Double Dead (16 page)

Still, he had to admit—the cannibals of Lawson Heights had gone to great lengths to match Coburn’s vision of what the inside of a Wal-Mart looked like. The shelves had been stripped bare and battered to Hell, as if some super-important Christmas toy release had come and gone and an army of Super-Moms had ripped through the store, buying everything up like an all-consuming void. Didn’t hurt that many of the shelves were lined with piles of bones both human and animal. Torches flickered atop endcaps. Freezer cases were bashed open. Graffiti everywhere—spray-painted pictures of skulls, middle-fingers, dicks, tits, and encouraging messages such as ‘Fuk You,’ and ‘I Eat Yor Skin.’ Floor torn up. Lights torn down. Trash blew through open aisles, piled up in corners.

Yep. In Coburn’s mind, this was Wal-Mart in a nutshell.

He silently stalked the aisles like a wolf roaming through the rows of a cornfield, sniffing out prey. And oh, could he smell them. It wasn’t just the stench of body sweat. It was the rancid odor of human meat. With every breath they gave it off. Blood under their tongue. Long pork between their teeth.
Eau de cannibal
.

Guilt was rarely a factor in Coburn’s eating habits. (Rarely? More like
never.
) But sometimes, killing folks gave him pleasure. Felt like he was excising a cancerous tumor from the world—a pedophile, a crooked cop, a gaggle of cannibals? Made Coburn feel like an all-round Boy Scout, doing good deeds with his mighty fangs. Was there a badge for this? Something he could sew on the sleeve of his jacket?

Someone stepped into the aisle next to him. He couldn’t see the person—a shelf separated them—but he could hear him. A man, probably. Heavy boots. No effort to be quiet.

In the back of the store, he heard voices: they’d discovered the bodies. Well, the
new
ones, at least.

Coburn leapt up atop a shelving unit, perched there like a crow.

A man walked beneath him. Burly fucker. Long chin beard, hair in a greasy top-knot, no shirt on. Coburn could see the gobbets and curls of meat dried in his chest hair. It wasn’t a good look. So he killed him.

That death came easy enough. He planted his feet on the fool’s shoulders, crouching down like he had atop the shelf, then put his hands in the man’s mouth. Grabbing his upper and lower jaws, he pulled like he was ripping open a bag of potato chips. Human Pac-Man.

The man dropped a weapon: an AR-15 semi-auto. Coburn caught it before it clattered to the floor, moving fast.

He wasn’t a big fan of guns, really. Wasn’t much point to them. They weren’t subtle. A vampire favored subtlety, unless he wanted to bring the world to his door, wondering why he’d got a bloodless body in his jet tub. You fired a gun, it drew attention—okay, not
much
attention, in New York City, but it at least merited a phone call from someone.

Coburn didn’t like drawing attention.

Now, though, that was the goal. He’d told Gil and the others to watch for his sign, and truth be told, he was just being blustery, but now, with a machine gun in his hands, he saw a way. Worse came to worse he could just start shooting out windows, but those torches gave him a pretty good idea. Torches meant fuel—you couldn’t just swaddle a stick in an old rag and light it on fire. The fire needed something to keep it going—gas, maybe, or motor oil. Something good and flammable.

That meant the cannibals had fuel.

Which further meant he was going to blow some shit up. Ideally by shooting it. The
rat-a-tat
of a machine gun? A bloom of unholy fire?

That
would get Gil’s attention.

Now, he just needed to find the fuel source. Gas cans? Tanks of propane or kerosene? It had to be around here somewhere. He lifted his nose like a dog scenting prey on the wind.

The vampire wound his way through the store—as he did, a woman came out from behind a pile of ruined tires, screaming and running at him. In her hand? An old classic: a board with a bunch of nails sticking out of it. She swung. He ducked, jacked her in the face with the butt of the AR-15 (it was not yet time to earn unwanted attention) and drove her nose up into her brain.

The smell of her blood trickling from her smashed nostrils made him hungry.
Refocus
, he thought—there would be time enough to feed.

It was then that he caught the odor.

Kerosene.

That was what they were using. It was the sharp, acrid tang of kerosene. It was… drifting down from above? He tilted his head, lifted his nose.

Was it on the roof?

He heard the
squeak
too late.

The creaky squeak came from behind him—and just as he pivoted heel-to-toe with the rifle, the world roared with a bark from an autoloader shotgun.

It took Coburn’s right leg off at the knee. It was the leg on which he pivoted and now, quite literally, he didn’t have a leg to stand on.

He tumbled to the ground, taken totally by surprise. He’d been first dizzied by the scent of blood and then so consumed with searching out the invisible threads of kerosene vapor that he never heard the old man coming up behind him.

The old dude—his chin whiskers and head buzzed to salty nubs—rolled up in a wheel chair, a Remington 1100 shotgun sitting in his lap.

“Interloper,” the old man hissed. His voice carried a distinct Southern twang—a guttural West Virginian accent.

Coburn went to bring the rifle up to dispatch the old sonofabitch, but a boot stepped down hard on it. Two men—one short and fat, the other tall and thin with a scoliosis bend in his back—snatched the gun away and then started to pick him up under the arms.

The old man leered. “You’re invited to dinner.”

Coburn got the joke, ha-ha, he was supposed to be dinner, but really, fuck that right in the ear. He still had one good leg and two dummies supporting him. He shot out with a hard kick—but the old man was just far enough away that his boot snapped against nothing.

Boom
.

The shotgun slug took off Coburn’s good leg right below the knee. The half-leg pirouetted through the air, clanging into a shelf.

Coburn’s first thought was,
I like those boots
.

His second was,
I’m going to need new legs, stat
.

“Wyatt, Stevie, get him into the carrier.” The old man gestured behind him, and sure enough, Coburn saw that behind the old cannibal lurked a pet carrier—a dog kennel big enough for a German Shepherd.

“You motherfuckers,” he growled through gritted teeth, as Wyatt and Stevie carried him over to the kennel. He wasn’t going to go easily—he knew he had a choice here, which was to concentrate for a minute and put all his energy into growing a new pair of legs, or, instead, make short work of these monkeys without worrying about the legs.

He decided, for now, hell with the legs.

The vampire didn’t know which one was Wyatt, which one was Stevie, but the way they were carrying him, they had his arms around the back of their necks while they carried him around the trunk. Didn’t give him a whole lot of leverage, but his arms were pretty well-placed—

He cinched up his right arm and started choking the short, fat one—then he leaned over and took a bite out of his neck, or, at least,
tried
to. All he managed was to get hold of the cannibal’s rubbery ear, but that would have to be good enough. Coburn jerked his head and ripped the ear clean off.

Short, fat cannibal—Stevie? Wyatt? Styatt? Weevie?—screamed.

Then Coburn pulled tight on the other arm, bringing the back-bent cannibal’s own head around until it
thwacked
hard into the other one’s skull. All three of them dropped to the ground in a heap.

Coburn “stood up” on his two uneven stump-legs, triumphant, resplendent, fangs out, tongue tasting the air moments before he intended to thrust his face downward and feast upon one of the two chuckleheads…

But the old man in the wheelchair had other ideas.

Gone was the shotgun. In its place: the AR-15 that Coburn had dropped.

The old man licked his lips, then began firing.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Ambrosia, the Queen

Being a vampire had its perks. Endless life (provided he followed the rules). No conscience to worry him (provided he tamped it down into a deep dark hole). He could run fast, jump high, and twist people’s brains like a nipple held betwixt thumb and forefinger. He could even survive, when, say, shot in the chest a dozen times by a .223 Armalite Model 15 assault rifle.

But one thing a vampire could not do: betray the laws of physics.

Normally, bullets didn’t cause him much worry. They didn’t
feel
great, and getting punched in the trunk with a high-velocity rifle round was certainly
distracting
, but even still, it wasn’t a game-ender. Not like he had internal organs anybody could hurt. Perforate his spleen? Puncture his lung? Explode his heart? Eh. Whatever. He wasn’t using them. They were just dusty meat inside his dead body anyhow.

But his bones.

He needed those. They were his support system. If one part of his body held particular importance, it was his skeleton.

Disrupt the skeleton—with perhaps a shotgun slug to the kneecaps or rifle-rounds to the bones that held his arms together—and things got a lot more difficult. Especially since healing for him was not immediate: bones took a while to knit or regrow. Like slow osseous crystals forming from a bed of salt and calcium.

But even
that
was not Coburn’s biggest problem.

His problem right now? The dog kennel.

Soon as the old man—whose name, as it turned out, was simply ‘Grandpaw’—finished hole-punching Coburn’s body with rifle rounds, the other two cannibals shoved Coburn’s broken, legless body into the pet carrier. Though, not before the taller, stooped-over cannibal stripped him of his leather jacket—now perforated with holes—and put it on.

It was barely big enough. His leg stumps thrust up against the back of the kennel, and that was again a cruel reminder that he could not violate the laws of physics. Much as he wanted, without room to grow his legs, they would not grow. No legs meant he couldn’t dismantle this thing.

And his blood was swiftly leaving his body through the many holes and two stumps. Given that blood was a necessity when it came time to
heal up
, it meant he couldn’t heal his arms, couldn’t tear the door off this carrier, couldn’t do squat. He tried to
will
his body to retain the blood, to harness it and channel it—but it wasn’t happening. With every moment, a darker shadow of desperation drifted over him.

Wyatt and Stevie—the tall one who stole his jacket was Wyatt, the earless buttplug was Stevie—hooked the carrier up to a chain, then started dragging it across the busted-up tile floor of the Wal-Mart. Grandpaw wheeled alongside as Coburn struggled to make something,
anything
, happen.

“Shit,” Grandpaw said, peering in through the side holes. The word came out as
shee-yit
. “You still alive in there? After all that? You must be some goddamn
miracle food
. Ambrosia might make you a meal all for herself.”

Coburn tried to curse the old man out, but all that came out was a ragged whisper and a mouthful of blood. A bullet must’ve clipped him in the throat.

Grandpaw had one thing right:

Shit
.

They heard gunfire. A couple
booms
, then several
pop, pop, pops.

“Was that it?” Ebbie asked. “Was that the signal?”

“I don’t know,” Leelee answered.

Kayla nursed on a juice box, nervously chewing the straw. “I bet that was it. I bet that was the signal. He said we’d know.”

“But we don’t know,” Ebbie said. Leelee looked to her with eyes uncertain, eyes lost and wandering.

They’d been orbiting a strip mall parking lot for the last hour, leading a small but growing band of the undead around in circles. It was like herding cats with a laser pointer. But once the gunfire started off in the distance, about half of them broke away from the pack and started staggering off toward the Wal-Mart. That was how they were: creatures of stimulus and response.

“I think it could’ve been it,” Kayla insisted.

Gil came up behind them in the front of the mobile home. Jaw tight as he chewed on sunflower seeds. “That wasn’t it. We need a bigger opening than that. That distraction wasn’t more than a couple mouse farts.” He spit seed hulls into a paper cup. “We wait.”

“But—” Kayla started.

“I said,
we wait
.”

“Bring me the meat.”

He pressed his face against the cage of the carrier, and his first thought was,
That body must contain blood in the gallon, not the pint
.

Ambrosia, the Cannibal Queen of the Man-Eating Wal-Mart, was easily eight hundred pounds. She did not
sit
so much as
allow her fat to sprawl out
across a dais made from shipping pallets, six-packs of soda, and various repurposed ottomans. Her ‘throne room’ was framed by a niche of flat-screen televisions (this was, after all, the electronics department). While none of the televisions had electricity, on each was painted a garish and frankly amateurish portrait of Ambrosia in greasy colors.