Gil held up the crossbow, gently set it down on the floor.
“Let’s try this again,” he said, “my name is Gil. I’m a survivor. Just like you. Now if we can all just put down our weapons and—”
The .22 went off. A sharp snap—the wall coughed up bits of drywall into Gil’s cheek and he danced away from it.
Another disapproving shake of the head from Scrawny. “
Dude
.”
Aiden clarified: “He means, I talk. You shut the fuck up. Say one more word, he’ll have a bullet rattling around in your head like a marble in a fishbowl. Nod if you understand the words coming out of my mouth.”
Every inch of Gil wanted to reach out and snatch up the weapons from these kids and scold the king hell out of ’em. He remembered one time Kayla, thinking someone was breaking in, took a .22 rifle off the gun rack in his bedroom and accidentally shot a hole in the ceiling. Went up through the attic, punched a hole in a junction box, almost started a fire in the insulation. That was when he taught her about gun safety—she never much liked it, but she needed it. The chief lesson he drummed into her head, time and time again:
you never point a gun at another human being unless you mean to kill him
.
Still. This was not the time. So Gil just nodded.
“Like I said: my name’s Aiden. The skinny sum-bitch with the Browning Buck Mark Plus aimed at your ball-sack is Pete. Girl who hit you with the chair-leg, that’s Ashleigh. Pigtails over there, that’s the Princess.” The girl waved, smiling big, her bone-woven pigtails bouncing. Aiden gave her a mean look and she stopped waving. Aiden pointed to the boy with the ice-picks. “That’s Booboo.” Then to a girl with a cleft lip and a sling-shot. “That’s Little Mary. Big Mary’s not here. That’s right. There’s more of us. A lot more.”
Gil almost spoke, then bit his tongue. He gestured toward the little plump four-year-old.
Aiden narrowed his gaze. “Don’t you worry about who he is, old man.”
All the children stood around, staring burning holes through Gil. Everyone except the one called the Princess, who stood there smacking her lips and looking blissfully ignorant of the horror in the room before her. Reminded Gil a little of Kayla that way. His heart went sour just thinking about it.
“Your dog’s dead,” Aiden said.
Gil felt like the oxygen had once more been removed from the room. Like a bag was again over his head and he was struggling to breathe. Once upon a time he hated that vampire’s little hellhound, but things had changed. Creampuff was like a board floating in the ocean, to which Gil clinged. And now? Gone?
Aiden continued: “He bit me, so we had to break his neck. Same goes for you if you try anything—”
From downstairs, a bark. A very familiar bark.
Gil felt like he could breathe again.
Aiden’s face grew red and he screamed downstairs: “Goddamnit, Charlie! I told you to keep that fucking mutt quiet!” He turned back to Gil. “Fine. I was lying. Whatever. Screw you. Not my fault you—“
Another sound. Not a bark.
Again, the bellow of a distant hunter—a keening, high-pitched screech. The sound made the hairs on Gil’s neck reach for the stars. He could see that he wasn’t alone. All the kids shifted uncomfortably. They knew what they were hearing.
Princess spoke: “Ellie.”
The other kids said the same name in unison: “Ellie...”
They bowed their heads, suddenly somber.
Gil dared speak. “You... you know what made that sound.”
“That’s Ellie.” Aiden nodded. “She was one of us.”
C
OBURN SMELLED PEACHES
and cigarettes. Heard Kayla laughing somewhere behind the high-pitched tone humming in his ears. Remembered that the last time he saw someone with a grenade, it was Leelee, Kayla’s best friend and almost-doctor and surrogate mother—the pin hit the ground and the grenade took out her and a pack of hunters. And that was the end of that.
I miss her
, came Kayla’s voice rising out of the fog.
The vampire tried not to think about that.
Instead, he put out his hand, tried to stand, but found that his arm was like that zombie who gutted him—missing below the elbow. He fell, leaning hard on a nub of bone. A barbed spear of white-hot pain shot up from the bone to his shoulder and all the way to his ear.
He rolled over. Into something wet.
Wincing, he sat up, felt along his back for whatever it was—came back with a smear of red. Nearby lay a bowl—no, not a bowl, but a chunk of skull-cap with hair on the bottom. Masterson.
Masterson was everywhere.
The grenade, silly
, Kayla said.
Remember that?
Oh. Right.
At the last moment, before the grenade went off, Coburn turned and dove away from Masterson, pushing that poor dumb human bomb backward. Which explained why Coburn’s arm was half-gone.
Now, here he was. Missing an arm. Covered in dust and shattered brick and parts of Masterson.
At least you’re not trapped in a Wal-Mart about to be eaten by a crazy super-obese lady
, came Kayla’s voice.
Yeah. You never said much about that, but I can see it here with all your other memories. That was pretty gross, JW
.
It was pretty gross.
And this was not as bad as that.
At least he had blood here. It was undignified and made him feel more than a little like a starving dog but...
He bent down, and vacuumed up what was left of Masterson with his lips. Like he was slurping spilled soup from the floor. It was dingy and dirty and losing its nutritive value fast and occasionally he had to spit out spurs of bone or clumps of hair, but blood was blood and this arm wasn’t going to regrow itself. (Well, it
would
, but only with the proper urging.)
While siphoning up the liquid parts of the exploded Minister Masterson, Coburn wondered just what the hell that guy’s deal was. Thought he was some kind of cult leader. Leading the people toward a—what was it he said? A
symbiosis
with living man and undead asshole. But the truth was, Masterson was just another parasite. This one clinging to Lydia the way a remora fish hangs off the belly of a shark—bottom-feeding scum-sucking trash-picker. Not a leader. Not a ‘minister.’
When Coburn was done, he stood.
Grunted. Flexed his toes. Gritted his teeth.
Blood moved to wet the bony end of his arm. Muscle and tendon grew along with it, along with an unfurling flag of too-pink skin.
It was miserable. Felt like his arm was covered in a thousand ants, then dunked in a bucket of boiling water to kill them. Then ants, then boiling water. Over and over again. Until a few minutes went by and he felt fingers—skinless fingers for the moment—wiggling in the open air.
Time, then, to figure out where he was.
He’d gone into the tunnel.
Then used Lydia’s head like a bowling ball.
Then Masterson, then
boom
.
And the tunnel mouth closed. A rain of bricks and bone, of dust and dead guy. And now Coburn was looking down the mouth of the tunnel where Lydia had gone. Ahead he saw that this grotto broke into a smaller tunnel—an egg-shaped tunnel of old pale brick that cut across horizontally.
Time to move.
He reached the tunnel. Left or right?
He willed his lungs to pull in air, get a good noseful—he smelled the memory of sewage, not fresh but still married to these walls the way cigarette smoke clings to a sport coat. And beneath it, that hint of jasmine, that touch of death and cold clammy skin. A smell he once thought reserved only for him.
Left, then.
The tunnel did not allow him to stand at full height. He had to crouch, an undignified way to travel if ever there was one. Doubly undignified is how he had to pull himself along, hands falling upon debris that had long lined the brick—much of it stuck there like a lollipop glued to a baby’s cheek. Fast food wrappers. Used condoms. He even saw an old red-headed wig plastered to the tunnel wall. None of it breaking down. In a hundred years—a thousand—these will be the remnants of human civilization. The question then became, would anyone even be around to find these things? Or was humanity’s ticket punched as its dead fed on its living?
Coburn told himself he hoped humanity
did
stick around, if only so he had something—er, someone—to eat.
Kayla just laughed in the back of his mind, as if she knew better.
Whatever the case, that’s why he had to do what he was doing. Had to get to the lab. Had to have them analyze his blood—not just for his own restorative powers but for the healing blood of the very special miracle mystery girl. Her blood was curative. If they could make that into a cure for all mankind, well, that meant his food supply would once more be in good working order.
This was all part of the original deal, he told himself—and told the girl in his head. Protect her. Shepherd her.
Carry her forth
. He did not keep her safe but he could keep what mattered safe: her blood.
She laughed again—the sound of birds chirping, broken glass tinkling.
He ignored her, and pushed on.
Five minutes in, water began trickling past his feet. A silvery rivulet of scum-topped water. It smelled of—
The tunnel vibrated. The growl of distant thunder.
Rain. It smelled of rain.
That was not great news. These sewers no longer worked like they were supposed to. Not that he knew exactly how a sewer system operated, but he was pretty sure that electricity figured into it somewhere down the line. And maintenance. He’d been down beneath New York enough times to know that run-off from the street moved from tunnels like this one into bigger spaces—and from those bigger spaces, the water was pumped away to treatment plants.
No pumps meant the water had nowhere to go.
It would just fill up the tunnels. Some of it might overflow into the bay. But the rest would drown him like a rat. Not that he needed to breathe, but he didn’t feel like getting washed into the bay like a dirty soda bottle, either.
He put a little pep in his step. No need to urge his body to do anything crazy yet—he didn’t want to waste the blood. But still: faster was better.
Another trembling tumble of thunder from above.
And with it, the sound of a hunter’s scream.
It was not as distant as he had hoped.
As the tunnel bent east, Coburn saw ahead of him a murky band of light—a storm-drain looked out onto the streets of San Francisco as rainwater cascaded down in a shimmering sheet. Even as he approached, he heard the susurration of rain grow heavier—from a steady fall to an asphalt-battering downpour.
He neared the storm drain.
An arm shot out of that space. Reaching in from the outside—a lanky, scabby arm, the purple-gray of a faded bruise, the fingers long,
too
long, each tipped with not so much a claw as a curve of sharpened bone poking through the dead flesh. It swiped the air only a few feet in front of Coburn’s face, scratching across brick and leaving furrows in the stone.
It was a child’s arm.
The hunter shrieked into the storm drain. Coburn saw the beast’s face: yes, a child’s face, stretched long and thin, the eyes set back in hollow sockets, the mouth a wide-open nest of shark’s teeth. Razors laid upon razors. Biting the air. Long tapered tongue licking along the edge of the storm drain the way a dog might lick the rim of his food bowl.
Long dark dirty hair hung in stiff ringlets around her face.
Oh, my god, it’s a girl
, Kayla said. Coburn could feel the ghost in his head recoil in horror. But not just horror—sadness. And not sympathy, but empathy. As if Kayla saw some part of herself in this girl—dead, now a monster, or part of one.
The hunter spit and licked the walls and gnashed her horrible teeth. A second arm reached in next to the first, both reaching for him.
Coburn felt a stirring of something inside his own mind—a sepulchered carcass of grief and guilt and shame rising from its psychic tomb and shaking off decades of dead and thoughtless dust. Dead girls. Kayla. Rebecca. This one. All his fault. The zombies were him and though this hunter was not his, it still pointed back through time to when he gave the middle finger to the wrong man.
No! No time for that. No time for sympathy or empathy or grief or any of those emotions. They were unproductive. Useless as a short-sleeved straitjacket, worthless as a vestigial organ.
Just as Coburn started to wonder just how he was going to get past the slashing claws and flicking tongue of this child hunter, the creature withdrew her seeking arms and was gone. Whoosh. Leaving only the pouring rain and stomach-grumbles of thunder.
No time like the present. He hurried past the open drain.
Kayla issued an ominous warning:
Remember, JW. Those hunters are smarter than the average rotter
.
It was then that, behind him, he heard an equally ominous noise:
A manhole cover being ripped from its mooring.
Coburn lit a fire in his blood and ran like a sonofabitch.