Creampuff growled at the steps leading to the second floor.
Gil swallowed. Stepped past the terrier, sliding a bolt into the crossbow and cocking it. The stairs up were steel steps like you’d find on a tractor trailer, suspended from the ceiling by thick dark cables.
No way to go up quietly. Every step a metallic gong.
The stairs shook as he ascended.
The smell? Stronger up here.
He steadied himself on the railing—another cable, this one strung horizontally—and saw Creampuff hop up onto a white leather couch and stare up at Gil with trepidation.
Gil turned, headed down the hallway.
All the while, the roadkill stink growing gnarlier until Gil’s eyes were watering and his stomach—which didn’t have much more than a few stale Entemann’s crumb cakes bobbing around the lake of digestive fluids—churned like a bucket of bad milk in a clumsy man’s hand.
At the end of the hall, Gil saw a door cracked open.
He gently tapped it with a foot. It opened with a squeak.
And there he found the source of the stench.
Rotters. Three of them.
Two of them on the bed. Supine. Bound there with an inelegant tangle of nylon rope, extension cords, and twine. One was a man: dark fraying turtleneck, head a mop of Andy Warhol hair, pair of dark frame glasses literally stapled to his mottled face. The other, a woman. Gray blouse with sharp collars. Pair of flowy black pants. No shoes. Toes worn away, leaving only twitching nubs of blackened bone. The two of them hissed and writhed against their bonds.
The third rotter was a child. A young boy of eight or nine with a bowl-cut of black hair and a windbreaker whose fabric went
vip vip vip
every time he moved. One eye dangled out of his head, resting on his swollen chipmunk cheek. The rest of the boy looked relatively well-preserved, for one of the undead.
He, too, was bound up, to a wire-frame office chair. Wheels locked so that it couldn’t roll around.
It was someone’s family.
The man—the
father
—gurgled. Dead lipless flesh rubbing together. Gil saw a patch of the man’s shoulder that had been worn away: the turtleneck gnawed open and the flesh, too. As if on cue, the woman tilted her head toward the father and craned her neck until she could get her chompers around his exposed flesh. She took a few graceless bites and then pulled away again, seemingly dissatisfied by the taste—or, Gil wondered, the lack of nutrition, given that rotters didn’t seem to eat one another with any regularity.
The whole scene stirred within him a turbid shit-storm of emotions: it was perplexing (
who did this
), it was grotesque (
couldn’t do this to my own family
), it was sweet (
someone cared enough
).
Whatever the case, Gil thought, these people needed to be put to rest. He raised the crossbow. Looked out over the bow sights—a little pink plastic ‘V’ at the tip of the weapon—and let his finger curl around the trigger.
Something jabbed into the small of his back.
His world lit up. Like it was on fire. A loud fly-wing buzz.
His finger squeezed.
The smell of ozone. And burning. And death.
Gil dropped. The crossbow clattered.
Somewhere, Creampuff barked.
And then a plastic bag pulled tight over his head. As Gil sucked in a hard breath he found plastic in his mouth, around his lips, shutting off his air with a vacuum seal made by his own desperate gasps. His tongue played against it as his body twitched and a sad scream rose up within his throat.
Darkness reached up to claim him.
C
OBURN WALKED DOWN
into darkness.
As he approached the basement, he smelled mold, and a breathy sewage gust. Voices rose up from the shadows, a half-conversation interrupted—
Masterson: “—take me with you, I can help—”
Lydia: “Get away from me. Go deal with the vampire.”
Masterson: “Forget him. Forget the others. I’m alive. You’re dead. We need each other. I worship you. I—”
Lydia: “It’s not me you should be wor—” Pause. “Did you hear that?”
A moment later, she whispered: “
He’s here
.”
Oops. Oh, well.
Coburn whistled low and slow to further announce his presence.
“I’m feeling much better now,” he called into the dark basement. His eyes adjusted as he reached the bottom of the steps. The basement was just a repository for junk: boxes, debris, a gun rack, a cabinet. And, by the look of it, their bathroom: various fly-clouded buckets sat against the far wall. Reeking.
But what was most interesting was the hole dug out of the wall and floor. Drywall gave way to exposed brick and broken piping. Leading down into whatever tunnels the rat-man had been referring to.
And there, at the mouth of the shattered wall, stood Lydia and Masterson.
“Hey,
guys
,” Coburn said with a low, throaty chuckle. “Geez, I didn’t know you came here. The buckets of shit in the corner are
to die for
. You crazy kids want to get a booth or a table?”
Lydia looked to Masterson. Her gaze locked with his and Coburn could see that the self-proclaimed Minister could not escape. He tried, but couldn’t. Something transferred between them—which meant the vampire was dropping her hypno-hoodoo on him. Coburn had no interest in seeing that play out. As Lydia handed something to her cohort, Coburn moved fast.
In his head, Kayla called to him in alarm:
You’re not thinking straight. Again.
He ignored her. Again.
With a sweep of his arms he tossed the Minister aside; the man clattered into a heap of moldy cardboard boxes. Lydia wrenched a brick from its mooring with a sharp crack and brought it against Coburn’s head.
He didn’t even feel it.
Coburn roared, grabbed her face like it was a bowling ball: thumb in her mouth, two fingers in her eyes,
squeezing
in order to pop the face off her skull. Her eyes started to give way. Pop like swollen grapes.
Then she bit down.
Her teeth cut clean through Coburn’s thumb. Through skin, through bone. With the drugs storming through his system, it didn’t hurt too much. He even laughed as she spit the thumb out into the tunnel behind her. Her eyes swollen, rimmed with blood, the whites shot through with black.
“Nice job!” he said, giving her a thumbs-up with the hand that had no thumb. Blood wept from the wound.
She kicked him in the stomach. An ungainly, inept kick—nobody had taught her how to fight. Coburn taught himself long ago by getting in fights with any gang thug, robber, rapist, or killer he could find. Humans fought and got hurt just by fighting—too strong a punch meant a broken hand, too high a kick meant your balance was out of whack, and only idiots and assholes went for the headbutt. Headbutt someone, your eyes watered, your head rang like a bell, and dizziness would be your primary reward.
Coburn didn’t worry about any of that. His tear ducts were dry as peach pits. His head was as hard as a grave slab.
So he smashed his head into Lydia’s face.
Once. Then twice. Then a third time for good measure.
She’s a vampire,
Kayla reminded him.
Just like you.
Oh, right. Crap.
Just the same—her nose was shattered and she staggered back into the darkness of the tunnel. Coburn clapped his hands. This was fun. She was green, this one. Young and awkward like a newborn foal. She picked up a brick. Hissed for Masterson. Chucked the brick at Coburn’s head—
He leaned left, let the brick sail over.
“Someone really needs to teach you how to fight,” he said.
Lydia, nose smashed, eyes bugging out all bloody, shrugged.
“Somebody needs to teach
you
to pay attention,” she said.
He heard the scuff of a shoe behind him.
Lydia sprang into the tunnel like a fucking puma, her lithe shadow meeting the deeper shadows within—
Masterson tackled Coburn. Slamming the vampire into the side of the tunnel. As Coburn fell to the ground, Masterson clambered atop his chest. Weeping. Snot-bubbles boiling up out of his nose.
“I used to be somebody,” Masterson said. Voice hoarse.
He was holding a grenade. The pin was not at home.
Coburn winced.
Shit
.
Boom
, Kayla said, a half-second before the grenade went off.
And the world turned to noise and debris and pain.
PART TWO
ORPHANS
The Conversation: #2
Will I live with him now?
Beats me. Like I know how this works. We’re in new territory here, little girl.
Or maybe I’ll just die. Maybe I won’t exist anymore.
Could be, rabbit. Could be. But I hope not. I really hope not.
Maybe I’ll change him like I changed you.
Who said you changed me?
You’re so funny sometimes.
Yeah. A real laugh riot.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I Believe That Children Are Our Future
G
ASP.
Oxygen.
Breath screaming through his throat and filling his lungs—felt cool and hot and good and painful, all in equal measure.
Gil lurched upright. Bag still on his head. But someone had vented a hole where his mouth was, and with every breath the plastic whispered and crinkled.
He reached up, panicked, pawing at the bag. He ripped it off and threw it to the ground like it was a bundle of cottonmouth snakes.
Gil found his own crossbow pointed at his head.
And a dirt-caked child was the one pointing it.
“Get up, dickweed,” the boy said. Grungy blond hair covering one eye—a jet of air from pursed lips blew the hair to the side. “I said,
get the fuck up,
bitch.”
Gil scrambled backward like a crab.
Something hit him from behind—something heavy, wooden. Cracked him over the head—not hard enough to make him bleed, but hard enough to sting. He turned, saw another kid standing there holding a busted chair leg. It was a girl—hair an unwashed tangle, face streaked with fingers of what looked like ash.
Other children filtered into the room upon hearing the commotion. Another six of them. No teenagers, though a few that looked eleven or twelve, including the boy holding the crossbow aloft. Youngest seemed to be a boy of four or so—a porky mole-cheeked dumpling with hair stuck up and clumped with red as if it had been shellacked with strawberry jam. Gil realized with horror that it probably wasn’t strawberry.
His horror deepened when he realized all these kids had weapons. The girl with the chair leg. A pre-teen with bones woven into her pigtails held a folded license plate whose edge was plainly sharpened. A third held a .22 pistol. A fourth had a pair of ice picks, one in each hand. Even the fat little four-year-old dragged an oiled bike chain behind him.
Outside, thunder rumbled. Distant. But closing in.
“You tried to kill my father,” Crossbow Kid said.
Gil stammered, cleared his throat. Saw a pair of feet hanging over the edge of the bed—Mother and Father, respectively, both pairs of feet gently twitching and wiggling with the crude facsimile of life. Nearby, the third rotter—the kid with the bowl-cut and cherub-cheeks—spun idly in the office chair.
He stood, saw the crossbow bolt he’d loosed earlier sticking out of the flesh around the father-zombie’s collarbone.
“That’s your father,” Gil said, horrified.
“What of it, dick?”
“Watch your language, kid.”
“My name’s not
kid,
dick. It’s Aiden.”
Gil’s forehead furrowed. “My name’s not
Dick
, Aiden. It’s Gil.”
“Whatever. You tried to kill my father.”
“Yeah,” Gil said. “Except I think he’s already dead.”
That made Aiden angry. He surged forward with the crossbow, which was a mistake—Gil snatched it out of the kid’s hand as a bolt flew free and popped into the wall behind him with a
thunk
.
Gil quickly backed against the wall, struggling to find another bolt—but Aiden kicked forward a leather belt covered in loops once meant for bullets but now used to house crossbow arrows.
“You looking for these?” Aiden asked.
The scrawny tween boy pointed the .22 pistol—a long-barrel Browning target weapon—at Gil’s chest in an unswerving grip. All he said was: “Dude.” Then shook his head disapprovingly, like a parent disappointed in his child.