Double Dead Read Free Page B

took another running leap, aiming for an eight-story brownstone—he sailed through the air, legs kicking like he was riding some kind of invisible bike, the wind caught under his coat, that lingering tickle of blood-scent deep in his sinuses—and he landed, looked up, and found himself surrounded by the living dead.
    These, like the last one, were mummified: less rotting corpse and more dried-out husk , but unlike the last, these fuckers were all up and walking around. A dozen of them, milling about in a clumsy, drunken moonlit waltz. One in a ratty sweater. Another in a ruined suit—the fabric once dark and clean, now sun-bleached and tattered at the edges. Over there, a woman wandered around in a dress half-torn off, her shriveled tits like a pair of hog scrotums popping out, each a lifeless, milkless sack. Others shuffled in the dark of the roof.
    Coburn landed, tucked, rolled, and stood up in their midst.
    They hissed, raspy and wordless, and turned toward him.
    He didn’t have the time for a game of zombie grab-ass. Ratty Sweater reached for him and he caught its arm, snapped upwards, the bone splitting—the arm remained connected only by a tenuous, leathery cord of tendon.
    “You my dance partner?” Coburn asked. Ratty Sweater’s bulging white eyes stared, offering not a single lick of recognition or cognizance. The vampire jerked Ratty Sweater left, crashing him into Missus Hog Balls—they both went down.
    Then they came at him, en masse.
    They were slow, and he was fast. Faster than any human. By the time they reached him, he wasn’t even there anymore: he was behind two of them, and he wrapped his arms around their necks, putting them in a headlock.
    Coburn squeezed his arms. Their heads popped off with the sound of someone breaking a hard loaf of bread.
    Then, because he didn’t want to waste any more time with these assholes, he took off running for the next rooftop.
    He leapt. Right leg forward, left leg extended behind him.
    Something grabbed his foot.
    He pivoted, mid-air, just in time to see Ratty Sweater already back up—the ugly mummy had reached out and caught Coburn by the boot.
    Thus ruining any forward momentum he had.
    He—along with Ratty Sweater, whose zombie grip on the vampire’s Fluevog boot was unyielding—tumbled down through the darkness.
     
    Vampires? Hard to kill. Or, since they were already dead, hard to destroy . But that didn’t mean they were impervious to harm. Far from it. Their organs didn’t work, no, so it wasn’t like they could suffer liver failure or kidney damage or heart attacks or anything. But their bones were the same bones that humans had. They shattered just as easily. And if you put a bullet in their brain, that vampire would be done for. Game over, good night. All that would be left was to sweep up the greasy ash pile left behind.
    No brain bullet here. But even still, Coburn fell eight stories.
    With a zombie holding his ankle.
    Ratty Sweater hit the ground first. He didn’t explode so much as fold up upon himself , collapsing from head to foot into a cloud of skin-dust. The sweater held together. The rest of him, not so much.
    Coburn hit, legs down, landing on his feet like a cat.
    This was not ideal. All those movie images of a vampire dropping down from ten stories up and landing in some kick-ass dark hero crouch? Not happening. His boots hit asphalt, and the impact shattered his leg bones; osseous shards thrust through his skin at various angles. Coburn howled some unutterable profanity, some inhuman invective from the most primitive part of his reptilian brain, and then he collapsed to the ground like a house of cards, laying there in the remnants of Ratty Sweater.
    He took a moment. Not because he wanted to, but because he had to. For a human to suffer this kind of trauma, well—the human would soon perish or, at the very least, be in traction for the rest of his pathetic life. And thus came the vampire’s edge: yes, Coburn’s bones shattered