Bad Blood
Bad Blood
Chuck Wendig
Abaddon Books
An Abaddon Books™ Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
First published in 2011 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver
Desk Editor: David Moore
Cover Art: Pye Parr
Design: Pye Parr & Luke Preece
Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley
Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley
ISBN (.mobi): 978-1-84997-358-8
ISBN (.epub): 978-1-84997-357-1
Tomes of The Dead™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
PART ONE
FREAKS
The Conversation: #1
Did you think it would end like this?
Nah. Not really.
I’m cold.
Me too. But fuck it, I’m always cold.
I’m slipping away. Mouthful by mouthful. Gulp by gulp.
Now we know where you live, I guess. You live in my blood. Not in my head.
Did you doubt? See, I knew you doubted me. I could feel it, JW. All up inside you, squirming like a handful of nightcrawlers.
Doesn’t much matter now, does it?
Guess not.
Sweet dreams, little girl.
Oh, but I’m not ready to go to bed just yet. Are you?
CHAPTER ONE
Now You’re The Cure, Coburn
C
OBURN’S GUTS SAT
heavy in his hands, spilling out across his forearms like a heap of bloody kielbasa. He jacked his back up against the stairway and kicked both legs out, bracing his boots against the door as a wall of rotten flesh pressed against it. Through the octagonal window at the top of the door he caught glimpses of mouths like wet holes in turned dirt, splintered teeth, eyes the color of diabetic piss. Hands slapped uselessly against the glass—red blisters on gray flesh popped, leaving greasy streaks behind.
Nasty-ass motherfuckers,
he thought.
In his head, a voice altogether not his own answered:
Tsk-tsk, such bad language, Coburn. Naughty man.
Outwardly—and inwardly—he growled, gnashing his teeth so hard he thought they might snap. Turned out that Kayla the ghost girl—having taken up residence inside his skull like it’s a fifth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side of NYC—liked to chat. Chatty in life. Chatty in death (or what passed for it).
He told her to keep quiet.
She listened. For now.
“You don’t look good,” came a voice from behind him on the stairs. Gil. Kayla’s father. “Bad news when your insides are outside.”
“For you, maybe,” Coburn said. “For me, it’s just a stubbed toe. A bloody nose.” Bit of bravado, but it wasn’t entirely untrue. Not like he needed his guts for anything. They were dead as every other organ in his body: might even be better if he could rip them out and leave them behind. He’d travel a lot lighter. Move faster. Hell, stitch in a zipper and he’d have a storage compartment. Could keep Creampuff in there, maybe. As if sensing what Coburn was thinking, the rat terrier wriggled at his side, snarling and snapping at the air in the direction of the zombie horde.
Coburn blinked. Looked around. The window afforded them a little sunlight: a fact he still wasn’t used to, all this
not burning to a blackened nub
when the sun came up. But all that changed when he took in every last drop of Kayla’s blood, didn’t it? He hears her laugh inside his head.
Still. It let him see what he was dealing with. Here in San Francisco, all the houses sat crammed together in a dull array of pastels—that one there the color of Pepto Bismol, the one next to it looking like a sun-bleached robin’s egg, and this one they were in, looking like the petals off a daffodil.
All the colors made him a bit sick. He felt a pang of nostalgia for New York—the grays, the blacks and browns, all the steel, cement, glass.
This house—a crass mash-up of Victorian and Art Deco—had been split into apartments. A bank of four mailboxes hugged the tin-tile wall to Coburn’s right, with an apartment door to the left. The mailboxes were a good size, with lockers big enough to each accommodate packages: Coburn grunted, got his fingertips behind the box and tipped it over with a crash.
He wedged it under the apartment doorknob. Then eased off with his boots.
The rotters surged, but the door
thunked
dully against the fallen mailbox locker. They could not get through. Their frustration came through the door, in gassy hissing and soggy burbling. Rotten fingertips, some worn to the bone, searched around the door margins to no avail.
“Upstairs,” Coburn said to Gil. “Go, go, go.”
Gil turned, bolted up the steps.
The vampire grabbed his guts in one hand and the terrier in the other and marched up after the old man.
T
HEY KNEW
S
AN
Francisco was going to be trouble. How could it not be? Be foolish to think that a city that once contained a stone’s throw from a million living human beings would not now contain a
nearly equal portion
of undead assholes. They had a plan, and it seemed like a good one.
Might’ve been the bridge that gave them a false sense of confidence.
They crossed the Golden Gate that morning. Bands of fog thick above their heads, like rain-soaked cotton swallowing the brick-red cables and towers. Ahead of them, the way lay packed with abandoned cars. And not a single rotter in sight.
Creampuff the terrier seemed suspicious. Sniffed the air with a muzzle still bloody from a freshly-killed squirrel only an hour before (a little bit of the squirrel’s tail hung from the small dog’s chin like a tiny dog beard) and growled.
Gil commented on the absence of undead assholes: “I don’t see any dead folk stumbling around. That seem right to you?”
“Sure.” The vampire shrugged. “Way I see it, the bridge is basically a really long, really fat tightrope. Whatever zombies get herded onto it end up fumbling and stumbling over to the railing and over the edge into the bay below.”
“I read that lots of people kill themselves here.”
“Beautiful way to die, if dying’s your thing.”
“Says the man who can’t die.”
“Says the man who’s already dead.” Coburn headed over to the ass-end of a Toyota Corolla. He snapped his fingers at Gil. “Map. C’mon.”
Gil set his crossbow down, fished a Rand McNally pocket atlas from his pocket. “You snap at me again, I might shoot one of those fingers off.”
“Just bring out the fuckin’ map, old man.”
Kayla, inside his head, admonished him:
Apologize to Daddy
.
As Gil slapped the map down on the filthy car trunk, Coburn told the girl inside his head no, he won’t apologize, she didn’t get to make demands—
He knew it was a lie and she called him on it fast. Suddenly the noise level in his head cranked up like someone just spun the volume knob, broke it off, and stabbed him in the eardrum with the shattered plastic. Kayla screamed senselessly inside his mind, a shrieking banshee wail, and behind it all a sub rosa thread of thought that said:
I can do this all day
,
all night
.
Coburn curled his lip and muttered: “Sorry, old man.”
The psychic cacophony stopped.
“I’m not old. I’m barely into my fifties.” Gil cocked an eyebrow at him. “Was Kayla that made you apologize, wasn’t it?”
The girl’s father still wasn’t comfortable with the fact that Coburn had drunk the lifeblood of his daughter and that she was now taking up real estate inside the vampire’s blood, body and mind. He
believed
it; he just didn’t
like
it.
Coburn said nothing. Just grabbed the map and used his finger to trace their route through the city. “Look. We cross the bridge. We go south. Hug the water’s edge. Any dumbfuck zombies come after us, we snag a boat or just dive in the water. They don’t seem to do so well with the wet stuff. End to end, it’s not even six miles. If the lab’s on a ferry, it’s gotta be operating out of the wharf. There, or somewhere along the piers off the east side. We should be there by the afternoon.”
The wind kicked up. It had fangs. It whistled through the bridge cables. Gil didn’t say anything; he just stood there staring at Coburn, scratching at his salt-and-pepper beard with an idle hand.
“Can you see her?” Gil finally asked.
“No. I hear her.” Coburn thought about it, and clarified: “But I do feel her. She’s like a... well. It’s like when a TV is on somewhere in the house, and even if the sound is down you can still feel it. A white noise. An indiscernible buzz.”
Inside Coburn’s head:
Aww, how sweet. Every girl just wants to be thought of as an indiscernible buzz.
Gil nodded. Satisfied or not, Coburn wasn’t sure.
“Let’s keep moving,” Gil said.
And they did. They trudged south. Found a few rotters stumbling around at the toll gate at the end of the bridge. One woman with no arms staggering around, a rat’s nest of bleach-blonde hair gathering flies the way a tree gathers crows. Two men with dark blood-poison striations up their necks—toll booth attendants, one fat and tall, one thin and small, both easy to fell. Coburn shattered their knees with hard kicks, then stepped on their heads like overripe honeydews. Gil dispatched the blonde with the crossbow, the arrow going clean through her eye and out the back of her head.
As they headed south down the 101, the fog thinned and the sun came out and again Coburn felt that old spike of fear and for a half a second it felt like ants were crawling under his skin trying to bite their way free—but then, once more, he realized it was just the warmth of that unfamiliar ball of fire in the sky washing over him. He didn’t much care for it.
They left the 101. Got off on Mason. A stretch of wet grass (and the distant bay) to their left. On the other side, whitewashed warehouses and the trees encroaching behind and overtop them. A rotter flopped around on the ground, his legs tangled in the chain and spokes of a bicycle. Coburn kicked its head off.
Seemed like a cakewalk.
The air grew warm.
The sun was out.
What few rotters they found were dumber than hammerstruck calves, and just as easy to dispatch. Even Coburn—not a naturally optimistic creature—started to feel pretty good about their chances. He could feel Kayla growing excited, too. Her voice in his head like a cool glass of sweet tea:
Remember: you’re the cure, Coburn.
Things went off the rails as soon as they entered the city proper. They started seeing the tall needle-like masts of boats bobbing there in the water, and the warehouses and trees gave way to the condos and duplexes and single homes.
And to the zombies.
The street ahead lay crowded with them. Jostling together like sluggish fetid molecules, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder, the stench of death pairing with the stink of brine from the bay.