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the way. The new way. I’m leading people toward a symbiotic future. Where living man and dead man have a place in each other’s worlds. We can feed off of them as they feed off of us. Can’t you see the beauty in that? In the cycle of life to death to life again?”
    “You’re fucking baked.”
    “Baked on an idea. Baked by the power of our purity.” Masterson began pacing the room. “You know I used to be a banker? Down in the financial district. Packaging mortgages.”
    “Shoulda stuck with it. I hear the foreclosure market is ripe for the picking.”
    “Funny, man. Funny. I like you. But see, that’s the thing—you’re hitting on a real point. I was one of the guys who helped fuck things up for people. Did some naughty shit. I got rich as everyone got poor. I fiddled while Rome burned. Housing market collapsed like the house of cards that it was but we didn’t have long to nest on that, did we? Because that’s when the real shit hit the fan. And it showed me—and everybody—just what bullshit the system was. The system was a prison made of illusions, like, like endless walls of circus mirrors. It all crashed. The real crash. The crash of the dead against the living.”
    “Great story. Can I go now?”
    But Masterson ignored him. “But I don’t want it to be us versus them anymore. I want us to co-exist. Even if that relationship of coexistance is one based on food and need and hunger. That’s okay. Because those things are pure. Hunger is pure. I’m sure you understand that. Being who you are. What you are.”
    Coburn struggled against the hundreds of nails puncturing his flesh and pinning him to the table like a butterfly on a corkboard. His strength still wasn’t there—given his guts hanging out of his body and the traces of what was apparently a veterinary anesthetic lingering in his morbid veins, it didn’t seem like it would be in reach anytime soon.
    “Struggle all you want,” Flores said. “We nailed you there pretty good.”
    “You’re going to eat me,” the vampire said. That’s what this was. What this had to be. If the zombies were Grade-E-but-Edible—and hunger was pure , as Masterson put it—then a kidnapped vampire was like a fresh slab of filet-fucking-mignon hot off the grill. Though that still didn’t explain how they knew who Coburn was, or where he’d be...
    Masterson laughed. “Nah. We could. But we won’t. The Doc wouldn’t like that. The Doc’s the one with the plans.” He snapped his fingers. “Get Jeepers back in here. Our friend needs another dose.”
    “Dose? No. Don’t put me under again.” Those faces. The faces of those he damned—Coburn couldn’t abide another second with them. Hundreds of ghosts. Each trapped in a drop of blood. Hallucinations or specters, he didn’t know, he didn’t care , he just didn’t want to be locked away in the prison of his own diseased mind with them. He said something he never thought he’d say to these people: “Please.”
    The wizard Gandalf—or Jeepers, for some reason that remained unclear to Coburn—moved up alongside Coburn with another syringe. Coburn caught a whiff of sage and lavender. Goddamn hippies .
    “Doped blood,” Flores said, looking over Jeepers’ slumped shoulder. “We drugged up Fingerman the first time ’cause he loves the ketamine and he’s so goofy on it half the time he never falls into the K-Hole anymore. Drugs like that, you’re just chasing the dragon. No high is ever as good as the first. Ain’t that right, vampire man?”
    “Fuck you.”
    Suddenly Flores’ face tightened in a rictus of rage, eyes bugging out of his head in such a way that Coburn thought they might launch out of his head on wobbly springs. “ Fuck you , man. Fuck! You! Time to go tits up , bitch.” Flores walked off in a huff, saying, “Dose him, Jeepers.”
    The wizard shrugged, came at Coburn with the needle.
    Soon as it got near Coburn’s mouth, he opened his mouth wide and bit down on the needle. It