Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  Angus shrugged expansively and drank from his frosty glass. “Well, if you don’t mind a little advice, especially since it’s free, I’ll tell you you’re barking up the wrong tree. Don’t go talking to his family.”

  “I need to interview everyone who knew him, just in case.”

  Angus shook his head. “You do what you need to. All I’m saying is this is one man who cared less about his loved ones than he did about what he was going to have for breakfast. You seen those kids of his? They barely know him, and what they do know is hate. They hate him for not being there most of their lives because he was too busy off chasing vampires, and when he was there they hated him for not loving them enough. They’re rotten little brats, both of them, but maybe they got a reason to be. Jameson was my brother once, my little brother, and still I looked up to him. But since he worked that first vampire case, just before his wedding, he’s not been the same man I knew. He’s not been any kind of man at all.”

  Caxton’s immediate reaction to Angus’ words shocked her. She felt her heart grow cold and heavy in her chest. She almost stood up out of her chair. She was, she realized, offended.

  He was a great man, she thought. He was a hero.

  But she guessed that was behind him, too.

  “Ah, hell,” Angus said, suddenly. “What the hell’s he doing here? He ain’t supposed to arrive yet, not for hours.”

  Caxton was still too busy being angry to get what he meant. Then she turned and saw that a late-model maroon sedan had pulled into the motel’s asphalt lot. Its headlights dazzled her eyes for a second and then cut out as it rolled to an uneasy stop. Maybe it had stalled out, or maybe the driver was drunk, she thought. Immediately her eyes went to the license plate and memorized the number, just in case.

  “You’re meeting someone?” Caxton asked. “I have some more questions, but they can wait.” She turned back to face Angus, but he was still staring at the car.

  Grumbling, swearing a couple of times, he levered himself up out of his chair. She could only stare in disbelief as he pulled a massive buck knife out of his pocket and snapped open the blade.

  She turned around again then, and looked as the car’s door popped open and something sagged out onto the dark pavement. It was a body, a man’s body, and at first she thought the driver must be so drunk he couldn’t even stand up properly. Then she saw it was just a boy, a teenager in a hooded sweatshirt. He turned to face the two of them and she saw his face was torn and bloody, with pale strips of skin hanging from his cheeks and chin.

  “Half-dead,” she breathed, and grabbed for her weapon. Angus was already halfway to the car, his knife out and low by his side.

  10.

  “Angus, get back,” Caxton called, grabbing for her Beretta and jumping out of her chair. The old man was well ahead of her, closing quickly with the half-dead.

  “Don’t you worry, young lady. I can handle this sort.” The half-dead knelt on the asphalt, down on all fours as if it was too weak to stand. Angus grabbed at the creature’s arm and yanked it painfully up until it was standing on its feet. “You said you’d call on me at midnight. It ain’t time yet!”

  Caxton moved quickly, her weapon down and pointed at the ground next to her feet. The half-dead wasn’t armed and it seemed barely capable of standing—in fact, it was tottering back and forth as if it would fall as soon as Angus let it go. That didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous. Half-deads were the victims of vampires, drained of their blood and then raised from the dead. They were nasty little creatures, spiteful and cruel and lacking all the human qualities they’d had in life. The curse that animated them corrupted their flesh as much as it did their souls; a half-dead’s body started to rot and fall apart almost instantly, and it was rare that one of them could last more than ten days before disintegrating completely. This one looked at least a week old and smelled terrible, even in the cold night air. Weak as it might be, however, it could bite Angus and give him a nasty infection, if nothing worse.

  “Let him go and stand back,” Caxton ordered, but Angus acted as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “Twenty-four hours, you said,” he told the thing. “You’re early!”

  She had another interest in the half-dead, beyond protecting Angus. It took a vampire to raise a half-dead—which meant Jameson Arkeley had done it. That meant all kinds of things, some of which were more pleasant to think of than others. It meant Arkeley had killed a human being, proof positive that he had gone over to the darkness. If Caxton could keep the half-dead from falling apart for a little while, though, it could also mean a real break in the case. The half-dead might know the location of Jameson’s lair.

  She could interrogate it. She could intimidate it into telling her everything it knew. As long as Angus didn’t finish it off first. She started to raise her weapon, planning to point it at Angus if he didn’t start complying with her orders.

  The half-dead spoke, though, and Caxton froze in her tracks.

  “My master grows impatient,” it creaked. Its voice was high and unnatural, like the sound a nail makes when pulled out of a rotten piece of wood. “He has offered you a gift, and you have failed to accept. You know what the alternative is. What say you, Angus Arkeley?”

  “How about this?” the old man replied, and slashed the half-dead across the face with his hunting knife. The half-dead screamed and dropped to the pavement. Angus kicked it viciously. “You like the sound of that? My answer is no, you son of a bitch. He can ask a million times and it’ll always be no.”

  “Get back,” Caxton commanded. “Leave it alone!”

  Already drawing his foot back for another vicious kick, Angus turned to glare at her, his eyes traveling down her arms to the pistol in her hands. “Shee-yit,” he said. White foaming spittle flecked his lips and chin. “I can take care of this. You weren’t supposed to get involved.”

  “That thing is a vampire’s servant. That makes it my responsibility. Now get back,” she said, as calmly as she could. Her heart was thudding in her chest.

  Angus raised his hands, holding up the knife. No blood marked the shiny blade, just some scaly bits of gray flesh. “You got me outgunned, I guess,” he said. “But this is my trouble.” His foot came down and slammed into the half-dead’s side, making it choke and sputter.

  “Step back. You’ve been lying to me, haven’t you? You had some kind of contact with Jameson. Is that right?”

  Angus grinned at her as he took a step backward. “I said I hain’t seen or talked to Jameson in twenty years, and that’s the truth. Still haven’t. I seen this fellow last night, said he was sent by my brother. Said he had a message for me, a kind of a deal, and I had twenty-four hours to think it over. He also knew you’d be around asking questions. Said if I told you anything it would be the death of me.”

  “I can protect you. If I’d known—I could have taken you somewhere safe,” Caxton said, shaking her head. She glanced down at the half-dead and saw it wasn’t moving.

  “A man takes care of his own. I didn’t expect you to understand. Jameson’s my brother, and that makes it my job to kill him—to—”

  Angus’ eyes moved to stare at the half-dead’s car. Caxton thought it might be a trick—a ruse to break her concentration and let him get another kick in. Stepping backward slowly, she turned to glance at what he was looking at.

  Inside the car a massive dark shape stirred. A pair of red eyes glared out of the darkened backseat. Caxton started to swing her weapon around, to train it on the car, but she was just too slow. The far side rear door exploded outwards and a black-and-white blur bounced across the black pavement toward Angus. It slowed down enough to grab him around the waist, and in that moment she saw exactly what she expected to see.

  It was Jameson Arkeley, the vampire. He wore a black shirt and pants, but his feet were bare. His skin had lost all pigmentation and all its hair, even his eyelashes. His triangular ears, his red eyes, and his mouth full of ugly teeth couldn’t hide the resemblance he still bore to his
brother. Yet where Angus’ face showed the lines of age and care, Jameson’s features were smooth and unblemished. Only his left hand was less than perfect. It was missing all its fingers. He’d been maimed when he was still alive, and even his curse couldn’t grow them back.

  His red eyes stared right at her. She felt like a cold breeze blew right through the chambers of her skull and she heard his voice—his very human voice—calling her name, though his mouth didn’t move. Her arms fell slack at her sides and her eyelids started to droop. Caxton knew exactly what was happening. She’d felt like this before, far too many times for comfort. He was hypnotizing her. Freezing her in place.

  She had a charm on a thong around her neck, a spiral of silver metal, a talisman Vesta Polder had given her to allow her to break that kind of spell. She tried to reach for it even as she felt it growing warm against her clavicle, but her hand felt resistance as if it were moving through gelatin. Jameson had plenty of time to kill her before she could grab the charm and regain control of her own body.

  Yet that didn’t seem to be what he wanted. His eyes broke with hers and suddenly he was gone from her head. She reached up and grabbed the charm through her shirt, felt its heat scorch her fingers, but she was already free. Her other hand, her gun hand, came up and she aimed automatically at his heart.

  Too slow, still too slow. He was moving again, moving faster than she could track. She dropped to one knee to improve her aim and tried to get a bead on his back, even knowing that the chances of shooting him through the heart like that were slim to none. Worse, he had Angus dangling over his shoulder and she couldn’t risk shooting the living brother, for many reasons.

  “Freeze,” she shouted, but she could hear him laughing in her mind, a drawn-out evil chuckle that faded as his hypnotic hold on her dissipated altogether.

  She jumped back up to her feet and gave chase but didn’t get very far. Jameson had run right into the motel, kicking open the door to Angus’ room. He ducked inside with his brother still in tow. The door swung shut behind him and cut him off from view.

  Caxton raced to the door and threw herself against the wall just to the left of it. If Jameson came exploding back out the way he’d gone in she didn’t want to get in his way. She raised her weapon to shoulder height and tried to breathe, tried to work out what to do next.

  Jameson Arkeley, vampire hunter, would have known without thinking. Did you rush in and hope for the best? Did you wait outside for the vampire to come back out? He wouldn’t have even had to ask himself the question. Yet Caxton couldn’t decide that quickly. If she rushed the door she could be running right into a trap. Vampires loved setting traps. Jameson could be waiting inside ready to grab her and tear her to pieces before she even saw him. Yet if she waited him out—who knew what he would do to Angus?

  Her duty, she decided, was to the living brother. If she had any chance of saving him she needed to move fast. Already she’d wasted valuable seconds. Weapon at the ready, she launched herself at the door, then rolled into the room with her head down and scrambled behind the bed. Raising just her eyes and hands over the jungle print bedspread, she swung her Beretta back and forth, covering the room.

  It was empty—but the door to the bathroom was open. No light burned inside and she could see nothing but shadows. She rolled across the bed and rushed, shoulder first, through the open doorway. She pivoted on her heel, covering the toilet, the plastic sink, the pebbled-glass shower door. When nothing tried to kill her instantly she reached out with her left hand and switched on the lights.

  The shower door was painted with blood.

  11.

  “Oh, God, no—not your own brother,” Caxton sighed. She hesitated a second, not really wanting to know, but then she slid back the shower door. It slid back all too easily, its track slick with wet blood. More blood half-filled the tub, almost but not quite submerging the body of Angus Arkeley. The old man sprawled in an ungainly mess across the porcelain, one arm folded under his body, the other reaching up toward the soap dish. His eyes were very wide and blood still bubbled from a massive wound at his throat.

  Protocol demanded she call 911, and she did—though she knew Angus would die before help could arrive. “I have a man down in room four,” she told the dispatcher, once she’d provided her credentials and her location. “I’m looking at massive blood loss from deep lacerations to the neck. I need an ambulance right away and every officer you can send.” Clicking her phone shut, she grabbed up a stiff white towel. She shoved it into the wound, but the blood surged out from under it, coming in thick gouts so fresh they hadn’t begun to clot.

  Angus’ eyes rolled slowly down, trying to fasten on Caxton’s face. There was no emotion there. The old man lacked the strength to even beg for help. Caxton thought of questioning him but knew he couldn’t reply. He had told her enough already, she thought, even though he’d lied to her.

  As bad as Angus’ condition might be, she had another Arkeley to worry about.

  She looked up, around the bathroom. There was no sign of Jameson. She had read old folktales about vampires who could slip through the crack between a door and its frame, but she knew better. Jameson was a big guy and there was nowhere he could hide in the small room. She looked up and saw a window above the toilet. It was open, letting cold night air blast inside. It looked too small for Jameson to have wriggled out of—yet she knew he had. The metal frame of the window was buckled outward. With enough strength and determination and a complete disinterest in physical pain (all of which any vampire possessed), she figured he could have just made it through. She was tempted to jump up and follow him the same way, yet first she spared another glance down at Angus in the bathtub.

  Protocol also required her to stay by the man until the paramedics showed up. Simple human decency required as much as well. Yet if she waited she would just be giving Jameson a chance to get away—and Angus was going to die regardless.

  “I’ll get him,” she swore, looking down into his dimming eyes. It was as much comfort as she had to offer. She hoped he could understand her and know that he wasn’t going to die unavenged. Ignoring his eyes, she leaned over the toilet and peered out through the window.

  She couldn’t see a damned thing. The lights of the motel and the highway out front didn’t reach to the back. She thought there was a field back there, maybe some farm acreage left fallow for the winter. She could just about make out a thick growth of weeds directly below the window. Jameson could be out there, close enough to reach out and touch, but she knew she would never see him. His black clothes would hide most of his body and shadows would do the rest.

  Protocol had it she should go back, out through the front door, and circle round the back. Protocol also suggested she have a partner with her at all times, someone who could cover her movements. Screw protocol, she decided, and shoved her weapon in its holster. She climbed up onto the toilet tank and pushed herself head and shoulders first through the window. Getting her hands down to brace herself, she let her legs slither through the window and dropped to a tense crouch.

  This was the moment, she knew. This was when Jameson would attack, if he planned to. When her handgun was still in its holster and she couldn’t fight back. She braced herself, expecting him to slam into her like a freight train before she could even get her bearings.

  Nothing happened. Nothing moved. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark as she brought her weapon up again. She saw that the gray weeds around her ended about twenty feet away at the sharply defined edge of a field. A thin layer of white snow lay atop the furrowed earth, glowing slightly in the starlight. The flat plane of white screwed with her depth perception and made her eyes buzz. The hair on the backs of her arms started to stand up after a moment and she—

  Wait, she thought. She knew that feeling. It was the barely perceptible sensation of wrongness, of something unnatural quite close by. It was the feeling she always got when vampires were near. Jameson. He hadn’t just run off. He was sticking around, waiting f
or her. Toying with her.

  The thinnest crinkling sound came from her left and she spun, nearly falling over on her hip. A shadow cleaved off from the dark back of the motel building and she fired without hesitation. The gunshot shattered the darkness all around her, made her ears ring. The shadow darted out toward the snowy field and she squeezed her trigger again. The shot hit home, knocking Jameson sideways. For a second she saw him, his white face lost amid the snowy field but his black shirt sharply defined against the light. She saw him raise his hands to his chest as if he were clutching at a wound.

  It was a chance—a break, an opening. She didn’t waste it. Rushing forward, toward the shadow, she fired a third round, but she knew it went wide of the mark. She had a lot of trouble telling just how far away he was, but she pressed on, watching his silhouette grow larger and larger before her until he was looming up over her, until she was so close she could feel the cold of his body, feel him colder than the night around him. He raised his good hand to stop her, but she kept coming, her head down so as not to make eye contact, so as not to give him another chance to hypnotize her.

  “Trooper,” he said, and his voice was a low growl. “Laura. Let’s talk—”

  Jameson Arkeley, in his vampire hunting days, would have known exactly what to do then. So did she. Caxton closed to point-blank range, the barrel of her weapon only inches from his chest, pointed just left of his sternum. She fired before he could get another word out.

  The bullet left the barrel of her weapon at well over the speed of sound. It struck him dead on and knocked him backward as if he’d been kicked by a horse. Sprawling on his back, his legs and arms pinwheeling, he landed in a heap.

  It could have been enough. The bullet had plenty of energy—over 450 foot-pounds—to cut right through his skin, his pectoral muscles, his bony ribs. It would have had plenty of force left over to cut right through his heart. Caxton knew what a bullet could do to a body at that range, even a vampire’s body.