Free Bad Blood by Chuck Wendig

Cautiously, he resumed the story: “We... kept Ellie with us for a while. Had her held quick with a catch-pole somebody stole from one of the animal shelters. But over the last couple months, that’s when the doctor showed up. Wanting to take more of us away.”
    “The doctor.”
    “Uh-huh. She comes around every so often. At first she was nice. Offering us things if we went with her. She said she could take two or three of us on a boat and that she had this lab and there were people there, and it was safe and they had food. I never trusted her.”
    “You kinda trusted her,” Ashleigh said, twirling the chair leg like a slow-motion baton. “I mean, you said—”
    “God, Ashleigh, I changed my mind!” He scowled at her. “Fine. I sent some of us off with her at first. But then we never heard anything and I thought the doctor was strange anyway, and so next time she came by I said for everybody to stay here, that we were doing okay on our own and that the adults didn’t know safety from a sack of shit. Even still, Javier said he wanted to go with her and it didn’t help that she was waving a bag of M&Ms around.”
    Aiden sat on the edge of the bed, between the wiggling corpse-feet of his two dead parents, as if it was no big thing.
    “Wasn’t long after that Ellie got bit. And the next time the doc came around, she was pushy. Threatening us. Way she looked at you made you want to go with her even though you didn’t want to go with her.”
    “She had pretty eyes,” Pete said, as if lost in a dream.
    “But before any of us could follow her, Ellie broke free of the catchpole. Jumped on the doc’s back like a monkey. Bit down onto the lady’s neck and there was blood everywhere. The lady screamed. Threw Ellie against a dumpster. Ran off like a shot, like a... an Olympic runner. Weird thing was, didn’t even look like her neck was bit up. Blood, lots of blood, but no, y’know, wound.”
    Gil could’ve guessed the rest of the story, and it went about like he figured. “We got Ellie back with the catch-pole but she changed that night. Got all fuckin’ weird. She went from being a dumb zombie to... I dunno. It’s like she saw us again. But not in a good way. Like in the way a tiger watches you from behind the bars at the zoo. And she got still. Just sat down. Waiting. Zombies don’t wait. They smell you and they’ll come at you even if that means walking across a street full of broken glass to get at you. She wasn’t like that. Not anymore.
    “So. We let her go. Threw her behind a door and closed it, pulling the pole out. Then we ran like crazy.”
    “We still sometimes see her,” Booboo said, picking his nose with one hand and using the other to fidget with an ice pick.
    Aiden nodded. “We hear her out there. See her, too. She’s got a pack of zombos that follow her around like dogs.”
    Finally, Princess stopped sobbing, progressing to the sniffling-and-hitching-breath phase. She stood next to Gil and rested her dirty cheek on his shoulder. “I miss Ellie. She was a better princess than me.”
    Gil dared to ask: “This woman. One who Ellie bit. She say where she was taking you kids?”
    Aiden said, “Yeah. To Alcatraz. To her lab.”

 
    CHAPTER EIGHT
    Drowned Rats In A Dead Maze
     
    T HE VAMPIRE DARED not look, but the sounds told him everything he needed to know: the hunter dropped into the tunnel behind him, landing with a splash, bone claws and talons clicking on the ancient brick. But the hunter was not alone: other bodies hit the tunnel like sacks of grain dropped out of the back of a pick-up truck. Zombies. Clumsily bumbling into the dark, likely following the focus of their fruitless attention span: the beast in dark ringlets.
    As noted, Coburn ran.
    You can take her , Kayla said as Coburn hunkered down, clawing his way through the tunnel like a rat driven mad by a parasite. C’mon, JW. Just one little girl . Remember how well you handled me once upon a time?
    The memory of holding