CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Blood Drive

 

Voices bubbled up out of the darkness. Incomprehensible at first. Like hearing them underwater. But soon, they became clear—

“—coming out of it.” A man’s voice. Deep. Bass. “I’m almost impressed.”

A woman’s voice: “Nobody can take that much voltage.”

“The Devil has many powers.” That voice, he recognized.

Benjamin Brickert.

Coburn opened his eyes. The world swam in and out of focus. Someone—a woman, thick, tough, broad shoulders—shined a bright flashlight into his face.

Beyond her stood two other men. One a gone-to-pasture biker-looking dude in a leather vest. A bit of gut showing from beneath a dusty white wife-beater. Next to him? Brickert. Older. Leaner. Gaunt. Gone was the well-fed whatever-he-was—plumber, brick-layer, dick-sucker, Coburn never knew. His black goatee had gone to a full beard and was now shot through with gray.

“The vampire awakens,” Brickert said.

“Fuck you,” Coburn said, his words slurring.

“Fuck me? Sure. You want to flip me off again? First time you gave me the bird, I cut off your finger. And boy, didn’t that turn out real interesting. Second time you flipped me off, I shot down your chopper. But I guess you can’t show me all that piss and vinegar with your hands bound up behind your back.”

Coburn tried to move: it was true. His hands were bound up. Tight. Maybe with zip-ties, he didn’t know. His feet—barefoot, since he’d never found a goddamn shoe to fit him in the 66 States—were sitting in a tub of water. Not far away, he saw a couple car batteries, wires, alligator clips. They’d been electrocuting him. Brickert learned that trick long ago.

He sat in an alcove made of boxes. The ground bucked and bounced beneath him, beneath everyone. They were in a truck. A moving truck, by the looks of it.

“Do what you want,” Coburn said. He shut his eyes, found a cascade of images behind the lids: his daughter Rebecca dead on the floor, Leelee blowing herself to pieces, Kayla sitting propped up with her father and the dog. Plus, a whole host of corpses with Coburn’s name on it: dead on bed, dead in tubs, dead in shallow graves. All that blood. His eyes shot open. “I deserve all of it.”

Brickert laughed. A genuine laugh. He wiped tears from his eyes.

“I killed them,” Coburn said. “I killed them all.”

“Who’s that?” Brickert asked.

“My daughter, Rebecca. Kayla. Gil. The whole lot of them.”

Brickert and Shonda shared a look. “You did, at that. That was a messy scene. You’re one mean mother, Coburn.”

Brickert backed up. “Redbone,” he said to the biker-type. “Let’s hit the bloodsucker again. Light him up like Christmas.”

Redbone did as told. Came over, got Coburn in the neck with alligator clips. Coburn’s world lit up as his body seized. Redbone yanked the clips, bringing a bit of the vampire’s flesh with them.

“Shonda,” Brickert said to the woman. “Did I ever tell you the story of how me and the vampire met? How he gave me the middle finger, and I chopped that finger off and took it away?”

She nodded. “You did. But good stories like that one, I’ll listen to again and again.”

“That finger of yours,” Brickert said, “wasn’t something I meant to take. But it happened and in that moment before I hurried away and the bombs went off, I had what some people call an epiphany. So I snatched up the finger. Bombs went boom. And I thought you were really for-real dead.

“That finger. I wrapped it up nice and tight. Put it on ice and dropped it in a cooler, then took it down the next morning to a friend of mine who worked for a little lab that got a bunch of freelance work from Big Pharma. I gave your finger to my buddy, and, hell, I guess I had some bullshit science-fiction idea in my head that he’d be able to, I dunno, clone you or something. That way, we’d be able to find your weaknesses. See what makes you tick-tock, Mister Clock. Like I said: bullshit.

“But my buddy—who belonged to our group and so he was excited to have vampire tissue under his microscope—said he could do experiments at the cellular level. Said your dead cells came back to life, or almost, at least, when put in the presence of red blood cells or blood plasma. He said the mitochondria, which looked inert, would suddenly swell up and go crazy soon as red blood cells even got near to them.

“My friend gets this idea. Decides to… I don’t know the correct term here, so forgive me, but he decides to ‘infuse’ the vampire DNA into a simple bacteria. Bacterium? Whatever. Interesting thing: it kills the bacterium. Or seems to, at least. Bacteria stops moving. Cell structures rupture. Mitochondria shrivel up to nothing. And yet—suddenly, the bacterium started to move again. And when put in the presence of other non-infected bacteria, it infects them, and the same thing happens there: pseudo-death, then revivification.”

Brickert walked behind Coburn, now. Hiding in the shadows offered by the alcove of boxes. “Now, maybe you know where this story is going, maybe you don’t, but like people used to say on the Internet when there was an Internet: spoiler warning, this is how the zombie apocalypse was born.”

“You’re a shitty liar,” Coburn said. But it was just bravado: Brickert wasn’t lying, was he?

“My buddy was the first to get infected. Be honest with you, I don’t know how it happened. I wasn’t there. None of us were. Maybe he didn’t follow procedure like he was supposed to. He always was a little sloppy. Or maybe someone else fucked up. All I know is that lab was ground zero for the infection. And I know that the first zombie I put in the ground was my friend. From that point, it was all over after a couple days. Nobody knew it was coming. Nobody but us. This was the kind of thing we prepared for.”

Coburn almost laughed. What a horrible thing to discover, so horrible it was absurd. His middle finger. The progenitor of the zombie apocalypse. A little fuck-you-attitude can really change everything. “So when you say you should thank me, you’re being sarcastic, that right?”

“What?” Brickert said. “No, no, Coburn. I mean it. Thank you. Thank you. When a thing’s a little bit broke, you can do a patch-up job to fix it. Table leans a little, you put something under the leg to set it straight again. When a thing’s a whole lot broke, well. Table has a crack down the middle, only thing you can do is put something better in place. Sometimes, you fix something, you first have to destroy it. That’s what happened. The world was getting too awful for its own good, Coburn. It’s like before, when God sent the deluge to drown out the iniquities of man.”

“Does that mean that God sent me, then?”

Another laugh. “Maybe He did. Mysterious ways and all that.” Brickert mussed up Coburn’s hair—a crass, almost fatherly gesture. “Jeez, Coburn. This has been a real bad night for you. Chopper crashed. Killed your friends. Realized that you killed most of the known world just by flipping it the bird. There’s an old myth that vampires can’t see themselves in mirrors. It’s not true, obviously, as I’m sure you know. At least, it’s not true in the technical sense. But you look a little deeper, maybe it is true. Maybe the vampire isn’t supposed to see what he really is, because then what does he become? What happens when the monster sees himself in the mirror for the first time?” He got right up in Coburn’s face, unafraid. “Now you see yourself? That right? Bet you don’t like what you see, vampire. Bet you don’t like the Devil staring back.”

Coburn could’ve moved. Could’ve lurched forward, bit him right in the face, got a taste of blood. But he didn’t have it in him. He hated Brickert. But that hate had a softer edge than he expected. Almost like his heart just wasn’t in it. The man detested Coburn for what he was: a monster. It was certainly earned.

He was, after all, the creature that killed the world.