Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  Then again—maybe he had given in early. Maybe he had known it was inevitable, and decided it wasn’t worth torturing himself just so a few humans could live another day. Vampires saw death—human death—through a very different lens than she did. For vampires, human beings were simply prey. Game animals to be culled as needed. Angus had been given the option of becoming one of the predators. When he refused that gift, Jameson must have seen death as the next best thing for his brother.

  She shivered uncontrollably.

  “You okay, Caxton?” Glauer asked.

  She blinked her eyes and looked away from the sunset. Phosphor afterimages glared behind her eyelids. “I’m fine. Let’s get inside.”

  Down in the basement she booted up her computer and started composing her report of the previous night’s events. When she’d worked with Arkeley, when they took down Malvern’s brood, and later when she’d defended Gettysburg during the massacre, she had never worried so much about paperwork. Maybe Jameson had filed reports every night, but she’d been mostly concerned with staying alive. Now that she was head of the SSU she wasn’t able to avoid it anymore. The Commissioner of State Police demanded constant updates on her investigation and forms filled out every time she discharged her weapon. Every time she discovered a body she had to fill out a Non-Traffic Death Investigation Report, a much more complicated form than the traffic fatality reports she’d filled out as a highway patrol officer. It took her hours every day to type up all the necessary official files, and hours more to create files for the SSU database. She’d actually taken a touch-typing course at the academy in Hershey just to speed things up, but still much of her day was filled up with bureaucratic nonsense.

  At five o’clock, when people with normal jobs finished their days (or so she believed, having never held a normal job herself), she sat back in her chair and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She was just getting started.

  When Fetlock came up behind her and cleared his throat she jumped and banged her knees against the underside of her desk.

  “Deputy Marshal,” she said, remembering how she was supposed to greet him. “I was just writing up a report.”

  He nodded and came to lean against the edge of her desk. “I’ll want a copy, of course. Send it to my email.” He stuck a business card between two rows of keys on her keyboard. “In fact, send me every document you create from now on. Just so the Marshals Service has a record.”

  “Yeah, of course,” she said. “So I have Officer Glauer—I think you met him at the SSU briefing—Officer Glauer is organizing the mopping up at the motel crime scene. He’ll head over there tomorrow and see what we missed in the dark. I haven’t heard yet from your forensics people—”

  “They’ve come and gone already, Special Deputy,” Fetlock said. “They’ll have something for you tomorrow.”

  Caxton nodded. “In the meantime I have a guard on Angus’ body and—”

  “Fine,” he said.

  She frowned, not understanding. “You don’t want to hear this?”

  “Not particularly. Like we said, it’s your investigation. I didn’t come by to check up on you, if that’s what you think.” He smiled warmly down at her. “I may do things a little differently than other people you’ve worked for. A little more hands-off. Actually, I just came down to give you this.”

  He handed her a manila envelope with her name on it. She opened it, hoping he might have brought her something useful—a description, perhaps, of the man who had stolen all of Jameson’s files from the USMS archives. Instead she found a thick brochure, printed cheaply on newsprint. It was a federal government employee manual, laying out among other things the nature of her employment as an independent contractor and information on civil servant pay grades.

  “Oh. Thanks,” she said.

  “You need to sign the last page and fax it to me as soon as you get a chance.”

  She nodded. Then she started to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. He smiled at her as if he didn’t understand. “I’m sorry,” she said, clutching her lips. “It’s just that…” She shook her head, unable to go on. “Less than twenty-four hours ago I was fighting for my life. Now I’m supposed to be thinking about pension plans.”

  He stood up from the desk and shot the cuffs of his suit. He looked mildly annoyed.

  “I am sorry,” she said, getting control of herself. “I’ll make this a priority. Now, was there anything else—” She stopped as her cell phone started ringing. She looked up at him and he shrugged.

  She took the phone out of her pocket and saw the incoming call was from Astarte Arkeley. This ought to be good, she thought. Maybe the old bat wanted to accuse her of adultery again.

  She flipped the phone open. “Hello, ma’am.”

  Astarte’s voice on the other end was very tinny and distorted by heavy static. She caught very little of what the woman said. “—Deputy, I—assistance—most serious—”

  Caxton swore under her breath. She’d forgotten what lousy reception she got down in the basement. “Hold on, ma’am. I can’t really hear you. Give me a second and I’ll try to move to a better location.”

  Mouthing I’m sorry at Fetlock, she stepped out of her office and headed for the stairs. Astarte kept talking. Maybe she hadn’t heard what Caxton said.

  “—really quite—wouldn’t have, if not—”

  In the stairwell she lost another bar of the signal, so she rushed up the stairs two at a time. At the top she pushed open the door and stepped into the main lobby of the headquarters building. Troopers in various states of uniform were congregating there around the duty sergeant’s desk, probably receiving their orders for the night.

  Caxton pushed through them and out the front door into a flurry of snow and darkness. Four bars. Good. “Ma’am, can you repeat all that?” Caxton said. “I’m very sorry about the bad connection.”

  “There’s no time,” Astarte said. Her voice sounded strained, but it wasn’t the phone. “I told you already—he’s here!”

  18.

  “Mrs. Arkeley, please, stay on the line,” Caxton said, then took the phone away from her face. She rushed back inside the HQ building and pointed at the first trooper she saw. “You—get Officer Glauer up here. He’s in the basement.” She pointed at another and said, “You, call the local cop shop in Bellefonte and tell them there’s an emergency.” She checked her phone and gave them Astarte’s number so they could do a reverse look-up and get the address. She hated to send local cops into a vampire scene—they wouldn’t be ready for what they found—but she had no choice. It would take her more than an hour to get there herself, even if she sped recklessly the whole way. Astarte’s life might hang on a balance of minutes.

  “Ma’am, Astarte, are you still there?” she asked, lifting the phone to her face again.

  “Yes, dear. Momentarily. He’s outside the house right now.” Caxton heard a distant chiming sound. “Ah! He just broke a window in the kitchen, I believe. You’re not going to make it in time, are you?”

  “I have people on the way. If he sees the police coming he’ll probably scare off out of there,” Caxton said, trying to make herself sound as if she believed it. “I’m coming as fast as I can. Lock yourself in somewhere, if you can—anything to slow him down.”

  “Then you think he was serious, when he said my only other option was death? Yes, Laura, I can hear it in your voice. It’s odd. I’d always assumed that when my time came I would greet the Reaper with arms wide open.”

  “Get somewhere safe, as safe as you can,” Caxton said. “I’m coming!”

  Glauer came thumping up the stairs and rushed out into the lobby. He didn’t need to be told what was going on—when Caxton beckoned him and ran out into the parking lot he just followed.

  A thin layer of powdery snow had covered her Mazda when she reached it. She didn’t have time to brush it off. Climbing inside, she grabbed the blue flasher she kept for emergencies and clamped it on the roof of the car, then plugged it into the cigarette li
ghter. She didn’t have a siren built into the car, but the light would at least keep them from getting pulled over on the way. She waited for Glauer to cram himself into the small passenger seat, then slammed on the accelerator and tore out of the parking lot and shot out toward the highway. The windshield wipers made short work of the snow in front of her, but new drifts kept piling up on the hood. At the on ramp she fought her way through the midst of the rush-hour traffic—for once people actually got out of the way when they saw the flasher—and raced up the fast lane, heading northeast.

  “It’s Jameson’s wife. His widow. His whatever,” Caxton explained. Glauer hadn’t asked, but she figured he must be wondering where they were going in such an all-fired hurry. “She’s under attack.” She risked a glance over at him. He sat patiently looking straight ahead, his hands on the dashboard to brace himself every time she stepped on the brake. “From what I heard she hasn’t got a lot of time.”

  Glauer took a look at the speedometer. “We’ll make it,” he promised, though he must know as well as she did that he was just being optimistic.

  She tossed her cell phone to him. “Coordinate with the locals. Bellefonte can’t have much of a police force; it’s a tiny little place. Isn’t there a state police barracks out there, though?”

  He flipped open the phone. “Yeah. At Rockview Station. That’s just a couple miles from town.” He made the calls, got people moving. Before she was halfway to Bellefonte he had three patrol cars headed for the scene, and two more cars with a pair of local cops each already parked out front. “There’s no answer at the door. They want authorization to force entry. Do I send them in?” he asked.

  They’ll probably get killed if they do, she thought. Astarte would definitely get killed if they didn’t. “Yeah,” she said. “But tell them—tell them to be careful. Tell them to treat this like they’re breaching a survivalist compound full of gun nuts. Tell them not to get themselves killed if they can help it.”

  Confirmation came back shortly that the troopers were leading an assault on the house, with the locals covering their backs. It would be long tense minutes before they heard anything more, but Caxton grabbed the phone out of Glauer’s hand and held it against the steering wheel, ready to answer the moment anyone called.

  She tried to focus on her driving. The road conditions weren’t great—lots of thin crystalline snow blowing across the road, patches of black ice every time she crossed a bridge or a sketchy piece of highway. The Mazda wasn’t built for that kind of driving to begin with, and at her speed—eighty or better—it would slip and slide the second she let up a little on her grip on the wheel. She had to cut her speed drastically as she tore through State College. The road went right through the university town and she couldn’t risk hitting any students. Once she was past the Nittany Mall, though, she pushed the car back up to its limit.

  The phone rang in her hand and she nearly lost control. No time for the hands-free unit, she decided, and pushed it up against her ear, holding it there with her shoulder. “Go ahead,” she nearly screamed.

  “Trooper?” the voice on the other end asked, sounding slightly surprised. “Is that you?” The voice was deep and rasping and she didn’t recognize it at first.

  “Special Deputy, actually. What’s going on over there?”

  “They made you a Special Deputy. That’s fascinating. I spent my adult life thinking I was unique, that no one else could fulfill my special purpose. Yet practically the moment I was gone, destiny just plugged someone else into the empty socket. Have we come full circle?”

  “Oh, fuck,” Caxton said. Her foot eased off the accelerator. She was suddenly too scared to drive as fast as she’d been going. “Jameson. It’s you, isn’t it?”

  “That’s a question for the philosophers. My wife seemed to think not.”

  Caxton swallowed thickly. If it was Jameson on the phone, if he had somehow acquired the phone belonging to the lead of the state trooper team, that meant a lot of very bad things were also true. “You came for Astarte. You offered her the same choice you gave Angus, didn’t you? Become like you, or die. And she also refused.”

  “It’s probably best if you stay away from my family for a while, Special Deputy. You’re on your way here right now, I presume. It would be better if you just turned around and went home. Of course, we both know you won’t.”

  “When I get there will you be waiting for me?” she asked. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to be there or not. The last time they’d met she’d put two nine-millimeter slugs in his heart and it hadn’t done the trick. Would three work? Would the whole clip of fifteen in her Beretta be enough?

  “I’m going to do my level best not to kill you yet, Special Deputy. I have a reason to want to keep you alive. But if you put yourself in harm’s way I can’t be held responsible anymore for your safety.”

  “Stay there. I’m very close now,” she said, her pulse pounding in her temples. “Stay there and we can finish what we started. You didn’t want to become this monster, Jameson. Do you remember that? You accepted the curse to do one last good deed. To be a hero one more time. You’ve undone all that now, but it doesn’t have to go any further. We can still salvage something of your reputation.”

  She was talking to dead air. The phone beeped at her twice, telling her the connection had been terminated.

  She dropped the phone and screamed, pounding against the steering wheel with her hands. Glauer reached over to take the wheel away from her, but she shook herself violently and said, “Don’t. I’m alright.”

  She wasn’t, of course. Not in the slightest. But she could still drive.

  19.

  The roads were nearly empty as they tore into Bellefonte, racing up Water Street where it followed Spring Creek. By moonlight, sprinkled with snow, the town was eerily beautiful. Caxton had driven past the built-up section of riverbank at the western end of town a thousand times and admired the gazebo and the parks there, but never before had it looked so spectral, so haunting.

  Stop that, she told herself. She was letting the night’s events get to her. She yanked out the cord of the blue flasher as she turned down a side road, cutting her speed to a bare crawl. “There’s a shotgun in the trunk,” she told Glauer.

  “I thought this was your personal car,” he said.

  She shrugged. “The last two months have been all business. It’s loaded and there’s a box of shells there too. You grab those the second I stop the car, then follow my lead. This is not going to be fun.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  She took them down a street lined with massive trees that sheltered Victorian houses topped with mansard roofs and elaborate gables. Astarte’s house wasn’t hard to find. She just looked for the one with all the police cars parked out front.

  Caxton stopped the Mazda well back, parking in the middle of the street in case she needed to make a quick getaway—or in case anyone else tried the same thing. Her car would block the main route back to the highway. It was a trick she’d learned in a course on tactical parking at the academy. She killed her lights and wrestled her Beretta out of its holster before she set a foot on the pavement. She didn’t watch Glauer get out of the car—her eyes were fixed on the street before the house—but she could hear him moving to the trunk. She could count on him, she knew. It was why they worked so well together. He always did exactly what she wanted.

  Keeping her weapon low but ready, she moved quickly to the nearest cop car—one of the local units. Its flashers cycled wildly on its roof and its radio crackled with occasional calls from the Bellefonte dispatcher, but the seats were all empty, front and back. She moved to the next car, the other local patrol cruiser, and heard that its engine was still running. It was as empty as the first one, but there was blood on the windshield. The inside of the windshield.

  The Bellefonte cops hadn’t even had a chance to get out of their car before Jameson was on them like a cat on a flock of pigeons. She bit her lip and tried not to think about the fact
that she had authorized their approach. She was directly responsible for whatever had happened to them, but she could worry about that later.

  Farther up the street the three state police cars made a roadblock across the eastern end of the street. Their flashers and engines were off, but she could see right away they were empty too. She didn’t see any bodies anywhere, nor any pieces of bodies. There was some more blood on the snow that covered Astarte’s lawn, but not enough of it to account for all the cops. There had been three state troopers and four local cops on the assault—seven men and no sign of any of them.

  It wasn’t like a vampire to clean up his own mess. She considered the fact that some of them might still be alive. If so she had to move fast. Beckoning to Glauer with a hand signal, she rushed up the steps of Astarte’s porch and threw herself against the green clapboard wall just to the left side of the door. There was a plaque there of polished brass, showing the outline of a hand crisscrossed with curving lines. Underneath was written:

  MADAME ASTARTE

  READINGS AND ADVICE

  BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

  Glauer came thundering up the steps to take up position on the right side of the door. He had the shotgun cradled in his arms, his pockets stuffed full of extra shells.

  “There’s probably a back door. We do this just like in Mechanicsburg, okay?” she whispered. His shotgun would be little use against Jameson, but she doubted the vampire would rush right into its firing cone either. “You take the back, and don’t let anybody out. If I give the signal you come inside fast, loaded for bear.”

  “What’s the signal?” he asked.

  “If I start screaming, that’s the signal,” she told him.

  He nodded and ducked around the side of the porch, his boots clomping on the boards. When she couldn’t hear his footfalls anymore she kicked open the door.

  It was unlocked—the state troopers had already breached it for her—and she was inside in less time than it took for her heart to beat twice.