CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Down in the Dark

 

After a certain point, it all went away.

Coburn remembered giving Brickert the finger. He recalled the helicopter rising and with it, a deep and thriving hunger deep within him, a hunger for blood and the realization that he was surrounded by blood on all sides, blood in pink skin, blood pushed by pulsing drum beats, blood sticky and wet.

He remembered the fuel alarm. Remembered going down—not a crash landing, not really, but definitely a controlled accelerated descent down into what Thuglow said was Texas but what looked to Coburn like the fucking moon (a wide open expanse, no plants, no trees, just ground cracked and pale like dry skin).

Coburn remembered the sun. A bright liquid lava line at the edge of forever, and then it was all blankets as they swaddled him like some big bloodsucking baby, then dimness, then darkness, then everything went still.

It was then that it all went away.

It was then that he woke up here. In a kitchen. With Rebecca.

Rebecca. With her pig-tails. And the freckles on the bridge of her nose. And a too-big-for-her men’s flannel robe—his robe—so big, then, that she almost disappeared inside of it.

“You like my robe?” she asked. “It’s yours. You let me wear it.”

“You look like Kayla,” he said, his hand inadvertently touching a highball glass of Scotch made cool by a trio of ice cubes gently drifting within.

“Actually,” Rebecca said, “she looks like me. Isn’t that how it works? The someone after is the one who looks like the someone before.”

He nodded and smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s it.”

“So. What are we doing here?”

“I don’t know.” He lifted the Scotch to his lips. It tasted like blood.

“You remember my name, at least.”

“Is that a good thing?”

She smiled. “No, probably not.”

The room swiftly brightened: the bulbs in the fixture in the ceiling and above the sink hummed and glowed white hot, blinding him, the humming turning to buzzing, and then as fast as it had come, they dimmed once more.

Someone stood behind Rebecca.

A tall man. Standing in darkness. He emerged from shadow.

Blonde hair slicked back and pressed to his pale scalp. Nose, smashed flat to the left. The upper lip, sneering to the right thanks to a puckered scar from what might’ve been a cleft lip. He grinned. His teeth were smeared with red, like he’d been eating raspberries.

“Hi, John,” Blondie said.

Coburn winced like he’d been stuck with a needle. John. John. “John?”

“John Wesley Coburn. We’ve met before.”

“Have we? You know… my name. So what’s yours?”

“That, you don’t know. That you may never know. I’m still out there, though. Passed through the bowels of life and out on the other fucking side, pushed out like a kidney stone through a tight pisser.” Blondie smiled, came up behind Rebecca, started playing with one of her pigtails. Coburn wanted to launch himself across the table, rip his head off. But he couldn’t.

“How do I know you’re still out there?”

“Easy.” The word came not from Blondie but from Rebecca, who was leaning into Blondie’s touch like it pleased her. “Because you’re still around.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It’s one of those old immutable laws,” Blondie said, making a face that might’ve been a grin, might’ve been a sneer. “Kill the maker and you kill the monsters he made.”

“You’re my maker.”

“Could be, rabbit. Could be.”

“The one who turned me into a—”

But then the lights brightened again, everything lost behind a searing white curtain. The ground shook this time. Coburn’s—John’s—body seized tight. But then, like before, it passed.

Rebecca and Blondie were gone. He heard sounds coming from the living room. Coburn grabbed the Scotch. Heard the ice clink around the perimeter of the glass. He stepped into the living room. Saw Rebecca lying on her belly, the robe splayed out like a blanket, her face bathed in the black-and-white glow of the television. Looked like Ed Sullivan. But his face was different: the grin too wide, the eyes black like tar. Every time Ed spoke, flies poured from his mouth.

Rilly big shoe.

The window by Rebecca gently shook, then slid open with nary a sound. A shadow slid into the room, almost liquid, and it became a person: formlessness found shape. Blondie stood behind her.

Coburn tried to move, tried to cry out, but couldn’t.

Blondie eased behind her. She popped something into her mouth: rock candy on a wooden stick. Her head bopped left and right. Pigtails bouncing.

The vampire struck. He moved fast, like a praying mantis, his hands around her neck, his fingers ripping open her throat, a gush of red blood on the shag—

“No.”

A voice in Coburn’s ear. Rebecca was gone. So was Blondie. The blood, however, remained. The TV continued to flicker, now gone to static.

Blondie stood behind him, now. Hands on his shoulders.

“You don’t get away that easily,” Blondie whispered into his ear. “Is this how you remember it? Is this what you find when you start moving dirt? You’re hiding behind a stalking horse, John. Let’s keep moving dirt. Let’s try this again.”

The world lit up. Bright. White. Hot.

The flash receded like a nuclear tide.

There, again: Rebecca by the TV. Rock candy. The window opened. Liquid shadow turns to Blondie.

A new wrinkle: Coburn was there, too. He could see himself. Sitting at the back of the room in a recliner. Reading a newspaper whose words are gibberish, letters shifting like nervous ants, the corners of the pages wet with red (what’s black and white and red all over—a newspaper).

Things moved differently this time. Blondie walked not to Rebecca but to the Coburn in the chair—to John Wesley Coburn. Gently, Blondie pulled down the newspaper with an index finger. John Wesley looked shocked, but only for a moment. Blondie’s gaze met John Wesley’s gaze. Blondie murmured something: hushed, like a prayer.

And then it all leapt forth in terrible fast-forward. Blondie dragged John Wesley off the chair. Bit him. Arc of blood. Rebecca screaming. She ran at him. Beating at Blondie’s back. He threw her across the room. Into the TV. John Wesley thrashed on the ground. Blondie tore open his own throat with a twist of his thumb and forefinger, the way you might uncap a cola, then pressed John Wesley’s face to his neck.

Fast-forward again. Rebecca sat bound to a kitchen chair. Clothesline pulled taut across her mouth, pulling back her cheeks. Blondie’s hand rested gently on John Wesley’s back. Blondie pushed him forward.

John Wesley didn’t look right. Eyes unfocused. His own neck wound already healed up. When he opened his mouth, two fangs flicked forward. He wasn’t John Wesley anymore. That was the difference. Now he was Coburn. Just Coburn. Life lost. Identity gone but for a name. The girl in front of him not his daughter, not really, not his blood so much as merely full of blood.

Rebecca screamed.

Coburn tore out her throat and drank.

Again, the world lit up. Bulbs popped, rained sparks. Floorboards groaned as nails bent. Everything white, wiped out, tabula rasa.

 

A low sound keened across the open expanse as the moon sat pregnant above, the stars twinkling, and for just a moment, Coburn thought: it’s them, it’s the hunters, they’re back from the dead again and they’re coming to make me pay for what I’ve done. But then he realized, it was just the wind.

He smelled blood. Tasted it, too. About ten feet away, the Twin Huey helicopter sat on its haunches, the uneven and rocky ground giving it a crooked look. The rotor above gently turned, moved by the wind.

The front window lay shattered. A hand draped out. Blood, thickened like syrup, collected at the fingertips, drops hanging there but never falling.

A cold feeling ran through Coburn. He felt full. He’d fed.

Oh no.

Coburn found Danny first. He lay draped across a rock like a sacrifice. His throat, torn out. Not far away, Cecelia. Her head had been bashed in. Hair matted with blood and brains. Coburn looked to his hands, saw the fingers and palms flecked with dried blood that flaked away like old paint.

Ebbie was face-down toward the front-end of the chopper. Both wrists, opened. Blood pooling out across dead earth.

The hand sticking out of the helicopter was Thuglow’s. In his neck, a gaping hole. In death his head had fallen onto his shoulder; the blood drizzled down his arm and to his fingers.

On the far side of the chopper Coburn found Gil, Kayla and Creampuff. Arranged like a loving father and daughter, with their little terrier. Gil’s arm had been draped across Kayla’s shoulder. Her head, tilted gently so she rested on her father. The terrier, curled up and sleeping in their lap.

But the scene was imperfect. Gil’s mouth was stretched open in a horrible smile, his tongue missing. Creampuff’s head was turned too far inward, the neck plainly broken—his body thin, ribs exposed, drained of blood.

And Kayla. Her throat torn out. Like Rebecca’s.

Coburn collapsed onto his knees. Inside him, the monster’s voice chuckled, then the chuckle rose to a manic cackle, a breathless, riotous laugh that went on and on—above him, the moon looked too bright, the stars seemed to shift and swim, leaving trails of light. He felt the grim humming and buzzing in his own heart as the earth split open and swallowed him whole.