Gil brought the crossbow to his shoulder.
Creampuff bared his teeth.
Watching a horde of zombies figure out you were there was an exercise in patience: they lift their heads, sniff the air with ruined noses, let their rot-clad skulls teeter on mushy necks until
finally
they turn toward you, their prey.
Coburn didn’t think to give them the time.
He grabbed Gil, nudged Creampuff with a boot. The vampire pointed to a side street—Baker—and ducked down it. In the distance he could see that the road tilted up sharply, which was unsurprising given how San Francisco basically sat atop an epic hill. This way wasn’t clotted with rotters, though it had a dozen or more milling about the street, pawing at one another and gurgling. A few more plodded along the sidewalk, collecting flies.
One zombie—face all but indistinguishable from a plate of raw meat except for the eyes staring out—started jogging toward them. Others caught sight, started coming at them, too.
“
Coburn
,” Gil warned.
“Follow me,” he said. The vampire scooped up the terrier and leapt up onto a parked car, helping Gil up after him. Then he hurried along the cars, jumping from one to the next. The zombies were slow, stupid. By the time they lurched forward against the car, Coburn and Gil were already moving onto the next one. The undead were not efficient hunters—they went where the prey
was
, not where the prey was
going
. Yet another difference between the bloodsucker and the rotter.
But they come from
you
,
Kayla said.
Never forget that
.
How could he, with her reminding him like that all the goddamn time.
Of course, it was
true
. They were of his blood. Part of his grim legacy. Flipped the wrong motherfucker the middle finger, which lost him that finger. And that digit went on to spawn the undead menace, the zombipocalypse, the end of the world as they knew it. His
fuck you
to one man became a gigantic
fuck you
to the whole of the human race—and given the fact he needed their blood to survive, kind of a boomerang
fuck you
right back to him.
He was almost proud.
But then, as one zombie stumbled forward like a drunk and cracked its head into the passenger side window of a parked BMW, that pride dissipated like steam.
Coburn called to Gil behind him: “We work our way up to the next street, then we head east. You good?”
“You don’t need to worry about me. You just worry about yourself.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I just mean, you do what you do best: worry about you.”
“You saying I’m selfish?”
“What? No.” Gil followed Coburn, jumping from a Hyundai to the back of a Dodge pickup and into the truck bed. Coburn was already at the front. “Just go.”
“You think I’m a selfish asshole. You think I can’t keep your daughter safe.”
“Well,” Gil growled, “you did a bang-up job back in Los Angeles.”
Coburn stopped moving. He spun around on the roof of a Subaru Forester and showed his teeth. “
Hey
, I did my best. Besides, I wasn’t the one who led her into that goddamn deathtrap, now was—”
That’s the moment everything went pear-shaped.
The vampire had been seeing things on a horizontal playing field. And arguing with Gil, with his backup, made him miss what was coming.
And what was coming fell from above.
Bam!
A zombie tumbled off a roof and landed right on Coburn, knocking the vampire off the Subaru and onto the ground. Creampuff whined and tumbled under the car, claws scrabbling.
The rotter—a dead woman with skin the color and consistency of tar-paper—clambered atop him and put all her weight on his chin. Her rotten tooth-stubs sought out his throat, hankering for a taste of his blood. Coburn couldn’t let that happen. Last time he let rotters have a sip of his go-go juice it changed them. Turned ordinary zombies from brain-dead stumblers to smart super-predators. A condition they could spread, and that only ended when Coburn killed himself—or tried to, before Kayla brought him back to existence with that magic blood of hers.
Everything seemed to happen at once. Coburn got his hand under her cheek and pushed upward at the same time Creampuff darted out from under the car, snarling and nipping at her. She reared back, and only then did Coburn see that her left arm had no hand—the arm dead-ended at the elbow, which was just a jagged, shattered spur of broken bone.
The zombie plunged that bone right into his belly.
It wasn’t an attack. The dumb cooze was trying to
lean
on a hand that wasn’t there. And now she was bone-deep in his guts, writhing like an animal caught in a trap. Which, as it turned out, was not all that great for Coburn’s interior.
The zombie struggled, wrenching her arm up—
Slicing a ragged tear across Coburn’s stomach.
Cool air blew across his exposed guts.
Well, shit.
The zombie saw his undead bowel and thought to dive in the way a porky kid goes at a pie-eating contest, but as she dove forth with zeal and hunger, he grabbed her head and racked it backward until the spine snapped and her dead eyes went deader. Other zombies were already shuffling forward, crossbow bolts sticking out of a few of their heads as they dropped.
Coburn, laying on the street looking up, saw something else.
More zombies. On the roof. Milling about.
Their attention had been gotten.
Coburn grunted, packed his viscera into the cavern of his body and yelled to Gil: “Up, up, up!”
Gil looked up to see the zombies start spilling over the edge, two stories up. He danced out of the way as one slammed hard into the Subaru, rolling off the back end. Another crashed into the boughs of a small tree growing out of the sidewalk, thrashing as it tangled itself in the branches.
They kept falling. One after the other. None of them landing with grace, but all of them getting up afterwards.
And now the zombies from the bottom of the street—the horde—had been alerted. A seething tide of corrupted unlife. Rotten as a tsunami of dead fish.
Coburn backed up to a house—a house the color of daffodils—and shouldered open the door, waving Gil and whistling for Creampuff.
The zombies were coming.
CHAPTER TWO
Blood Light
A
S
G
IL USED
the butt of the crossbow to bust the knob off one of the apartment doors upstairs, Coburn realized he was losing a not insignificant amount of blood. Soaked his jeans. Dribbled over his arms, milked from his exposed intestinal loops. Left a trail of it up the steps.
His hunger was different now that Kayla was nesting in his brain, blood, mind, soul, or wherever it was she
existed
. His need for blood had lost its serrated edge—it was still sharp, just not so jagged, so raw.
But hunger was hunger.
They pushed into the apartment. Nice place. Open concept. Built-in bookshelves, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, travertine tile in the entryway. And a long-dead man in a leather recliner with a gun in his mouth and a rusty, clumpy peacock tail sprayed on the wall behind him.
A year ago, the sight of even that dried, shitty blood would’ve had Coburn tearing the pipes out of the walls in the hopes of finding a rat to eat, but now he kept his cool. As Gil orbited the room, Coburn muttered through gritted teeth: “Yeah, I’m going to need to eat something.”
“Can’t you heal that”—Gil gestured toward the exploded gutty-works—“first?”
“Normally. But turns out, a big hole in your midsection is one way for blood to make the great egress outside your body. And I need the blood to heal up.”
“Take my blood.”
The reaction inside Coburn was like a tiger with a string of firecrackers shoved up its ass—he damn near leapt across the room to get a taste of the walking blood-bag standing right in front of him. But Kayla’s presence—not even her voice, just her
existence
—inside of him cooled his heels.
“I’ve fed from you... too much already.” Pained him to say it, but it was true.
Last time he had a proper non-Gil-flavored meal was three days northeast of the city, where they found a trio of cannibals living out of a dead conversion van outside of Vallejo. They’d been driven mad, could barely speak English—everything was just howls of rage and single syllable words like
hunt, kill
,
eat
. Almost mistook them for zombies.
They thought to hunt Coburn and Coburn let them.
He ate them up. Drained them dry. They were too skinny. Their blood tasted of ash and madness. And an iron deficiency.
Now, most of their blood was on the ground.
Useless, now. Once again, ash and madness.
“I’ll be fine,” Gil asserted.
Again Coburn resisted the urge to go hog wild and break open Gil like a fucking Pez dispenser. “I said
no
. I feed off you now, you’ll be weak; too weak. Might give you a stroke or tweak your heart. You may die, but I won’t be the one to do it. Your daughter would never forgive me.”
You got that right
, she said.
Gil slumped against the wall, slid to the floor. The crossbow clattering away as Creampuff sat next to him.
Coburn smelled the salty tears before he saw them.
The girl’s father was crying.
“Oh, goddamnit,” Coburn said, trying again to hold up his guts. The hunger coiled and uncoiled like a rattlesnake in his mind. “We’re gonna do this now?”
“I failed her,” Gil said. “You were right. I was her protector, and her death is on my hands. Not yours.” He sniffed up a snot bubble and his mouth formed a mortified line. “Her. Cecelia. Ebbie. All dead because of me.”
“All dead because of Benjamin Brickert, who was the one who led you into that death trap.”
And Benjamin Brickert
, Kayla reminded him,
came looking for you, didn’t he? Doesn’t that make our deaths your fault?
“Shut up!” he barked at her, not meaning to say it out loud, but there it was. He decided to run with it. “I need you to toughen the fuck up, Gil. Your rope’s got too much slack in it; your daughter doesn’t need a limp snot-slick handkerchief. She needs her father. She’s not dead like you think of her being dead. I have her blood. I have the future.”
Those words made him sick to say, but there they were anyway.
“I need blood. Can’t be yours.”
The terrier whined.
“No,” Coburn said. “I’d need ten of you.”
Creampuff wagged his tail.
“You need to hunt,” Gil said, sniffling.
“Assuming anybody’s alive in this city may be a fool’s errand.”
“What happens if you don’t get blood?”
Coburn shrugged. “I start to dry up like a dead bug. Though what happens now that I have her up in my noggin remains to be seen.”
Remember what you did in New York
, Kayla said.
An image flashed in his head—an image he did not put there. Him. On the roof. Scenting for blood. How did she know that?
I have your whole head to wander around. It’s all up here. Stuff you remember. Stuff you... don’t.
That last part chilled him a little, and he wasn’t sure why.
Still. She had it right.
“The roof,” he said. “I’ve got to go to the roof.”
H
E UNDERSTOOD NOW.
Why zombies were up here. People came here to wait out the horror. This house, like many others, was set-up to offer a roof-top patio: chairs, tables, outlets, little BBQ grills. One zombie hadn’t realized that all his buddies had bailed on him and was still milling around, a sharp-angled pinstripe suit hanging loose on his desiccated, sun-dried body.
Gil knocked him off the roof. Crashing into the throng of massing zombies below. They accepted him as one of their own.
They were only two stories up, but Coburn could see the rooftops and, in the distance, the city on the hill. The tall buildings, the spired churches, the city of soft-colors and sea-bleached houses. The bay was a grim blue line. Behind them the skeleton of the Golden Gate rose, a crossing of bloody metal bones.
Blood
.
Coburn sniffed the air. The perfume of decay rose from below, again mingling with the smell of the sea—salt and fish and sand. Decay, then, from all sides, too, just like in New York. Rotters this way and that way and
all
ways, because that’s how the world was, now: home to the decomposing dregs of ex-humanity.
But no life.
No one alive nearby but them.
Weakness sucked the energy from his muscles, the life from his bones.
“Nothing,” he said to Gil. “Not a goddamn thing. Maybe we press on. Try to find the ferry. If there are living people there, I can...”
What?
came Kayla’s voice.
Make nice with them by making one of them a quick snack? I’m sure they won’t think that’s the least bit rude.