99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  No, she thought. Not another dead cop. Guilt skewered her kidneys like a thin knife. She put a hand on the door of the car, leaned down to get a closer look.

  The trooper inside sat bolt upright, his mouth closing with a click she heard through the glass. He turned bleary eyes to look up at her, then frowned.

  She fished out her state police ID and pressed it against his window. He nodded, then gestured for her to step back. Slowly he pushed open his door and clambered out.

  “You Caxton?” he asked.

  “Trooper Caxton, yeah,” she said, frowning.

  He gave her a weary smile that spoke volumes. She didn’t impress him. He’d probably heard stories about her, maybe even seen the stupid movie. All he really knew about her, though, was that she had dragged him away from a nice warm bed and made him run a fool’s errand before the sun had even come up.

  Hoping for the best anyway, she glanced at the backseat of his cruiser. No barrels there. “I’m ready to receive your report,” she sighed. “What’s your name, Trooper?”

  “Paul Junco,” he said, leaning against the side of his car and stretching out long arms and legs. “I got here about six-fifteen,” he said, pulling a notebook out of his pocket, “yeah, six-oh-nine A.M., to be exact, on report of a barrel stored at this location that you requested we take into police custody. I obtained entry at six-thirteen with the aid of a maintenance lady, name of Floria Alvade, and proceeded to room 424, in the Civil War Era Studies department—”

  “Where you failed to find any sign of a barrel. Come on, I need to see for myself.” She led the way. Junco shrugged and kept up with her as she hurried inside. A woman in blue coveralls, presumably the same Floria Alvade, was buffing the lobby floor with a big metal waxer. Its furry wheel spat dust across Caxton’s shoes. When she saw them coming she switched the machine off.

  “Miss Alvade?” Caxton asked. The woman nodded, her face a cautious mask. Lots of people looked like that when cops approached them. It didn’t mean anything. “I need to know, did anyone enter this building last night?”

  The woman nodded at Trooper Junco.

  “Anyone else? Anyone at all? Maybe a tall man, very pale skin, bald?”

  “Like that vampire I seen on the TV?” Alvade crossed herself. “Oh, Mary preserve me, no! Just him, I swear. I been here all night, too.”

  Caxton nodded and turned to go up the stairs. “How about you, Trooper? Did you see anybody leave as you were coming in?”

  “I think I would have mentioned if I saw an undead bloodsucker,” he told her.

  She whirled on him, fixed him with her hardest glare. Arkeley wouldn’t have put up with that kind of insubordination. She had to get tougher, had to rise above her bad reputation. Had to make people understand just how serious things had become.

  “If you have any more glib comments to make, Trooper,” she told him, “I suggest you save them for your official report. Clear?”

  His mouth hardened. “Yes, Ma’am,” he said.

  She turned without waiting for anything further and raced up the stairs two at a time. She was winded when she got to the top, but she pressed on, past the classroom where she’d met Geistdoerfer, back to the specimen room where she’d seen the barrel. It was gone. She’d already known that. Seeing it for herself made a difference, though. It made her blood run colder, made her skin prickle.

  The hearts were gone.

  When she could think again, when her own heart wasn’t bursting inside her chest, she headed back down to the parking lot. Three local police cars were just pulling in, lights on but no sirens. Officer Glauer stepped out of one. Dots of toilet paper flecked his throat where he must have just finished shaving.

  “You got my message,” Caxton said, by way of greeting.

  “Yeah. All four of them,” Glauer replied. He fingered his mustache, an obvious tell. He was worried.

  Good. She needed him worried. She needed him scared.

  “I just called exigent circumstances so I could search a room up there,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder at the classroom building. “Turned up nothing. There are ninety-nine missing vampire hearts. Whoever has them can wake up ninety-nine vampires when the sun goes down tonight. I’d like to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “I’d like to help you with that,” the big cop said. He reached into his car and picked up his hat. “The chief, on the other hand—”

  Caxton nodded. She knew Vicente was going to be a problem. “I’ll talk to him, when he actually comes in to work.” She looked up at the sky. The clouds were thickening and turning dark, but the sun was up there somewhere. “What time did the sun go down last night?” she asked.

  Glauer placed his hat carefully on his head. He squinted for a second as he tried to remember. “Just before seven. Yeah, I’d say ten till—that’s when I took my dinner break and I remember being very glad I was off the street. We kept our guard up last night, believe me, even if the chief thought we were safe. So we have until seven to find those hearts?”

  Caxton shook her head. “There might be another way.” She looked at Geistdoerfer’s Buick and decided it wasn’t the ideal vehicle for what came next. Her own Mazda was nearby, but it wasn’t marked as a police car. “You’re driving,” she said. “Maybe we can finish this in the next hour.”

  He gave her a weak smile. “Christmas is still two months away,” he told her, but he didn’t waste any more time. He took her south through town, down the tourist lanes into the battlefield. Up Seminary Ridge and then down an unpaved road through a clump of trees. She remembered exactly where it was—in highway patrol she’d learned to make mental notes whenever she was called to a scene, to pick out the local landmarks so she could find her way back if she needed to, so she could give accurate directions to paramedics and firefighting units. The little dig site was still fresh in her memory from the last time she’d seen it, only two days before.

  There were no cars at the end of the road. She got out and led Glauer and the four other cops down the path, about two hundred yards into the trees, back to where the dig site had been set up by Geistdoerfer and his students. The tents were still there and the campfire, but the ashes were cold and wet with dew.

  Exhaustion and guilt formed ice crystals in her brain as she saw the place again. She should have known—somehow she should have known. She should have cordoned the place off, declared it an official crime scene. Of course she hadn’t been on active duty when she’d first seen it, but there had been plenty of time afterward. It had just not occurred to her. Jeff Montrose, the grad student who showed her around, had thought the place was dead, a simple crypt.

  It helped her conscience a little that Arkeley hadn’t bothered to lock the site down, either. It helped a very little.

  Okay, she thought to herself. My guilty feelings about the past help nobody. For the present: No more mistakes. Do this just like Arkeley would.

  She drew her weapon from its holster. Checked the safety. “There won’t be any vampires down there, not now, but there could be others. Half-deads, or maybe deluded people who work for my vampire. They may have gotten the hearts but didn’t have time to put them with their respective bodies. In that case they might be guarding the coffins right now.” She stood silent for a moment, listening for any sign of activity inside the tent. The nylon walls stirred a little in a breeze, but she didn’t hear anyone moving around. She stepped through the tall wet grass that left little dark ovals on her pant legs, and twitched back the door of the tent.

  There was nobody inside. Not up top, anyway. She looked back at two of the cops who’d come with Glauer. Gestured for them to go around either side of the tent. There could be any number of monsters hiding in the trees around them—she did not want to go down into the cavern and have somebody pull the ladder up, trapping her inside.

  She moved into the tent with just Glauer at her shoulder, half a pace behind her. He was so tall that the roof of the tent bowed outward around his head. She stopped and lo
oked back at him, then down at his belt. He looked confused until she pointed directly at his gun. He frowned guiltily, then drew it.

  His instincts, his cop training, had told him you didn’t enter a place looking for a fight. You didn’t draw until you were ready to shoot. In any other circumstance that would have been a good thing, proper firearms discipline. In the tent it was just dumb.

  He drew his weapon, lifted it to shoulder height. The muzzle pointed up, through the roof of the tent. If he tripped or panicked his shot would go clear and not hit Caxton in the back. That made her feel slightly better.

  She walked past the tables full of old rusty metal artifacts and whited lead bullets. The excavation at the far end of the tent was as she’d last seen it, with the ladder leading down into the cavern. One thing was different, but it took her a moment to place it. Somebody had turned off the lights down there.

  She spun around looking for a generator, or a switch, or any way to get them back on. She couldn’t see anything. Instead of wasting more time looking for a way to get the power back on, she took her flashlight off her belt and swished its beam around the bottom of the hole. Nothing jumped out at her.

  “Cover me,” she said, “then come down ten seconds after I get to the bottom.”

  Glauer nodded. His eyes were very wide.

  There will be nobody down there, she thought. There will be nobody down there except ninety-nine skeletons. We can spend the rest of the day grinding them down to powder and then burning the powder in a blast furnace. My vampire has the hearts, but without the bones that’s nothing.

  It could be that easy. It really could. She knew better, though.

  She put one foot on the ladder. Nothing grabbed her ankle. The rung held her weight. She put her other foot down and waited a second, then hurried down as fast as she could go. At the bottom she panned her Beretta back and forth at eye height, ready to shoot anyone who appeared. Nobody did. She scanned the cavern with her flashlight beam.

  Behind her Glauer scampered down the ladder too fast. He missed one of the rungs and nearly fell.

  She should have told him not to bother coming down.

  “Remember the conversation we had that one time, about the worst things we’d ever seen?” Caxton asked him. “I think I have a new contender.”

  Her flashlight lit up stalactites and stalagmites, old dusty broken furniture, mineral deposits. The cavern was otherwise empty—no bones, no coffins.

  Somebody had moved them while she wasn’t looking. There could be only one reason why.

  Back up top, she gathered the locals together and told them to start calling every name on their emergency phone tree, to get every available man out of bed or work or wherever he was and get them down to the police station. She asked Glauer to find Vicente for her, to start liaising there.

  Her job had just become a lot more difficult. They would need to find the coffins, the bones, the hearts. All of them. They would need to find her vampire, wherever he was sleeping the day away. They might need to do a lot more than that. She glanced at her watch. It was nine-fifteen. She had less than ten hours and no leads whatsoever.

  No—there was one person she could call who might know what had happened in the cavern. One person who was responsible for the coffins. Deep in the stored phonebook of her cell she found an entry for Jeff Montrose, the graduate student from the department of Civil War Era Studies. She called him and after four rings got his message:

  “Welcome…to the dark lair of Jeff, Mary, Fisher, and Madison. We can’t take your call right now, most likely because we’re hanging by our feet someplace quiet and gloomy. If you’d like to leave a message, a prayer for salvation, or your darkest desire, we’re just dying to hear from you!”

  The phone beeped in her ear and she snapped it shut. She needed to talk to Montrose as soon as possible.

  “Glauer,” she shouted, “call your dispatcher. I need a street address right now.”

  58.

  I looked to the side, which was all I could do, & caught sight of Chess rolling on his own ground, his hands clutching his sides. He, I knew, would not be slain by such a fall. He would be merely inconvenienced.

  Storrow fired direct into the body of Chess, & then he loosed his second shell. The vampire curled like a moth that has touched flame, & shook, & screamed in anger & in pain. Not dead yet, & surely he would recover in a moment.

  When he did Storrow fired again. Then he reloaded his weapon & when the vampire stirred he shot once more. Neither of us knew any way to permanently steal the vampire’s strange life, but Storrow understood the creature could be kept stunned, at least for a while.

  Storrow did not speak to me as he carried out this ugly work. I did not know how many shells he possessed. It could have still ended in both our deaths, & perhaps it should have. Yet before too long we both looked up for we had heard some great noise in the woods around us, as of many men approaching. Had I seen then dead Simonon’s ghost riding a skeletal horse I would have not been so surprised as to see who led that host. For instead it was Hiram Morse, our cowardly deserter.

  —THE STATEMENT OF ALVA GRIEST

  59.

  She spent the morning doing police work—real police work. Following up leads and examining crime scenes. There was plenty to find. The vampire had been busy.

  By ten-thirty it started raining, a faint drizzle that felt more like mist. Water shook down from the trees and soaked the leaves on the sidewalks. Where Caxton’s shoes brushed away the oak leaves they left brown spiky stains on the concrete, shadows cut loose in the silvery light.

  The chief arrived in a car with a gold badge on its hood and just a single blue light on top. He stepped out and glared at her, not even trying to hide his annoyance. He wore a heavy yellow raincoat with reflective tape across the back. He rushed toward her while opening an umbrella.

  “You told me you had this under control,” he said.

  “I told you to stay on your toes,” she replied.

  It wasn’t what she’d wanted to say. It was a game she was playing, though, and she’d never been very good at games. This time she needed a solid win.

  “I’d hoped we’d seen the last of you,” he said. He had a tight smile on his face that was probably the closest he could manage to a look of patient concern. “That’s why we brought you in. You’re supposed to know how to handle these things.”

  The chief would have been briefed at least once by his officers. He had to know what was going on. Still he wanted to put the blame on her. To make her say it was all her fault. That wouldn’t help anybody.

  Carefully she laid out their shared problem. “There were ninety-nine more skeletons in that cavern. Our vampire has managed to remove them all to an unknown location. He has also come into possession of the hearts that used to belong to those ninety-nine vampires. If he puts the hearts together with the bones he can wake them up. All of them. Tonight, just before seven, they’ll rise from their coffins and they’ll be very, very hungry.” She had to play this just right, she knew. Not step on his toes, but not kowtow to him either. “This is your show. You have some pretty tough decisions to make. I’ll be happy to advise you if I can.”

  “You’re saying he came back here.” The chief just didn’t seem to get it. She needed to fix that. “You’re saying there are going to be more of them?”

  Caxton nodded. “I’m sorry to drag you all the way out here. I just thought you should see this for yourself.”

  Arkeley would not have played this game, she knew. He wouldn’t have had to. He would have bulled into town and demanded his due share of respect and power and he would have run things his way from the start. She’d already blown any chance of doing that—already squandered what goodwill the chief might once have felt toward her.

  Glauer had filled her in on what had happened while she’d been in Philadelphia. Already Vicente had tried to undermine her. He’d made a big show of inviting her down to Gettysburg originally because he thought she could ki
ll the vampire in one night and make all the bad things go away without putting any of his men at risk. She had been the famous vampire killer, the one they made that movie about—surely one vampire would be no problem for her to dispatch. It hadn’t worked out that way. Instead she had scared off all the tourists—the town’s lifeblood—and cost the local businesses untold amounts of money.

  Everybody in this world has a boss, and the chief of police’s boss was the mayor. There had been an emergency meeting of the chamber of commerce. The National Park Service, which was its own little fiefdom in a town with more history than people, had weighed in as well. They weren’t happy at all. The mayor, who knew nothing about vampires, had come down hard on Vicente. Ripped him a new asshole, as Glauer put it (and this from a man who had trained himself never to curse in polite conversation).

  Shit rolls downhill. Bureaucracy rolls faster. Vicente had put the blame on the state police and more specifically on Trooper Laura Caxton. It had been her misconduct that had hurt the town, he claimed. In short, he had covered his ass. His question the previous night, when he had asked her if his men could stand down, had followed immediately.

  He knew the danger his town was in—knew it intellectually, but didn’t really understand. He was a lot more worried about losing his job.

  Which meant she had to convince him there were some things more important than political advancement. He could still send her packing if she didn’t get through to him. Send her away with polite thanks and say he would take it from there. She couldn’t let that happen. No more mistakes, she swore. “Would you come this way, Chief?” she asked.

  She led him down an alleyway between a bank and a dry cleaner’s. More yellow police tape blocked it off from traffic. Halfway down the narrow lane stood a car, a Ford Focus with New Jersey state tags. It looked like three people were sleeping inside, one in the driver’s seat, two in the rear seat leaning against each other.