Free Bad Blood by Chuck Wendig Page A

Kayla aloft by her throat struck him. An almost physical blow. With it: another wash of guilt. Acid on the back of his tongue. Acid in the back of his mind. Guilt was for suckers. Shame was for chumps.
    Remorse was a line that separated the living and the dead.
    The dead had no remorse.
    And Coburn reminded himself: he was most certainly dead.
    Ahead, the tunnel split—a Y-shaped fork in the path. Coburn quickly sniffed the air, caught at first only the smell of rainwater and broken-down grease and other old chemicals washed from the streets into the sewers, but as he could feel and hear the hunter coming up behind him (a hundred yards, now? seventy-five?), panic twisted through his heart like a rusty screw—
    Jasmine. There.
    Coburn scrambled down the left-most path.
    She’s gaining on you , Kayla said.
    And she was. The wretched sounds of the pursuing hunter were closer now and closing in fast—the water beneath his feet was starting to form a heavier stream, six, seven inches deep, the walls were growing slick with moisture. His hands slipped, his feet splashed as the water slowed him just enough. It felt like being in a bad dream, except Coburn didn’t usually have bad dreams. Hell, Coburn usually was the bad dream.
    Turn. Face her. You’re not a runner, JW. You don’t flee what scares you. Kayla laughed. I didn’t think anything scared you .
    But this did. This terrified him. Curdled his blood.
    Didn’t matter now. The hunter was upon him.
    She shrieked as she scuttled up behind him, running up the wall on her hands and knees like a spider. Coburn pivoted, spun to meet her as she leaped for him.
    The child hunter slammed into his chest, claws digging deep as she shrieked, flecks of rancid spit dotting his face. The pain of her claws was vibrant, alive, an electric misery. As Coburn’s head slammed back into the water, rushing into his ears and up the back of his shirt, he saw the little girl up close: a wretched mockery of a child’s innocent face, mouth twisted into a shark’s grin, eyes the color of infection, neck elongated as if the vertebrae had multiplied.
    But that’s not the face he saw.
    He saw his daughter.
    Blinking sweetly as she lay atop him, humming a song.
    Light filtering in through gauzy curtains.
    A TV going in the background. Something about Ovaltine.
    A hard slash of four jagged bone-tip fingers across Coburn’s cheek—turning his face into a loose fringe—returned him to reality.
    You can’t hurt her , Kayla said. Can you ?
    He wanted to. But couldn’t. He couldn’t hurt this thing that was plainly no longer a child, that had been gutted out by the zombie disease and replaced with the virulent demon borne by the vampire blood—the girl was no longer in there .
    But you’re still in here , Kayla said. And you’re becoming a real boy, Pinocchio.
    Go to hell, Kayla, he thought.
    Behind the hunter, the zombies that had fallen in through the manhole were starting to catch up. Crawling on all fours like an old man looking for his fallen glasses. Dragging themselves forward.
    They came to feed, too. Vultures hungry for scraps.
    Coburn decided to let them have a meal.
     
     
    G IL STRUGGLED WITH all of it.
    The little girl had bitten a—well, what else could it have been? A vampire. Another vampire. Even imagining a world with two Coburns damn near made Gil pass out. Doubly troubling was that this vampire seemed somehow connected with the lab they were seeking. What other lab could it be?
    All of that didn’t add up. Separate puzzle pieces that refused to click together. Only an incomplete picture formed; other parts remained missing.
    Just the same, that was bad news. Coburn was out there. So was a hunter. And a second bloodsucker. His daughter’s soul caught in the middle.
    He remembered what those hunters could do. A vampire biting you was one thing, but zombies biting a vampire—that changed the equation. Things were bad enough with one hunter out there. Gil didn’t care to see