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.For a moment, things felt right.A tiny moment in time where all felt okay.Kayla to his right.Dog in his lap.But it was fast swept away by the undercurrent of imagery that played out in his head.Leelee.Beatific.Happy.At peace.And then erased in a flash, the grenade taking out her legs and ruining her face and without warning she was just a piece of meat and so were the monsters with which she’d surrounded herself.Coburn had seen lots of bad shit.He’d been the engineer of most of it.He’d seen blood and horror aplenty and it didn’t mean squat.To him, the human population of the world comprised nothing but meat-puppets and blood-bags: people to manipulate and motherfuckers to eat.And that was that and never would it be different.Or so he thought.And then Leelee went and blew herself up.For him.That was the part that needled him.That stuck in his mind like a blade.Somebody did something… well, to call it nice was the understatement of the year, wasn’t it? Like saying ‘the ocean is pretty big’ or ‘Hitler had some issues.’ Leelee died to save his very existence.He didn’t have to twist her mind to do it.He didn’t have to threaten her.She destroyed herself so that he could live.Or, whatever you called the rough approximation of ‘life’ he possessed.She was crazy, said the monster’s voice inside of him.But that wasn’t it at all.It may have been true; he had no idea and didn’t care to speculate on the state of her sanity.Coburn leaned out of the chopper, feeling the air rush through his hair with rough fingers.The ground began to move away from them as lead thunked into the metal hull of the chopper.Out there, in a pickup truck, he saw him.Benjamin Brickert.Long beard.Hollow eyes.Eyes that met his own.Eyes that flashed recognition and echoed rage.Coburn gave him the finger.CHAPTER THIRTY-TWOThe End Begins AgainThat fucking vampire.Brickert felt the air sucked out of him.He couldn’t catch a breath.His temples pounded.His heart felt like it was ready to kick its way out of his chest.That motherfucking piece-of-shit vampire.Coburn was supposed to be dead and crispy, crushed by the collapsed floor of that old theater in New York.That was years ago.And now? He was here?It didn’t seem possible.For a moment, Brickert seriously entertained the notion that he had died years ago and that this was Hell.To see that clown-king fleeing in a Twin Huey chopper was one thing.To see that God-forsaken vampire up there with him felt like it was designed to punish him personally.Brickert manned the.50 cal and again lifted it skyward.He put the vampire in his sights.And then he moved the gun to the left.He fired a fusillade of.50 rounds into the ass-end of the chopper.He prayed that those bullets did their job, and it wasn’t long before he saw that they did.Out of a trio of holes in the back, fluid sprayed even as the chopper lifted up and gained distance, pressing forward like an eager hummingbird.The bitch was leaking fuel.Brickert finally found his breath and sucked in a lungful.“No,” he said, grinning.“Fuck you, vampire.”The Bitch Beast lifted her broken body, rising up out of the carcasses of her brothers, her sisters, her children—what they were she had no name for, no deep understanding, she only realized that once they had been connected, but now they were scraps of meat perforated by searing shards of angry metal.She, too, had been torn ragged.But they had taken it head-on.Their heads and faces hung on shoulders only barely, turned to pulp and splinters of bone.They were gone from this world.She, however, was not.But she needed sustenance, and feeling no more loyalty toward her ruined companions, she knelt down and began to eat of their flesh and drink of their black blood.A glorious and wretched sacrament.The sun was coming up, soon.Coburn could feel it.So when the warning began going off in the helicopter—an insistent beeping that they could hear even over the chopper’s rotors—the vampire did not know what the hell was going on.But he learned soon enough.Thuglow leaned over the seat, pale, sweaty, and he mouthed a phrase that nobody else could hear but Coburn.We’re leaking fuel.Shit.PART FOURPENITENTCHAPTER THIRTY-THREEDown in the DarkAfter a certain point, it all went away.Coburn remembered giving Brickert the finger.He recalled the helicopter rising and with it, a deep and thriving hunger deep within him, a hunger for blood and the realization that he was surrounded by blood on all sides, blood in pink skin, blood pushed by pulsing drum beats, blood sticky and wet.He remembered the fuel alarm.Remembered going down—not a crash landing, not really, but definitely a controlled accelerated descent down into what Thuglow said was Texas but what looked to Coburn like the fucking moon (a wide open expanse, no plants, no trees, just ground cracked and pale like dry skin).Coburn remembered the sun.A bright liquid lava line at the edge of forever, and then it was all blankets as they swaddled him like some big bloodsucking baby, then dimness, then darkness, then everything went still.It was then that it all went away.It was then that he woke up here.In a kitchen.With Rebecca.Rebecca.With her pig-tails.And the freckles on the bridge of her nose.And a too-big-for-her men’s flannel robe—his robe—so big, then, that she almost disappeared inside of it.“You like my robe?” she asked.“It’s yours.You let me wear it.”“You look like Kayla,” he said, his hand inadvertently touching a highball glass of Scotch made cool by a trio of ice cubes gently drifting within.“Actually,” Rebecca said, “she looks like me.Isn’t that how it works? The someone after is the one who looks like the someone before.”He nodded and smiled.“Yeah.Yeah, I guess that’s it.”“So.What are we doing here?”“I don’t know.” He lifted the Scotch to his lips.It tasted like blood.“You remember my name, at least.”“Is that a good thing?”She smiled.“No, probably not.”The room swiftly brightened: the bulbs in the fixture in the ceiling and above the sink hummed and glowed white hot, blinding him, the humming turning to buzzing, and then as fast as it had come, they dimmed once more.Someone stood behind Rebecca.A tall man.Standing in darkness.He emerged from shadow.Blonde hair slicked back and pressed to his pale scalp.Nose, smashed flat to the left.The upper lip, sneering to the right thanks to a puckered scar from what might’ve been a cleft lip.He grinned.His teeth were smeared with red, like he’d been eating raspberries.“Hi, John,” Blondie said.Coburn winced like he’d been stuck with a needle.John.John.“John?”“John Wesley Coburn.We’ve met before.”“Have we? You know… my name.So what’s yours?”“That, you don’t know.That you may never know.I’m still out there, though.Passed through the bowels of life and out on the other fucking side, pushed out like a kidney stone through a tight pisser.” Blondie smiled, came up behind Rebecca, started playing with one of her pigtails.Coburn wanted to launch himself across the table, rip his head off.But he couldn’t [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]