13 Bullets

by David Wellington

  Suddenly they were everywhere.

  Shadows detached from the trees, pale shapes darted around them like wolves circling to the attack. No warnings were given this time, no cryptic messages to draw them out. A half-dead whirled out of the dark, a six-inch knife in his hand, and Caxton smashed him across the face with her weapon. He went down, but not before three more sprang out at her. “There are too many!” she shouted. “We need to get out of here!”

  “Go!” the Fed yelled back, though he was only three feet away. “Go now!”

  Caxton broke away from Arkeley and dashed to the side of the kennels, intent on at least getting something behind her. Otherwise they might sneak up on her. She expected Arkeley to run for cover as well, to protect himself.

  He didn’t.

  The Fed dropped into a firing crouch and moved out into the open space between the kennels and the house. His gun arm stood straight out from his body and swung back and forth like a weathervane as he tracked some assailant she couldn’t see. He squeezed the trigger, and bright fire leaped from his barrel. To her side, just inches from her left shoulder, a half-dead slipped downward to writhe in agony on the ground.

  Arkeley spun and fired again—and a third time. Shadows howled and flopped in the darkness, but more of them appeared as if emerging from out of the night, as if they’d dropped from the moon-colored clouds. One leaped onto his back and bit at his neck with sharp teeth. He smashed its nose with his free fist and knocked it away. Another rolled into his legs, dropping him to one knee. He shot her in the chest and she jerked backward.

  A half-dead grabbed Arkeley’s gun arm and twisted. He yelped in pain—Arkeley, of all people, cried out in pain. The half-dead must have caught him completely off his guard.

  But Caxton had her own concerns. The half-deads were coming for her, too, though with far less force and in fewer numbers. Clearly they didn’t consider her to be a threat on Arkeley’s level. She found herself almost disappointed.

  She fired at a dark shape that lunged down across the roof of the kennels, and it fell to the ground with a hiss of exhausted breath. She kicked it in the legs and felt its flesh yield. Another half-dead reached down to grab her shoulders. She lifted her gun and fired without even looking.

  “Go!” Arkeley shouted again. She looked over in his direction but could barely see him. He was surrounded on every side by Scapegrace’s servants. She discharged her weapon over and over, trying to thin out the crowd, even as she dashed out, away from the kennels. Arkeley was about to be overrun and she knew it, but there was very little she could do. She couldn’t save him—she didn’t have enough bullets. Her only hope was to get away herself and find some backup.

  The problem was that she wasn’t sure where to go next. The driveway led straight out to the road and the possibility of help. Any police response would come from that direction, assuming she lived long enough for anyone to arrive. Arkeley had said there were half-deads stationed out there, however. They would almost certainly be laying in wait.

  Instead she turned to the back of the drive, to where a ten-foot privacy fence cut through the trees. She got a foot in between two of the boards and lunged up and grabbed at the branches that protruded over the top. Adrenaline carried her up and over and she slid down the trees on the other side, branches whipping at her face and digging up long scrapes on her hands and arms. She rolled down a steep embankment and into the parking lot of the elementary school next door. In the moonlight the black asphalt sparkled.

  She heard gunfire from the other side of the fence. One shot—two more. Then nothing. She tried to breathe normally, tried to control her urge to panic. Arkeley was probably dead, but it didn’t change her situation.

  The trees by the fence shivered and their dry leaves whispered as they rubbed together. Two half-deads were climbing up after her. Chasing her. They would be on her in a second.

  She checked her weapon. She had only one round left. She was better off saving it, she decided. She climbed to her feet and ran.

  The school building was low and rectangular, a black edge in the night that guided her. She didn’t know if half-deads could see in total darkness or not. Vampires could see your blood glowing in the gloom, but what about their servants? It was one of the many things she should have asked Arkeley back when she’d had the chance.

  Back when he was still alive.

  Guilt dripped down her spine as she dashed around a corner and up a short stairway. She could feel guilt and run at the same time. Ahead of her lay a backstop and a chain-link fence, the pale dirt of a baseball diamond. She dashed through a narrow gap in the fence and slid in a patch of mud. There were trees ahead of her. Not such a big surprise. There were trees everywhere in Pennsylvania. They might give her a little cover, she decided. They might shield her from half-dead eyes. She slipped between them and realized her mistake almost instantly. You can’t run at night in a forest, or at least, you can’t run very far. No matter how dark a night might look, it’s ten times darker under a forest canopy. Unable to see, she could run right into a hardwood trunk or trip over exposed roots. She had a flashlight in her pocket, but turning it on would give away her position instantly.

  Without light she could break her neck, or worse, break a leg. She could end up immobilized but still conscious, unable to walk and forced to wait for the half-deads to find her. She needed to get out of the woods—but going back was out of the question.

  Ahead of her she saw a patch of wan radiance and headed toward it, her hands outstretched, feeling her way forward. Her boots shuffled forward spasmodically, just waiting to be trapped by thick underbrush or sucked down into a puddle of mud.

  The light revealed a clearing maybe fifty yards on a side and strangely regular in shape. A few thin saplings grew there, but mostly it was covered with overgrown grass, yellow and thin with the season. She stepped out of the woods and into the relatively bright space, relief flooding through her body, and then she tripped over a rock. The hard, half-frozen ground connected with her chin and her teeth smashed together with a horrible clinking sound.

  She struggled onto her side, then sat up and looked behind her. The stone she’d tripped over was pale, almost ghostly white in the moonlight. It was rough on top but straight on the sides, worn down by wind and rain over the course of centuries, but once, long ago, it must have been straight and smooth. A slab of rock planted upright in the soil. Like a gravestone.

  She had stumbled right into an abandoned cemetery.

  50.

  W hen she knew what to look for it was obvious. The low stones were badly eroded, ground down by time’s wheel until they were just tall enough to trip over. She could see where they made neat rows, however, and at the far end of the clearing she could see twisted bars of metal, the remains of a pair of wrought iron gates.

  There were little graveyards like this all over the Pennsylvania countryside, Caxton knew. Developers hated them because they were legally required to move the bodies if they wanted to tear up the land. More often than not they just left them in place. It was no great shock to find one in the woods behind her house. There must have been a church nearby in some past decade or century, but it had been burned or pulled down since. There was nothing to fear from the graves, she told herself—vampires slept in coffins, yes, but they didn’t bury themselves in ancient churchyards just for the ambience.

  Something snapped maybe ten yards from her head. A fallen branch or maybe a crust of frost on the ground. It could have just been a cat or a deer—or it could have just been a branch finally giving way.

  Caxton froze anyway. Her entire body craned toward her ears, her whole brain tuned up in anticipation of the next sound.

  It came in a series of tiny pops, like a string of firecrackers going off but much, much softer. Perhaps something had trod on a carpet of pine needles. Caxton lowered herself inch by inch until she was lying flat on the ground, trying to make herself small, trying to make herself invisible.

  “Did you
see that?” someone warbled. It was the squeaky voice of a half-dead. After a moment she half-heard a muttered reply.

  She cursed herself for lying down, for moving at all. In the darkness, if she’d been perfectly still, maybe they would have walked right past her.

  She had one bullet left in her Beretta. The flesh of half-deads was rotten and soft and she could probably beat another one to pieces. If there were three of them, however, or if they were faster than she expected, it would all be over.

  She tensed her body, ready to strike upward if anyone came close. She would try her best to destroy them, if there were two of them. If there were three, or more, she would shoot herself in the heart. It would prevent her from being raised as a vampire.

  “There, what’s that?” a half-dead asked.

  There were two of them. There had to be two. She prayed there were two.

  Then she heard a third voice.

  “You two, leave us alone,” someone else said, someone who had to be standing right behind her. She rolled over and looked up into a pale silhouette with a round head. It wore a pair of tight jeans and a black T-shirt. Its ears were dark and ragged-looking.

  Scapegrace.

  Caxton brought her pistol up and fired her last round point blank into the vampire’s chest. The bullet tore through his shirt, then pranged off into the trees. It didn’t even scratch his white body. She hadn’t really expected to kill him—even in the dark she could see the pinkish glow of fresh blood moving beneath his skin—but at the least she’d expected to make him turn and snarl. He didn’t even laugh at her. He just crouched down next to her and touched the grave marker she’d tripped over. He didn’t look at her or touch her.

  She tried to ask a question but her throat kept closing up. “What…what are you going to…”

  “Don’t talk to me,” he said. “Don’t say anything unless I speak to you first. I can kill you,” he added. “I can kill you instantly. If you try to run away I can catch you. I’m much faster than I used to be. But I want to bring you in alive. I mean, those are my orders. I think you know what She wants. I’ve also been told that if I hurt you a little, that’s okay. That it might even help.”

  He faced her, then, and she had a bad shock when she saw how young he looked. Scapegrace had been a child when he killed himself. A teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen at the most. His body was still painfully skinny and hunched. Death hadn’t made him a grownup overnight. He still looked like a little boy.

  “Please don’t look at me like that,” he said to her. “I hate it.”

  Caxton turned her face away hurriedly. She knew her own features had to be wracked by fear. Snot was running across her upper lip and cold sweat was breaking out on her forehead.

  “I can see some things in the dark, but I can’t read this,” he told her, running his fingers across the headstone. The lettering there had mostly worn away, but here and there an angle or a fragment of a curved inscription could still be seen. “Maybe you can read it better. Read it to me.”

  Her throat shuddered and she thought she might throw up. She fought her body until it was back under her control. She couldn’t quite read the letters, but maybe it would help to feel them, she thought, to trace them with her fingertips. Trembling fear lanced up her forearm as she ran one finger across the face of the stone. She could make out a little:

  ST PH N DELANC JU 854–JULY 1854

  She told him what she had discovered. “I think—I think it says Stephen Delancy, died July 1854. The date of birth is h-h-harder to m-m-make out,” she chattered.

  Caxton felt as if someone were pouring cold water over her back. It had to be at least partially the weird feeling she always got around vampires, the cold sensation that she got standing next to Malvern’s coffin or whenever Reyes had touched her. But most of that skin-crawling horror had to come from the fact that at any moment he could kill her. Tear her to pieces before she could even raise her arms to ward him off.

  “Do you think he was born in June or July? Did he live for a full month or only a few days?” Scapegrace knelt down beside her and ran a hand across the gravestone as if he were caressing the face of the infant buried below. “I guess there’s one way to find out.”

  “No!” she screamed, as he dug his pale fingers into the soil and started tearing out clods of earth. She threw herself at his back and beat on his neck with her empty pistol. Finally she got a reaction out of him.

  Turning from his kneeling posture, he grabbed her around the waist and slung her away from him. The empty Beretta flew out of her hand and into the darkness. She couldn’t see where it went because she was too busy reeling across the graveyard. She tumbled backwards, her feet kicking at the ground point-pointlessly. She came down hard across another gravestone, this one nothing more than a stub of rock sticking out of the ground like a decayed tooth. Her elbow collided with the stone and wild pain leaped up and down her arm. She didn’t think she’d broken anything—just hit her funny bone.

  Scapegrace had made a hole three feet deep by the time she could stand again. The bones and cartilage of her hand still thrummed with agony, but she was going to be okay. She found herself crying, though, as he lifted a wooden box out of the ground. She couldn’t stand it—between the fear and the horror of what he was doing, she thought she was going to start screaming, that she would run away even though she consciously knew he would just chase her down.

  The box was of some light-colored wood, maybe pine, riddled with worm casts. It was decayed so badly that she couldn’t tell if it had originally been ornate or plainly made. The baby-sized coffin broke apart in Scapegrace’s hands, though he was clearly trying to be gentle with it. He brushed away the fragments of pulpy wood and the dirt and sediment that had collected around the body inside.

  “My family had a big funeral for me,” he told her. “I could kind of see what was happening, like I was a ghost floating around the ceiling of the church. Everybody from my school was there and they walked past and looked down at my face and some of them cried, and some of them said things. Sometimes it was people I didn’t even know. Girls who would never have talked to me in the hall, not even if they needed a pen and I had a spare one. Some of them were really upset, like they finally understood what it was like, what they had done to me. That was kind of awesome. Nobody would touch me, though.” Gently, with his thumb, he brushed debris away from the tiny body.

  “Please,” Caxton said, the word strained and stretched as it came out of her. “Please. Please.” He didn’t strike her but he didn’t stop what he was doing, either. He shook the coffin a little and debris and dirt and other matter fell away. Vomit surged up her throat and she turned to the side, ashamed to show such disrespect but unable to stop herself from throwing up right then and there.

  “When you’re on the other side of it, death just isn’t scary anymore. Actually, it becomes kind of fascinating. A lot of being a vampire is like that. It totally changes your perspective.” He held something round in his left hand, something about the size of an apple. With a half twist he removed it from the coffin. The rest of the infant’s remains went back in the hole and he kicked dirt over them. Then he turned around and showed her what he’d found.

  It was the skull. Stephen Delancy’s skull, which had been buried for a hundred and fifty years. “Look,” he told her. “He was only a few days old when he died.” He showed her the skull. It was packed full of dirt and smeared with dried fluids. It was horrible to behold, sickening. “Maybe he was never really born.” He considered the baby-sized cranium at length. “This will work,” he said. He rubbed at the skull with his thumbs and then stared deeply into its eye sockets as he chanted softly. She didn’t understand the words—she wasn’t even sure they were words he was speaking.

  When he finished he closed his eyes and then held out one hand, the skull balanced on his white palm. After a moment the skull began to vibrate. She could see it blur with motion. A sound leaked out of it, a kind of wailing moan it couldn’t
possibly make on its own—it didn’t even have a lower jaw. The scream grew louder and louder until she wanted to clamp her hands over her ears. Instead Scapegrace pressed it against her hands. “Take it,” he said, and she could hear him just fine over the shrieking. “Go on—my ears are more sensitive than yours. Take it!”

  She took it in her hands and the screaming stopped instantly.

  “I’m going to take you with me, back to Her lair. I need you to behave, though. So we’re going to play a little game. You’re going to hold Stephen in both of your hands, because that’s the only way to keep him quiet. Nod for me so I know you understand.”

  She shuddered. It made her head bob on her neck as if it weren’t fully attached. She wrapped both hands around the skull. Something moved and chittered inside, some insect hidden in the dirt that filled the baby’s sinus cavity. She moaned a little, but she didn’t drop the skull.

  “Now you take good care of that. If you take your hands away from it or if you drop it or if you crush it because you’re holding it too hard, I’ll hear it scream. Then I’ll have to hurt you. Really, really badly.” He squinted his red eyes and stared shrewdly into her face. “I’ll break your back. You know I can do that, right?”

  She nodded again. Her whole body trembled.

  “Okay, Laura,” he said. “Now move.”

  51.

  S capegrace led her out of the woods and back to the parking lot of the elementary school. She scanned the surrounding area with her eyes, desperately hoping someone would see them and call the police. No luck, though. She and Deanna had picked the place because it was out in the middle of the woods. Plenty of space for the shed and the kennels. Nobody around to complain about the sometimes bizarre noises greyhounds made. At night there was nobody around at all.

  A car, a late-model white sedan, waited for them in the lot, its engine idling, its lights on. Doctor Hazlitt sat in the driver’s seat, looking nervous.