He dialed another frequency. His voice was more panicked, now. “Loco, come in, Loco, shit, man, come on, this is Thuglow, bro. Do you read me?”

A burst of noise came out of the radio. It was Loco’s voice—Coburn recognized it from the night prior—but the words were indecipherable, what with all the machine gun fire in the background. Way Coburn heard it, he was pretty sure Loco was yelling. Or maybe ‘screaming’ was a better word for it.

Then the radio cut out.

Thuglow stared at the radio like it had just grown a dick.

“No, no, no no no,” he protested as Coburn stalked toward him, hissing, and Thuglow knew full well that whatever it was that came next, it wasn’t going to be pretty and it was likely to involve giving his hangar a new paint-job, with the paint being gallons of his own bodily fluids.

But then, outside:

Distant machine gun fire.

And worse, a sound that Coburn knew too well. A chorus of banshee wails—four of them threaded together, a terrible harmony born of Hell’s own misery.

They were here. The super-zombies. The uber-rotters. The four hunters.

“What the fuck was that?” Thuglow said.

“New plan,” Coburn snarled, heading over to unmuzzle and unleash Creampuff from the corner. “Got a vehicle around here?”

“What the fuck was that?” Thuglow asked again. Coburn smacked him.

“Vehicle! Moron! Do. You. Have. One?”

“Uh, a, a, a golf cart. Behind the hangar.”

Coburn grabbed Thuglow by the neck, forced him to stand. “Good. Hope you got the keys handy, because we need to take a ride.”