At the same time the odor was crawling its way up his nose like a worm, a sound reached his ears that chilled his already cold body:
A howling screech. Containing within it a madness beyond life’s margins, a desperate ragged hunger that had no end and gave no quarter.
The scream was far away... but close enough to still be heard.
That sound set off a cascade of images in his mind: rotters drinking his blood, turning into monstrous hell-zombies, the
hunters
who stopped at nothing when it came to getting another taste of Coburn.
How could another hunter exist in the world? All the ones he inadvertently made—and then those that made each other—were gone now. Was there just one? Or had their unstoppable army begun to form anew?
Coburn lay there in the darkness for awhile, trying to parse what he’d heard. A figure drifted beyond the beaded curtain; a shadow upon the sea of shadows. Coburn willed his eyes to see better—normally, he could see in darkness like it was a cloudy day, but right now it seemed that either the ketamine or his day-long exposure to the bleary fireball known as the ‘sun’ had done his night-sight no good.
Again he smelled jasmine and death.
Stronger, this time.
The figure emerged from behind the curtain.
Now he could see her. She was Asian. Clad in a white doctor’s coat. The woman was tall, long limbed, with the elegance of a cellar spider. Flesh pale like a cave cricket and flawless like porcelain—except for the asterisk-shaped crater on her cheek below her left eye. Like someone had taken a chisel to a beautiful doll.
As she approached with confident step, the jasmine smell washed over him.
And so did the smell of death.
She’s one of you
, Kayla said.
“I’ve come to take your blood,” she said.
“That’s awfully matter-of-fact, Doc.”
“I see no reason to obfuscate my intentions.” She walked the table at his feet, pacing in slow half-moons. He couldn’t hear shoes. Was she barefoot?
“You’re pretending to me like me.”
She frowned. “To be like you how?”
“You know.”
“Enlighten me.”
He opened his mouth, hissed, let his tongue play across the tip of two plainly-displayed fangs. “See what I’m getting at, China Doll?”
“I’m Korean, and why do you think I’m pretending?”
“Because I’m the only one out there.”
“I’m surprised you think so, though I suppose I see why.” She seemed done with the conversation. She waved someone on behind the beaded curtain, and here came itchy, twitchy Fingerman, pushing a metal cart with a wooden case atop it.
“Don’t you, uhh, need lights?” Fingerman asked.
The woman barely gave him a look. “I can see in the dark even if you cannot. Run along, little rat.”
Coburn snorted. “I thought he looked like a rat, too.”
But she didn’t respond. So much for being friendly.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Lydia.”
“Nice to meet you, Lydia. I’m—”
“Coburn, yes, I know.” She popped the latch on the case—a little brass hook—and opened it. Looked to be something out of medical antiquity. One giant metal syringe. A number of glass containers, each about the size of a stick of dynamite. Old surgical tubing. A shiny metal piece that looked like the head of an octopus with all of its tentacles chopped off at the half-way mark. She began hooking it all together efficiently, silently.
“What’s all this nonsense?”
“It’s a blood transfusion kit. From the era of the Great War. Would’ve preferred something more updated, but the hospitals remain host to a continuing plague of the undead.” She clipped the octopus head to the tubing, then the tubing to the syringe. Then she did the same the other way: connecting one glass jar to the tubing, and back to the octopus head. “Don’t worry. I tested it.”
“Tested it.”
“Mm. I have test subjects.”
“Pigs?”
“Humans. Children, actually.”
He laughed, though it was without mirth. “I’m a little confused here, honey. You know that if you were a real bloodsucker you don’t need all this fancy crap, right? You just... open your mouth. Let your fangs come out to play. Sink them into somebody’s skin like pushing your pinky through a stick of warm butter... mmm. Oooooh-ee. Nothing beats it. Not that you’d know, being a—”
He was about to say pretender, but then Lydia leaned forward, extended her jaw and tilted her head back, and let her fangs show.
As he did, she poked at each with a tongue.
“Satisfied?” she asked. “Good.”
Then she went back to setting up the kit.
She told you, boy,
Kayla said.
He willed her to shut up.
“So why the kit if you could just drink me dry here and now?”
“The blood is not for me.”
She turned her gaze suddenly to the wall. Then to the beaded curtain. Back to Coburn, an unexpected moment of cageyness submerged now beneath that glassy exterior.
Something scratched at his mind like a crow clawing the earth.
“Not for you. Who’s it for?”
She didn’t answer.
“Who the fuck wants my blood,
Lydia
?”
Still silent. Only the click and squeak of her hands adjusting the apparatus.
What’s going on, Coburn
?
“I don’t even have that much blood in me. If I did I’d be up off this table. I’d be tearing this place to pieces, commanding these freaks to eat one another alive.”
Lydia stopped. Finally seemed resolved to say something. “It’s not your blood that matters. It’s what’s inside it.”
He went cold. Like someone flushed his system with saline. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your blood is different now. You have a guest. I’m here to take her.”
Her. Kayla. The cure.
Shitfuck.
Coburn, how does she know that
?
No time to think about that now. Panic settled into his supine body like sepsis; that cold feeling of saline turned to a hot rush of acid. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t want to do this.”
“Not used to this, are you? The begging. The pleading and wheedling. Usually it’d be your victim, wouldn’t it? Begging you for her life. Or begging you to take her life, depending on how badly you tweaked her brain. Trust me. I know.” Lydia screwed a massive needle onto the tip of the equally massive syringe. Looked like something used to deliver adrenalin to an elephant’s heart. Her gaze flicked again to the windows. Did Coburn sense a nervousness there? “But now you’re the one on the slab. You’re the one imploring another to save you. Or save the one inside your blood. I wonder what that must be like. To care about another as you do now. The good news for me is, I am not given over to such delicate compunction. It’s sad to see you like this, really. It’s like watching a wolf limp.”
“Are you done talking?” Coburn said. “Because I’m getting tired of hearing your fool mouth flap.”
“I am. A rare moment of gregariousness. I suppose I just savor the irony of your situation.” An icy smile. “Let us begin.”
She gave the needle one last tighten. Moved it toward his neck.
Then: outside, another keening banshee’s wail. The hunter, hunting.
Lydia tensed. Syringe held firm in her grip.
Coburn suddenly understood.
“The hunter,” he said, clucking his tongue as if to chastise a tardy student. “The hunter’s yours, isn’t it? You let your guard down. And when you did, some rot-fuck took a bite out of you—not out of your cheek, no, that’s from before you turned into the carefree killing machine you are now—and something happened that you didn’t figure on. The rot-fuck changed. And now he’s out there. Or
she’s
out there. Looking like something that kicked its way out of the Devil’s own dickhole. Like something that’s bringing Hell with it.”
“Shut your mouth,” she hissed.
“Oooh. Getting testy, now. It’s my turn to be the smart one and you don’t like that.” She turned the syringe downward and he uttered a quick
tut-tut-tut
. “Slow your roll, sister. That thing’s on the hunt. And it wants one thing: vampire blood. Yours, if it can manage it. But I suspect mine will do fine. You let one drop of my blood hit the air and that thing will be like a shark scenting prey. It’ll come. For you. For me. For all of us. That what you want?”
She hesitated. The needle tip hovering.
Coburn, on the other hand, did not hesitate.
He jerked his body toward—not away from—the needle, letting its tip pop a hole in the side of his neck. He didn’t have much blood left, but what he had beaded up at the puncture site like a blood-colored pearl.
It timed out well: only a moment later came another wailing, mournful—and righteously hungry—cry from the distant hunter.
Lydia staggered backward. She dropped the syringe.
Coburn laughed. A dry rasp. Way he saw it: whatever it was she wanted, he did not—and whatever she
didn’t
want, well, he’d make certain that came to pass. She was afraid of the hunter? Then he wanted to stoke the fires of that fear.
The other vampire hurried toward the curtain, poking her head through. He heard her barking orders: “Need to move him. Ready another hit of the ketamine. Someone get in there to watch him.”
He had little time.
The ketamine was finally gone from his system, leaving only a ghost of its effects behind—he wouldn’t be as fast or as capable as usual, but he still had a little of Gandalf’s blood left. Enough kindling to start a fire.
He let it burn. Let the blood reach through his system like claw-tipped fingers. He began to rock back and forth—the way they nailed him gave him little room to move, but enough to build momentum, and the table was built for quiet dinners, not rowdy, pissed-off bloodsuckers.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Left. Riiiight
.
Almost... almost...
Shit!
The table did not tip.
But then—it did something else. The table would not suffer the stress. Two of the legs on the right side of Coburn’s body suddenly snapped like shattered bones, splintering with loud cracks. The force of the table hitting the ground pulled some of the nails from Coburn’s flesh.
Not all of them.
But enough.
Coburn snarled, got his right arm free and felt his way underneath his tilted body—he reached out, grabbed the doorframe leading into the hall, and
pulled.
Pain shot through him, every nail popping free with the fresh hell of a cigarette burn, his guts still sloshing around half-outside his body, but then, with the sound of buttons tearing free from a shirt, Coburn freed himself from the table.
Two feet planted in front of him. Dirty feet. Bare. Nails painted neon green, the big toenails sporting anime cat faces.
The reedy sylph brought the bat down again.
But this time, Coburn shot up a hand and caught it in his palm.
Thwack
.
“Hit me once,” Coburn said, rising to his feet, “shame on
you
. Hit me twice, I tear you open like a human piñata and feast on your blood candy.”
He tossed the bat aside. The girl turned to run and he caught her by the hair, snapping her back to him and holding her tight in a cruel embrace. He tilted her head to the side as she struggled, saw the pale freckled stretch of neck—
She’s on something
, Kayla whispered in the hollows of his mind.
Not ketamine, but something else. She’ll slow you down, not speed you up
.
He roared, picked the sylph up, then threw her into the wall; she left a crater in the dry wall and tumbled down on the ground, her body still.
A
S
G
IL MADE
his way east through the streets of San Francisco, he heard the hunter’s cry echo over the buildings.
It made his blood turn to piss, made his piss turn to ice water. Creampuff darted between Gil’s legs, tail tucked low.
His heartbeat galloped like a spurred horse, remembering the lab in Los Angeles: the sound of those things crashing through the ducts, climbing up through the elevator shafts, scrambling up the outside of the building, screaming and wailing as they did so.
It occurred to him, then: they thought the rotters were the end of the world, but they weren’t the end. They were just the start of it. The hunters—wretched things of gnashing teeth and razor claw, of extended necks and distended mouths—were the true end of the world. A hurricane of hunger belched up out of Hell.
But then the vampire put an end to them. By putting a bullet in his own brain, Coburn effectively put a bullet in all their brains—giving way to some undead vampire-zombie logic that Gil didn’t care to understand.
So now, to hear another hunter...
Thoughts ran wild through his head: Coburn had been bitten. He was too brash, too bold, and got himself in trouble. That was how the hunters were born, wasn’t it? One zombie gets a taste for vampire blood and that’s it, game over.