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stuck in his tongue and snapped. Jeepers yelped, struggling to wrench open Coburn’s jaw—
    Which was the wrong move. The vampire reopened his mouth, clamped down a pair of mean canines on the span of flesh between the old wizard’s thumb and forefinger— crunch —and began to guzzle. Fresh blood—if not entirely clean, as Coburn caught the trace of hash or marijuana hanging out in there somewhere—flooded his mouth as Jeepers screamed like a middle-aged housewife seeing a mouse run across her kitchen floor.
    This was the way out. Fresh blood meant a shock to his system. Purge the drugs. He lurched forward with renewed vigor, the nails popping through his flesh and tearing it like ragged leather. Jeepers tried to back away as the monster rose anew, feasting, drinking, making good on his promise to kill Jeepers first (though at present not as painfully as he’d like). Masterson ducked through the curtain, rattling the beads. Flores disappeared down the hall. Fingerman dropped into a fetal crouch and rocked back and forth.
    Flee, freaks, flee.
    It didn’t matter.
    All these assholes were going to die today.
    Or so he thought.
    But then, out of nowhere, came the reedy sylph girl.
    She had a Louisville slugger in her hand and a crazy beaming smile on her face. The girl held the bat like she was swinging for the fences.
    The bat connected with Coburn’s head.
    Starbursts erupted in his vision. Streaks of smeary white.
    He tried to get back up—
    The bat came down on his chest. Then his chin.
    Flores launched himself up atop Coburn’s body and took a knee. With hands as muscled as the rest of his ’roid-monkey body, Flores jacked open Coburn’s now-broken jaw and—
    Squirt .
    Into the mouth with another jet of bad blood.
    Coburn slipped once more into the dark tide. He couldn’t tell if Kayla was laughing, or crying, or both. The faces renewed their assault, drowning him in a bucket of his own bilious guilt.

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
    Hunters Hunted
     
    T HE VAMPIRE WAS right. Soon as Coburn took off leaping from rooftop to rooftop like the shadow from a cloud moving overhead, the zombie throng slowly began shuffling up the street, leaving only a few stragglers behind.
    Gil peered over the roof’s edge. Creampuff whined by his side.
    He felt suddenly overwhelmed and alone. The city was silent. Same way that all the cities were, now: no cars, no helicopters, no constant rumbling murmur of voices and HVAC units and music. Nobody was here to care about him or have him care back. Dead streets, dead city, dead world. Who were they trying to save again, exactly? What was left of humanity? And how many of them were worth a shit?
    “I feel alone,” he said to Creampuff. “And I miss my daughter.”
    The dog sat down, stared up.
    “Yeah, I hear you. Cut the pity party. Let’s hit the bricks, pooch.”
     
     
    W HEN NEXT C OBURN opened his eyes, night had fallen and he found himself nailed back to the dining room table. For a half moment he caught a whiff of something sweet and sour hanging in the air—the scent of jasmine mingling with an eerily-familiar odor of death. Familiar because...
    Kayla filled it in for him: It smells like you.
    At the same time the odor was crawling its way up his nose like a worm, a sound reached his ears that chilled his already cold body:
    A howling screech. Containing within it a madness beyond life’s margins, a desperate ragged hunger that had no end and gave no quarter.
    The scream was far away... but close enough to still be heard.
    That sound set off a cascade of images in his mind: rotters drinking his blood, turning into monstrous hell-zombies, the hunters who stopped at nothing when it came to getting another taste of Coburn.
    How could another hunter exist in the world? All the ones he inadvertently made—and then those that made each other—were gone now. Was there just one? Or had their unstoppable army begun to form anew?
    Coburn lay there in the darkness for awhile, trying to