13 Bullets

by David Wellington

  Alone with her, the only distraction the sporadic click of her withered nail on the keyboard, Arkeley drew his weapon and placed it on a heart monitor outside of Malvern’s reach. He did not, in fact, get a chance to use it.

  The vampires, the remaining two members of Malvern’s brood, came to him around two in the morning. Their cheeks were pink and their bodies radiated palpable heat. They appeared without a sound, one from the main entry to the ward, the other rising up out of the blue-edged shadows of the room. Arkeley had not seen them come in, though he’d been expecting them.

  One of them tried to hypnotize the special deputy. The other moved fast as lightning across the room, his hands out to grab Arkeley’s shoulders, his mouth wide to bite off his head. Both of them stopped in midattack when they saw what Arkeley held in his hand.

  Before they arrived he had taken certain precautions using surgical instruments that were readily available in the ward. With a bonesaw and a pair of pliers he had removed part of Malvern’s rib cage. A young healthy vampire could repair that kind of damage almost instantly, but Malvern was starved of blood and far too old to even feel what he was doing. His amateur surgery had revealed Malvern’s heart, a cold lump of black muscle that felt like a charcoal briquette in his hand.

  When the two male vampires came at him, he gave her heart a little squeeze. It started to crumble under the slightest pressure. As weak as she was, she found the energy to crane her head back, her toothy mouth yawning open in a voiceless scream.

  The vampires froze in place. They looked at each other as if communing silently about what to do next.

  “I’m going to present you with a few options,” Arkeley told them. He refused to make eye contact with either one—though he believed himself able to resist their wills, he didn’t want to find out the hard way. “You can kill me. Either of you could do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, my last spasm of life would travel down my arm and I would crush this heart into oblivion. You can stand there all night waiting for my arm to get tired, but you only have four hours before the sun comes up. How far are you from your coffins?”

  They didn’t answer. They stood there, their red eyes watching him, and waited to hear a third option.

  “You can just leave now,” he said, trying to sound reasonable. “That way everybody survives.”

  “Why should we trust you?” one of them asked. His voice was rough and thick with the blood that surged in his throat.

  “You slaughtered our brother,” the other said, biting his words into the air. “You could destroy her the moment we step away.”

  “If I kill her I’ll have to face trial as a murderer. I know, it doesn’t make any sense to me, either.” Arkeley started to shrug, but the gesture would have moved his hand and pulled Malvern’s heart right out of her chest. The moment that happened, there would be no reason for the vampires to let him live. “If I’m going to die tonight, I’m going to take her with me.”

  The vampires disappeared without another word, leaving as quickly as they had come.

  When he was sure they were gone, Arkeley made the rounds of the guards in the hospital. They had done as he had told them. The vampires had no need for blood—they were replete with it—and when the corrections officers gave them no resistance they walked right past. Nobody in the abandoned hospital had been harmed in the slightest.

  When Arkeley returned to the private ward he found that Malvern had typed a new line on her computer:

  boys my boys take him

  Luckily for Arkeley, her brood hadn’t received the command until it was too late.

  “You,” Caxton said, when he’d finished his story, “haven’t got any blood in your whole body. Just ice water.”

  “I’m glad you think so. While they were standing there I was sure my hand was going to cramp up.” He smiled, not his condescending smile, not the smile he showed his partner’s girlfriend. Just a normal human smile. It looked out of place on him but not entirely repellent. “Eventually the sun came up. She pulled in her arm and I put the lid on her coffin. And now here we are.”

  “You should have brought me along. We could have fought them together,” Caxton insisted.

  “Not like that. They were so full of blood a bazooka couldn’t have made a dent in them. There’s a reason they always feed before they fight. There’s an upside to this, however. They were bringing that blood for her, to regurgitate it all over her just like Lares did that night on the boat. Now they’ll have to digest it on their own. It’ll make them strong, but it’ll slow them down, too. Tonight, and maybe tomorrow night as well, they won’t want to feed at all.”

  “So you didn’t invite me along because you thought I would be a liability. You thought I would screw up your plan.”

  “I thought,” he told her, “that you would get hurt. Do we have to do this now? I haven’t slept all night.”

  Caxton seethed but knew better than to argue with him at that moment. “Fine. You’re done with me, that’s fine. I’ll go home to my dogs, then.”

  He shook his head. “No. We’re changing your duties, but you’re still on the team. You can coordinate the detective work, find me some names and street addresses for Malvern’s boys. There will always be something for you to do.”

  “Gee, thanks,” she spat.

  “Don’t be like that. Few people have what it takes to fight vampires, Trooper. You gave it your best. Just because that wasn’t enough is no reason to feel bad about yourself. Hey.” He looked down at the coffin, then back at her and raised his eyebrows. “Want a peek?”

  26.

  “I don’t—” she said, but she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t even sure what she was rejecting. Did she even want to stay on the case? Did she want to know another single thing about vampires, about evil and how nasty the world could really be?

  “It’s like seeing a caterpillar turning into a moth. It’s foul, but fascinating if you have the stomach for it.”

  She was ready to say no. She was going to say no, and turn away.

  “Every morning she goes through this, transforming like a larva in a chrysalis. Her body has to change so it can repair all the damage she took the night before.” He lifted up the lid. A weird animal smell came out, hot and musky but unnatural. It made her think of the way the dog kennels smelled when the dogs were sick. “This is what immortality means.”

  No. She just had to say no and he would put the lid back down. She was done with this case, with vampires. If he wanted her working a desk, that was fine.

  She stepped closer to the coffin. He threw the lid back and she looked down.

  Malvern’s bones lay askew on the upholstery. Her enormous lower jaw had fallen away from the upper part of the skull. Her heart, which looked like a rotten plum, lay inside her rib cage, unattached to anything else. All the rest of her flesh had been reduced to a mucilaginous soup that stained the silk lining of the coffin, a gloppy mass that covered her pelvis and part of her spine. Pools of it lingered in the corners of the coffin and filled one of her eye sockets. Flecks of what looked like charred skin hung submerged in the fluid, while tiny curved things like fingernail clippings clustered at the center of the mess. The smell was very, very strong, almost overpowering. Caxton leaned forward a little and studied the fingernail clippings. She could just make out little hooks protruding from one end, and the rings that segmented their tiny bodies.

  “Maggots,” she gasped. Her face was inches from a maggot mass. Rearing up, she nearly screamed. Now that she could see them for what they were, it was impossible to pretend they were something else. Her skin crawled, writhed away from the coffin. Her lips retracted in a grimace of horror.

  “One of evolution’s greatest wonders,” he told her. He looked completely serious. “If you can see past your own prejudices, anyway. They eat the dead and pass the living by. Their mouths are designed so that they can only survive on food of a certain viscosity. They are so adept at working together to break down necrotic tissue that they literally sha
re a common digestive system. Isn’t that astounding?”

  “Jesus Christ, Arkeley,” she said, bile touching the back of her tongue. “You’ve made your point. Cover her up, please.”

  “But there’s so much you haven’t seen yet. Don’t you want to watch her come back to life when the sun goes down? Don’t you want to see her tissues recompose, her eyeball inflate, her heart reattach?”

  “Just close it,” she breathed. She hugged her stomach, but that just made it worse. She tried to breathe calmly. “That smell.”

  “It’s wrong, isn’t it? That’s not how natural things smell.” She heard the coffin lid scrape closed behind her back. It helped, a little. “The maggots don’t seem to mind, but dogs will howl if they smell her and cows will stop giving milk if she passes them by. People notice eventually. Something feels wrong about her, something’s just not right. Of course, by then she’ll already have ripped one of the big veins out of your arm so she can gulp down all the blood in your body.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” she demanded. “It makes you feel good to put the little girl in her place.” Caxton stalked to the far corner of the room, as far as she could get from the coffin. “It must make you feel tough.”

  He let out a long, elaborate sigh. She turned around. There was no joy in his face. No desire to hurt her, she could tell. Just weariness.

  “You were grooming me to be your replacement,” she said. “Someone to keep fighting vampires after you’re gone.”

  He shook his head. “No, Trooper, no. I never even considered you a candidate. I won’t bullshit you. I owe you at least that much, since you’ve been honest with me.”

  She nodded heavily. There was no way she could win the argument. It was like when she used to fight with her father. He was a good man, too, but the rule was that in his house he was always right. It had been harder to remember that when she was a teenager.

  Jesus, she thought, why was she thinking about her dad so much lately? Ever since the vampire, the now-dead vampire, had hypnotized her, she’d been thinking about him a lot. And she’d told Vesta Polder about her mom. It had taken her months to talk to Deanna about her dead parents. Arkeley had dredged all that up to the surface in record time.

  Enough. It was over. She’d thought that when she’d seen the first vampire die. But now it was actually true. “I’ve got something you should see, too,” she said, and he looked at her expectantly. The argument hadn’t bothered him at all, because he knew that it was his investigation and that made him right. Fine, whatever, okay, she thought, knowing she would blow up later when he wasn’t around. She took out her PDA and scrolled to Clara’s email. She opened up two of the picture attachments and displayed them side by side. “A survivor in Bitumen Hollow gave us these,” she said.

  He bent close to look at the pictures on the small screen. She’d studied them already and she knew what he would see. The pictures had been assembled from a virtual Identikit, mix-and-match software that let the sheriff ’s department create full-color composite sketches of Actors #1 and #2. Like all such images, they weren’t exact and they looked blocky and strange, more like pictures of Frankenstein’s monster than vampires. The skin tone was all wrong, because the Identikit didn’t have an option for deathly pale, nor did it have red eyes (a kind of rich, warm brown was the best it could do) and it certainly had nothing like a vampire’s jawline and teeth.

  Yet the images struck a chord with Arkeley right away. “Yes. This is them,” he said, looking up at her. “This is good. It’s useful.”

  Caxton nodded. “I thought so too. And look, we even have an identifying mark for one of them.” The Identikit artist had sketched in the long triangular ears of Actor #2. The survivor had insisted, however, that Actor #1 had normal human ears that were discolored on top, almost black. “His ears are different.”

  “Because he tears them off daily,” Arkeley agreed.

  “He what?”

  The Fed picked up the PDA and brought it very close to his face. “The ears are a dead giveaway. Some vampires, young vampires, will try to hide them, to make themselves look more human. Lares did it for camouflage. I’ve read of others who did it out of self-loathing. They wanted to look human again. They’ll wear wigs and blue contact lenses and even put rouge on their cheeks and noses to look more like us.”

  “But every day…this guy tears his own ears off every day?”

  Arkeley shrugged. “Every night. At dusk, when he wakes, he’ll find they’ve grown back.”

  That just made Caxton think about the maggot mass in the coffin. “Some of them must hate themselves. They must hate themselves and what they have to do.”

  “No one knows. The movies suggest they have deep and brooding inner lives, but I don’t buy it. I think they sit around all night thinking about blood. About how good it tastes and how bad they feel when they don’t get it. About how to get more without being found and executed. And about how long it will be before they stop caring about being found.”

  Caxton suddenly felt cold. She held herself close. “Like junkies,” she said. Before she’d dropped out of college, she’d known some girls there who did heroin. They were individual people with thoughts and feelings before they started using the drug. Afterwards they were interchangeable, their personalities completely submerged beneath their need. “Like junkies who can’t quit their habit.”

  “There’s a difference,” he told her. “Junkies eventually die.”

  27.

  “S omething happened here last night, didn’t it? Something that could have been bad,” Sergeant Tucker said, staring across his desk at them. The last time Caxton had seen him he’d had his feet up on the desk and he’d been watching television. Now he was leaning forward, his eyes scanning the hallways that led off in four directions from his station. “We had twenty-three COs on duty last night, but I can’t get a straight answer out of anyone. One guy saw shadows moving around like his room was full of candles and they were flickering and shit. Another guy definitely saw a vampire walking across the lawn, pale skin, lots of teeth, bald as an egg, but he had orders not to even tell the asshole to halt.”

  “That was my order,” Arkeley confirmed.

  Tucker nodded. “And then at two-fourteen in the A.M., the temperature in the hospital wing dropped by seven degrees. I got a recording right here on my computer. It was sixty-two, then it was fifty-five. By half past two it was back up to sixty. I’ve got video footage of something pale and blurry running across the pool room so fast I can’t even get image enhancement to work.” Tucker’s eyes narrowed. “If you hadn’t been here, if it had just been my men—”

  “I was here. The situation was under control the whole time.”

  Tucker studied Arkeley’s face for a long time, then looked away and scratched at his close-cropped hair. “Yeah, alright. What can I do for you now?”

  Caxton handed over her PDA and Tucker stared at the pictures on the screen. “These are the vampires who were here last night,” Arkeley explained. “I need to know if they resemble any of the people on my list.”

  Tucker tapped at his keyboard. “Right, the list of all the people who worked here in the last two years. I can’t say I recognize either of them but let’s look.” He swiveled his monitor around so they could see. The names from the list came up on the screen and he clicked each one to show them a picture.

  “This is a pretty sophisticated database,” Caxton marveled.

  Tucker pursed his lips and clicked through the names, one by one. “It has to be. I don’t know what this place looks like to you, but to me, it’s a corrections facility. I run it like I would any prison—which means I keep very close tabs on who goes in and out.”

  “There,” Arkeley said, pointing at the screen. “Stop and go back a few.”

  Tucker did so and soon they were all staring at a picture of one Efrain Zacapa Reyes, an electrician with the Bureau of Prisons who had come through Arabella Furnace the previous year. “I remember th
is guy, a little. He came in to replace some fluorescents and to set up the blue lights Hazlitt wanted in the hospital wing.”

  A chill ran down Caxton’s spine.

  Arkeley frowned. “So he would have been close enough to communicate with her. Close enough for her to pass on the curse.”

  Caxton started to ask a question, but then she remembered something. She wasn’t really on the case anymore. She could help Arkeley out in whatever capacity he chose for her, but her thoughts and opinions were no longer welcome. She felt a weird pang of loss, weird because it was very similar to how she’d felt when Clara had kissed her. Like she could see a whole new and exciting aspect of life, only to know she would never be allowed to explore it.

  “I’ll admit there’s a similarity, but this ain’t your guy,” Tucker said, startling her back to attention.

  “And why is that?” Arkeley asked.

  “Well, he was only on the hospital wing maybe like an hour. All he did was screw in some lightbulbs, and I had three COs in there with him while he was doing it. If he’d tried anything they would have beaten him down on the spot—we do not fuck around at Arabella Furnace. Nobody mentioned anybody swapping blood or spit or anything wet.”

  Arkeley nodded, but he clearly hadn’t written off Reyes as a suspect. Caxton stared at the two pictures, the one on her PDA, the one on the screen. There was a distinct resemblance in the forehead and nose between one of the vampires and the electrician. There was one major difference, though.

  “He’s Latin,” Caxton said. The picture on the computer screen showed Reyes as having skin the color of ripe walnut shells. The vampire, of course, was snowy white.

  “Others,” Arkeley intoned, “have made that mistake. Others who are now dead. When vampires rise from the grave their skin loses all of its pigment. It doesn’t matter if they were black, Japanese, or Eskimo beforehand, they end up white. You saw for yourself,” he said to Caxton, “that vampires aren’t just Caucasian. They’re albino. This,” he said, tapping the computer screen, “is one of our men.”