13 Bullets

by David Wellington

  She collected her own car and drove in the general direction of home, her overworked brain a little assuaged by the sound of her wheels hissing on the asphalt and the rising and falling roar of the engine. She rubbed at her eyes and blinked a lot, as if she was going to cry, but she didn’t. She didn’t even know why she expected to. Of all the emotions struggling inside of her, none stood out so strongly as to require such an overreaction.

  She felt hungry, and knew it had to be bad if it could compete with all of her other concerns. She pulled over at a place in Reading where they made good cheesesteaks and ordered one “wit wiz,” which meant she wanted onions and Cheese Whiz, the traditional condiments. She sat down in a little booth with her steak and a diet Coke and chewed on the sandwich. It was good, but her mind kept wandering, her tongue stopped tasting anything. She was half done with her meal before she stopped to think about the real issue, the thing that should have consumed her with panic and really made her cry.

  The vampires wanted her for something. Something specific, something specific to her life. The half-dead who followed her home the first night had been sent on a mission. But what mission? Just to scare her? In that case it had been successful. But she couldn’t imagine the vampires would waste time just to give her a shock.

  She thought backwards, a little desperately, searching for anything that might explain the vampiric interest. She thought of previous cases she’d worked on, but nothing stood out. She worked highway patrol—how could that mean anything to Malvern and her brood? She tried to remember the car wrecks she’d seen, tried to draw some kind of connection, but nothing came to her. She’d sent some people to prison for driving under the influence, for possession of drugs. She had caught them, arrested them, testified against them in court. The perpetrators had been sad, broken people, people who needed to drink or inject methamphetamines more than they needed to stay out of jail. None of them had put up much of a fight, and they could never look her in the eye when they went to trial. How could a few drunk businessmen and stoned teenagers possibly matter to Justinia Malvern?

  It had to be something personal, then. But what? She wasn’t the kind of person who made a lot of enemies. She didn’t have a lot of friends, either—and that made her think of Efrain Reyes. A nonentity, Arkeley had called him. Someone with no real life. Someone no one would miss when he died. Caxton had a life, of sorts, but there were holes in it. Her parents were dead and she had no siblings. She had a few friends in the troop, but they rarely hung out. The beer she’d shared with Clara Hsu was the first time she’d been in a bar in months. Clara—Clara would wonder what had happened to her if she disappeared, but not for long. Deanna would be devastated, mentally destroyed, but the only real change in Deanna’s life post-Caxton would be that she would have to go back to living with her alcoholic mother. If the one person who defined your life had no life herself, what did that say about you? She had the dogs, who would miss her very much, but Caxton didn’t suppose dogs counted.

  Malvern had been looking for a fourth candidate, someone she could add to her brood. Every cell in Caxton’s body squirmed at the same time. She stared down at the mess of grease and gristle on her plate and felt bile frothing in her throat. Would Malvern—could Malvern—turn her into a vampire?

  She got back in her car and rushed home. She needed to get inside and be safe for a while. She would definitely sleep in the next morning, she decided, and let other, more qualified people raid the substation.

  She knew the road back to her house like the lines on her palm. She could drive the route half-asleep, and often did. Yet as she approached her own driveway she felt suddenly as if she’d never seen the place before. As if she were no longer welcome in her own house.

  Unnatural, Arkeley kept saying. Vampires were abominations against nature. Was this how that felt? To be around life and warmth and comfort and feel like you were visiting some alien world?

  She started to pull into the driveway and stopped short because she’d heard something. A crash, a bright melody of glass breaking, as if a window had been knocked in. She unholstered her weapon and slowly, taking every possible precaution, stepped down onto the grass of her lawn. She couldn’t see anything from the front of the house, so she edged around the side, toward the kennels and Deanna’s shed.

  Shards of broken windowpane littered the side yard, long triangular pieces leaning up against the side of the house. Someone wearing a hooded sweatshirt, maybe a teenaged boy, was standing next to the shattered window, his hands resting on the empty frame. He looked as if he were talking to someone inside the house.

  “Freeze,” she barked.

  The boy turned to look at her. Flesh hung in tatters on his face. He was a half-dead. She discharged her weapon without thinking, and the half-dead’s fragile body split into pieces. The chunks slumped to the ground. The stink coming off of him made her eyes water. She stepped closer anyway, intending to search his pockets, when she finally had a chance to look in through the window.

  Deanna stood there, naked from the waist up, her outstretched hands, her lower face, her bare chest all covered in bright red blood.

  30.

  “J esus, Dee, Jesus, what did he do to you?” Caxton sobbed. She wiped at Deanna’s face with a wet washcloth and found a three-inch-long wound along the edge of her chin. It was going to need stitches, even if she could get Deanna to a hospital before she bled to death. Caxton picked the larger slivers of glass out of the cut, but that just made it bleed more. She pulled open the drawer where they kept their scissors and their twine and found a roll of thick masking tape. Lacking any better idea, she stretched a length of it across the cut and pressed down.

  Deanna howled with pain. Her eyes were clenched tightly shut and her knees were up against her chest where she lay on the kitchen floor. Her hands were wrapped up in an old T-shirt that was already soaked through with blood. She had wounds all over the front of her body as well, tiny cuts and big lacerations. Caxton had called 911 and they were sending an ambulance, but the blood kept flowing and flowing.

  “What did he do to you?” Caxton asked again, smearing blood on her own face as she tried to wipe away her tears. If the ambulance didn’t come soon she would lose Deanna, just like she’d lost her mother. It was more than she could bear. “What did he do?”

  “Who?” Deanna wailed. She had been hypnotized, or perhaps was just in shock, when Caxton found her, but now she was recovering herself and the pain was coming. Caxton shushed her and stroked her red hair, but the bleeding just wouldn’t stop. She didn’t know what to do, how to save Deanna. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to scream herself. “Who?” Deanna asked again.

  “The half-dead, the thing in the window,” Caxton gasped.

  “There was nobody—” Deanna paused to howl with pain. “Nobody here. Nobody but me and I—I couldn’t seem to wake up, I was having a dream and I couldn’t, I couldn’t—” She screamed again and Caxton picked her up and held her close. Caxton was crying so hard that she couldn’t see where the blood was and what was clean. “I dreamed you were being crushed under this, this, this heavy stone and your insides were squirting out, all of your blood. I woke up but only halfway, I kept seeing your body torn apart, in pieces, I kept seeing it when I closed my eyes.”

  “Shhh,” Caxton said, and held Deanna closer. Then she worried that if she put pressure on Deanna’s wounds they might reopen. She loosened her grip.

  “I came in here,” Deanna whined, “into the kitchen because I heard something cracking, some glass, some glass was cracking. I went to the window and there was a crack running from the top to the side and there was a drop of blood rolling down from the crack. I couldn’t stand to see that, so I tried to mop up the blood with my hand, but then more blood came and when I pressed, when I pressed on the crack it just split open and there was glass everywhere.” She buried her face in Caxton’s shirt. “There was blood everywhere.”

  In the bedroom something crashed to the floor. Caxton
looked up, alert again with a suddenness that surprised her. A soft voice swore in Spanish, a voice that wasn’t human.

  There was another half-dead, inside the house.

  “Dee, I have to let go for a second,” she whispered. “I have to do something, but you’ll be okay.”

  “No,” Deanna begged.

  “You’ll be okay. The ambulance will be here any minute. Just do whatever the paramedics say, and I’ll be right back.”

  “No, please, please don’t leave me,” Deanna mewled. But there was nothing for it. Caxton gently lowered her back onto the kitchen floor. She checked the tape on Deanna’s cheek and saw that it was starting to peel away. She pushed it back down and it stayed, mostly. She drew her weapon again and glided down the hallway, toward the bedroom.

  “Pumpkin, come back!” Deanna shrieked. “It really hurts!”

  Caxton knew what had to be done, though. She stepped into the bedroom. A half-dead wearing a baseball cap and a football jersey stood next to the closet door. He had knocked over her nightstand, and her clock radio lay in pieces on the hardwood floor.

  “Hostia puta,” he squeaked. He looked from side to side, his flayed arms spread against the wall. It was pretty clear what he planned to do next. He was all the way across the room from the open window. If he could run faster than she, he could easily get away.

  Before he’d taken three steps Caxton knocked his legs out from under him, smashing his upper body down to the floor. He called out, but she sat down hard on his pelvis and lower spine and he could do no more than move his arms and legs along the floor as if he were trying to swim away.

  “What did you do to her?” she asked, as coldly as she could manage. If she lost control now she would just crack his skull and that would be the end of it. Not that she would mind, but she needed information more than she desired revenge. “Tell me and I’ll let you go.”

  “La concha de tu hermana!” the half-dead shouted, wriggling underneath her, trying to break free. She was stronger and it must have known that. It wasn’t going to get away without tearing itself to pieces.

  “You came here looking for me, didn’t you? You wanted me, but you tried to kill Deanna. Why? Why?” She bounced up and down on top of the half-dead until it screamed.

  “I don’t know who you are, lady,” it cried out in English. “I got no idea!”

  “You came here for me. Tell me why.”

  The half-dead shook violently. “If I say something he’ll rip me up.”

  “He who? The vampire, Reyes?” she demanded.

  “I ain’t talking about President Bush, lady!” The half-dead grunted and groaned and rose a fraction of an inch off the floor, lifting her weight at the same time in a supernal act of will. With a gasp of frustration he collapsed again. “Me cago en Jesus y la Virgen, you might as well kill me now and get it over with, huh?”

  Caxton thought about Arkeley and what the Fed would do to get the information. She knew he would torture the half-dead. He would do exactly what the half-dead feared to receive at the hands of the vampire. The half-dead was less afraid of oblivion than of pain. She had said at the time that she would not be able to stand by while Arkeley did that. She couldn’t countenance torture, she’d told him.

  Of course at that point no one had tried to kill Deanna.

  She reached down and grabbed the index finger of the half-dead’s left hand. It felt wrong in her grip, not at all like a human finger. There was no skin on it and very little flesh—it was more like holding an uncooked sparerib. She twisted it with all her strength and it came right off the half-dead’s hand.

  “Coño!” the half-dead screamed, a pure, horrible noise, a sound of perfect pain.

  The disembodied finger wriggled in her hand like a centipede. She threw it away from her. Then she reached down and grabbed the middle finger of the same hand. She gave the half-dead a second to think about what was going to happen, and then, without a word, she tore the middle finger off, too.

  His left hand had nothing but a thumb when he finally spoke. “He told us to come here and pick up whoever we found, that’s all, lady, please, stop now!”

  “Who told you? Efrain Reyes?”

  “Yeah, that’s who! He said to come get you, your tortillera girlfriend, your dogs, anybody who was here. He even told us how, with the hechizo.” She grabbed the thumb and asked what a hechizo was. “It’s a spell, a magic spell, kind of! Hey, lady, I’m telling you what you want to know, be nice, okay?”

  “You hypnotized her? You hypnotized Deanna, is that it?”

  The half-dead struggled again, but he was growing weaker by the minute. He had no blood to spill, but the pain seemed to take the fight out of him. “Yeah, but it only works when she’s asleep and dreaming.”

  “Why us? Why were you sent to this house?”

  “He doesn’t tell us that. He doesn’t fill us in on his big plans, he just says, vamos, and I go. Please, lady, please, I told you all I know.”

  A siren wailed through the walls of the house. Caxton heard doors slamming and people running up to the door. “Alright,” she said. Then she grabbed her pistol and smashed in the back of the half-dead’s skull. He stopped wriggling instantly. Slowly, stiffly, her clothes sticking together where the blood had dried in the folds, she rose from the floor and holstered her weapon. Then she walked into the kitchen and opened the door for the paramedics. On the floor Deanna was curled up in a tight ball, weeping piteously. Her blood was everywhere.

  31.

  A stretcher rolled past Caxton’s face, barely three inches away. It was being pushed at high speed up the main ramp to the emergency room entrance, but to her it seemed to float, unattended, through boundless space, taking its time. The body on the stretcher was just a pile of bloodstained rags. She couldn’t even see a face. But then the body reached out a hand to her. The skin was scorched and falling away in places. Thick clotted blood was smeared across the fingers. She couldn’t even tell if it was a male or female hand.

  Still. She reached out, touched it. The fingers curled around hers, but then the hand was ripped away from her, the stretcher flying up the ramp. Somebody shouted for plasma and she squinted and tried to clear her head.

  She’d been sitting in the hallway for hours and hours with no stimulation except the constant parade of mutilated bodies that flew by. She shouldn’t have been in the hallway at all—there was a waiting room for people like her, complete with six TV sets and a couple hundred pounds of straight women’s magazines—but being a cop had its privileges. Most of the EMTs and nurses who passed by didn’t even give her a second glance; they assumed she was just guarding the entrance. In fact it just let her be a couple hundred feet closer to Deanna. They wouldn’t let her into the operating room or the recovery room. The hallway was as close as she was going to get.

  That hand. It had been like something out of a dream, but she knew it was real. It had touched her. She looked down and saw real blood on her fingers. Her hand smelled like gasoline and shit, a smell she knew all too well. The smell of a really bad car accident. The hand had been real and warm and alive.

  Unlike the half-dead she had tortured and executed on her bedroom floor. Unlike the vampires who were coming to destroy her life.

  Caxton sighed and crossed her arms and waited. She had tried reading a magazine, but she was too distracted. Images and words jumped into her head unbidden. Not even things related to the investigation, not even memories of Deanna, just weird little scraps of thought. She kept wondering if the milk sitting out on the kitchen counter was going to go bad. The kitchen had to be as cold as the outside air, since the window was completely gone. Pretty much anybody could climb in through the hole where the window had been—should she call someone, have them check the house, have them put cardboard, at least, over the window? If she did that, should she ask them to go inside and put the milk back in the fridge?

  She couldn’t shut her mind down. It didn’t work that way. Only sleep could turn off the brain, and
she was a long way from sleep. The banal thoughts, the endless, cycling inanities had their purpose, as excruciating as they were. They kept her from thinking the big thoughts, the real thoughts. The things that scared her.

  Thoughts like the fact that vampires wanted her dead. So badly they would send their minions to kill everyone in her house. Everyone. The half-deads would have killed her dogs, probably, just to be thorough about it.

  Thoughts like, Arkeley had turned his back on her. She couldn’t even count on him to defend her against the dark things that wanted her life. He wasn’t done with her, he had some purpose for her, but she wasn’t going to be an active part of his investigation.

  Thoughts like: Is there really any difference between someone being hypnotized into breaking a window and impaling themselves on broken glass…and someone whose brain chemistry stops working one day, and they hang themselves in their bedroom? Her mother had had a good job and plenty of money. She had a perfectly good daughter to live for, a nice house, partners for bridge, church socials, potluck dinners. Holidays. Family. Vacations. Retirement. Her suicide had been a complete mystery to everyone who knew her. It had been a mistake, really, it had to have been.

  Deanna had nothing to keep her living. No job, family who loathed her for what she was. A partner who cared and who tried but who just didn’t have the time to be there for her. No future. Art that nobody understood.

  Was it still suicide, if you had an excuse? If you were driven to it?

  “Officer,” someone said, nearby. It was like the ghost that had called her in Urie Polder’s barn, a directionless, bodiless voice. “Officer,” the voice said again. Caxton frowned and turned her head. A nurse stood there in bloodstained scrubs, a middle-aged woman with white hair up in a bun on top of her head. She wore heavy gloves, the kind you wear when you wash dishes. “Officer, she’s awake,” the nurse said.