Free Double Dead by Chuck Wendig

Daddy’s a good shot with that rifle.”
    “Yeah. I know .”
    “He always hits his target.” The smile on her face broadened: she was no longer just talking about the rifle, and she wanted Kayla to know it.
    “Gross.”
    “Your friend from last night rolls up in here, he’s going to kill him. Figures he probably won’t show because by now the PCP or whatever he was jacked up on will have worn off—he won’t survive those other bullet wounds. But if he does show?” She made her finger into a gun and held it against Kayla’s temple: the nail, cut and painted, dug into the teen’s skin. “Pop, pop, pop. Three to the head.”
    “You’re disgusting.”
    Cecelia licked her lips and winked.
    “Coburn’s going to come back. I dreamed about it.”
    “You’re too old for that kind of fantasy. Bet you also believe a unicorn’s going to come out of those woods and whisk you away on its back.” Her laugh was as much a growl as anything; it was almost enough to put Kayla off smoking. Then, Cecelia changed gears suddenly. “He and I are gonna get married, your Daddy and I. Soon as we find the perfect spot away from the rotters. Out West somewhere. During the sunrise. We’ve talked about it. Maybe one day you’ll call me Mom.”
    Kayla couldn’t take it. She shoved past Cecelia and exited the RV. Just to be sure that Cecelia got the message, she slammed the door.
    Hard.
    Hard enough, in fact, to break it.
    The door didn’t stay closed when she slammed it; that was the first sign of a problem. The latch didn’t catch. The door just bounced off it and drifted open.
    Kayla felt panicked. That wasn’t good. The door needed to close. The zombies, they were creatures of opportunity, not intelligence—ironically, even though shooting them in the brains put them down for good, they didn’t have a whole lot going on in those brains, either. Something as simple as a door presented a problem for them: best they could do was swarm up against it until they broke it down by sheer weight and volume.
    She hurried back over, gently closed the door. Heard a click . Let out a sigh of relief, then stepped back down to the ground.
    And the door drifted open again.
    “Oh, no,” Kayla said. “Shoot shoot shoot .”
    Cecelia appeared in the open doorway.
    “You gotta be shitting me, Kayla!” she said—Kayla couldn’t tell if the anger and outrage was real, or just Cecelia trying to pour gas on a fire. “You broke the damn door? For real? I swear, you are nothing but a problem. First you invite some kind of cannibal back to our camp, and now you break the ’Bago door? You are something. Now somebody’s going to have to fix it before the damn rotters show up. Nice one. It’s like you want us to get killed.”
    Kayla didn’t even hear this last part—because, by then, she was weeping and running for the woods.
    It wasn’t fair.
    You’re special , they told her. Again and again. You’re different. You’re not like everybody else. You should be dead. We have to take you somewhere.
    We have to take you Out West .
    Then, of course, times like these came along and she didn’t feel special at all. Matter of fact, she felt the opposite: she felt lower than a snake’s belly in a wheel rut. Her father treated her like a child. Leelee treated her like a fragile little thing, a snowflake that might melt with even the gentlest touch. Cecelia treated her like a bag of garbage. And Ebbie…
    Well, Ebbie was the only one who was nice to her at all.
    It was, in part, why she liked that vampire. It wasn’t that he treated her well—he insulted her, threatened her, choked her so hard the bruises made her look like one of the walking dead. But what she liked was that he shot straight: he told her what he was thinking, what he was feeling, and then he acted on it. He didn’t say one thing and do another.
    For a monster, something about him felt utterly honest .
    Refreshing, in a kind of horrible way.
    Kayla leaned up against a tree,