“I want her,” Blondie said. “I want what she gave you.”
“Fbuh myoo,” Coburn said, and gamely spit a loose tooth against Blondie’s forehead—
ptoo
.
Blondie grabbed Coburn’s head. Racked it back.
Then sank his fangs deep.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Conversation, Continued
R
ED LIGHT BLOOMED
in darkness. Stop light. Exit sign. Supernova. Television screen smeared with someone’s blood.
Faces tottered atop shadow bodies. Faces of victims. Coburn’s victims. Cheeks of porcelain. Eggshell chins. Bone China. Cracking, splitting, pieces falling to the ground and turning to fat flies with red eyes who fly away.
Kayla sat on a recliner. Drinking a glass of Scotch. Smoking one of her Virginia Slim cigarettes she wasn’t supposed to have.
Peaches and nicotine.
“You still didn’t say it,” Kayla said.
Coburn—not just Coburn, but John Wesley Coburn, a man in slacks and a cardigan wearing penny loafers to warm his feet—grunted. “Say what?”
“You know what.”
“I’ll miss you too, Kayla.”
Behind Kayla’s chair, another little girl appeared—Rebecca, running around, giggling, pigtails bouncing. In and out of shadow. Like she can’t see all the faces and bodies disappearing around her.
“My baby girl,” John said.
“She’ll be gone soon, too.”
“I don’t want that.”
Kayla shrugged. Blew a gauzy plume of smoke. “I’m cold. And tired.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, are you really sorry?”
Coburn narrowed his eyes. “What are we talking about, here? Sorry about you being cold and tired here in the house inside my head? Or sorry about something bigger? Something deeper?”
“About anything.”
“I don’t really know.”
Kayla sipped the Scotch, wrinkled her nose and brow like she just took a hit of vinegar. “You used to drink this stuff? Somebody should put a Mister Yuck sticker on it.”
Again Rebecca appeared. Circled Kayla’s chair the way a moth circles a porch light—same glow, too. But then: back to shadow.
Coburn was about to speak, but Kayla interrupted.
“Listen, JW, this is poop-or-get-out-of-the-outhouse time. I gotta know how committed you are to all this. Because I’m not feeling real good about our chances. I’m thinking your friend with the split lip and the white-blonde hair has it right. This is just a place for monsters, now. We found one lab and it went to hell. We found the second lab and it had already been swallowed up by the Devil you know. Creampuff’s halfway dead. So’s my Daddy. We’ve got not one but two other vampires, and we’re trapped on a prison island outside a dead city.”
“What’s that have to do with—”
“You feeling sorry? Dude, look around. You killed a lot of people. Still would and still want to. My resolve is starting to shake in its boots. I’m thinking, maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe I was always wrong. Maybe you’re never gonna be a better man than you are right now—maybe you’re always the monster and I should just let you and me and your baby girl go home. Maybe there’s no John Wesley left in here like I thought. Maybe there’s just Coburn.”
“Fuck you.”
“See? That’s what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t need to feel bad about who I am or what I’ve done.”
“Don’t you? Because feels to me like you want to save people—real people, living people—then you gotta want it. Gotta want it in a way that means they’re more than just little blood-bags tottering around. Can’t just be a man-sized mosquito anymore, JW.”
He snorted. “Ends justify the means.”
“Do they? Do they really?”
Again Rebecca did a circuit around the chair. This time, her throat was ripped open. The front of her shirt like an apron of blood.
“I want to talk to my daughter.” Coburn stepped in front of the girl’s next loop but—poof, she was gone.
“You can’t. Because you killed her. Girl doesn’t want to talk to you. Little girl’s supposed to trust her father, like I trust mine. But she doesn’t and so that door’s closed to you.”
“I never meant to kill her. He did this to me.”
“Blondie? Life sucks. He did that to you. But you did it to her.”
He caught a glimpse—Rebecca, hiding behind the chair, staring over with wide bright eyes. Suddenly those eyes cracked like marbles hit with hammers. She fell to pieces. Turned to fat-bellied flies.
Coburn dropped to his knees. “She’s gone now.”
“She’s with him.”
“Then I should go, too.” He ground his teeth so hard they started to break. Fingernails into his palms. Knees hard into the ground. Wet tears. Red tears. “Let’s all just go. If she’s in Hell, then that’s where I want to be.”
“Me first,” Kayla said. And then she broke apart like the ash from her cigarette and was gone.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Eject or Die
C
OBURN HIT THE
ground. Bloodless and broken.
Blondie pulled away, clawing at his throat, his mouth, his head. Fingers fishing around the edges of his eyes, a wail rising up out of his throat that sounded like someone torturing a coyote.
Coburn watched it. From inside his own head.
I’m still here,
he said to Kayla.
Still me
.
But no answer came back to him.
He couldn’t feel her there.
Blondie backed against one jail cell. Began bashing his skull against the bars—
whang-whang-whang-whang
. Howling.
“I want her back,” Coburn said. To everybody. To nobody.
He started to drag himself forward. Palms slapping flat on cement, pressing down, pulling himself forward inch by miserable inch.
His searching hands found his maker. Coburn pulled himself up.
“
I want her back
,” he gurgled.
Blondie just screamed.
A hand fell on his shoulder. Cold. A whiff of jasmine.
“What did you do to him?” Lydia cried, and spun Coburn around. Her face was a rictus of rage. Fangs out.
A spire of wood shot through her chest. Then disappeared again.
She blinked.
Coburn rasped: “The brain.
The brain
.”
With trembling hands, Gil jammed the shattered rifle spear through her temple. Coburn caught sight of the man’s face: Gil looked like hell.
But then, Lydia’s eyes went glassy and rolled back and she collapsed like a scarecrow without a cross to hang on. She died like one of the hunters: skin going red, then black, blistering like a hot dog left too long on the grill. From her head-hole a jet of ropy red blood splashed out, turned glossy and dark like motor oil.
Soon she was just a stain with a pile of clothing and skin sitting atop it.
Coburn had never seen another vampire die before.
Huh.
He liked it enough, he wanted to see it again.
He grabbed Blondie. Jacked him against the cell bars. A rain of rust flaked off into that platinum hair.
Blondie’s incoherent wails resolved into a few decipherable words: “Hate her hate her hate her hate her
her presence burns
.”
“That’s my girl.” Coburn forced a smile. It was like moving mountains. He did it anyway. “Now give her back.”
With one good arm, Coburn did as was done to him: forced the head back. His own mouth was smashed to bits—fangs just jagged stumps in his mouth. They’d regrow, but not here, not now.
Instead, he raised his ruined arm. A jagged sliver of bone poked from the forearm. He jabbed it hard into Blondie’s neck.
Then placed his mouth over the wound and drank.
H
E FELT THEM
come back to him.
In the rush of blood, in that horse-kick of jetting red, there they were.
His ghosts. His dead.
They gave him wings and they were his anchor. They ruined him. They elevated him. They were his and his alone. He owned them.
He heard his daughter’s giggles.
He smelled peaches and cigarettes.
My girls.
C
OBURN COULD SMELL
it. The sun was coming up.
Fueled by some twisted combination of rage and bliss, revenge and madness, he dragged his maker by his too-blonde hair past the cells, kicking and screaming. The other vampire seemed weak, empty now of Kayla but still broken somehow, like a fractured wind-up toy limping in circles.
Bam
. With a heavy boot, Coburn kicked open the front door. He dragged Blondie out, tossed him down over the railing and onto the rocks below. He heard his foe’s back snap. That sound gave him great pleasure.
Coburn, fueled by the blood of his maker, leapt over the railing.
He landed with both feet on Blondie’s chest.
Ribs and breastbone cratered with a crunch.
Blondie sobbed. His face slick with crimson.
Coburn held him there. Across the bay, east toward Oakland, the horizon became a pink smear like someone spilled a convenience store slushie across it—it glowed brighter and brighter until the top of the sun’s head poked out.
Smoke smoldered from Blondie’s hair.
“Kill me,” Blondie said.
“Happily,” Coburn growled.
“She’s like a poison.” Bubbles of blood welled on Blondie’s empurpled lips.
“She’s my poison.”
And it was then that she spoke to Coburn.
You can’t kill him, JW.
Bullshit, he thought, as wisps of smoke licked the top of the other vampire’s head. Coburn smelled the reek of burning hair. Pale flesh started to char.
Kill the maker. Kill the monsters.
He told her, good.
That means you
.
Good.
That means me
.
Fuck.
That means Rebecca.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
Coburn hauled the man to his feet. Heat came off him in waves. The backs of his ears started to turn lobster red, then black, then gray.
“You get to live,” Coburn growled. “Or whatever it is we do. This is your reprieve. But remember her beauty. Her innocence. Remember her sweet, irritating voice inside your head—and realize it’s worse now that she’s gone.”
“Please. Let me burn.”
“Not today. But one day.”
And Coburn marched out to the water and threw the vampire in.
The monster hit the water with the sound of a red hot skillet run under the faucet—steam rose with a brief boil of bubbles.
Then the body was gone.
But Coburn was still here.
And, it turned out, so was Creampuff. As Coburn turned to walk back up to the prison, he found Creampuff sitting there. Still looking rough as a gym sock that went through a house-fire, but there and alive and giving him a cocky look.
The vampire scooped him up.
I
NSIDE,
G
IL LAY
on the floor, dead.
But then he stirred. Groaning. Sitting up. Looking like death on a hot plate. Creampuff trotter over, licked his hand. Gil gave the pooch a nod.
“He’s alive?” Gil said. “And you too?”
“Mm,” Coburn grunted. “Looks like.”
“Am I alive?”
“I guess. Figured that bite would’ve taken you by now.”
“Not yet. But I sure feel like the underwear around a rotter’s rotten ass.”
Coburn shrugged. “You look like that, too. Except maybe with the elastic all blown out.”
“Thanks.” Gil offered a weak thumbs-up.
“Hey. Think nothing of it.”
Coburn offered his hand. “Here. Let’s get you up. Get you some blood.”
“You think there’s another lab out there somewhere?” Gil took the hand. “CDC? Big Pharma? Scientists, doctors, someone?”
“If there is, we’ll find it.”
Gil suddenly said: “Kayla was stillborn.” He must’ve seen the blank and bewildered look on the vampire’s face, so he kept talking. “That’s what I was going to tell you—and tell her—before. She was born dead. And she was dead for forty-seven minutes. They tried resuscitating her. Nothing. Guess they were about ready to...” Gil drew a deep breath, almost fell over before Coburn steadied him. “Ready to bag her and tag her. But then she took a big gulp of air and shot up on the table. They tried to tell us it was natural, that some stillborns do that—though rarely forty-seven minutes after the fact—but then she took another gulp, and another, and next thing you know her purple face turned red as a beet as she let out the biggest damn squall in four counties. She was dead. But then she lived.”