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fumbled clumsily for a square of dirty gauze which he quickly slapped over the neck wound. From behind the sandbag he rescued a roll of black electrical tape and a walkie-talkie.
    He wound the tape around the gauze with one hand, and spoke into the walkie with the other.
    “He got me. I mean—I got him. I mean, shit , ahhh, you know what I mean. Over.” The rat man stared at Coburn as the vampire teetered there, trying desperately to will his limbs to respond to his desire to rip out this freak’s throat.
    The response from the walkie came from with rough voice that sounded like two bricks being rubbed together: “What’s he doing? Over.”
    “He’s just standing there. Staring at me. Over.”
    The rat-man mouthed two words to Coburn: I’m sorry .
    The gravelly voice: “Good. Bring him to the corner of Page and Masonic. I’ll send Flores and Jeepers to help you bring him in. Hurry before the stumblers find you. Don’t fuck this up, Fingerman. Over and out.”
    The rat-man—Fingerman, apparently—looked at Coburn and then shrugged. That’s when his face melted. Leaving behind only a grinning skull.
    The sky above turned to an eye.
    The blood in the vampire’s mouth and throat felt suddenly like a bubbling pile of clipped fingernails, chewed calluses, and battery acid.
    Fingerman pushed Coburn over, wound electrical tape around his eyes and mouth, and began dragging him.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    The K-Hole
     
    C OBURN’S WORLD, PLUNGED into darkness.
    But in the darkness, light flared like a burst of red phosphorus.
    He saw faces in those dark spaces, faces lit by crimson light. A prostitute with her neck torn open. A pair of club kids, tongueless, made to kiss with their bloody mouths as Coburn watched. A meter maid, skin gone ashen, a pair of puncture wounds on her bloodless, mortified wrist.
    Ebbie’s moon face.
    Cecelia, laughing.
    Together they all whispered his name, his true name:
    “John Wesley Coburn.”
    Then:
    Kayla. Sitting on the floor. Watching a television whose round full screen flickered static with a black and white image dancing behind the noise—a voice crackling through the hiss: Rilly big shoe .
    Kayla became Rebecca. Hair into pigtails. Sweet smile.
    Then, back to Kayla.
    “It’s a strange place in here,” she said. “Messy.”
    “How’d you get in here?” he asked, even though he knew the answer: You stabbed yourself in the neck and made me drink your blood, and now I’m your keeper, your container, your little Coburn. Cure for what ails the world.
    “Lots of dead people in your head.”
    “Not like you, though,” he said. “You’re really here.”
    “They’re all really here, JW. Can I call you that now? I think I will.”
    He wanted to tell her no, don’t call me that , but couldn’t find the words.
    She continued: “Everybody you killed, whose blood you drank, lives in here. Part of them does. Maybe it’s biology. Maybe it’s the soul. Who knows? I’m stuck, too. Not like I have access to the Internet in here.”
    Kayla laughed. But it wasn’t her laugh. It was Rebecca’s laugh.
    “My daughter,” Coburn said. If everybody I ever killed is in here...
    “Don’t worry about her right now. You gotta bring yourself back from this. You’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, JW. And you’re falling still. It’s time now to wake up, you hear? Time to see where you are.”
    “But Rebecca...”
    “Isn’t going anywhere. But you are, big guy.”
    “Wait.”
    “No time to wait.”
    “Wait!”
    His scream echoed.
    His eyes opened behind black tape.
     
     
    H IS HANDS MOVED. They moved when he told them to. Not fast. Barely functional. Felt like they were somebody else’s arms and he was willing them to move with telepathy—there came a delay from when his brain issued the command and when his arms flailed upward like the limbs of a doll. He cried out. His numb fingers found the tape around his eyes. Pried the tape off. No pain. Just bright light that washed out the