Bad Blood Read Online Free Page A

middle; reality bled in at the edges.
    He saw zombies.
    Upside-down zombies. Filthy gore-caked faces. Lips ripped away. Dead tongues lolling, tasting the air. About ten, fifteen feet away. Floating. Flying.
    Coburn grunted. Sat up. A cry of alarm erupted at his feet—a fist popped him in the face, knocked his head back down as upside-down zombies continued to lurch forth. The sky was on the ground and asphalt was the sky and—
    You’re upside-down , Kayla said, not them. Silly vampire .
    It all began to work itself out.
    Coburn dipped his chin to his chest, saw that three humans were dragging him up toward a house on the corner, a house walled away behind sandbags and cars and coils of razor wire. House the color of turned earth, of fresh mulch, of grave dirt.
    The three humans looked back at him as they hurriedly dragged him forward by his boots—one of them, the rat-man, Fingerman, yelped. “He’s wakin’ up! Chee-rist, he’s wakin’ up!”
    Another one—a wild-eyed Hispanic-looking motherfucker with fat biceps and a corded neck that looked like the trunk of a sequoia—barked at him: “Go back to sleep! Go the fuck to sleep!” To the third man, a wispy old dude with a Gandalf beard and a cheap pink plastic lei around his neck: “Give him the shot! The shot!”
    Gandalf let go of the vampire’s boot, coming at Coburn with a syringe full of red. Coburn’s mouth tingled— that’s blood, Kayla told him, but it’s bad blood —but he had to suppress the hunger. He tried to kick his feet but they were slow to respond, tried to bat at the incoming hippie-wizard but his fist felt like it was swaddled in cotton swabs, and before he knew what was happening the dude’s beard was in his eyes and the syringe was squirting blood into his mouth and—
    There. The bitter tang. The medicine wrapped in a spoonful of sugar.
    Kayla: They’re drugging you .
    “Muhfuh!” Coburn muttered—it sounded better in his head—and once more the darkness found him, again touched by the faces of the dead and tinged by firelight cast through a curtain of blood.
     
     
    H OURS. D AYS. W EEKS. Years.
    Coburn could not say long the parade of the doomed and the dead lasted this time. When he finally awoke, it felt like leaving a too-loud, too-crowded party and walking out onto a balcony or sidewalk where the air is cool and everything is comparatively quiet and the clamor and clatter has been left behind.
    That effect did not last.
    When Coburn’s eyes adjusted, he found himself nailed to a dining room table. Dark cherrywood. The air smelled of—what was that? Hash. The crispy, pungent tang of hashish.
    Gandalf stood at Coburn’s side. Whistling ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ as he worked. In this case, worked meant swaddled Coburn’s guts with a ribbon of duct tape. Gandalf wound the tape over the vampire, then under the table, then over the vampire and back under the table.
    Above the vampire’s head, a water-stained ceiling. Cracks in the plaster like cracks in glass. To the right: a hallway. Toward his feet: a beaded curtain in rainbow colors, with no idea what lay beyond—though he saw figures moving. And smoke vented through the beads. Again: hashish.
    Coburn tried to move. He felt weak. His body, still partially unmoored from his brain. The effort to move shot ragged cigarette burns of pain up and down each limb—hundreds of them.
    I think they used a whole lotta nails , Kayla said. Owie.
    “Sonofa...” Coburn growled. “ Bitch .”
    Gandalf, startled, danced away, dropping the duct tape. It rolled away.
    “Hey, brother,” Gandalf said. Voice throttled by a frequency of fear. “You okay over there?”
    “Fucking delightful.” Coburn noted that his voice sounded like he’d been smoking cigarettes full of ground-up glass for the duration of his long unlife. “I really enjoy it when some whacked-out moon-units kidnap me off the streets of a zombie-infected city and then nail me to their dinner table.”
    “Cool,”