13 Bullets

by David Wellington

  “No.” No, no, no, she thought. “No.”

  “Yes.” Deanna reached out and grabbed Caxton’s shoulders. Hard enough to pinch. Maybe even to hurt a little. She really wanted to convince Caxton that she was telling the truth. “Congreve sent him to find you, and bring you to him, so you and I could do this together.”

  “No,” Caxton said again.

  “Yes. Because I was scared to do it alone. And because Reyes wanted a matching pair of us. I was so confused when you woke me up that night as if nothing had happened. Then you scared away the half-dead. The one assigned to you.”

  No, Caxton thought, but she couldn’t say it. If she said it, she thought, it might come out as a yes. Because she saw it could be exactly as Deanna said. It could be. But it wasn’t. Because if it was, if Deanna had been cursed that whole time and Caxton hadn’t even noticed, if she’d failed Deanna that badly—

  “This whole thing, all the pain and suffering, was about me. And if you had just tried to talk to me, if you had just stayed with me that night I hurt myself—we could have been—we could have done it together—”

  “No!” Caxton shrieked. She just wanted it to stop. She wanted it all to stop. She pulled out the Glock 23 and fired her last three rounds into Deanna’s chest, one two three.

  The noise obliterated all words. If only for an instant.

  Then Caxton looked down at what she’d done. The white silk dress was scorched and torn but the skin underneath wasn’t even singed. Deanna was completely unhurt.

  “Oh God—you’ve fed tonight,” Caxton wailed.

  “You’re my girlfriend. You’re supposed to want to be with me forever, no matter what! We’re supposed to want the same things. Why is this so hard for you?”

  The fingers on Caxton’s shoulder compressed like an industrial vise. Caxton could hear the bones in her shoulder creak and start to pop.

  “Don’t you love me anymore?” Deanna demanded.

  58.

  D eanna’s fingers dug into Caxton’s flesh like iron knives. Deanna’s fingernails were just as short as they’d been in life, but still they tore through Caxton’s jacket and shirt as if they were razor blades. In a moment they would break the skin.

  And what would happen then? Deanna was already enraged. If she saw fresh human blood would she even stop to consider what she and Caxton had once meant to each other? Caxton was pretty sure she wouldn’t.

  She struggled to pull away, twisting her shoulders to the left and then the right. Deanna’s face was a mask of anguish, her eyes wide, her jaw hanging open. All those teeth gleamed even in the minimal light of the invalid ward. Deanna’s head was moving backwards, rearing to strike at Caxton’s neck. The motion was painfully slow, perhaps unconscious. When it was complete Caxton would be dead. She’d watched Hazlitt die like that. She’d seen plenty of vampire victims.

  Her arms and hands began to tremble. The death grip on her shoulders was cutting off her circulation. The empty Glock fell from her hand and banged noisily on an iron bedframe.

  Caxton gritted her teeth and focused every ounce of strength she had into pulling away, tearing herself out of the grip. Her jacket came off in long flopping pieces and she tumbled backwards, tripping on the bedframe, her arms flying wide to try to catch herself. Deanna seemed to loom up over her, as if she were growing even taller or as if she could fly up over Caxton’s head. She was going to strike from above. Caxton rolled to the side.

  The vampire’s weight came down on the bedframe with a grinding, screaming noise of metal being twisted out of shape. Caxton was already rolling to a crouch and then up to her feet. Adrenaline made her feel like she weighed nothing at all, as if she’d been hollowed out and filled with air.

  She didn’t turn to look at Deanna. She just ran.

  She ran without even bothering to turn on her flashlight. Her foot grazed a bedframe and she might have fallen down, but fear lifted her back up. She slammed painfully into the double doors at the far side of the invalid ward, her hip connecting with the push bar. The doors grated open and she rushed through.

  Deanna was behind her, one hand reaching to grab the door almost before Caxton reached the hallway beyond. Caxton swiveled around sideways and ran down the hall with her mouth open, her breath bursting in and out of her body. Before she could find another doorway, Deanna smashed into her back, spilling her across the floor. Caxton got back up by sheer willpower and kept running.

  Another door. The room beyond was lined with moldy tiles. She couldn’t see more than three feet in front of her face. She sensed something wrong with the room, as if it didn’t have enough walls or as if the floor was sloping downwards—something—yes, it was the floor. There was something about the floor. She stopped short and fell back to hug the wall.

  Deanna came bursting through the door like a pale comet blazing through limitless space. Her face was wide open, her mouth craned back to swallow Caxton whole. She looked in the gloom as if she were flying, truly flying—and then abruptly she disappeared from view.

  Caxton tried to get some breath back into her body, but there didn’t seem to be enough air in the world to fill the demand. The beginning of a splitting headache lit up the back of her skull as her brain shouted for more oxygen, more adrenaline, more endorphins, more anything. She pushed herself harder and harder against the wall as if it could absorb her, as if the tiles could part and let her inside, into a hiding place.

  Deanna screamed in thwarted rage. The noise rolled around the room, reverberating strangely.

  Caxton lifted her Maglite and switched it on. She played it across the grimy tiles, trying to understand what was happening. Five feet ahead of her, the floor stopped short. Had she kept running forward when she entered the room, she would have fallen into that pit. She looked at the door she’d come through and her light picked out faded black letters painted there: POOL ROOM.

  The pool room—she’d heard Tucker mention it, once. She carefully folded up the twinge of guilt she felt for Tucker’s death and scanned the room, looking to see where Deanna might have gone. She sniffed the air. Any scent of chlorine was long gone, and she was pretty sure the pool had dried up. She did smell something nasty and unnatural, though, something that made her nose wrinkle. It was the smell of a vampire. Wherever Deanna had gone, she was still nearby. Close enough to strike at any second. Was she playing some kind of game? Caxton didn’t think so.

  She had to know more. But she didn’t want to move away from the wall. It felt as if her body had adhered to the tiles. She took one cautious step closer to the edge of the pool and pointed her light down over the concrete lip.

  There was a sheer ten-foot drop to the bottom of the pool. Down there she saw tiles, more tiles, endless rows of them. They had been white and smooth once, but the black mold that had devoured the grout between them had spread across the crazed surface. Time and water had shattered some of the tiles and left the floor of the pool littered with tiny sharp fragments. A standing puddle of dark scum filled one corner of the pool. A little to the left she saw a massive bronze drain, completely black with tarnish. Caxton moved her light slowly across the bottom of the pool. She had to know, she couldn’t just—

  Deanna leaped up and nearly snatched the light out of her hand. Her jaws snapped at empty air and she fell back to land on her feet like a predatory cat. She stared up at Caxton with a look of pure and utterly simplistic hatred. There was a smudge of dark muck down the front of her white dress. She had run right through the door, ready to grab Caxton and kill her and feed on her blood. She hadn’t looked where she was going and she’d fallen into the pool.

  Caxton stepped back, away from the edge.

  Time to run again.

  She pushed through the door and back out into the hall. She estimated she had ten or maybe fifteen seconds before Deanna found a ladder or climbed up out of the shallow end of the pool. She couldn’t count on any more time than that. With her light on this time, she retraced her steps. She had no intention of going
back to the invalid ward, though.

  It took her three or four seconds to find the door she wanted, the one marked CONSERVATORY. She pushed it open and emerged into moonlight so bright it dazzled her eyes.

  Behind her she heard Deanna screaming in frustrated rage once more. It wouldn’t be long, now, she told herself. She had better be ready.

  59.

  T he first thing she had to do was make a choice. It wasn’t an easy one. She had to decide she was going to kill Deanna. It didn’t matter what they’d been. It didn’t matter who had failed whom. She asked herself what Arkeley would say and knew he would say that Deanna was unnatural. A monster.

  That didn’t help nearly as much as she wanted it to. She could still love a monster, she knew, if she let herself. She could learn to love Deanna again, she could forgive her for what she’d done, and it wouldn’t even be that hard. But it looked like she wasn’t going to get the chance. Deanna would kill her unless she killed Deanna first. Her decision was made. She would kill Deanna if she could.

  The second thing she had to do was figure out how.

  The conservatory she’d finally found had once been a long, two-story space where brick walkways wound between tables and espaliers and giant flowerpots. The walls and the sloped roof had been constructed of wide panels of plate glass, held in place by a framework of steel girders. It must have been a lovely place once, she thought, a refuge for the dying patients. A place for them to get out of their beds and get some sun. Time and weather had changed the greenhouse, however. The plants had either died or flourished far beyond what the inmates might have ever hoped for. Vines crawled up the glass walls, choking off the grimy panes, littering the brick floor with curled brown debris. The far end of the conservatory had been smashed in altogether, perhaps by one of the violent storms that swept through the ridges of Pennsylvania from time to time. Yellow caution tape had been strung back there, tied from one girder to another to keep the staff out. She could see why—long spears of broken glass were there, lined up and stood on end, maybe by the same workers who had abandoned all that plaster compound and lumber outside the invalid ward.

  Caxton needed a weapon. She waved her light around and found a piece of a steel stanchion that had once secured a trellis. It looked half rusted and like it might come loose with a couple of kicks. With a rage born of fear and desperation, she knocked it loose with her boot. She grabbed it up and immediately felt better, even though she knew her sense of security was an illusion. She had a steel bar the length of a riot-control baton with one jagged, wicked-looking end.

  Next she needed to secure the door. She saw a terra-cotta pot the size of a refrigerator that she thought she might be able to use as a barricade. She went to grab it, knowing it would take every ounce of her strength to move it, when the door slapped open and Deanna came roaring through.

  She was twenty feet away—and then she was right next to Caxton. Her pale arm lashed out like a camera flashbulb going off. Caxton’s face went hot with pain, and her ears rang as if her head were a bell that had just been struck. She felt herself falling, tumbling backwards. Her nose ached almost immediately and she wondered if it was broken. She struggled not to fall over and then, when that appeared hopeless, she struggled to catch herself on her hands.

  Deanna reached down, and even before she’d struck the ground Caxton was jerked back up into the air. Deanna punched her in the stomach and her breath flew out of her. Nausea wracked her body and she felt like she was going to throw up. Deanna’s hand came down on her forearm. She felt the bones there creak and rub together unnaturally. She lost control of her hand and her pathetic metal bar went flying, skittering across the rough brick floor.

  Caxton couldn’t have kept standing if she’d been propped up. She dropped to her knees, knocking them badly, and grabbed at her stomach, feeling as if she’d been disemboweled. Deanna hadn’t cut her at all, though. There wasn’t a drop of blood on her, not even from her nose, which was hotly numb and sprained at the very least. She was in horrible pain and felt like she would never stand up again. But she wasn’t bleeding.

  Deanna had thought through her attack. She’d been careful to keep Caxton in one piece. “What do you want from me?” Caxton sputtered.

  “You know what we want. You know what She wants.” Deanna squatted down in front of Caxton and folded her arms across her out-jutting knees. “We want you to kill yourself and get this over with.”

  “That’s what she wants,” Caxton replied. “I asked what you want, Dee.”

  Deanna laid her head on her arms and looked away. She had to think about it. “This is just a little spat, what you and I are having right now. We can get over it and make up. I still love you. I still want to be with you. But there’s no way that can happen as long as you’re still human. So I want you to kill yourself, too.”

  Considering the way she felt right then, it didn’t sound so bad. It would be an end to all the pain and all the fear. “I would resent you forever,” she said. “I would hate you for what you’d turned me into.”

  Deanna smiled sadly. “No, I’m sorry, but that’s not true. Maybe at first you would be upset. But then you would get hungry. You would want the blood more than you hated me. Once you tasted it—well, once I tasted it I knew that this isn’t a curse. I don’t care, Pumpkin, if I’m going to get old and withered. I don’t care about how bad the blood tastes. When I felt how strong it made me I didn’t care about anything else. It’ll be the same for you. I promise.”

  Caxton was pretty sure Deanna was telling the truth.

  “But I’m so scared, Dee,” she admitted. “You know about my mom.” A tear gathered in the corner of her eye, but she squeezed it back. Too much.

  Deanna reached forward and stroked Caxton’s hair. “I know. I know you’re scared. But it only takes a second.” She grabbed Caxton’s arms and lifted her up to her feet. “Come on. I’ll help you.”

  “No,” Caxton said. “Let me do it myself.” She was still shaky, but she’d recovered enough to walk. She stepped over to where her iron bar lay on the bricks. “Let’s go over here in the moonlight,” she said. “I can’t do it in a dark place.”

  Deanna’s smile was perfectly pure and innocent.

  Caxton walked up to the caution tape and lifted her bar. Deanna had hurt her pretty badly but had been careful not to spill a drop of blood. Caxton wasn’t sure why, but she knew that had to be important. “Maybe I should do it like this,” she said, and dragged the sharp end of the bar across her left wrist.

  “Pumpkin, no,” Deanna breathed, raising one hand to stop Caxton. Then she dropped the hand and just stared.

  A line of ragged pain ran across her arm. A razor blade would have made a neater incision, but the wound wouldn’t have bled so much. Caxton watched dark blood surge up inside the wound, filling the narrow channel in her flesh. It welled up and over the edges of the cut and spilled down her wrist. A drop splashed on the bricks, black in the moonlight.

  “Oh, Pumpkin,” Deanna said. She stared at the blood on Caxton’s arm.

  “What? Am I doing it wrong?” Caxton asked. Congreve, she remembered, had been unconscious, hurt, down on the ground and passed out, and a single drop of her blood had revived him. It had been like a shot of adrenaline pumped right into his heart. Reyes had tortured and damaged her, but he had never broken her skin.

  Maybe they were afraid of the blood, as much as they wanted it. Maybe the blood made them crazy. Maybe it made them lose control.

  Deanna’s mouth was wide open. Her feet kicked at the bricks. A moment later she was running, her arms outstretched, her eyes closed as her jaws worried thin air. She almost seemed to be airborne. Her feet barely touched the ground and she moved as fast as a galloping horse, homing in on the blood.

  Caxton timed it perfectly. She dropped to the ground and rolled to the left, and Deanna went right past her, moving too fast to stop easily.

  With a crunching noise the vampire collided with the upright spears of glass, h
er arms flailing, trying to find something to hold onto, to stop her impact. Shattered glass filled the air like spinning, falling snow.

  The sound…the sound was unearthly. A scream broken into pieces. A million tiny bells ringing.

  A living human being would have been shredded. Deanna stood up slowly, her dress hanging in tatters from her limbs. Her skin was a maze of blood, dark, dead blood dripping away, rolling down her arms and legs. She tried to grab at it with her hands. She licked herself like a cat, trying to reabsorb all that lost blood.

  It wouldn’t work. “It has to be fresh.” Caxton said. “It has to be warm.”

  Deanna looked up with red, confused eyes. She didn’t understand what had just happened to her. Then she saw Caxton’s dripping wrist and her mouth opened involuntarily. She took a step forward—and a jagged tongue of glass neatly impaled her foot. She let out a yowl.

  Caxton stripped off her uniform tie and wrapped it around her wrist, tugging at it until it hurt and then knotting it off as a tourniquet. No point in bleeding to death now, she decided.

  She let Deanna take a few more painful, injurious steps toward her. She waited until all the blood had dripped away from Deanna’s flawless body, already healed but paler now, very much paler. Deanna looked like she’d been carved from marble. The pink had left her cheeks altogether. The blood wouldn’t protect her any longer. It would have been nice to have a Glock full of ammunition, but the jagged iron bar would serve just as well. Caxton brought it around in a long arc and plunged the sharp end right into Deanna’s rib cage. A little to the left of her sternum.

  Deanna screeched and howled and tried to form words, to beg, to plead. Maybe to say good-bye. Caxton pulled the bar out and struck again, and again. Three times had to be enough, she thought. It needed to be. She didn’t have the strength to stab her partner a fourth time. Her arms felt like cut rubber bands.