13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  Eventually they let her go home.

  13.

  In the morning, with sunlight coming in through the windows, Caxton got up without disturbing Deanna and pulled on some clothes, anything, really. It was freezing in the little house and there was frost on the garden. She turned on the coffeemaker and left it belching and hissing, then went and fed the dogs out in the kennel. Their breath plumed out of the cages. They sang for her when she came in, the ages-old greyhound song that is unlike a noise any other dog can make, a warbling, atonal screech. To Caxton it was a symphony. They were happy to see her. She let them out to run around for a while on the wet grass, none of them willing to test the limits of the Invisible Fence, content, for the moment, to stay in their safe little patch of lawn bordered by winter-quiet trees. She watched them play, snapping at one another, knocking each other over, the same game dogs had been playing for a hundred thousand years, and still nobody ever won. It made her smile. She felt surprisingly good, maybe a little stiff where she’d fallen on her arms and her ribs the night before, a few bruises here and there from when the vampire had yanked her out of the car. But mostly she felt good, and healthy, and like she’d achieved something.

  So she was quite confused when she started crying. Not big noisy sobs, just a little leakage from the eyes, but it didn’t seem to want to stop. She wiped it away, blew her nose, and felt her heart jump in her chest.

  “Pumpkin?” Deanna asked, standing mostly naked in the back door, just a sleeveless T-shirt on that covered everything the law required. Deanna’s red hair stood up in a bed-head shock of spikes, and she shivered visibly. She’d never looked more beautiful. “Pumpkin, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  Caxton wanted to go to her, to grab her around the waist, to ravage her. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t stop crying. “It’s nothing. I mean, really, I have no idea why I’m crying. I’m not sad or…or anything, really.” She wiped at her eyes with her fingers. It had to be a delayed stress reaction. They’d taught her about those in the academy, and told her she was no tougher than any civilian. Like everyone else in her class, she had thought, yeah, right, and fallen asleep during the seminar. She was plenty tough. She was a soldier of the law. But she couldn’t stop crying.

  Deanna rushed out on the grass, the dew squishing up between her toes, and grabbed Caxton up in a stiff kind of back-patting embrace. “There’s some guy at the door who wants to see you. Do you want me to send him away?”

  “Let me guess. Old guy, lots of wrinkles, with a silver star on his lapel.” Caxton pushed Deanna away, not ungently. She grabbed the flesh of her own upper arm near her armpit through her shirt and gave it a good twist. The pain was sudden and real, and it stopped the crying instantly.

  At the front door Arkeley stood waiting patiently, his mouth a meaningless slot again. When he saw Deanna, though, his face started to glow. She opened the door to let him into the kitchen and asked if he wanted a cup of coffee. Caxton stayed a little away from him, not wanting him to see her irritated eyes.

  He smiled even more broadly but shook his head. “I can’t drink the stuff. It gives me ulcers. Good morning, Trooper.”

  Caxton nodded at him. “I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said. “I thought we were done after last night.”

  He shrugged. “While we were busy having so much fun yesterday, some people were out there doing real police work. Fingerprints, dental records from the half-deads, what have you, have turned up no identification on the vampire yet, not even a name. But we do have this.” He handed her a computer printout. She recognized it immediately as an entry from the national car license plate registry. It listed the license plate number from the Cadillac CTS that had started the vampire investigation, the car full of bodies that the one-armed half-dead had abandoned. The sheet listed the name and all known addresses of the car’s owner.

  “This is our vampire?” Caxton asked.

  Arkeley shook his head. “Our best guess is that it’s the victim. The one in the trunk. His fingerprints turned up nothing, but his son’s did, and blood typing suggests everyone who was in that car was related.”

  “What kid has been fingerprinted?” Deanna asked, her nose wrinkling up. “I thought you only got printed if you got arrested.” She poured some cereal in a bowl but didn’t bother with milk. Breakfast tended to be an informal affair at their house.

  “We’ve been printing kids as fast as we can for a couple years now,” Caxton told her. “It helps identify them if they get kidnapped. At least that’s what we tell their parents. It also means the next generation of criminals will almost all have their fingerprints on file when they start committing crimes.”

  Arkeley sat down unbidden in one of the cheap Ikea chairs around the kitchen table. He had that same uncomfortable posture she’d seen before whenever he sat in a chair. He must have seen the question in her face. “The Lares case nearly killed me,” he explained. “I had to have three vertebrae fused together. This one last night was easy.”

  Caxton frowned and studied the printout. It indicated that the car’s owner had been named Farrel Morton and that he owned a hunting camp near Caernarvon. Not too far from where she’d been working a standard Intoxilyzer sweep just two nights earlier. She put the pieces together. “Jesus. He took his kids hunting and the whole family got eaten alive. Then the living dead stole his car.”

  “There are human remains at his hunting camp. A lot of them,” Arkeley told her.

  Deanna stamped her bare foot on the floor. “No fucking shop talk in the kitchen!” she shouted. It was a habitual war cry and Caxton winced.

  “Quite right. There’ll be time enough for the gory details later.” He and Deanna traded a look of complete understanding that made Caxton wince again. He would never have looked at her like that. Maybe she shouldn’t have cared, but she did.

  “You’ve got quite the partner here, Trooper,” Arkeley said, rising painfully to his feet. “Have you two been together for very long?”

  “Almost five years,” Caxton said. “Should we get going? The crime scene is getting old by now.” Not that it was likely to matter much with the perpetrator dead, but there were rules in police work.

  “How did you meet?” he asked.

  Caxton froze. She had to decide, at that moment, whether she was going to let him inside of her real life or not. The cop stuff, the vampire fighting, that was important, sure, but this was her home, her dogs, her Deanna. The side she didn’t let anybody see, not even her fellow troopers. Of course she’d never had a work partner before. He was her partner at least for the duration of the investigation, and you were supposed to have your partner over for dinner and stuff like that. He would be going away soon, now that the vampire was dead. She decided the danger of letting him inside was minimal. “I rescue greyhounds,” she said. “From the dog tracks. When one of the animals gets injured or just too old they put them down. I give them a more humane option—I save the dogs and raise them to be pets. It’s an expensive hobby—most of the dogs you save are injured or sick and they need a lot of medical help. Deanna used to work as a veterinary technician. She used to sneak out heart-worm pills and rabies sticks for me. She got fired for it, actually.”

  Deanna leaned across the kitchen cupboards, stretching, one leg up in the air. “It was a shit job anyway. We were putting down animals all the time because people didn’t want to pay to fix them up.”

  “I can imagine that would get disheartening,” Arkeley soothed. Deanna’s face grew radiant under the warmth of his sympathy.

  Jealousy spiked upwards through Caxton’s guts. “Now she just does her art.”

  “Aha, I knew it,” Arkeley said. “You’ve got an artist’s hands.”

  Deanna waggled them for him and laughed. “Do you want to see the piece I’m working on?” she asked.

  “Oh, honey, I don’t know,” Caxton tried. She looked at Arkeley. “It’s contemporary. It’s not for everybody. Listen, you can see my dogs instead. Everybody likes dogs, righ
t?”

  “When they’re safely behind a fence, sure,” Arkeley told her. “I can’t stand the way they lick. But really, Trooper, I’d love to see your partner’s work.”

  There was nothing for it but to head out to Deanna’s shed. Deanna put on shoes and a padded winter coat and headed across the lawn to work the combination lock. Caxton and Arkeley followed along a little more slowly.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Caxton asked, once Deanna was out of earshot.

  Arkeley didn’t play coy. “You always make nice with your partner’s wife. It gets you invited to dinner more often,” he told her.

  They entered the shed with roses on their cheeks—it was going to be a truly cold day, it seemed. Caxton moved to stand up against one wall of the shed, extremely embarrassed. Her cheeks burned, not just because of the cold.

  Deanna was as unabashed as ever. She’d shown her work to every person she could find who was even slightly willing to look at it. Most of the time she got polite silence in response. Some people would deem her work “interesting” or “engaging” and go on for a while about theories of body politics or post-feminism until they ran out of steam. The people who actually appreciated her work scared Caxton. They didn’t seem all there—and worse, they made her wonder if maybe Deanna wasn’t altogether normal herself.

  Arkeley moved around the shed carefully, taking it all in. Three white sheets—queen-sized—hung from the shed’s rafters with a few feet of empty air between them. They moved softly in the cold empty air of the shed, lit only by the early morning sun coming through the door. Each sheet was spotted with hundreds of nearly identical marks, roughly rectangular, all of them the same reddish brown. There was no smell on such a cold day, but even in the height of summer the marks gave off only the faintest tang of iron.

  “Blood,” Arkeley announced when he’d walked around all three sheets.

  “Menstrual blood,” Deanna corrected him.

  Here it comes, Caxton thought, the moment when Arkeley gets skeeved out and calls Deanna a freak. It had happened before. A lot. But it didn’t come. He nodded and kept studying the sheets, his head tilted back to take it all in. When he didn’t say anything more for a full minute, Caxton started to feel nervous. Deanna looked confused.

  “It’s about taking something hidden,” Caxton blurted out, and they both looked at her. “Something that is normally hidden away, disposed of in secrecy, and putting it up on display.”

  The pride in Deanna’s face made Caxton want to melt on the spot. But she had to juggle her two partners. She couldn’t let Arkeley see any sign of weakness, especially not here in this deepest sanctum.

  Arkeley breathed deeply. “This is powerful,” he said. He didn’t bother trying to interpret it, which was good. He didn’t try to explain it away.

  Deanna bowed for him. “It’s taken me years to get it this far and it’s not nearly done. There’s a guy in Arizona who is doing something similar—I saw him at Burning Man a while ago—but he’s using any kind of blood and he lets anybody contribute. This is all me. Well, Laura has helped a few times.”

  Caxton’s hands started shaking. “Okay, too much information,” she let out. It just came out of her. They both looked at her, but she just shook her head.

  “Perhaps we should get to the crime scene,” Arkeley suggested. She had never been so glad to receive an order.

  14.

  “What about garlic?” Caxton asked. By day the dead trees that lined the highways looked a lot less threatening. She supposed it helped that the vampire was dead. There were some half-deads out there unaccounted for—the one driving the Hummer H2 that had rammed them and the one-armed one that had scared the hell out of her, at least—but by all accounts they would be easy to round up and subdue now that their master was gone. The vampire was dead—it made the whole world look better. She was finally giving in to her curiosity, which she had kept leashed before because she was terrified of the answers to her questions. Now they seemed harmless, academic. “Will garlic keep a vampire away?”

  Arkeley snorted. “No. In ninety-three I did a little extemporaneous experimentation on Malvern. I brought a jar of minced garlic into her room and when Armonk wasn’t looking I dumped it all over her. It made a pretty good mess and it pissed her off, but no, no lasting harm. It might have been mayonnaise for all she cared.”

  “How about mirrors? Do they show up in mirrors?”

  “From what she’s said she loved looking at her reflection back in the good old days. She doesn’t like the way she looks now, that much is certain.” He shrugged. “I suppose that one has a grain of truth in it. The old ones will break any mirror they see. The young ones don’t care.”

  “You already ruled out crosses. What about holy water, communion wafers, hell, I don’t know. What about other religions? What about the star of David or statues of Buddha? Do they run away from a copy of the Koran?”

  “None of that works. They don’t worship Satan—and yes, I did ask—and they don’t practice black magic. They’re unnatural. If that makes them unholy, well, it doesn’t seem to hurt them any.”

  “Silver,” she tried. “Or is that werewolves?”

  “It was vampires, originally. No one has actually reported a werewolf sighting in two hundred years, so I couldn’t tell you about their vulnerabilities. As far as vampires go, silver has no effect.” He shifted in the passenger seat. He looked a lot less flexible than he had the day before. Fighting vampires took it out of him, she guessed. “We tried all these things out on Malvern in the first couple of years, back before Armonk started worshipping her and moaning about her rights. Light, we found out, is obnoxious to her. It doesn’t set her on fire, but it causes her pain. Pretty much every kind of light causes her pain. She has to sleep during the day; there’s no way to keep her awake. Her body literally changes while the sun is up, repairing whatever damage she took during the previous night. You’ll have to come see the metamorphosis some time. It’s gruesome but fascinating.”

  “No thanks,” Caxton said. “When this case is closed I’m done with monsters. You can keep your title as the only American vampire hunter. I think I’ll stick with DUIs and fender-benders. So how did all these stories get started if nothing works?”

  “Simple. Nobody likes a story with an unhappy ending. Until the last century—and the advent of reliable firearms—vampires pretty much had their way with us. The poets and the writers changed the details so as not to depress their readers with how bad the world could really be.”

  “But if they had the reality to compare to—”

  “That’s just it—they didn’t.” Arkeley sighed. “Every time a vampire pops up people say the same thing: ‘I thought they were extinct.’ It’s because there’s never more than a handful of them anywhere in the world at a given time. And thank God for that. If they were any more common, if they were better organized, we’d all be dead.”

  Caxton frowned with the effort of trying not to think too hard about that. She drove the rest of the way to Caernarvon and the hunting camp without small talk. Arkeley was good at silence, a fact she was just beginning to appreciate. Some things weren’t worth talking about.

  Patrol cars from three different jurisdictions sat parked on rolling grass near the hunting camp when they arrived—state police, the county sheriff, and a sole vehicle for the local policeman, a middle-aged man in a dark blue uniform who stood outside looking like he wanted to throw up. Technically it was his crime scene, and he had to authorize Caxton and Arkeley before they could go in. They waited until he felt well enough to check their ID.

  “Are you going to be able to handle this?” Arkeley asked her. It didn’t sound like a dare, but that was how she intended to take it. “This won’t be pretty.”

  “I’ve scraped prom queens off the asphalt, tough guy,” she said. “I’ve dug teeth out of dashboards so we could match dental records.”

  Arkeley gave her a dry little chuckle for her bravado.

  It didn�
��t look so bad from fifty feet away. The camp itself was a more elaborate affair than Caxton had imagined. It stood next to a chirping stream, protected in the shadow of some tall willows. Most camps in Caxton’s experience were drafty little log cabins with steeply peaked roofs so they didn’t collapse under the weight of winter snows. Farrel Morton’s place might more accurately have been deemed a hunting lodge. A big main structure with lots of windows branched off into a newer wing and what Caxton judged had to be a semidetached kitchen, taking a clue from all the chimneys and vents. A porch ran the full length of the building, well supplied with rocking chairs made of rough-hewn logs with the bark still on. Under the peak of the roof Morton had mounted a brightly painted hex sign, an old Pennsylvania Dutch ward against evil.

  Apparently it hadn’t worked too well. Cops with their uniform shirts unbuttoned and their hats set aside were digging holes in the kitchen yard and out around back. They didn’t have to dig too deep.

  “I thought the vampire’s victims all came back as half-deads,” Caxton said, looking down at a pile of bones and broken flesh that had come out of one of those holes. Maggots made the ribcage quiver. She had to look away. This was worse than traffic fatalities. Those were fresh and the colors were normal. These smelled bad. Really bad.

  “Only if he bade them to rise,” Arkeley explained. “He wouldn’t need very many servants, especially if he was trying to stay under our radar. Half-deads can’t disguise themselves as well as vampires can. His bloodlust would force him to keep taking more victims, but he wouldn’t want thirty slaves wandering around, doing nothing but drawing attention to themselves.”