She was right.
Gil said something in response, but Coburn couldn’t hear the old man—Kayla spoke again. More truth from the ghost girl.
You’re sniffing for the wrong thing. Try again. Something’s out there.
No. Nothing. He still couldn’t—
Wait. There.
Not blood. But sweat. Body odor. The human musk—a sign of life.
He didn’t understand how she’d smelled it and he hadn’t.
You did smell it, you just didn’t realize it yet. I’m you and you’re me, dude.
“I smell someone,” Coburn said, interrupting whatever Gil was saying.
Gil stared at him like he didn’t believe it.
“I’ve got to hunt. I’ve got to hunt now.” Before the scent was lost on the bay-born wind.
“How you plan to do that with all those rotters out there?”
“I go roof to roof. Only five feet between them.”
Gil shook his head. “It’s all short blocks. You’ll hit a street before long.”
“Then I hit a street. By then I’ll be ahead of the throng. They’re slow. Stupid. I’ll be fine.” He didn’t necessarily believe it, but this wasn’t the time to tell Gil that.
“What about me?”
“Hunker down. The zombies’ll come after me; my blood makes them a little crazy.” Coburn cringed as he pushed his guts back in his body, then closed his jacket over the wound and zipped it up snug. “When they’re gone? Bug the fuck out of here. Find the lab. And I’ll find you.”
“I can’t do this—”
Coburn didn’t let the old man finish.
No time to waste. He bolted forward in a clumsy gallop and leaped from this roof to the next—soon as he hit, the vampire tucked his legs and rolled, barely managing to come back up on his feet.
But he did. Because hunger afforded him little choice.
CHAPTER THREE
The Rat Man
H
E HAD HIM,
now.
Coburn knew he was on the trail. The man—and it most certainly was a man, that was just a thing that the vampire knew—left his unwashed scent on every street sign and mailbox and curb.
Humans were such dumb apes. They never knew how plainly they were telegraphing their weakness—generally to other stronger humans, apex predators like con-artists, robbers, rapists, but this time to all flavors of the living dead. Broadcasting that signal of frailty and isolation to one lone vampire and a deluge of always-starving zombie motherfuckers.
Hunger was driving Coburn, now. Still not as toothy as it had been, and now with Kayla there he was able to push it longer, harder, faster—but just the same, the edges of his vision were tinged with a rose-red hue. By now he’d normally be feeling like an infinite carpet of insects crawled just beneath his skin, but here the hunger was clear and cleanly sharp like a shard of broken glass.
He moved south through the city. Through the once-hoity-and-also-toity neighborhood of Pacific Heights, now looking like it had been through a riot: sandbags and fallen coils of barbed wire and burned cars stacked together. Then below that, toward gutted restaurants and shattered boutiques (Indian food! Head shop! Turkish coffee! Weird hats! Oaxacan blankets!).
The zombies were thicker, here—an environmental hazard to be dealt with, to be got past, as obtrusive as floodwaters, as empty-headed as a pack of starving dogs. Coburn was singularly-driven. He hurt. He starved. Any zombie that got in his way found its knee popped, neck snapped, head crushed. When the throng got too thick, he clambered up fire escapes, went roof to roof and back down again.
All the while following that trail.
Invisible handprints of sweat.
A gob of spit on the curb.
A swipe of snot across a bent parking meter.
And then, bright as the moon in a dark sky, a dime-sized dollop of blood in the middle of the intersection of that old hippie standby, Haight and Ashbury.
That blood lit up Coburn’s brain like a full-tilt pinball machine, bumpers flickering and flippers clicking and lights and klaxons and
an electric surge of raw hunger
coursing through his fingertips and eyeholes—
Wait
, Kayla said.
Something’s wrong
.
No time for that. No need. Zero interest.
Move, rove, run, hunt.
Coburn, stop
.
He felt her somehow reaching through his dried-up veins and tugging on them like puppet-strings, but he had no time for that—the demon within bucked like a scorned hell-steed and Kayla’s ghostly grip slipped.
There.
A shape, a form, darting around an overturned dumpster and into an alley.
Moved fast.
Human. Not zombie.
Coburn!
He screamed inside his own head to shut her up as he rounded the corner, found a small man hiding behind a pile of ruptured sandbags in a dingy puddle-soaked alley—Coburn growled and grabbed him and hauled him to his feet. Saw wide scared eyes, the eyes of a rabbit, and long greasy black hair with a kinky dread-twist beard to match, and the man mumbled something but it only came out as a froth of spit bubbles and
who cares just fucking feed
—
Kayla screamed inside his mind.
He bit deep into the dirt-caked neck.
Blood ran hot into Coburn’s mouth. Coppery, oily, heavy, sweet—
But then, something else, too. A bitter edge on the back of the tongue. A rising taste of salt; a crass medicinal tang.
Coburn’s head suddenly felt like it was doing loops and whorls, a biplane flying barrel rolls inside his skin. Kayla tried to say something, but her voice grew warped, distorted, like he was a little fishie inside an aquarium and she stood on the outside yelling in
whash ish appeming
—
The vampire could not pull away. The blood continued to pump into his mouth. When the rodent-like man pushed Coburn away, Coburn could not resist
that
, either. He felt like a store mannequin, his limbs somehow distant from the rest of him, his brain out there on a tether like a child’s birthday balloon.
The rat man whimpered, fumbled clumsily for a square of dirty gauze which he quickly slapped over the neck wound. From behind the sandbag he rescued a roll of black electrical tape and a walkie-talkie.
He wound the tape around the gauze with one hand, and spoke into the walkie with the other.
“He got me. I mean—I got him. I mean,
shit
, ahhh, you know what I mean. Over.” The rat man stared at Coburn as the vampire teetered there, trying desperately to will his limbs to respond to his desire to rip out this freak’s throat.
The response from the walkie came from with rough voice that sounded like two bricks being rubbed together: “What’s he doing? Over.”
“He’s just standing there. Staring at me. Over.”
The rat-man mouthed two words to Coburn:
I’m sorry
.
The gravelly voice: “Good. Bring him to the corner of Page and Masonic. I’ll send Flores and Jeepers to help you bring him in. Hurry before the stumblers find you. Don’t fuck this up, Fingerman. Over and out.”
The rat-man—Fingerman, apparently—looked at Coburn and then shrugged. That’s when his face melted. Leaving behind only a grinning skull.
The sky above turned to an eye.
The blood in the vampire’s mouth and throat felt suddenly like a bubbling pile of clipped fingernails, chewed calluses, and battery acid.
Fingerman pushed Coburn over, wound electrical tape around his eyes and mouth, and began dragging him.
CHAPTER FOUR
The K-Hole
C
OBURN’S WORLD, PLUNGED
into darkness.
But in the darkness, light flared like a burst of red phosphorus.
He saw faces in those dark spaces, faces lit by crimson light. A prostitute with her neck torn open. A pair of club kids, tongueless, made to kiss with their bloody mouths as Coburn watched. A meter maid, skin gone ashen, a pair of puncture wounds on her bloodless, mortified wrist.
Ebbie’s moon face.
Cecelia, laughing.
Together they all whispered his name, his
true
name:
“John Wesley Coburn.”
Then:
Kayla. Sitting on the floor. Watching a television whose round full screen flickered static with a black and white image dancing behind the noise—a voice crackling through the hiss:
Rilly big shoe
.
Kayla became Rebecca. Hair into pigtails. Sweet smile.
Then, back to Kayla.
“It’s a strange place in here,” she said. “Messy.”
“How’d you get in here?” he asked, even though he knew the answer:
You stabbed yourself in the neck and made me drink your blood, and now I’m your keeper, your container, your little Coburn. Cure for what ails the world.
“Lots of dead people in your head.”
“Not like you, though,” he said. “You’re really here.”
“They’re
all
really here, JW. Can I call you that now? I think I will.”
He wanted to tell her
no, don’t call me that
, but couldn’t find the words.
She continued: “Everybody you killed, whose blood you drank, lives in here. Part of them does. Maybe it’s biology. Maybe it’s the soul. Who knows? I’m stuck, too. Not like I have access to the Internet in here.”
Kayla laughed. But it wasn’t her laugh. It was Rebecca’s laugh.
“My daughter,” Coburn said.
If everybody I ever killed is in here...
“Don’t worry about her right now. You gotta bring yourself back from this. You’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, JW. And you’re falling still. It’s time now to wake up, you hear? Time to see where you are.”
“But Rebecca...”
“Isn’t going anywhere. But you are, big guy.”
“Wait.”
“No time to wait.”
“Wait!”
His scream echoed.
His eyes opened behind black tape.
H
IS HANDS MOVED.
They moved when he told them to. Not fast. Barely functional. Felt like they were somebody else’s arms and he was willing them to move with telepathy—there came a delay from when his brain issued the command and when his arms flailed upward like the limbs of a doll. He cried out. His numb fingers found the tape around his eyes. Pried the tape off. No pain. Just bright light that washed out the middle; reality bled in at the edges.
He saw zombies.
Upside-down zombies. Filthy gore-caked faces. Lips ripped away. Dead tongues lolling, tasting the air. About ten, fifteen feet away. Floating. Flying.
Coburn grunted. Sat up. A cry of alarm erupted at his feet—a fist popped him in the face, knocked his head back down as upside-down zombies continued to lurch forth. The sky was on the ground and asphalt was the sky and—
You’re upside-down
, Kayla said,
not them. Silly vampire
.
It all began to work itself out.
Coburn dipped his chin to his chest, saw that three humans were dragging him up toward a house on the corner, a house walled away behind sandbags and cars and coils of razor wire. House the color of turned earth, of fresh mulch, of grave dirt.
The three humans looked back at him as they hurriedly dragged him forward by his boots—one of them, the rat-man, Fingerman, yelped. “He’s wakin’ up! Chee-rist, he’s
wakin’
up!”
Another one—a wild-eyed Hispanic-looking motherfucker with fat biceps and a corded neck that looked like the trunk of a sequoia—barked at him: “Go back to sleep! Go the fuck to sleep!” To the third man, a wispy old dude with a Gandalf beard and a cheap pink plastic lei around his neck: “Give him the shot! The shot!”
Gandalf let go of the vampire’s boot, coming at Coburn with a syringe full of red. Coburn’s mouth tingled—
that’s blood,
Kayla told him,
but it’s bad blood
—but he had to suppress the hunger. He tried to kick his feet but they were slow to respond, tried to bat at the incoming hippie-wizard but his fist felt like it was swaddled in cotton swabs, and before he knew what was happening the dude’s beard was in his eyes and the syringe was squirting blood into his mouth and—
There. The bitter tang. The medicine wrapped in a spoonful of sugar.
Kayla:
They’re drugging you
.
“Muhfuh!” Coburn muttered—it sounded better in his head—and once more the darkness found him, again touched by the faces of the dead and tinged by firelight cast through a curtain of blood.
H
OURS.
D
AYS.
W
EEKS.
Years.
Coburn could not say long the parade of the doomed and the dead lasted this time. When he finally awoke, it felt like leaving a too-loud, too-crowded party and walking out onto a balcony or sidewalk where the air is cool and everything is comparatively quiet and the clamor and clatter has been left behind.