Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “Over there!” a half-dead squeaked. She heard them come toward her, running through the dark. One hit a chair and went sprawling to the ground with a pathetic yelp, but the others kept coming on. Caxton didn’t even know which way to run.

  Then the door burst open and a powerful beam of light speared through into the foyer, lighting up two half-deads with steak knives raised high. The barrel of a shotgun came through the door next and it discharged with a roar, blasting Caxton’s ears with its report and filling her nose and throat with the stink of gunpowder so that she coughed and gagged.

  The two half-deads fell out of the beam of light and thunked to the floor, not even having a chance to scream their last.

  Glauer burst through the open door, pumping his weapon for a second shot. Evidently he didn’t see the third half-dead, the one that had tripped over the chair, coming straight at him with a fireplace poker.

  Caxton reached out as fast as she could and grabbed the half-dead’s arm. She twisted it back hard and the poker fell to clunk on the floor. She saw Glauer raise his shotgun and had time to shout for him to stop, but it was too late. The heavy wooden stock came down right between the half-dead’s eyes and crushed in its skull.

  “What do you mean, stop?” he asked when the creature dropped to the floor. He shone his heavy-duty flashlight in her face.

  “I wanted to keep it alive for questioning,” she answered. She pushed the flashlight away. It was hurting her eyes. “What took you so long?”

  He shrugged amiably. “There’s about fifty doors in this place and they were all locked.”

  It didn’t matter. He was here now. Caxton did a quick calculation in her head. “There were seven of them originally, assuming Jameson raised them all.”

  “Seven? There were seven cops called to this scene—”

  Apparently he was just figuring out whom he’d been fighting. She raised a hand for silence. “I got one upstairs.” She grabbed the light out of his hands and pointed it at the two on the floor, their bodies twisted around by the shotgun blast and completely lifeless. She pointed it again at the one with the knocked-in skull. “That’s four.”

  “Two more of them tried to get me back in the kitchen,” Glauer said. “Check this out.” He tried to show her a bad cut on his arm. “Went right through my jacket and my shirt. Just a little paring knife, but that guy wanted me bad.”

  “Six, then, all dead—and one left,” Caxton counted, too busy to worry about his arm. She spun around with a sudden intuition and pointed the light at the front door. It hung open to the night. “Come on, hurry,” she said, and sprinted out across the porch and down into the street.

  At first she saw nothing, just the cars piled up in the road. She had expected the last half-dead to steal one and make a break for it, and had just hoped it wouldn’t be the Mazda the monster chose. All the cars were in their proper places, though.

  “There,” Glauer said, and pointed at the road. A thin layer of new powdery snow had coated the street since they’d arrived. A trail of boot prints curved away from the house and off to the west, toward the highway. Glauer started for the passenger side of her car, but she shook her head. “No time for that. We can catch him on foot.”

  She raced down the street, her eyes bleary with the light from the streetlamps and the glare off the snow after the darkness in the house. She had no trouble following the trail, however—the footprints were dark against the snowy street and they headed due west, never weaving back and forth, never turning as if the half-dead had looked over his shoulder to see if he were being pursued.

  She had a bad feeling she knew what that meant. Half-deads for all their wicked humor and spite were bound to the whims of vampires. They could no more resist the commands of their masters than they could make themselves alive and whole again. This one wasn’t just escaping a hopeless fight—no, it would have stayed until the bitter end if Jameson had so desired. It was carrying out some other order.

  She ran as fast as she could, her work shoes slipping constantly in the wet slush. She hadn’t had a chance to put on proper boots. Glauer came chugging along behind her, more sure-footed but not as quick. Yet it was he who first caught sight of the half-dead ahead of them.

  He shouted and pointed and Caxton followed his finger. There, a block ahead, the half-dead was moving fast. It was limping badly and one of its pant legs had been torn away. It had a nasty bloodless wound in its calf, where part of the muscle had been blown away. It must, she realized, be the one she had wounded with her wild shots on the stairs. Yet as crippled as it was, it forced itself along, forced itself to keep moving.

  She had closed the distance to half a block when she realized they were about to run out of road. The street ahead curved southward to follow the creek, but the half-dead wasn’t turning with it. It hurried on forward in a straight line.

  She tried to sprint after it and nearly fell on her face. “Glauer—grab it, quick,” she called, and the big cop shot past her, puffing mightily. She raced after them both and arrived at the built-up edge of the creek just in time to watch the half-dead jump awkwardly over the edge and split the dark water like a falling stone. It disappeared with a gurgling whine and was immediately lost from view.

  Glauer started to pull off his jacket as if he would jump in after it, but she grabbed his arm and yanked him back. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said, breath surging in and out of her chest. “You’d freeze to death in minutes.”

  “But it’s getting away!” Glauer cried back.

  “No it isn’t,” Caxton knew. She understood right away what Jameson had demanded of his creature.

  She didn’t know if the icy water would have hurt it, but she knew half-deads didn’t breathe. She imagined they weren’t very buoyant. It must have sunk like a stone. Under the water its brain would freeze and that would be the end of its short un-life. “Back when we were working together—I mean, Jameson and me—it was standard practice to try to capture half-deads. That was our best source of information. He knew I would want to talk to this one, and he made damned sure I didn’t get the chance.”

  22.

  Caxton and Glauer trudged back toward the house through the snow. It had grown significantly colder since they’d arrived in Bellefonte, and the sky had turned heavy and the color of lead. The snow flurry that had come just after dark had stopped, but it looked as if the clouds weren’t done for the night.

  “What’s our next step?” Glauer asked, his voice nearly lost under the noise of their shoes crunching the powdery snow. It sounded like teeth grinding together to Caxton, teeth gnashing and tearing.

  She shook her head. It was only seven o’clock, but it felt much later. “We secure the scene. Call in the necessary people and wait for them to arrive.”

  “I meant—” Glauer began, but then he just shook his head.

  They walked the rest of the way in silence. Astarte’s house remained just as they’d left it. The cars out front had gained a thin skin of snow that diffused the light of the red and blue flashers so that instead of stabbing out at the night they just glowed fitfully, first one color, then the other. Glauer wanted to switch off the engines of the cars, but Caxton said no—it was important to maintain the integrity of the scene, down to the last detail.

  She made the required phone calls. A lone officer of the local police department came quickly, but he did little beyond stringing up some yellow caution tape. He didn’t go inside the house at all. Ambulances arrived on scene next, but the paramedics had to wait for the local coroner’s office to officially pronounce everyone dead. A technician from the morgue arrived half an hour later, an annoyed-looking doctor in a fur-lined parka with the hood up. He went inside the house and came back out five minutes later. He just nodded to the paramedics and they went inside. Not that there was much for them to do.

  Lights came on in other houses up and down the street. Anxious-looking people peered out of their windows, but none of them came down to have a look for themselves. Gl
auer offered to canvass the neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking if anyone had seen anything. “I doubt anybody did,” he said, “but it’ll calm them down if they have somebody to actually talk to.” Caxton cared very little what Astarte’s neighbors thought, but it was something for the big cop to do, and she let him go with a sigh of relief. He’d been pacing up and down the sidewalk, looking like he had something to say but never actually coming out and saying it.

  Her own tension kept mounting, and she just wanted to get away. It was nighttime—it was going to be nighttime for another twelve hours—and she knew she wouldn’t relax until dawn came. There was work to be done, but she couldn’t leave, not until she could hand the scene over to someone officially capable of taking charge. Before she knew it she herself was pacing. The exercise kept her joints from freezing up if nothing else.

  An unmarked late-model car drove up and she squinted through the headlights, trying to see who was inside. There were two occupants, a man and a woman. She was very surprised when she saw them get out of the car—it was Fetlock and Vesta Polder.

  The deputy marshal nodded at her, then walked over to talk to the local cop, who was standing guard at the front of the house. Vesta came straight over to Caxton and took her hands.

  The older woman looked over her shoulder, scanned the trees lining the street as if she expected to see ghosts there. “Astarte has passed,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t have come, especially not at this time of day. I don’t like to be away from my home at night, as you know. But I must see her.”

  Caxton wasn’t sure what to make of that. It was against every protocol she knew to let a civilian into a crime scene that was still under investigation. Exceptions were made sometimes for direct family members, but Vesta Polder was no kin of the Arkeleys. Vesta wouldn’t explain why it was so important she see the body, either. She just stared into Caxton’s eyes as if trying to hypnotize her.

  “Come on,” Caxton said, finally. It was still her scene, until a detective from the local PD showed up, so she was still in charge of who went into the house. She led Vesta inside, warning her not to touch anything, then took her up to the room where Astarte’s life had ended.

  The widow lay exactly as Caxton had first seen her. The blood on the floor had started to dry in the warmth of the house, but Vesta walked around it with mincing little steps, careful not to get any on her black boots. Caxton knew Polder enough to understand she wasn’t just being squeamish.

  Vesta moved to the foot of the bed and closed her eyes. Her lips moved, but Caxton couldn’t hear what she might be saying. A prayer, she supposed. When she had finished she remained there, eyes closed, hands held out slightly at her sides.

  Caxton wondered how long this was going to take. After a minute or two she cleared her throat and Vesta opened her eyes.

  “Judging from the size of that wound I’d say he didn’t hurt her much,” Caxton said, gesturing at Astarte’s arm. “When he killed Angus he was in a real hurry, but here he took his time.”

  Vesta nodded in agreement.

  “First his brother. Now his wife.”

  “Do you know why he killed them?” Vesta asked, sounding as if she already knew but she just wanted to hear Caxton say it out loud.

  That was pretty typical for Vesta Polder. She saw all, knew all—or so she wanted people to think. Caxton was pretty sure it was mostly an act, a practiced technique to draw people out and make them give away what they knew. It still creeped her out.

  “He made them both the same offer, I think. They could join him and become vampires or they could die on the spot. As to why, I don’t really get it yet.”

  “He loved them,” Polder replied. “He loved them but they were human, and to a vampire human life is contemptible. He could not reconcile those two feelings. To resolve that tension he had to either make them like himself, to bring them up to his level, or extinguish them altogether.”

  “I got that,” Caxton shrugged. “But vampires see us as prey. As livestock. He didn’t feed on either of them, just tore them up and let them bleed out.”

  “Perhaps,” Vesta said, “to Jameson, now, that is affection. He put them to sleep, as one would a beloved pet, instead of making a meal of them like a cow or a pig.” She moved around the side of the bed and leaned over Astarte’s face, close enough that Caxton started to raise a hand in warning. Vesta passed one hand over Astarte’s mouth and then swept her ring-bedecked fingers together as if she were catching a fly. “She has moved on. Jameson will not be able to raise her as a half-dead. That’s what I came for. May I close her eyes?”

  Again, that was something you just didn’t do at a homicide scene, but Caxton just bit her lip and nodded.

  Vesta lowered the dead woman’s eyelids gently, with two fingers of her left hand. Then she drew back. She was clearly finished. Before she could go, however, Caxton had a few more questions for her.

  “The night’s just begun. I’m worried he’ll strike again.”

  “Not tonight,” Vesta said, shaking her head so her blond ringlets bounced on the shoulders of her severe black dress. “This moved him. It affected him, that portion of his heart that remains capable of love. He’ll return to his lair and sulk.”

  Caxton couldn’t really imagine Jameson sulking, but she accepted what Polder said. She knew things, somehow, that other people didn’t. It was best not to question how she knew them. “You don’t happen to know where his lair is, do you?”

  Polder shook her head again. “That is hidden from me, and from all human eyes. Good night, Astarte,” she said.

  She started to come around the side of the bed as if to leave the room, but Caxton stopped her. “You went out of your way to come here tonight.”

  “Astarte was a friend. Someone needed to be here, to do what I have done.”

  Caxton had thought otherwise. “Raleigh—back at the fake funeral—Raleigh told me about you and her. She said you and Astarte had a falling-out or something. Care to tell me what that was about? She said you hadn’t spoken to each other in years.”

  “You haven’t guessed already?” Polder asked. She looked away. “I had an affair with Jameson, of course.”

  Caxton dropped her hand. If she couldn’t imagine Jameson sulking in his lair, she was completely incapable of seeing that in her mind’s eye.

  Polder lifted her chin and stared at the ceiling. “It was in 1987. Jameson and Astarte had been married only a few years, but already they were drifting apart. It had been a sort of arranged marriage, of course. Jameson was the dashing hero who had slain the great darkness—the man who had single-handedly driven vampires from the face of the earth. Or so we thought. He didn’t tell anyone that Justinia Malvern had survived, not at first. Astarte came from a very respectable, extremely old family. She could trace her lineage all the way back to the foundations of this country.”

  “To Plymouth Rock, you mean?”

  Vesta smiled. “To Salem. Still, it wasn’t a very good match. He was twenty years her senior, for one thing. They were never happy. He spent far too much time at his work and left her to keep house here, all but abandoned. He only seemed to drop by to impregnate her—that autumn, and then in the winter of the following year. She struggled with raising the children alone, virtually a single mother. I helped her as much as I could—back then I was less limited in my movements. She was my best friend, you see. That’s how I met Jameson. I didn’t like him at all back then. He never beat her, of course, and every word from his mouth was loving, yet I thought he was a monster for the way he neglected her.”

  “And yet,” Caxton said, “you somehow got involved with him.”

  “There are those among us who find monsters quite attractive,” Vesta said. She had a knowing smirk on her face that made Caxton cringe. “Such a powerful man. Passionate, and driven. That kind of focus is very hard to resist when it is turned in your direction.”

  Caxton scratched one of her eyebrows. “When I spoke with
Astarte, um, recently, she—suggested that he and I might have been romantically connected.”

  “That’s rather foolish. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that you’re a girl-lover.”

  The conversation had taken a turn that wasn’t going to help her investigation, Caxton decided. She led Vesta out of the room and back down to the street. Fetlock waited there to talk to her. He looked impatient.

  “You do know this woman, then,” he said, when Vesta Polder climbed back into the passenger seat of his car. “She came into the state police HQ a little after you left, demanding to be taken to you at once. I tried to get some ID out of her, but she said there was no time.”

  “She probably doesn’t have any ID. She lives pretty far off the grid. But she’s one of the good guys.”

  Fetlock nodded as if he was satisfied with her vouching for Polder. “We could use more of those. Especially since we just lost seven of them.” He nodded his head in the direction of the house. “You know this doesn’t look good, right? You know this was kind of a disaster.”

  Caxton admitted she could see how he might think that. “When people fight vampires, some of them die,” she muttered. It was the kind of thing Jameson might have said.

  “Tell me at least one good thing came out of this,” Fetlock insisted.

  Caxton looked him right in the eye. “I know where he’s going to strike next.”

  23.

  “Alright,” Fetlock said. “Tell me what you know. And how you know it.”

  Caxton sat down on the hood of his car. Warmth from the engine seeped up through her clothes. “He approached Angus, his brother, with an offer—join him or die. Tonight he made the same offer to his wife. He’s going after his own family. He thinks he’s doing them a big favor, making them as immortal and as powerful as he is. They don’t see it that way, and the only other option as far as he’s concerned is to kill them painlessly. He can’t just let them lie in peace.”

  “But why?” Fetlock asked. “What’s in it for him?”