13 Bullets

by David Wellington

  “He used the Silent Rite on me, or at least that’s what Malvern calls it. Just one of a long list of what she calls orisons. Reyes called it a hechizo.” She didn’t mention how she’d learned that word, how she’d tortured a half-dead by pulling his fingers off. She didn’t want Clara to ever know about that. “It’s a spell, or maybe some kind of psychic power. Either way, it’s a violation of the brain. He shoved part of himself in through my eye sockets and took total control of my dreams. He could make me fall asleep against my will, and he kept me in and out of the dream state. He showed me a vision of hell, I guess, and waited for me to commit suicide.”

  “Hmph,” Arkeley said.

  “Something you want to add?” she asked.

  He glared back at her with eyes wide, as if she’d forgotten her place. She supposed she’d never used that tone with him before. It made her want to say “Hmph” herself.

  “I’ve studied every vampire I’ve killed,” he told her. “It’s central to the curse. In Europe every suicide was questionable. They used to have to bury suicides at crossroads, the thinking being that the vampires would be lost when they rose and wouldn’t know the way home. In other times, in other places, they buried suicides with their heads cut off and turned upside down or fired a bullet through the heart.”

  “A silver bullet?” Clara asked.

  “That’s a myth,” Arkeley and Caxton said at once. Another opportunity to glare at each other.

  “The curse drives you to take your own life. Once it’s in you the thought starts gnawing at you. You start thinking that all your problems would just go away if you were dead. That’s the last step in the change, and it’s necessary. He was very clear on that.”

  “Reyes went through this same process, most likely,” Arkeley asked, voice neutral, just looking for data. “And Lares, and Malvern before him.”

  Caxton shook her head. “No. Reyes didn’t require any of the dream magic bullshit. He already wanted to die. Malvern looked into his soul and he said yes, just like that. Congreve—that’s the vampire we killed together—took about three hours to convince. Reyes did him and the other one, the one with docked ears. Congreve was a construction worker. That’s why he picked that site for his ambush. He had a master’s degree in Renaissance music but couldn’t find a job with his degree, so he ended up working construction on a highway project. He hated it, hated everything about his life. Reyes capitalized on that and convinced Congreve to blow his own brains out. It was too hard for Malvern to make happy, healthy people into vampires, so she went looking for real losers. People with nothing to hold them to life.”

  “Jesus,” Clara sighed. “I feel that way half the time.”

  Arkeley ignored her. “The other one. With the mangled ears. Do you have a name?” he asked.

  Caxton thought about it for a second. She bit her lip. It suddenly occurred to her for no reason at all that Clara trusted her and probably wouldn’t even try to stop her if she just reached forward and grabbed the steering wheel and gave it a quick yank to the right. They were driving along the wooded bank of a dry streambed that ran maybe thirty feet down. The New Beetle would crumple like a soda can when it hit the rocks down there.

  She sat back in her seat and pressed her knuckles against the sides of her head and pushed the thought away. It wasn’t her thought, though it had felt like any of the million other things in her head. It was Reyes, the part of Reyes that had colonized her brain. His curse was still trying to destroy her.

  “Scapegrace,” she said, coughing out the name. She had to fight to make Reyes let it go, but once she had the name she had the whole story. “Kevin Scapegrace. He was sixteen years old. Tall but skinny, too scared of his high school to get decent grades. The kids at school picked on him. One of them, an older boy, raped Kevin in the showers during gym class. Kevin was pretty sure that made him gay, and he couldn’t live with himself anymore.” Caxton’s mouth hardened into a tight snarl. “He’d swallowed a bottle of aspirin when Reyes found him. Reyes sat with him while the half-deads raided a drugstore. They brought back a bottle of Valium, and Kevin took that, too. Kevin didn’t really understand what he was being offered. He accused Reyes of raping him, too, and now he hates what he’s become.”

  She looked up and saw Arkeley staring at her. Clara kept glancing back over her shoulder, and her eyes were tougher to meet. They were full of confusion and worry and a little fear.

  “Reyes told you all that, before you killed him?” Arkeley asked, softly, as if he knew the answer already.

  “No,” Caxton replied. She suddenly wished Clara wasn’t there. She licked her lips. “No. After.”

  Arkeley nodded patiently. Damn him. He was going to make her say it out loud. He was going to make her say it in front of Clara. “And how is that possible, Trooper?”

  Caxton closed her eyes. “Because he’s still inside my head.”

  44.

  C lara drove them into the electrical substation, the same place they had originally thought Reyes was using as a lair. It might have been a completely different place the second time. For one thing, she arrived in a car about half as big as the Granola Roller, with no armor and very few weapons. For another thing, she knew the place was empty. Empty of everything except ghosts, anyway.

  Clara stayed in the car while Arkeley led Caxton into the depths of the substation. The day was starting to cloud up and the air had a bitter chill to it. It might snow soon, she thought. As they walked between the switch towers Arkeley gave her a moment to pull her coat tighter, then started in with the questions.

  “You can feel him in there? Even though he’s dead?”

  She shrugged, pulling her collar close around her neck. “It’s difficult to describe. There’s a chunk of him in my head. I get thoughts that I know belong to him, not to me. I can access his memories as if they were my own.”

  “Does he tell you to do things? Do you hear his voice?”

  She almost tripped over her own shadow. No, she didn’t hear Reyes’s voice. But she had heard Arkeley’s, even when he wasn’t there. She wasn’t sure if that made her crazy. “He’s…passive. It’s like he’s gone to sleep in there. Unless I want something from him he keeps to himself. If I do want something, like when you asked me about Kevin Scapegrace, then he wakes up and we fight. I’m winning, so far.”

  Arkeley looked like he could have spat. He didn’t, he was far too cultured for that, she knew. “When Scapegrace and Malvern are dead we’ll take you back to the Polders. They’ll know how to get him out of there.”

  “Seriously?” she asked. The offer was almost kind, something she didn’t expect from Arkeley.

  “When Malvern is dead, yes.”

  She frowned. “I thought you had a court ruling saying you couldn’t just kill her. She can’t be executed.”

  “Not unless she breaks the law. It’s hard to murder anyone when you can’t climb out of your own coffin. If I can get some evidence that she conspired with Reyes and Congreve and Scapegrace, though—if I can pin Bitumen Hollow on her, do you think any judge in this state will refuse me that pleasure?”

  Caxton frowned. She felt a lot of clues fall into place, as if jigsaw puzzle pieces had fallen out of the box and landed perfectly aligned with one another, their tabs already interlocked. She had something. “That’s what this has all been about,” she said.

  “Don’t oversimplify things.”

  “Oh, I think that’s your job, and I wouldn’t dare to step on your toes. For twenty years you’ve kept this case perfectly black and white. No matter what it takes, no matter who says not to, you’ve always wanted to kill Malvern. To finish the job you started in Pittsburgh.” He didn’t stop her. She went on. “You can’t stand the fact that she survived. That you had a chance to destroy her but through simple chemistry she just didn’t burn as fast as the others. You can’t stand the fact that you failed. When the court ruled on her, when they said you couldn’t kill her—that ate you alive, didn’t it? You have a wife. Vesta
Polder said you had a wife. Do you have kids?”

  “Two. My son’s in college, up at Syracuse. My daughter’s an exchange student. She’s in France.” His face fell. He wasn’t even looking at her—his eyes were turned up as if he were reading a note scribbled on the inside of his skull. “No,” he said, “Belgium.”

  “You really had to work for that.” She was being cruel, but she figured Arkeley could take it. “This case is all you have. It’s your life’s work. That’s why you’re such a hardass about it. Why you don’t let anybody help you, because you won’t share the eventual glory.”

  “I work mostly alone, that’s true. It keeps other people from being killed. If you had slept in yesterday the way you were supposed to—”

  She stopped him. “What’s your son’s major? At Syracuse.”

  He didn’t try to answer. He didn’t turn to upbraid her. He just trudged onward, toward the switch house.

  “You’ll do just about anything to get the goods on Malvern, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Anything.” He pulled open the door of the switch house as if he wished he could tear it off its hinges. He turned on a flashlight and handed it to her. He had one of his own. They stepped inside, into almost perfect darkness. Only a diffuse yellow glow came in through the mullioned windows, a dull radiance that illuminated nothing. Caxton played her flashlight beam over massive constructions of coiled copper wire and varnished wooden switches as long and thick as her arm. They were as ornate as bedposts. They had to be the original circuit breakers from when the substation was opened a century earlier.

  “What are we doing in here?” she asked. She shone her light on the floor and saw a trapdoor set in the cement. Just like the one at the steel mill. She didn’t want to go down through it. She really didn’t want to. “What’s down there?”

  He pointed his flashlight at her face. “You tell me,” he said, his voice totally blank.

  Maybe he was just being cruel to get back at her for questioning his private life. Maybe he really wanted to know.

  “We were right, weren’t we?” she asked. “Reyes did use this place as a lair. Before he moved to the mill.” That much was guesswork. For anything more she needed to ask the vampire in her head. She sighed and closed her eyes. Arkeley moved his light away and she was in total darkness. She reached down into the darkest corner of her brain—and felt a pale hand grab for her. It was just a metaphor, though, and she easily slipped out of the ghost’s grasp. “He spent a lot of lonely nights down there. Thinking. Planning. This is where he decided to trap one of us. Malvern didn’t like the idea, but he thought it would be funny. He also knew that you and I were responsible for Congreve’s death.” She opened her eyes, but all she saw were colorful spills of light, phosphor afterimages. The things the eye sees when there is no other input. “He told Malvern he wanted to catch one of us and take us apart. It would be funny, and it would make them safe again. I imagine he probably would have preferred to get you, since you were the one who did the actual killing.”

  “Imagine again,” Arkeley said. His clothing rustled as he moved in the dark. He lifted the trapdoor and she heard echoes roll up from below.

  She pointed her light down the stairs and forced herself to proceed. At the bottom she stood in a wide space full of damp air that smelled of mildew and decaying leaves and something fouler but fainter. She swung her beam around and saw bodies.

  Dead bodies—lots of them. It was worse than the hunting camp. These bodies hung from the ceiling by their feet, their arms dangling down, water running across their fingers to the floor. They were fixed to the walls, held in place with giant iron staples that had rusted over time. They crouched in the corners as if hiding from the light, as if they would raise their rotting arms to protect themselves if she approached. They were wired in place, held in position.

  In the center of the room a pair of bodies took pride of place. They were clearly meant as the masterpiece of the collection. They were both female and their skin was pale white, mottled with dark spots where fluids had gathered after they died. One was missing an arm, but otherwise they were still intact. Their hair had been yanked out of their scalps. They were locked in an intimate embrace, kissing.

  No, no they weren’t. Caxton moved closer for a better look. They weren’t just kissing. Their lower faces had been fused together, the lips and teeth cut away so they were like Siamese twins joined at the mouth.

  “Tell me if I’m wrong. But I think he wanted to capture you, specifically,” Arkeley said. “I think you turned him on.”

  The sight failed to make her sick. She wanted to throw up, but her body wasn’t in the mood. Her emotions weren’t altogether her own. She wanted to have a visceral reaction to that much death. Reyes wouldn’t let her. He was proud of what he’d achieved. And whatever he felt, she felt too. Seeing the bodies brought him back to life, a little. He curled inside her, excited to see his old home again. “I need to get out of here,” she told Arkeley. Not because she wanted to flee in revulsion. Because she kind of liked what she was seeing.

  “What was Reyes planning? What was his next step?” Arkeley asked her. He wanted the vampire to wake up, to surge inside of Caxton. This identification between herself and Reyes was just another tool for him. He thought it would make it easier for her to remember Reyes’s plans. And it did, though the plans she recalled were from an earlier time, when he’d first learned of Laura Caxton’s existence.

  He had targeted her. She didn’t have to fight at all for that piece of information. Reyes wanted her to play back that particular memory, as if it were a favorite record. Reyes had specifically gone after her, Pennsylvania State Trooper Laura Caxton, regardless of what he might have told Malvern. He hadn’t really cared about removing the vampire killers. He’d wanted her, her body. When he had learned she was a lesbian, when his half-deads had gone to her house and seen her sleeping with Deanna (oh God, what had they seen? How many nights had they stood outside the windows and watched the two of them sleep?), he had become sexually aroused.

  Vampires, she now knew, weren’t supposed to think of living humans as sexual beings. It was like a human wanting to fuck a cow. But Reyes had become obsessed with her. He had remembered all those men’s magazines he used to read when he was alive. He had always liked the girl-on-girl portfolios. They always got him hot. He would imagine them sucking each other off, desperate for a real man to come along and show them what they were missing. If he made her a vampire, then perhaps he could fuck her. Perhaps she would want to fuck him.

  That memory, finally, was enough to make her sick. “Let me out of here,” she screamed. She spun around and the bodies looked back at her, their dead eyes all focused on her face. How they had worshipped Reyes. Or feared him, yes, they all feared him, it was the last thing to pass through their faces, that fear. Reyes had loved that.

  “What was his next move?” Arkeley asked. He stood in front of the stairs. “Was he going to make more vampires? Was he going to wait until he had four, to bring blood to Malvern? Where is Scapegrace right now?”

  She shook her head. “Let me out,” Caxton said. The bones. The bones of the dead—death itself. Death called to her, her own death, suicide, the death of others, murder. Reyes stretched inside her brain like a predatory cat, languid, pleased with what he had created. No, there was no creation in that cellar. Pleased with what he had destroyed. “Let me out! Get away from me,” Caxton howled, unsure who she was talking to—the Fed or the vampire. “Leave me alone!”

  45.

  U p above ground, leaning against the side of Clara’s Volkswagen, Caxton rubbed at her face over and over, trying to make sense of things. She wanted to throw up but kept thinking she would vomit up clotted blood, just as Reyes had. She wanted to sit down, but she knew if she did she wouldn’t ever want to stand up again.

  “The only reason I’m alive,” she said, muttering to Arkeley, “is because I happened to fit into some vampire’s kink. Not just any vampire. A dep
raved vampire.” She tried to stop breathing. Her body freaked out, panicked, made her hyperventilate.

  Vampires didn’t breathe, of course. They were dead things and they didn’t need to breathe. Living things, like state troopers, needed to breathe a lot.

  “His curse is alive,” she sighed. “His curse is alive in me.”

  Clara pushed a paper bag into her hands. Caxton realized that Clara must have been talking to her, but she couldn’t hear her. She couldn’t hear anything. She breathed into the bag and slowly, slowly, she calmed down. She felt things slow down all around her. She felt the air on her skin and smelled fruit, maybe strawberries.

  She took the bag away from her face. “Strawberries?” she asked.

  Clara’s forehead wrinkled. “Strawberries and kiwi fruit, and a cup of unsweetened yogurt. How…how did you know what I had for breakfast?” The look on her face verged on fear.

  Caxton waved it away. “I’m not psychic.” She crinkled the bag in her fingers. “I just have a good nose.” They laughed together. That helped. It helped an awful lot, actually.

  “When you’ve stopped panicking, let me know,” Arkeley said. “So we can go back down there.”

  With her eyes closed Caxton could pretend that Arkeley wasn’t really there. That he was just in her head again. Then he had to talk again and ruin it.

  “I can wait until tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that Scapegrace will still be too full to hunt tonight. I’d say, eighty percent sure. Which means that there’s only a twenty percent chance he’ll tear someone’s throat out because you were too scared to help me.”

  She opened her eyes and saw Clara standing not two feet from the Fed.