Double Dead Read Free

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