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you, pup?”
    The dog kept growling.
    That was unexpected. This little snarling cur was resisting his blood-sucker mojo. Had that ever happened before?
    Instead, he tried a different approach: he snapped his fingers.
    The dog sat down in the cage, and quieted its growls.
    “Yeah,” he said, feeling pretty good about himself. “See how I did that, pooch? I did that old school .”
    He bent down and unlatched the cage. Coburn reached in and grabbed the dog under his front legs. If the dog tried to bite him, he’d just snap its neck.
    But the dog didn’t bite. Instead, it panted.
    Coburn grinned, licked a little blood off a fang.
    “I hereby name you Creampuff ,” he said, chuckling. “Because you are going to be a delightful little snack tomorrow night.”
    Then, dog under his arm, he took off walking.

CHAPTER SIX
    Chuck Wagon
     
    It struck him, then, as he walked down the two-lane road—a road littered with cars shoved into one another at odd angles, a surefire sign of the Apocalypse if ever there was one—that the clock wasn’t going to turn back. Things had changed ( duh ), and they weren’t going back. Sometimes you break something and make it better, but this wasn’t that: this was a broken world that wasn’t merely content to stay broken, but would continue to break down even further.
    Just as rot had claimed the zombies, it had also claimed New York. It had probably claimed the entire planet, for all he knew.
    Coburn approached this thought charitably, with a spreading sense of warmth and satisfaction—a good meal had a way of casting one in a pleasing glow, even if the rest of the world had gone to Hell in a hazmat suit. The blood in his belly was now working its way through his blackened heart, through the withered channels. It felt good to be fed. It always did.
    And before last night, getting fed had been easy.
    The vampire led an easy, spoiled existence. The last fifty years had been an endless all-you-can-eat buffet. Manhattan had a population of almost two million, and that didn’t even count the millions who came in and out of the city each day as workers and tourists. Coburn sat in the midst of this like a glorious tumor, funneling fresh blood supply into his mouth night-in and night-out. He wasn’t really all that good-looking: his nose was a bit crooked, his teeth were a little fucked up. He was lean and lanky and had dark gray eyes that nobody in their right mind would’ve called ‘friendly.’
    But being a vampire came with an unholy host of perks. With but a thought he could turn his voice into an angel’s song or a devil’s cry, he could blink and make his eyes as calming as a hot spring or as bleak and endless as a black hole. Didn’t hurt that he could snap even the toughest sonofabitch alive clean in half. Anybody got wise to his hypno-bullshit, he could break their necks easy as snapping a rib of celery.
    Hell, most of the time none of his tricks were even necessary. The city that didn’t sleep was also a city that supped on sin. Drunk chicks. Meth-heads. Party-till-dawn-with-sex-drugs-and-techno-music. Blood thick with narcotic bliss.
    God, he hated that fucking music. Didn’t anyone know how to play a goddamn electric guitar anymore? And the things they drank, the drugs they did. Nobody seemed to enjoy a good shot of cheap whiskey. Or a spoon full of black tar heroin. It was all artisanal cocktails and designer drugs . Made him sick. Made him want to puke up a bucket of blood.
    This generation was the worst. Generation of weak-kneed hipster emo shitbags. A poor facsimile of their parents—and, frankly, those people were awful versions of their own parents, too. Generation after generation of bad duplicates. Like a letter run through the copier too many times. After a while, you couldn’t even tell what it was trying to say anymore.
    That was why he didn’t feel bad about killing all those people. He went out of his way to select victims from the ranks of the douchebags,