13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  She was losing it, and she knew it. That she would drive so far just to see young people made her realize how dark her life had become in such a brief period of time. She pulled into a parking space on College Avenue before a big stone gate that let her look all the way up the quadrangle. She undid her seat belt but didn’t get out of the car.

  Arkeley looked up. He’d been studying his Blackberry since she’d started driving. “Good news,” he told her. “The investigative unit has ruled out seventeen of the suspects. They decided to run down the medical personnel and corrections officers first—the ones who might have actually had physical contact with Malvern. They’re about half done.”

  Caxton nodded. That was good news. “Malvern. It all comes back to Malvern. How did she get here?” she asked. “She was in Pittsburgh when you found her, but she wasn’t born there, right?”

  “No,” he said. He put the Blackberry in his coat pocket. “Vampires move around a lot—it’s how they stay one step ahead of people like us. It took me years to trace her route and I’m not done yet. I know she was born in Manchester, in England, around 1695. She terrorized that city for about sixty-five years before the bloodlust got too much and she couldn’t rise any more from her coffin. She lived for a while under the care of another vampire, Thomas Easling, who was burned at the stake in Leeds in 1783. Malvern’s body was found among Easling’s property, and it was assumed at the time that she was dead, just a mummified corpse. A curio. She was purchased for thirty-five British pounds by a Virginian plantation owner, one Josiah Caryl Chess, who fancied himself a scholar of natural history. He had quite a collection of dinosaur and mammal fossils, so a moribund vampire must have been a prize find. He never bothered to remove her heart. She couldn’t move, after all, and even though he must have known she was still alive in there in some fashion—he may have even fed her—he was certain she was beyond harming anyone. Most likely she had him under her spell, though his journals suggest just the opposite. He was physically intimate with her at least once.”

  “Shit, no,” Caxton said, her stomach squeezing down like a rubber ball. Caxton remembered what Arkeley had said about Malvern and her current attendant, Doctor Hazlitt. She had more to offer him, Arkeley had said, than her piercing gaze. “But she would be all…look, I’m sorry if this is gross, but she’d be too dry.”

  “Personal lubricants have been widely available throughout history. I know the ancient Romans used olive oil. And if you let her, if you play along, she can make herself look however you want. Your ideal woman. The illusion lasts as long as she wants it to.”

  Something in Arkeley’s voice worried her. “You’ve seen her do it?” Caxton asked. She really wanted to ask if she’d changed her appearance for him—and if he’d succumbed. She couldn’t ask that, though, not in so many words.

  He chuckled. “She’s tried plenty of tricks on me. I’ve been visiting her every few weeks for two decades now—she’s been trying to get me on her side this whole time. So far I’ve resisted.” He made it sound as if he couldn’t guarantee, even to himself, that he would always be successful. “Anyway. Chess died of blood loss, of course. No one ever officially put the blame on Malvern. She had never moved from her coffin, which was mounted in a front room as a kind of conversation piece. Looking back now, it’s pretty obvious that she sucked Chess dry, but at the time they blamed a mutinous slave for his death. They locked Malvern up in the attic and forgot about her. The plantation was burned to the ground during the Civil War and she disappeared for a while. In fact the next time anyone has a record of her is when she showed up in the possession of Piter Byron Lares, and you know how that story goes.”

  “Lares had plenty of moribund vampires, not just Malvern.”

  Arkeley agreed. “They take care of their own. It’s almost like ancestor worship, and it’s one of the very few things that can make them act irrationally. I assumed originally that the four vampires in Lares’ boat were all of one lineage, that one of them had made Lares while another had made the one who made Lares, and so on. I was wrong. By the time I discovered him Lares had been collecting old vampires for decades. Maybe he thought that by getting blood for them he was doing something good and nurturing. Maybe it helped assuage his conscience, assuming he had some kind of conscience. I don’t know. I’ve been studying vampires for twenty years myself and I still don’t know how they think. They’re just too alien to us.”

  Caxton scratched under her armpit. She stared out through the windshield at the eighteen-year-olds walking by, their arms clutched around each other for warmth, their faces so clean. None of them knew what the future would hold, or what they would become. “You’ve been working the same case all this time.”

  “Lots of cops define their careers with one case. The murderer who got away, the child who went missing and never showed up again.” Arkeley shrugged. “Alright. You got me. I’ve never been able to get the Lares case out of my mind. I moved here, to Pennsylvania, to follow up on it. I’ve spent years getting to know people like the Polders who might have some information. And I’ve watched Malvern like a hawk.”

  “And now when someone calls the FBI to say they have a vampire killing, they call you.” Caxton frowned. “That’s a lot of weight to carry around.”

  “I do alright,” Arkeley told her.

  Whatever. She should be focusing on the case, not feeling sorry for Arkeley. “This is my first serious investigation,” she told him. “I’m no detective. But I think I have an idea of what’s been going on. Lares kept Malvern going until you killed him. Then, through various bureaucratic channels, she got installed at that hospital, at Arabella Furnace.”

  “Right.”

  “She tried to charm her way out, to talk her way out, she even ate one of the doctors, but it’s been no good. You’re sitting on her, just waiting for her to do something bad so you can punish her. She can’t just give up, though. She’s going to live forever, locked up in a withered corpse of a body forever, so the only option is to keep planning an escape, even if it takes twenty years to pull off. She’s getting a little blood, but not enough to sustain her. She needs more muscle. So she creates three vampires.”

  “More likely she created one of them and he created the other two—it would involve less direct risk for her.”

  Caxton clucked her tongue. “Why three, though? Why do they even need to bring the blood to her? One vampire could just steal her, coffin and all, and hide her where we’d never find her. Then he could bring her back on his own timetable.”

  “Her body is too frail to be moved around like that. If she broke in two pieces right now she might never have the strength to put herself back together. She needs to walk out of Arabella Furnace under her own power.”

  Caxton added that to her store of facts. “Okay. So the big plan is to bring blood to her, the way Lares used to. But a lot of blood this time, enough to completely heal her. To make that happen she creates a vampire. He goes out into the woods and takes over Farrel Morton’s hunting camp, makes it his base of operations. He creates some half-deads to keep the place going and creates two more vampires. For months they stay on the down low, eating migrant workers, not showing themselves. Biding their time. But why? Why haven’t they tried to free Malvern yet? Do vampires get stronger over time?”

  “No—they’re never stronger than the first night they rise to hunt.”

  Caxton nodded. “So the longer they wait the weaker they get, and the more risk they have to live with. Risk that somebody’s going to wander by the hunting camp and notice that it’s been turned into a mausoleum. Which is in fact pretty much what did happen. If that half-dead hadn’t come up against my sobriety check we wouldn’t know that any of this was going on. Farrel Morton shows up with his kids, looking for a weekend in the woods. He finds himself in a house of horrors instead. The vampires are so afraid of being discovered that they send a half-dead to dump the bodies somewhere else, to make it look like Morton never even went to the camp. Why go to such len
gths? When it didn’t work they had to leave home so fast they left their coffins behind. They’ve got to be desperate by now.”

  Arkeley nodded.

  “Desperate enough to attack the hospital?”

  “Malvern’s plan isn’t ready to be put into action—not yet. She can be an astonishingly patient creature, when it suits her. Still, she doesn’t waste opportunities. She’ll have a backup plan and she will put it into action as soon as possible. Still, I don’t expect an attack right away. I believe I know why the three of them were biding their time.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s simple logistics. She needs a certain quantity of blood. Three vampires couldn’t bring her enough blood to fully revivify her. Four of them could. They were going to make another one.”

  “Christ. But now—they’re down to two, half of what they need. That’s something, right? It’s a good thing.”

  Arkeley scowled at her. “It buys us some time, that’s all.”

  Caxton looked up. While they’d been sitting there talking the last of the afternoon had faded away. A streak of yellow marked the western horizon—the sun was going down. In perhaps fifteen minutes it would be dark. “People,” she said, “are going to die tonight, one way or the other.”

  Arkeley didn’t bother to confirm it. He was too busy reaching for the Blackberry that buzzed in his jacket pocket. When her cell phone began to ring as well, she knew something must have happened. Something bad.

  19.

  Caxton drove fast but safe, keeping her wheels on the road. The blue flasher on the dashboard played hell with her night vision, but she’d trained for this. When they reached Farrel Morton’s hunting camp she switched off the flasher and her headlights and rolled up in the darkness. No need to make themselves a target.

  An hour earlier, at dusk, the state troopers stationed at the camp had failed to report in on schedule. They were good men with many years of experience between them—they wouldn’t just have forgotten to call headquarters. The local cop had called Troop J dispatch and told them he would drop by and see what had happened. He expected the troopers were having radio trouble. He’d reported back twenty minutes later with the news that the troopers were nowhere to be found. He was going to take a look around the surrounding woods and see what he could turn up. He had not called since and his cell phone rang for a while and then went to voicemail.

  The sheriff was sending two units. Troop J out of Lancaster was sending every available car. Caxton and Arkeley hadn’t waited to hear what came next. They were the closest to the camp, and Arkeley seemed to like it that way.

  “You’re almost smiling,” she said, taking the key out of the ignition. “You hoping that somehow this is all a big misunderstanding, that everybody’s okay?”

  “No,” he told her. “I’m hoping this is exactly what it looks like. I’m hoping we get a second vampire tonight. I doubt it, though. They aren’t stupid.”

  Caxton popped the trunk of the unmarked patrol car. She lifted out a riot shotgun, a Remington 870, and slung it over her shoulder. The weapon had a shortened barrel and no buttstock so that it was easier to carry around, a black coating so it wouldn’t glimmer in the low light. It would be worthless against vampires—the relatively small #1 buckshot was meant to stop a human being in his tracks, but it wouldn’t even penetrate vampiric skin. Against half-deads it might be more effective.

  “They weren’t supposed to come back here,” she said, closing the trunk as quietly as possible. “That was the idea, right? It was too dangerous for the vampires to come back. They would know we were watching the place. They left their coffins behind and they weren’t coming back for them. That’s what you told me.”

  “Are you going to blame me,” he asked, “when we don’t even know what happened yet?”

  Caxton pumped the shotgun to put a round in the chamber. With her other hand she unlatched the holster of her pistol. “You want to lead?” she asked.

  “With that kind of firepower behind me? Not a chance. You’d cut me in half at the first sign of any danger. You go first and I’ll cover you.”

  The camp was dark, only a single light burning on the side of the building. It made the shadows deeper. She headed around the side of the kitchen wing, staying low, the shotgun pointing straight up. She came to an open window and decided to chance it. She flicked on the flashlight mounted to the top of the shotgun and checked to make sure he had her back. He did, of course. He might not like her very much, but he was a skilled cop. Caxton stood up and pointed her light inside the house. Nobody jumped out at her, so she took a quick look, panning the light from one side of the room to the other just as she’d been taught.

  She saw what she’d expected. Stove. Refrigerator. Piles of bones. A half-dead could have hidden anywhere in the room, in the shadows, out of her light beam. She didn’t see any movement, though. She circled the house with Arkeley following behind her.

  When she got to the back of the house, near the stream, a harsh, cackling laugh wafted through the trees and ran cold down her spine. She froze, ducked down into a firing squat, and scanned the darkness all around. Her flashlight rippled across the trees on the far side of the stream and stopped when she found the source of the laugh. A half-dead was hanging in one of the trees. No, not hanging. It was secured to the tree with lengths of baling wire, its arms and legs bound securely.

  She thought immediately of the dead people wired into sitting postures in the camp’s living room. “Don’t fucking move!” she shrieked.

  The creep laughed again. The sound of it irritated her. It got on her skin and made her feel grimy, like her skin was crawling with dirt and cold sweat. “Oh, I promise,” it said. Its voice wasn’t human at all, nor was it anything like a vampire’s voice. It was squeaky and infantile and nasty.

  Arkeley came up on her left, his weapon pointed at the sky. He didn’t look at her, just at the half-dead.

  “I have a message for you, but I’ll only tell if you’re nice,” the half-dead cackled. Before she could reply Arkeley shot it in the chest. Its ribs and the stringy flesh holding them together snapped open and shattered. Pieces of bone flew tumbling away from the tree. The half-dead screamed, a sound strangely similar to its laugh.

  “Tell me now or I’ll shoot off your feet,” Arkeley said.

  “My master awaits you, and you won’t like him so much!” the half-dead crowed. “He says you’re going to die!”

  “Tell us the goddamned message,” Caxton growled.

  The half-dead shook and rattled, its bones straining against the wire. As if the simple effort cost it enormously, it lifted an arm and pointed one bony finger across the stream, deeper into the forest.

  “Where is he?” Arkeley demanded. “Tell me where he is. Tell me.”

  The half-dead was still shaking, though, convulsing, tearing itself to pieces. Without warning, its head slumped forward and crashed to the ground. Clearly they wouldn’t get any more answers out of it.

  Its arm remained pointing toward the shadowy woods.

  Caxton stared at the outstretched finger. “This is a trap,” she said.

  “Yes,” Arkeley told her. Then he splashed across the creek and into the trees. She rushed forward to catch up with him and take the lead again. Her boots hit the stream with a splash and freezing water soaked her socks. On the far side she hurried into the dark, her flashlight bobbing through the trees, its light swinging across the trunks, leaping up among the branches, searching among the roots.

  When it became clear they weren’t going to die instantly, she figured she could afford to ask more questions. “What happened to being cautious?” she asked. “To wearing seat belts and not keeping a round in the chamber?”

  He turned to look at her in the near dark. “This way we know we’re in danger. If we headed back to the car they might spring on us without warning. When you know your enemy is trying to trap you the only course of action is to rush forward. Hopefully you can spring the trap before your enemy is
fully prepared.”

  Half the time she thought he said things like that just so that he could be right and she could be wrong. She tramped after him into the gloom.

  It didn’t take long to find the two state troopers and the local cop. They were wired to the trees just as the half-dead had been. Their bodies were twisted and broken. They had died in terrible pain.

  “The vampire,” Caxton breathed.

  “No.” Arkeley grabbed the barrel of her shotgun and pushed it to move the flashlight around until it shone on the face of the dead policeman. Blood dripped from his lacerated nose, blood still steaming with residual body heat. “No vampire would leave a body like that. They wouldn’t spill out blood on the ground, not if they had time to clean it up.”

  “Lares spilled blood all over the place. I read your report.”

  “Lares was desperate and in a hurry. This vampire can afford to take his time. We don’t even know his name.” He let go of her weapon. “We’re wasting our time.”

  She turned to go.

  Arkeley shook his head. “I didn’t say we were done here.”

  Caxton spun around and saw it—a patch of dirt between two trees lifted and cracked open. A skeletal hand shot up and clutched at the air. She turned again and saw a half-dead coming at her between the trees, a butcher knife in either hand. She lifted the shotgun and fired.

  The half-dead’s body exploded in a fountain of ash and dust, bones splintering into fragments, soft tissues bursting open, tearing, bouncing off the trees. The knives flashed forward and clattered together on the ground.