Double Dead (2 page)

But beyond those…

Blood. Excess. A woman laughing. A woman screaming. Limousines that stank of money and leather, and dark alleys that smelled like rotten garlic and stinking curry. The stars and moon above, always dark, never the sun, the provenance and kingdom of Coburn the vampire. These were the images he knew. These came back to him comfortably. Like a warm blanket felt for in the dark.

It was a life—or an unlife, or whatever it was you cared to call it—bloated to the gills with the most wonderful of sins: gluttony and lust and revenge and all those glorious transgressions. An existence of endless pleasure.

And now, this.

Waking up in a ruined movie theater. Feasting on a dead deer. Attacked by—what? Homeless degenerates? Meth-addled plague victim freakshows who were too stupid or too jacked to know that they were a hair’s breadth from death?

“Ain’t exactly the—” His throat crackled. He coughed, and
ptoo
-ed a bloody wad of whitetail fur out of his dead throat. “Ain’t exactly the Four Seasons.”

Coburn stood. Walked over to a faux-gilded movie poster frame. The poster within was no longer recognizable, covered as it was with rampant mold, but the glass was still surprisingly intact. The vampire examined his reflection.

He didn’t look so hot. Cheekbones, sunken. Eyes, too. His skin had started to soften—but some of it still lay cracked, like the skin around his eyes or the flesh betwixt each finger. His hair, once slicked back and lacquered to his skull, was now a hot, frizzled mess. Hell, all his roguish good looks had been run through the gauntlet. Coburn’s lips curled into a sneer below his crooked nose.

His time below had ruined a perfectly good thing.

He swatted a fly away from his head, and in doing so, called to attention a curious fact.

“I’m missing a fucking finger,” Coburn said, not sure who he was talking to. Did he always talk to himself? Or had his time underground tweaked his psyche? He didn’t know and didn’t care, and was instead more interested in his hand.

He held up his right hand, waggled all of his fingers except the middle one. That finger dead-ended in a shriveled stump.

It would regrow. Eventually. Once he had some
real
blood sitting in his gut and churning through his dead heart. The deer blood wouldn’t do it. Not strong enough stuff—like light beer or wine coolers, it was a thinned-down version of the real thing. Worse, it wouldn’t last long. Give it a couple of nights and he’d be back to starving, and when starvation was on the line, reason and higher thinking were out the window. Go without for too long and it was back to the crispy body, the muscles-gone-rigid.

Which meant it was time to hit the town. Would be easy pickings in this city: it always was. Head down to Times Square or Penn Station, wait for some tourist drunk off the newest Broadway fiasco, sweep them up, do a little of that
voodoo-that-you-do-so-well
, and drink them dry in an alley or a restroom. Then Coburn could clean up a little, because damn if he wasn’t nasty-looking.

At least he still had his leather coat—a ratty, weathered thing worn by David Johansen of the New York Dolls, Christmas Eve, 1971. Band’s first performance. And his boots: pair of derby swirl Fluevogs with soles that read: ‘Resists alkali, water, acid, fatigue, and Satan.’

He looked back over the theater. Tried to remember how he got there. Something moved in the back of his thoughts, like a moth fluttering against a darkened window. But it refused to be pinned.

Coburn would remember. It would just take time.

And blood. It always took blood.

He marched toward the theater’s front double doors and threw them open, ready to step into the bright lights, big city, and feast like a fucking king.

The average vampire had the nose of a pregnant woman: the olfactory sense was dialed up to 11, then the knob was broken off. Truth be told,
all
of a vampire’s senses were ratcheted up, but right now the one that mattered most was smell.

The city stank of death.

A crowd gathered outside, as it always did here in the Big Apple. But this crowd wasn’t like any other crowd.

This crowd was not alive.

A woman with a missing nose and hair like the tail of a dead horse dragged a broken foot, the bones jutting awkwardly from ruined flesh, a clutch purse still in hand.

A man in construction gear stumbled around in circles, his fat belly bloated with foul gases, his skin marred with the purple striations of death. With a rotten hand—literally rotten, so rotten it was just a mush of meat with bleached finger bones sticking out—he scratched divots in his cheek.

A little boy, his lower half just a squid’s beard of guts and meaty fringe, dragged himself across an open manhole, then fell down into the dark.

And it wasn’t just them. Dozens right here. Hundreds down the street in every direction. The city, thick with them.

The air, fat with flies.

The city lay dark and still but for the shuffling and mumbling of the damned. No power anywhere. No car horns. No music playing. Coburn couldn’t smell food cooking, couldn’t feel the subterranean rumble of the subway, couldn’t even hear the scurrying of the rats or the fluttering of pigeon wings.

Only the swarm of flies and the slow dance of the dead.

The construction worker pivoted his head toward Coburn. His lower jaw unhinged—not like a snake’s jaw but rather like a jaw whose tendons had long turned to mush—and he hissed.

Coburn pirouetted back inside, gently shut the door behind him.

As he closed the door, one final realization crossed his mind.

The city no longer offered a bounty of expected smells: burger grease, exhaust, cologne. But that wasn’t the troubling omission.

Coburn couldn’t smell blood, either.

No life, no blood.

No blood, no food.

That was not good news.

CHAPTER THREE

Dead City

Panic chewed at his guts like a nest of hungry rats. No blood.
No blood
. All dead? Not a whiff of life here in the city? Best case scenario put him, what, sucking the juice out of pigeons in Central Park? Worst case scenario put him starving on the streets and collapsing on the sidewalk before morning. Then he’d either be eaten by those freaks out there or he’d be scorched by the coming sun.

What was going on? None of it made sense. This was some kind of fever dream. He never woke up. Clearly—
plainly
!—he remained down in the dark, trapped in the throes of some undead nightmare.

Still, this all felt pretty goddamned real.

Coburn tried to find focus as the panic inside him was boiling what little useful blood he had in the cauldron of his vampire’s body.

He gritted his teeth so hard together he thought his fangs would snap. What time was it? How soon was dawn? No telling. What to do? Wait here? Wait the rest of the night as his body rendered the blood inside inert? Or go? Go and risk the dawn, the dark, the dead city?

“Fuck it,” he said. Coburn wasn’t a timid creature. He wasn’t a church mouse—hell, he ate church mice like they were Jalapeno peppers. Standing around like this, he might as well go and shove one of those antlers up his ass. The time for thinking was over. The time for doing had begun.

No windows in this room—no use having windows in a theater. But up above, he did see a vent.

That was where he had to go.
Up
.

The theater curtains—red, ratty, moth-eaten—felt uncertain in his grip, like they might fall apart at any moment, but when he tugged on them, they held. And so Coburn began to climb. For him the task offered little struggle: he wasn’t some gawky teen hauling his bony butt up the rope in gym class. He was a vampire. That afforded him abilities and powers others could only dream of.

When he reached the top of the curtain, he kicked out with his legs, swung over and caught the ridged vent cover with his (remaining) fingers. He pried it off with a twist of his wrist, and then crawled up into the ventilation system.

Up top, the air didn’t smell so thick with the stench of death. Coburn elbowed open the vent and wriggled free like a worm escaping from a foul apple, and he took a deep breath up here. The breath did little for him; fuck oxygen, because his vampire’s body could thrive only on blood, but even still it was good to exercise those dead bladder lungs of his, if only to draw scent from the air.

And here it smelled clean.

Or clean
er
, at least.

No time to dwell.

The rooftop gravel crunched under foot as he hurried to the building’s ledge. The darkness of the city below struck him. New York had always been a vibrant, living thing: a bleary neon beast with arteries of light and blood, a monster that never slumbered, a city that was as much a vampire as he was, awakening at night to drink the life of the weak.

And now, it had been rendered a dark ruin.

The moon rose fat above, highlighting distant windows—some broken, some not—but the rest of the city lay covered in shadow. Just black shapes. Silhouettes.

He couldn’t be the only one.

It couldn’t all be dead.

If it was…

Well. No time to contemplate that. No time to think about how without blood he’d turn into a dried strip of vampire jerky. That was not a future he decided to entertain.

Had to be blood out there.

He lifted his chin, urged his lungs to suck in a powerful breath through his nose—scents on the wind, the commingled odors of death. But somewhere beyond it all, he could smell a flower pushing up through broken concrete, he could detect a rat taking a piss on a ledge, he could smell a faint lingering whiff of gasoline…

There.
It lit up his dead synapses like a circuit-board. Suddenly his gut clenched, ripples of
want
and
need
and
I’ll tear down this dead city to get it
wrenching his esophagus closed. He felt like a dog watching his master eat: if he could have drooled, he would have.

On the wind, the faintest aroma of blood.

Human blood.

Vibrant and bright and alive. But far off, too. Distant, like the Dog Star.

Just then: a
hiss
down and to his right.

One of them—
let’s just say it,
he thought
, it’s an undead motherfucking smells-like-a-roadkilled-possum-stuffed-with-gorgonzola-cheese asshole zombie prick
—lay against the ledge. Except, this one
didn’t
smell bad—or, at least, not like the others. This one was practically mummified. Skin like that of fried chicken. Eyes white and bright. Teeth, too, like white pebbles in the dry cavern of its mouth. Lips pulled back. Gums just hard, parched nubs. Couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. It just lay there, moving only its head, snapping its teeth in his direction. Equal parts ‘comical’ and ‘pathetic.’

Maybe the sun did this. Thing got trapped up here. It wandered. The sun cooked it down, dried it out.

Coburn kicked it in the head.

The head came off easy as anything. Like flicking a seed pod off a dry stalk. It broke apart, the crispy head shards spinning off into darkness.

Down in the theater, one rot-fuck got a hoof through the temple. The other caught an antler up under the chin. This one stopped moving when he booted its head off the roof.

“Just like in the movies,” he said. “Aim for the head, they go dead.”

The rhyme pleased him, if only a little.

He turned, once again looked at the moon. It had already begun its descent toward the horizon. He didn’t have long until morning.

Two hours, maybe? Three, at best.

He stood at the edge, caught that scent of blood once more. It waited for him
out there
. Out beyond Riverside Drive. Out beyond the river itself. Wouldn’t be far. He could make it. If only it really
were
like the movies, he could think real hard, squeeze his butt-cheeks
real tight
, and—poof!—turn into a bat and flutter away without a second thought. But vampires, they couldn’t fly.

Though they sure could jump.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Deader of Two Evils

Coburn leapt roof-to-roof, a shape blacker than the night itself. He did so silently, the only sound being the thump-and-crunch of boots striking rooftops. Not every roof was parallel—sometimes he crashed hard into a fire escape, then bolted his way up to the rooftop. Not fifteen minutes later he stood atop a ten-story walk-up, the roof home to a pigeon coop whose only inhabitants were a morose display of long-dead birds, matted feathers hanging from rust-colored bones. The vampire didn’t stop to admire the attraction.

From here it would be easy: this was the Upper West Side. From this roof to the river, he could plan his journey above the city with ease—in the moonlight he could see a path cut between the too-tall buildings, a path that would let him take a slow descent. At least, until he got to Riverside Drive: there, the buildings shot up again to ensure that the hoitiest, toitiest New York citizens got a view of the river. Of course, all those citizens were now food for the living dead. Or were perhaps themselves the living dead—Coburn didn’t have to time to worry about the mechanics of it, as to whether this was somehow viral or bacteriological or mystical or whether it maybe fell from the sky as part of some kind of alien meteor. Didn’t matter and so he didn’t care. Wasn’t his fault, so—
fuck it
.