13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  He heard her. He didn’t face her or do anything, really, but she could tell he’d heard her. His body stopped moving and sagged in place as if he’d been switched off. The words that came out of him next were like wind escaping from a dying set of bagpipes. “Nobody ever knows what it’s like,” he said. She had no idea what he meant. “They think they do. They’ve seen all those movies, all those idiotic movies. They think vampires are something you can reason with. Something you can explain away. They don’t understand. They don’t understand that we’re fighting animals. Wild beasts.”

  “At least tell me what you plan on doing with the evidence.” She couldn’t bring herself to call it an arm.

  He nodded and started up again. His power source replaced. “There’s a hospital near Arabella Furnace with the facilities I need. You can call there tomorrow and talk to them about getting it back, if you really want it. My advice is to burn it, but apparently we haven’t reached the point yet where you’re comfortable taking my advice.”

  “What’s the number of this hospital?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow. I’m going to be in Harrisburg, at the state police headquarters. I want you to report there so you can repeat everything you told me to the Commissioner.”

  Caxton must have looked shocked. Honestly, she didn’t know why the Commissioner would want to hear her report in person. But she knew better than to ignore a direct order from a Fed.

  “Go home now. Get some sleep, and I’ll see you tomorrow,” he told her. Then he walked away, into the night.

  The Sergeant grabbed her shoulder when she came back to the roadblock. She must have looked like she was going to pass out. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she told him, and he backed off. He didn’t say a word when she announced she was going home.

  The drive back to the house flickered in and out of her consciousness. She couldn’t remember falling asleep at the wheel, but whole mile markers would go by without her noticing them. She stopped at the first diner she found and drank two big cups of coffee. It helped a little. She kept her speed down on the back-country roads she used for the last third of the journey, lightless, often unpaved stretches of track where the trees pressed in close on either side, their curving arms flashing at her in the headlights, the gray weeds that sprouted up out of the ground before her waving like seaweed.

  She couldn’t escape the feeling that the whole world had changed. That something horrible and new had come to life in the darkness outside, the chilly blackness that filled up the sky. Something big and dangerous and toothy, still made shapeless by her ignorance. It infected everything, it had gotten inside her head. Her teeth felt encrusted. She could sense the dirt under her fingernails. It was just exhaustion and low-grade fear, she knew, but it still made her itch inside her own skin. Everything had turned bad. The old familiar roads she’d driven a thousand times, ten thousand times, seemed more bendy, less friendly. Usually the car seemed to know the way to go, but tonight every turn and jog of the path took more strength out of her arms. She rode the brake down every hill and felt the car labor beneath her as she crested another rise.

  Eventually, finally, she pulled her patrol car carefully into the wide driveway next to the Mazda and switched everything off. She sat there in the driver’s seat for a moment, listening to the car ping, listening to the thinned-out rise and fall of the last of the year’s cicadas. Then she popped open the door and slipped in through the garage. The ranch house she shared with her partner was perfectly quiet inside and mostly dark. She didn’t want to disturb the stillness, didn’t want to track any horror into her own home, so she left the lights off. She unstrapped her holster and hung it in the closet as she passed through the kitchen with its humming refrigerator, passed through the hall, unbuttoning her uniform shirt, pulling it down over her arms. She wadded it up inside her hat and put them both on the chair next to the bedroom door. Inside Deanna lay sleeping in their queen-sized bed, only a tuft of spiky red hair sticking up above the covers at the top, and, at the other end, three perfect little toes that had sneaked out from underneath. Caxton smiled. It was going to feel so good to climb into that bed, to feel Deanna’s bony back, her sharp little shoulders. She would try as hard as she could not to wake her. Caxton unzipped her uniform pants and pulled off her boots one at a time. Suppressing the groan of pleasure it gave her to have her feet finally free, she stood there for a moment in just her bra and panties and stretched her arms above her head.

  Behind her something tapped on the window. She pulled the curtain aside and shrieked like an infant. Someone stood out there, a man, his face torn into strips of hanging skin. She screamed again. He slapped a white hand against the window, the fingers wide. His face beckoned at her. She screamed again. Then he broke away and ran. As Deanna stirred behind her and freed herself from the duvet, Caxton couldn’t look away from the dark silhouette that loped across the garden behind the house. She watched until he slipped between the dog kennels and Deanna’s shed and disappeared from view.

  “Pumpkin, what is it, what is it?” Deanna shouted again and again, grabbing Caxton from behind.

  “He only had one arm,” the trooper gasped.

  6.

  The state police headquarters in Harrisburg was a brick box with big square windows, surmounted by a radio mast. It sat just north of the city in an underdeveloped patch full of road-salt domes and baseball diamonds. Trooper Caxton spent most of the day sitting around out back, waiting for Arkeley to show up. It was supposed to be her day off. She and Deanna were supposed to go up to the Rockvale Square Outlet stores and get some new winter clothes. Instead she sat around watching the civilian radio operators come out for their smoke breaks and then hurry back inside again. It was a chilly November day.

  The sun was up, though, which was a wonderful thing. Caxton hadn’t been able to sleep after the half-dead tapped on her window. Deanna had somehow managed to curl back up under the warm sheets and doze off, but Caxton had sat up and waited for the local police to come and pick at the dead plants in her garden. She’d sat up and talked to them and watched them make a hundred mistakes, but it didn’t matter. There was no evidence in the garden, no sign the half-dead had ever been there. She had expected as much.

  Now, in the sun, in the fresh air, she could almost pretend it hadn’t happened. That it was some kind of dream. She sat on a picnic table behind the headquarters lunch room with her hat in her hands and tried to will herself back into having a normal life.

  There was the question, of course, that kept tugging and pulling at her. The question of why. Why the half-dead had come to her house. Her house specifically. If it had gone after Wright or Leuski, that might have made a certain amount of sense. Those two had chased the thing right into barbed wire. But why her? She’d been running the Intoxilyzer. She’d been in the trailer the whole time. It just didn’t make sense.

  If she concentrated very hard, she could not ask herself the question for whole long minutes at a time. She refused to let it rattle her. She was a state trooper, for fuck’s sake. A soldier of the law—that’s what they’d called her when she graduated from the academy. A soldier, and soldiers don’t panic just because somebody tries to give them a little scare. She told herself that enough times to start believing it.

  She read case reports and pursuit logs to fill the time, which was only slightly less boring than watching the smokers come in and out. Arkeley came for her at three o’clock. By that point she was ready to sign out and go home. “I’ve been waiting here all day,” she told him when he stepped through the back door to collect her.

  “I’ve spent all day getting search warrants and court orders. Which one of us had more fun, I wonder?”

  “Stop talking to me like a child,” she demanded.

  His smile only deepened.

  He led her up to the Commissioner’s office, a corner office with two glass walls on the top floor. The other two walls were lined with deer antlers and the head of one very large twelve-point buc
k. A rack of antique fowling guns sat immediately behind the desk, as if the Commissioner wanted to be able to perforate anyone who brought him bad news.

  Arkeley would have been a good candidate. After Caxton finished giving her report and Arkeley had made an introductory statement, the Commissioner gave him a look of pure hatred. “I don’t like this, but you probably already guessed as much. The nastiest, ugliest multiple homicide in decades, and you just come in and take it away from us. A U.S. Marshal. You guys guard courthouses,” he said, leaning way back in his chair. He was bald on top, but it hadn’t reached his forehead yet. The bottom button of his uniform strained a little at keeping his gut in. He had a full colonel’s birds on his shoulders, though, so Caxton stood at attention the whole time he was talking.

  Arkeley sat in his chair as if his anatomy was constructed for some other kind of conveyance, as if his spine didn’t bend properly. “We also capture the majority of federal fugitives,” he told the Commissioner.

  “Trooper,” the Commissioner said, without looking at her. “What do you think of this piece of shit? Should I run him out of town?”

  She was pretty sure it was a rhetorical question, but she answered anyway. “Sir,” she said, “he’s the only living American to have successfully hunted vampires, sir.” She stayed at attention, staring up at the brim of her hat like she’d been taught.

  The Commissioner sighed. “I could block this.” He gestured at the paperwork spread across his desk. Most of it was signed by the lieutenant governor. “I could hold it all up, demand verification, demand copies in triplicate. I could stall your investigation long enough for my own boys to take care of the vampire.”

  “In which case, young man, more than a few people would die in a most horrible fashion.” Arkeley wasn’t smiling when he said it. “There’s a cycle to these things. At first the vampires try to hide among us. They disguise themselves and bury their kills in privacy and seclusion. But over time the bloodlust grows. They need more and more blood every night to maintain their unlife. Soon they forget why they were trying to be discreet. And then they just start killing wholesale, with no moral compunction and no mercy. Until this vampire is brought down, the body count will continue to rise.”

  “Why have you got such a hard-on for this?” the Commissioner demanded. “You’re willing to make enemies, just so you can horn in on this.”

  “If you’re asking why I chose to take this case, I have my own reasons and I’m not going to share them with you.” Arkeley stood up and picked his papers off the desk one at a time. “Now, if you’re done pissing on my shoes, there are some things I need. I’d like to talk to your area response team. I need a vehicle, preferably a patrol car. And I need a liaison, someone who can coordinate operations between the various local police agencies. A partner, if you will.”

  “Yeah, alright.” The Commissioner leaned forward and tapped a few keys on his computer. “I’ve got a couple of guys for you, real hotshots from the criminal investigations unit. Cowboy types, grew up in the mountains and learned how to shoot before they started playing with themselves. I’ve got six names to start—”

  “No,” Arkeley said. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. At least it felt that way to Caxton. “You misunderstood. I didn’t ask to be assigned someone. I’ve already picked my liaison. I’m taking her.”

  Caxton was looking at her hat. She didn’t see Arkeley point. It took her way too long to realize he meant he wanted her to ride with him.

  “Beg your pardon, sir,” she said, when the rushing in her ears had passed, “but I’m a patrol unit. Highway patrol,” she reiterated. “I don’t feel I’d be appropriate for what you want.”

  For once at least it seemed he was willing to explain a decision. “You said I was the only living American to kill a vampire. You must have read something about me,” he told her.

  She’d read everything she could find while she waited for him to show up. It wasn’t much. “I read your incident report on the Piter Lares case, yes, sir.”

  “Then you’re the second-best-informed person in this building. Commissioner, I want you to release her from her current duties.”

  “For how long?” the Commissioner asked.

  “Until I’m done with her. Now. You,” he said, looking at Caxton, “follow me and stay close. I keep a certain steady pace, and I expect you to match me, or you’ll forever be asking me to slow down.”

  She looked at the Commissioner but he just shrugged. “He’s a Fed,” his expression seemed to say. “What are you going to do?”

  Arkeley led her down to the area response team’s firing range out back. The ART was the antiterrorism squad, but they were also the ones who were called in to break up protests in the capital. They had the equipment and the tactics for mass arrests and crowd control, and they had a sizeable budget for less-lethal weapons (which Caxton knew used to be called nonlethal weapons, until somebody got accidentally killed). The ART guys were all gun nuts and gadget freaks and had an experimental weapons firing range behind the HQ where they could test out their toys before they actually had to deploy them. It also let them get in a little target shooting whenever they got the itch. Caxton kept her hands over her ears as they came up on the range officer, who was firing what looked like an antique musket. It was loud enough to make her think he must be using black powder.

  Arkeley eventually yelled loud enough to get the range officer’s attention. The RO took off his ear protectors and the two men had a brief discussion. Whatever Arkeley said made the RO snort in laughter, but he disappeared into an ammunition shed and came back out with a box of bullets.

  Arkeley lined up thirteen of them on the firing stand and carefully, methodically loaded the magazine of his weapon. It was a Glock 23, Caxton saw. More firepower than most police handguns, but it was no hand cannon. “You only load thirteen?” she asked, looking over his shoulder.

  “That’s the capacity of the magazine,” he said, his voice thick with condescension. It was going to take a lot to warm up to this guy.

  “Most people would load an extra round in the chamber, so they’re ready to shoot at a second’s notice. I do,” she said, patting the Beretta 92 on her belt.

  “Tell me, do you not wear a seat belt while you’re driving, so you can save half a second when you get in and out of your car?”

  Caxton frowned and wanted to spit. She dug one of the bullets out of the box and studied it. The slugs were semijacketed lead, about what she had expected and not enough to make the range officer so excited. Two perpendicular cuts had been made in the nose of each round, forming a perfect cross. She thought maybe she’d caught him in a mistake. “I read your report—you said crosses had no effect on vampires.”

  “Luckily for me, they work wonders on bullets.” Arkeley shouted to clear the range and sighted on a target thirty yards away, a paper target stapled to a plywood two-by-four. Caxton covered her ears. He fired one round and the target shredded. The two-by-four exploded in a cloud of wood chips. “The slug mushrooms and breaks apart inside the target,” he explained to her. “Each piece of shrapnel has its own wound track and its own momentum. It’s like every bullet is a little fragmentation grenade.”

  As much as she hated him, she had to let out a low whistle at that. So this was what you shot vampires with, she thought. She asked the RO to bring out another box in 9mm for herself.

  “I can do that,” he said, his voice low enough to count as a whisper, “but they won’t be parabellum. Cross points are against the Hague Convention.”

  “I’ll never tell,” Arkeley said. “Load her up.”

  7.

  “Down here, take the next right,” Arkeley said, stabbing one finger at the windshield. He settled back in the passenger seat, looking more comfortable there than he had on the chair in the Commissioner’s office. Maybe he spent more time in cars than offices, she thought. Yeah, that was probably right.

  Caxton wheeled their unmarked patrol car around a stand of ail
anthus saplings that bounced and shimmered over the hood. Twilight was about to be over: the night was just starting. According to the map they were right in the middle of the township of Arabella Furnace, named after a cold-blast pig-iron furnace that would once have employed the whole population of the town. There was nothing left of the furnace itself except a square foundation of ancient bricks, most of them crumbled down to dust. There was a visitor’s center there, and Caxton had learned all about the history of cold-blast furnaces while Arkeley took a pit stop.

  Other than barking out directions he had very little to say. She had tried talking to him about the skinless face in her window the night before. She had not presented it as something that had scared her, though it still did, especially as the daylight dwindled in her rearview mirror. She presented it as part of the case. He grunted affirmatively at her suggestion that he should know what had happened. But then he failed to add so much as a comment.

  “What do you think it was about?” she asked. “Why was it there?”

  “It sounds,” he said, “as if the half-dead wanted to scare you. If it had wanted to hurt or kill you it probably could have.” Any attempt on her part to get anything further out of him resulted in shrugs or, worse, complete apathy.

  “Jesus!” she shouted, finally, and stopped the car short so they both hit their seat belts. “A freak with a torn-up face follows me home and all you can say is that it probably just wanted to scare me? Does this happen so often in your life that you can be so jaded about it?”

  “It used to,” he said.

  “But not anymore? What did you do? How did you stop it?”

  “I killed a bunch of vampires. Can we continue, please? We haven’t got a lot of time before the bodies start showing up in heaps.”

  She studied him the whole length of the drive. She wanted to get the drop on him at least once, to prove that she wasn’t a complete child. So far she’d failed. “You’re from West Virginia,” she suggested. It was the best she had. “There’s a hint of a drawl in your voice.” Plus she had read that his investigation of the Lares case had begun in Wheeling, but she left out that detail.