13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “You have to take the heart,” Arkeley told her.

  She turned around, looking for the Fed. He was so close she could feel his body heat. Just like she felt the cold absence of Reyes’s humanity. She couldn’t see Arkeley, though. He was just in her head. She was careful not to say as much, though. Saying anything like that seemed to make him disappear, and she knew she could use his advice.

  “Take the heart,” he told her again.

  She looked for the heart but couldn’t see it. It wasn’t floating near Reyes’s spine, nor had it bobbed up out of the bottom of the rib cage. There was something shadowy at the bottom, resting on the silk upholstery of the casket. Something dark that wasn’t a bone. She started to reach for it, then stopped. She didn’t know if she could reach through the liquefied flesh.

  “You twitched your thumb,” Arkeley told her. “You promised yourself that if you did that, you would keep fighting. This is the only way.”

  She closed her eyes and plunged her arm into the casket. The liquid clung to her, sticking to the hairs on her wrist and forearm. She felt a bone bump against her skin, rough and terrifying. Maggots crawled on her skin, inching their way up her arm. She wanted to scream but was still too foggy to make a sound. If she hadn’t been half-hypnotized, she knew, she would not have been able to take the heart.

  In her semilucid state, though, she felt her fingers close around the shadowy organ and lift it free. The organic broth that was Reyes’s daytime body dripped from the heart. It splattered her shoes. The heart itself was writhing with maggots. She tried to shake them off, but it didn’t work—they clung tightly to it. The muscle in her hand pulsed gently against her palm, an almost imperceptible ticking rhythm. It told her she wasn’t finished.

  She looked around at the shelves. Reyes had said the vaulted cellar had once been used to store lime and borax, and now that she was half-awake she could, in fact, smell them, a sort of alkaline bite in the air. At some point the cellar had been converted into a general storehouse, however, and the shelves were full of all manner of things. There were jars full of nails, bolts, and other hardware. There were camping supplies and spare candles and box after box of materials data safety sheets, government-required forms that explained what chemicals were present in the mill and how toxic they all were.

  She took the biggest jar she could find and emptied it into the mess in the casket. She crumpled a dozen or so sheets of paper and pushed them into the jar, careful to leave room for air to circulate. She’d been a Brownie once and she’d been camping enough times to know how to make a fire.

  The candle Reyes had used to illuminate the cellar was guttering low when she was ready, but it only took a moment to light her makeshift fire starter. Bright orange flames dripped down the sides of the jar. The paper blackened and crumpled quickly, but she had plenty to work with and kept stuffing more and more inside. Then she dropped the heart into the jar.

  She’d expected to have to feed the fire for hours as the wet heart dried out. Muscle tissue, especially the heart, was notorious for being hard to burn. This was not true of a vampire’s heart. It might as well have been made of paraffin—it burst into flames instantly, blue flames so hot they shattered the glass jar and spat flaming refuse all over the cellar.

  In the casket Reyes’s skull floated to the surface, the jaw wide in a scream Caxton heard just fine, a drawn-out, horrified scream. The scream of a creature being burned alive but unable to roll or run or get away from the flames.

  And that was it. She had expected—or hoped for—something more dramatic. After a few moments, though, the skull sank back down into the goo and was still once more. The scream in her head faded but remained, a distant sort of musical tone. It never quite disappeared, but it was swallowed up in the background noise of her own head.

  “Don’t feel bad for him,” Arkeley told her.

  She coughed to find her voice. “I don’t. This son of a bitch raped me. Even now he’s inside of me. I’m glad he can feel this.”

  She knelt down next to the burning heart and watched it shrivel and fall to pieces. When it was nothing but orange embers, when the screaming had stopped, she picked up a smoldering piece of the heart with a rolled-up piece of paper and tossed it into the casket. The liquefied flesh inside went up like a fireball and cheerful little lines of fire ran across the wooden molding on the casket’s lip.

  “What are you going to do next?” Arkeley asked her.

  “I’m going upstairs,” she told him, because it was just that simple. But first she paused to find her Beretta. It felt very good, and very important, in her hand.

  42.

  A pair of half-deads were standing near the trapdoor. They were carrying a coffin between them, a plain wooden box that might once have held tools but that was just about human-sized. The coffin was meant for Caxton, for her vampiric rebirth.

  One of them wore a chrome Kaiser helmet. He had been a biker four days earlier, a massively built tough guy with a penchant for leather and grease. Reyes had taken him while he had stopped at a pay phone. Nobody remembered who he was going to call. “It can’t be much longer now,” the half-dead said, his voice high and shrill. He rubbed his skeletal hands together until bits of dried-up flesh flaked off. “The sun is almost up.”

  The other half-dead shook her fleshless head. “The sun. I didn’t think I’d ever see the sun again. I would have paid cash money to see it and now…Jesus. What am I? What did he make me into?” she asked. She sounded confused and more than a little scared. Reyes had found her jogging just before dawn, out on a lonely rural road still carpeted with the night’s haze. She had tried to run, but Reyes had been faster. “This is…this is hell. I’m in hell, I must be.”

  “Don’t be so quick to write this off,” the biker told her. “It’s got its good points.”

  The female half-dead turned to look at her companion. “Good points? Spending the rest of time as an undead freak with no face has an upside, is that what you’re telling me? I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. My body is falling to pieces while I watch, literally corroded by contact with the air. Where the hell is the silver lining in this?”

  “Well,” he told her, “it only lasts about a week.”

  Caxton stepped out of the shadows then, a five-foot-long bar of solid iron in her hands. She brought it around in a sweeping blow that knocked the faceless head right off of the former biker’s neck. His stringy body slowly collapsed to the floor.

  She turned to face the other one, the female. The half-dead backed away from her, arms outstretched, begging. In a moment she was out of range and the heavy bar was an unwieldy weapon at best. Caxton threw it at her and winced as it clanged and rattled and banged on the concrete floor, well short of its target.

  The half-dead turned and ran on wobbly legs. Caxton ran after her and caught her easily. She grabbed the female’s hand and tore it free, threw it into the dark corner of the mill. She grabbed the left arm and it came off with barely any pulling at all.

  The half-dead screamed and screamed. Finally she collapsed to the floor. Caxton stamped on her head with both feet until the screaming stopped.

  She took a moment to breathe, just breathe. She stood alone in the darkness of the mill. The vampire was dead.

  “You still need to get out of here alive,” Arkeley told her. She’d stopped looking for him. He was nearby, that was what mattered. “All that noise will bring the others.”

  She nodded, accepting that he was right. She checked her Beretta. She had three bullets. There were at least thirteen half-deads still active in the mill. She couldn’t take them all on at once. She couldn’t take more than one or two at a time—she’d only prevailed against the biker and the jogger through the element of surprise. Her arms were shaky with stress and horror. She’d barely been able to lift the iron bar.

  Okay, she thought, so if you can’t fight, then run. The trouble was, she didn’t know what direction to head in. The fire from the night before had burned out and the mill
was filled with darkness, great clotted heaps of it. There had to be an exit from the mill, a doorway leading out into the day, but she had no idea where to find it.

  “If you can’t decide, head for the nearest landmark. That’ll at least help you get your bearings,” Arkeley told her. She turned and headed into the depths of the mill, toward the ladle and the cold-blast furnace. The sun had smeared a little white light on the tall windows and she could make out a few details here and there. She could see enough that she didn’t trip over the piles of junk or the ankle-high molds that littered the floor.

  She saw torn faces floating in the gloom, bodies swimming toward her out of the dark. She felt skeletal hands reaching for her. One touched her side, the wasted muscles of a half-dead hand closing on the fabric of her shirt. She swung her elbow backward, hard, and the hand fell away with a high-pitched squeak.

  Ahead of her a red ruin of a face floated out of the gloom, and she raised the Beretta and fired as the half-dead’s arms came up to grab her. The half-dead cracked apart and exploded, but that left her with only two more rounds. She ducked under the attack of another half-dead and ran around the side of the ladle. Ahead she saw a pair of double swinging doors. A thin line of bluish light sneaked in beneath them. She ran at the doors and threw her arms out to hit the pressure bars. The doors screamed open and she burst out into a courtyard enclosed by high brick walls on every side. Yellow grass burst from the ground all around her. She saw workbenches and old tool racks but there was no way out.

  She was trapped.

  At least there was blue sky over her head. At least she was outside. She smelled the baking manure smell of Kennett Square and knew she couldn’t be far from help. The southeastern region of Pennsylvania was pretty heavily developed. If she could just get out of the courtyard she would be free.

  There was no exit, however. No way out. She’d run right into a dead end. The walls on every side were solid, unbroken. They were too high to climb.

  The double doors rattled and a half-dead poked its skeletal head out into the open air. She raised her pistol and it ducked back inside. “Arkeley,” she said, “what do I do?”

  He didn’t answer. Maybe he had no better ideas than she did. She had two bullets and maybe ten or twelve half-deads chasing her. She had no time.

  Caxton grabbed the rough edge of a wooden table—really just a big sheet of plywood nailed to some sawhorses—and dragged it toward the far wall. She jumped up on top of it, but she was still about seven feet too short to grab the top of the wall.

  The double doors started moving again. One inched open, scraping on the uneven ground. She stared at it, almost as if she were hypnotized again, unable to move. If all the half-deads came out, if they were armed even with just knives or clubs, she was dead. She couldn’t fight them all off.

  “They’re cowards,” Arkeley told her. His voice was very soft.

  “What?” she asked, but she understood. “I only have two bullets,” she pleaded with him, but she knew perfectly well by that point that he was just inside her head. That he was her own survival instinct, compartmentalized, made abstract.

  She waited a moment to let the half-deads get clustered, and then she fired both shots right into the crack between the two doors. She heard one high-pitched scream and a lot of excited shouts. Good enough. She shoved the empty gun into her holster. Then she jumped down and grabbed another work table, then a pile of two-by-fours. Soon she had a rickety heap of wood that looked like it might collapse under its own weight, much less hers. She stared up at the tottering pile and thought there was no way she could climb it, no way she could then jump from the top of the assemblage and grab the lip of the wall.

  She knew what Arkeley would say. You only have to do it once, and if you fall and break your neck, it won’t matter for very long.

  With hands that shook badly, she hauled herself up the makeshift scaffolding. She got her feet on the top level, an overturned wheelbarrow. She put one foot on a wheel and it spun away from her. Carefully, her body trembling like grass in the wind, she got to the top and launched herself up the side of the wall. The heap collapsed beneath her, leaving her ten feet up in the air with no support.

  One of her hands found the top of the wall and clamped on, hard. Her other hand swung free, but she fought her momentum and made it grab the wall as well. Then she heaved, pulling her own weight up onto the top of the wall. From up there she could see that the courtyard was surrounded by mill buildings on three sides. The fourth side fronted a country lane. A road—which had to lead somewhere. It had to lead to safety. There was a fifteen-foot drop on that side. She didn’t let herself think about it, just lowered herself down as far as she could with her arms and let go.

  The ground came up very hard and very fast. It crushed the wind right out of her, making her broken ribs sing a high plaintive howl of agony, but the rest of her seemed okay. No broken limbs, anyway. She rolled to her feet and started running down the road, intending to flag down the first car she saw.

  She was free.

  43.

  They had a shower in the back of the local cop shop, with fresh towels and good soap and everything. It wasn’t too surprising—the local chief of police was a woman. Caxton was a little disappointed not to find a bathtub, though she supposed that wouldn’t be too professional. She spent a lot longer getting clean than she probably needed to.

  While disrobing she found Vesta Polder’s charm still hanging around her neck, grimy with her sweat and dirt. She cleaned it off, held it up to the light, and didn’t see anything different than she had before. It was just a spiral of metal, cool to the touch. Whether it had helped her or failed her she had no idea. Maybe that was how such things worked. Maybe it was entirely psychosomatic, or maybe it had been the only thing that saved her from Reyes’s domination. She imagined she would never know.

  By the time she’d finished cleaning up, the paramedics had already arrived to take a look at her. They told her she’d been very lucky, that her ribs were merely sprained, not broken, and would heal nicely in a week or two. She had a lot of minor lacerations and contusions, which they painted with antiseptic and dressed with bandages before going away.

  Caxton put on the street clothes the chief had offered her, which were only a little too big, and sat down in the break room with a yellow legal pad. She started to write down her story. Caxton had never been very good at long reports. They always made her think of writing papers in her abortive attempt at college. Still, she told the story as plainly as she could, with as much detail as she could remember. She stopped only when Clara arrived.

  Clara. Caxton had asked specifically for the sheriff ’s photographer to come and drive her home. She had called Deanna, but mostly just to make sure she was okay. Deanna was still in the hospital and couldn’t come for her. Caxton told herself that Clara had been her second choice. When Clara came into the break room, though, Caxton knew better, just by the way she felt seeing Clara again. She held out one bandaged hand and Clara took it, then came closer and stood there for a moment before awkwardly leaning down and kissing Caxton on the top of her head.

  Warmth—stemming from both embarrassment and other causes—spread through Caxton’s face and down her neck.

  “We thought you were dead,” Clara said, her voice a little shaky. “We looked all night. Somebody called me yesterday morning because…because they thought I would want to know you were missing, and I came right away and joined the search party. We looked everywhere. We even checked out that steel mill, but it was all locked up. Oh, my God, I looked that place over myself and I didn’t see anything.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Caxton heard Arkeley say. “They’re masters of concealing their hiding places. They have charms to confuse the mind, especially by moonlight.”

  “He insisted on coming along,” Clara said.

  Caxton frowned. She wanted to ask what Clara meant, whether Clara had heard Arkeley’s voice as well, but then the Fed walked in
to the break room and sat down on the edge of the table. Caxton slowly realized he wasn’t just in her head anymore. It was the real Jameson Arkeley, vampire killer.

  It was truly weird to see him again. She had internalized him, made his personality part of herself, and it was the only way she had survived being Reyes’s captive. He had come to represent something vital and necessary to her. The flesh-and-blood Arkeley, by comparison, was someone she didn’t necessarily want to see.

  She sighed. She had so much to tell him, though. So much he had to hear.

  “Special Deputy,” she said, “I need to make a report to you.”

  His face contorted, the wrinkles all running in one direction, then another, as if he couldn’t decide whether to smile or frown. He finally settled on a pained-looking grimace. “I’ve already got the Cliff ’s Notes version. You killed Reyes.”

  “I waited until dawn and then I burned his heart,” she said.

  “Unnecessary understatement is almost as bad as pointless embellishment.”

  She stared up at him, her face devoid of any emotion. What she had to say was going to be important to him. “He tried to make me one of them.”

  Nobody moved or spoke after that. Nobody dared break the silence until Arkeley reached up and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me while we drive.”

  She expressed her thanks to the local chief and they headed out back to where Clara’s personal vehicle waited. It was a bright yellow Volkswagen, a New Beetle with a flower vase built into the dashboard. It was a lot like Clara herself—tiny, cute, and from a whole different world than the one Caxton inhabited. A world she could visit for a while but would never be allowed to stay in. The vampires would make sure of it.

  Caxton crawled into the back while Arkeley took the front passenger seat. His fused vertebrae trumped her sprained ribs, he announced. She leaned forward between the front seats and told him about her ordeal. Clara drove not west, toward Harrisburg, but southeast, back toward Kennett Square. Nobody bothered to tell Caxton why, and she was too busy talking to ask.