13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “Laura, call off your dog, will you? She’s yipping obnoxiously.”

  Clara’s entire body tightened. Her muscles curled, and she looked ready to punch Arkeley right in the gut.

  “Are you going to strike me, Sheriff ’s Deputy Hsu? Is that your intent? Because I have to say, the way you’re telegraphing your punch, you’d be lucky to touch my coattails before I had you on the ground with two broken arms.”

  Clara rolled her shoulders and tilted her head side-to-side. “You’re not worth the paperwork,” she said, and suddenly she was standing down. She hadn’t moved an inch, but her posture and the slump of her shoulders spoke volumes.

  “If you’re not going to hit me,” Arkeley said, “then please leave us alone. The trooper and I have things to discuss.”

  Clara nodded and walked over to where Caxton leaned against her car. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” she said.

  “I wish it were that simple,” Caxton breathed.

  Clara reached across the space between them and cradled Caxton’s chin in her hand. She gave it a gentle squeeze, then made herself scarce behind a tower of switching gears. She could probably still hear them, but Arkeley didn’t seem to mind.

  “I want to help you,” she told him. “I do.”

  He walked toward her as if he hadn’t heard her at all. As if she hadn’t said anything. She immediately felt guilty. She felt the way she had felt as a child when her father would give her the silent treatment. She tried to push that feeling out of her gut, but it was no use. She braced herself, almost expecting him to slap her.

  “I will do anything you ask. Except I won’t go back down in that hole.”

  He nodded and came even closer. Close enough to touch her, but he didn’t.

  “When I was down there he came swimming up to the surface, like he wanted to poke his nose out. Like he wanted to see his creation one last time. It was horrible. I felt the way he felt. I don’t think my body can tell the difference between my emotions and his. I—I’m so sorry, but I can’t help you like that.”

  “Alright,” he said, a sigh coming out of him.

  “No, no, it’s not alright,” she said, and felt herself on the verge of breaking down. “Reyes spoke to me down there. He spoke right into my head. Maybe not with words, but…but he was aware. Still alive in me, somehow.”

  He nodded. “Okay. I kind of expected that his ghost would plague you.”

  “You expected—you knew—how can you know? How can you know anything about what I’m going through?”

  “I know,” Arkeley told her.

  “How?” Caxton said, squinting at him. “How do you know that?”

  He picked up a stone and threw it hard at a transformer fifteen feet away. The metal box clanged. It made Caxton jump.

  “Piter Byron Lares dragged me down into his hiding place and stuck me there through hypnosis. He didn’t hurt me. He didn’t take my weapon away. And he never spoke a word to me.”

  Caxton thought back to when she’d read his report. She’d read about how violent and uncaring Lares had been, tearing apart an entire SWAT team, and she’d been more than a little surprised when the vampire had taken the Fed down through the river and onto his boat still in one piece. But there had been an explanation. “He was saving you as a midnight snack,” she said.

  “No, he wasn’t.” Arkeley leaned on the car next to her and folded his arms.

  “You can’t be saying—”

  “He had only started the process with me when I killed him. He didn’t get anywhere near as far as Reyes got with you. I didn’t even know I was being raped by that pale son of a bitch. But a part of him broke off in my head, just like a part of Reyes got stuck in yours. Not so much that I could feel him in there, no. Just enough that every once in a while, maybe twice a year, I dream of blood.”

  “You don’t need to—”

  Arkeley turned to stare at her. “It tastes like copper pennies on your tongue. It’s hot, hotter than you expect, and very wet at first, but it clots even as it fills your mouth. It sticks in your throat, but you swallow it down, you can feel it stringy and dark in the back of your throat, but you force it down so you can have some more, another mouthful, and another. I know it so well now. The dryness of it, the clots in your teeth. The need.”

  She had to look away. Because it didn’t sound as disgusting as he made it out to be. It sounded almost…tempting. She couldn’t stand for him to see the naked desire she knew was lighting up her face.

  “He remembers the taste. He’s been dead so long there’s nothing else left of him, just the longing for that taste. And it’s never going to go away. If I killed myself today I don’t know if I would come back as a vampire or not.”

  “But you know I would,” she said. “You know that I’m already one of them, whether I like it or not. And there’s no way back.”

  “That I don’t know at all. I’m truly hoping the Polders know a way to exorcize this curse from you, Laura. The first step, though, has to be that we kill Scapegrace and Malvern. So nobody else has to share our dreams. So I want you to go back down that hole and look at those bodies again and tell me what his next step was going to be.”

  He adjusted his weight with a grunt and was standing in front of her. He held out his hand to her but she wouldn’t take it.

  “No,” she told him.

  “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

  “No. I won’t go back down there. I don’t know how to get rid of this curse, but I know if I go down there it’ll just make things worse. You find something else for me to do, some way to help you, and I will play along. But not if it means going down into that chamber of horrors again. Ever.”

  46.

  “Christ, it’s not even Thanksgiving yet and look at this,” Caxton exclaimed, gesturing up at the air above their heads. It was winter outside the car. Big white flakes of snow were coming down, swirling in the car’s wake, gathering on the sills of the windows. The sky had turned a watery gray shot through with vaporous reefs of cloud. The road surface darkened and glistened with frost and Clara had to slow down to keep her little car on the road. In the backseat Caxton couldn’t seem to get warm. Clara turned up the heat for her, but it wasn’t enough. She clutched herself, her arms close so they wouldn’t touch the cold glass of the window, and shivered. She was one of them. She was some kind of vampire in training. She thought of the cold feeling she’d gotten from the vampires—especially from Malvern, when she’d stood next to the dried-up monster in her wheelchair.

  She needed to get away from death and horror for a while. She needed to go home and be with the dogs and not think about anything for a long time. She had a couple of stops to make before that, however.

  They dropped Arkeley off at the police station. Caxton had to climb out of the back to take his seat, so she could sit up front with Clara and nearer to the heater. Her arms folded across her chest, she tried to make eye contact with the Fed, but he didn’t look back, just swaggered over to his car and clambered inside.

  Caxton threw herself back into the Volkswagen and yanked her door closed. The cold was sending her into convulsions, her body trembling violently, her teeth snapping at each other, chattering so loudly that she could hardly hear Clara ask if she was okay.

  “I know it’s a stupid question,” Clara said when Caxton didn’t answer. The smaller woman looked straight ahead through the windshield. The wiper blades swung back and forth, a pendulum marking the time.

  “Listen,” Clara finally said. “Why don’t you come home with me tonight?”

  Caxton shook her head. Her whole body shook, so she reiterated in words, “You know I can’t do that.”

  “No, not like that, we wouldn’t sleep together. I mean, you could sleep in my bed. With me, because I don’t have a guest room or even a real couch. But we would keep our clothes on. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be alone tonight.”

  “You have no idea how alone I am right now,�
�� Caxton said. It sounded bitter, and she wanted to apologize. She opened her mouth to do just that, but the look on Clara’s face stopped her in her tracks. The hurt there was too guarded—if Caxton acknowledged what had just happened, it would only hurt Clara more.

  Clara started up the car and got them on the highway headed west, toward Harrisburg. Caxton needed to see Deanna before she did anything else. She needed to hold Dee’s hand and figure out what her next step was.

  They turned on the radio and drove in silence. Caxton watched the snow get thicker the farther they went and wished they could just magically be there. She was sure it would be warmer in the hospital. When they arrived, however, outside of Seidle Hospital, there was no parking available and they had to circle for blocks before they found a spot.

  “You don’t have to come in,” Caxton said. She had meant it as a kindness, but it made Clara wince as if she’d been struck. “I mean, it would really help me if you did, but you don’t have to.”

  “I’ve come this far,” Clara said, almost aggressively, but there was a little smile on her face.

  Caxton would have done anything for things to be comfortable between the two of them. But she guessed her life was just going to be complicated for a while. Together they made their way back to the hospital, a big modern monolith of a building that looked across the river at the ruins of the Walnut Street Bridge. Caxton had never gone in through the main entrance—they had brought Deanna in through the emergency room—so it took her a while to get her bearings. Eventually she took Clara up an elevator and down a long hallway full of equipment carts and bad, but colorful, paintings. “Listen. It’s a semiprivate room, and her roommate doesn’t approve of women like us,” she told Clara. “Just so you know.”

  “I’ll try not to stick my tongue down your throat while we’re standing over the hospital bed of your horribly injured domestic partner,” Clara told her, deadpan.

  A laugh bubbled up inside Caxton’s chest and she snorted out all her frustration, leaning hard against the wall and closing her eyes for a moment. God, she had needed that release. “Thanks,” she said, and Clara just shrugged. Caxton knocked and pushed open the door, which sighed a little. The two of them passed silently by the bathroom and into the main room, which was lit only by the flickering glow of the television set. The obese woman in the other bed was asleep, her face turned to the wall, and Caxton tried to be quiet so as not to wake her. Clara waited by the door.

  Caxton stepped over to Deanna’s bed and gasped. It was empty.

  She clapped a hand over her mouth and ran back out into the hall. Clara grabbed her arm and stroked her bicep. “They just moved her. Really,” she said. “It’s okay. They just moved her.”

  Caxton headed down to the nurse’s station and scowled at the woman there, who was filling out a form on her computer. “Deanna Purfleet!” she shouted, when the nurse wouldn’t look up. “Deanna Purfleet!”

  The nurse turned slowly and nodded. “I’ll call the doctor. It’ll just be a second.”

  “Just tell me where they moved her to. I’m Laura Caxton. I’m her partner.”

  The nurse nodded again. “I know who you are.” She put on a pair of reading glasses and looked down at a phone directory. “Please sit down and wait for the doctor. You’ll want to talk to him.”

  Caxton didn’t sit down. She paced back and forth around the nurse’s station, studied the awards and plaques on the walls, took a cup of water when Clara brought it to her, but she couldn’t sit down, not if she ever wanted to get up again. The doctor came out of an elevator down the hall and she ran to him. It wasn’t the doctor she’d seen before. “Deanna Purfleet,” she said.

  “You’re Ms. Caxton, I think?” he asked. He was a small Indian man with perfectly combed hair and very soulful eyes. He looked like he’d never smiled in his entire life. “I’m Dr. Prabinder. If you’d like to sit down—”

  “Jesus, just tell me where she is! Won’t anyone tell me where she is?”

  “There was a complication,” the doctor said, and everything turned rubbery and soft. The floor started to rise toward her face.

  47.

  Caxton sat in the morgue. Deanna’s body lay on a gurney. Dr. Prabinder and Clara were nowhere to be seen. She was all alone in the semidarkened room, surrounded on every side by rolling partitions. How she’d gotten there she couldn’t say. It was as if she had blacked out, except she hadn’t, at all. The trip from the fourth floor down to the basement was all there in her memory. It was just so immaterial that she hadn’t bothered to review the information.

  There had been a complication, she remembered. She got up and walked around the gurney. She touched Deanna here and there. Twitched back the sheet that covered her. Deanna’s face was calm, at least. Her eyes closed, her red hair clean. Her lips were pale, but otherwise she didn’t look so bad. Caxton moved the sheet back a little more, and wished she hadn’t. Deanna’s breasts pointed in the wrong directions. Her chest was open like a ravenous mouth, her ribs like teeth reaching for a piece of meat. Her lungs and her heart lay collapsed at the bottom of that wound like a lolling tongue.

  There had been a complication. Deanna had lost so much blood when she broke the kitchen window that she had required five new units of plasma. They had also given her some whole blood because she had started to show the signs of acute anemia—coldness in the extremities even while her trunk was warm, a lasting and dangerous shortness of breath.

  There had been a complication. A blood clot had formed, perhaps from one of her wounds, possibly from a bad reaction to the transfused blood. Dr. Prabinder had refused to speculate. The clot had entered Deanna’s bloodstream and probably roamed around her body several times before it reached her left lung.

  There had been a complication. A pulmonary embolus, Dr. Prabinder had called it. When it was detected they had rushed her immediately into surgery, of course. They had tried to cut it out. And that was one complication too many.

  “I really must insist, Ms. Caxton,” the doctor said, pulling back one of the partitions. Clara stood next to him. “You’re not supposed to be here at all, and truly, it’s not appropriate for the morgue technicians to let you see her in this condition—”

  “That’s Trooper Caxton,” Clara announced. She held up her badge.

  “Oh, I…I didn’t know,” Doctor Prabinder said.

  “This is a homicide investigation, Doctor.” Clara put her badge away. What she was doing was highly illegal. She was well outside of her jurisdiction. So was Caxton. Lying about a criminal investigation could get them both fired.

  Caxton wouldn’t tell, if Clara didn’t. She pulled the sheet back up over Deanna’s chest. Blood soaked through it almost instantly.

  “When?” Caxton asked. She couldn’t get any more of the sentence out.

  “What was the official time of death?” Clara asked.

  The doctor checked his PDA. “Last night, about four-fifteen.”

  “Before dawn,” Caxton said. While she had been fighting vampires in abandoned steel mills, Deanna had been slowly dying and nobody had known. There would have been nobody with her. Perhaps if there had been it could have been avoided. Perhaps if Caxton had been there, listening to Deanna’s ragged breathing, she might have noticed some change. She could have summoned the doctor. They could have gotten Deanna into surgery that much quicker.

  At the very least she could have held her hand. “I wasn’t here,” she said.

  “No, no, come on,” Clara said.

  “Ah, ladies, I know it is not my place to ask, but is it acceptable for this woman to investigate the death of someone so close? Is there not a conflict of interest?”

  “She was alone,” Caxton said, ignoring him.

  “Was there anyone in her room last night? Any visitors at all?” Clara asked.

  The doctor shook his head in incomprehension. “No, of course not. We don’t let visitors in after seven, and anyway she had posted a guard on the room.” He pointed at Caxton with his
PDA. “Did you not know about the guard?”

  Clara glanced at her, then back at the doctor. “I was just brought in on this case. I’m still catching up.”

  “I…see.” Doctor Prabinder straightened up and squared his shoulders. “Now let’s get one thing clear. I wish to assist the police in any manner possible, of course. But this is my hospital, and—”

  “Doctor,” Caxton said, turning to face him for the first time. She gave him her best fisheye look. Caxton wasn’t wearing her uniform, she didn’t have a badge, and her weapon was still in the trunk of Clara’s Volkswagen. It didn’t matter. The look was what made you a cop. That perfectly uncaring, potentially violent look that could freeze most people in their tracks. “I need to know if anything unusual happened here last night. I need to know if anybody saw or heard anything weird or out of place. Anything at all.”

  “Of course, of course,” he said. He looked down at his shoes. “But this is a hospital with a trauma ward in a major urban center. You must clarify for me, I have seen so many weird things…” His words trailed off.

  “I’m not talking about freak accidents. I’m talking about people with no faces being seen in the hallways. I’m talking about vampire activity.”

  “Vampires, here?” He muttered something in Hindi that sounded like a brief prayer. “I saw on the news that—I hear some things, yes, and the bodies that came in—but oh, my, no, nothing like that last night! I swear it.”

  “Good.” Caxton reached down and took Deanna’s hand. It was freezing cold, but so was her own. “Now I need someone to sew this woman up so I can bury her. Can you arrange that?”

  Dr. Prabinder nodded and took out his cell phone. “There will be papers to sign, of course, if that is not too much.”

  “Of course,” Caxton said. She took out her own phone. Deanna’s brother Elvin was in her stored phonebook. Hopefully he would know his—and Dee’s—mother’s number. There were suddenly a lot of things she needed to do.