Bad Blood Read Free Page B

trail. The man—and it most certainly was a man, that was just a thing that the vampire knew—left his unwashed scent on every street sign and mailbox and curb.
    Humans were such dumb apes. They never knew how plainly they were telegraphing their weakness—generally to other stronger humans, apex predators like con-artists, robbers, rapists, but this time to all flavors of the living dead. Broadcasting that signal of frailty and isolation to one lone vampire and a deluge of always-starving zombie motherfuckers.
    Hunger was driving Coburn, now. Still not as toothy as it had been, and now with Kayla there he was able to push it longer, harder, faster—but just the same, the edges of his vision were tinged with a rose-red hue. By now he’d normally be feeling like an infinite carpet of insects crawled just beneath his skin, but here the hunger was clear and cleanly sharp like a shard of broken glass.
    He moved south through the city. Through the once-hoity-and-also-toity neighborhood of Pacific Heights, now looking like it had been through a riot: sandbags and fallen coils of barbed wire and burned cars stacked together. Then below that, toward gutted restaurants and shattered boutiques (Indian food! Head shop! Turkish coffee! Weird hats! Oaxacan blankets!).
    The zombies were thicker, here—an environmental hazard to be dealt with, to be got past, as obtrusive as floodwaters, as empty-headed as a pack of starving dogs. Coburn was singularly-driven. He hurt. He starved. Any zombie that got in his way found its knee popped, neck snapped, head crushed. When the throng got too thick, he clambered up fire escapes, went roof to roof and back down again.
    All the while following that trail.
    Invisible handprints of sweat.
    A gob of spit on the curb.
    A swipe of snot across a bent parking meter.
    And then, bright as the moon in a dark sky, a dime-sized dollop of blood in the middle of the intersection of that old hippie standby, Haight and Ashbury.
    That blood lit up Coburn’s brain like a full-tilt pinball machine, bumpers flickering and flippers clicking and lights and klaxons and an electric surge of raw hunger coursing through his fingertips and eyeholes—
    Wait , Kayla said. Something’s wrong .
    No time for that. No need. Zero interest.
    Move, rove, run, hunt.
    Coburn, stop .
    He felt her somehow reaching through his dried-up veins and tugging on them like puppet-strings, but he had no time for that—the demon within bucked like a scorned hell-steed and Kayla’s ghostly grip slipped.
    There.
    A shape, a form, darting around an overturned dumpster and into an alley.
    Moved fast.
    Human. Not zombie.
    Coburn!
    He screamed inside his own head to shut her up as he rounded the corner, found a small man hiding behind a pile of ruptured sandbags in a dingy puddle-soaked alley—Coburn growled and grabbed him and hauled him to his feet. Saw wide scared eyes, the eyes of a rabbit, and long greasy black hair with a kinky dread-twist beard to match, and the man mumbled something but it only came out as a froth of spit bubbles and who cares just fucking feed —
    Kayla screamed inside his mind.
    He bit deep into the dirt-caked neck.
    Blood ran hot into Coburn’s mouth. Coppery, oily, heavy, sweet—
    But then, something else, too. A bitter edge on the back of the tongue. A rising taste of salt; a crass medicinal tang.
    Coburn’s head suddenly felt like it was doing loops and whorls, a biplane flying barrel rolls inside his skin. Kayla tried to say something, but her voice grew warped, distorted, like he was a little fishie inside an aquarium and she stood on the outside yelling in whash ish appeming —
    The vampire could not pull away. The blood continued to pump into his mouth. When the rodent-like man pushed Coburn away, Coburn could not resist that , either. He felt like a store mannequin, his limbs somehow distant from the rest of him, his brain out there on a tether like a child’s birthday balloon.
    The rat man whimpered,