99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “Pure conjecture,” Vicente said in a weak voice.

  “Maybe so, but that’s what we have to go on.” Time to drive her point home. “Chief,” Caxton said, “I’d like to make a recommendation, if you’ll listen to it.”

  Vicente scowled, but when he’d stared at her for a while he eventually nodded.

  “You should completely evacuate the town.”

  She stood her ground, waited for Vicente to start shouting. She didn’t have to wait for long. While he told her just what he thought of her idea she waited patiently for the verbal storm to blow over. She barely even registered what he was saying.

  “We’ll search this town from top to bottom for those coffins,” she said. “I will do everything in my power to find them before nightfall. But if the search fails—”

  “—You have a recommendation for when that happens, too?”

  Caxton stared into his eyes. Directly into his eyes—like a vampire hypnotizing a victim. She lacked the magical powers, but she hoped her sincerity and her fear would have a similar effect. “If we can’t find the coffins before nightfall, we need to be ready. Ready for an army of vampires. Because that’s what we’re talking about. They’ll wake up hungry and they will kill everyone they see. Chief, I need you to authorize me to start planning for tonight.”

  “Tonight? Tonight, when you’re going to single-handedly take on a hundred vampires with your sidearm?”

  “No. I need you to help me gather my own army. I need officers, I need guns, and I need you to stay out of my way. I need you to stop thinking in terms of jurisdictions. I need you to stop thinking of this as an investigation and start thinking about this as a war.”

  64.

  I arrived in time to see Chess hang, and to watch his mansion burn. It should have ended there, with the vampire’s second and final death. Yet like this war the tale has no conclusion yet; and like the unquiet grave, it seems, any finality it offers is temporary at best.

  If the War Department wants my final assessment of what happened at Gum Spring, then let it have this: Private Hiram Morse should get a medal. Then he should be horsewhipped. The cur was good enough to search the burnt ruins of the Chess plantation and find the decrepit female still partially alive; or undead, or whatever the mot juste may be; and then to bring her down to where the Army Investigators waited, where they were already examining what remained of Obediah Chess. I would guess he was drunk with the praise he’d already received for giving them one vampire on the end of a rope. He must have thought his rewards would be doubled when he returned a second, and this one still capable of interrogation. Surely he cannot have known what vital knot he was unraveling. By recovering her body he may have changed the course of this war; yes, and of history. But he has also given me the most profane duty I ever hope to receive, and robbed all my future nights of sleep, however many they may be.

  —THE PAPERS OF WILLIAM PITTENGER

  65.

  So much to be done. Caxton’s weary body felt it piling up on her as if she were being buried alive.

  Local police had to be rounded up, given cars, given maps that broke down their search areas. Radios had to be synchronized. The dispatcher, with an exasperated sigh, routed dozens of messages an hour to the unit in Caxton’s car. Houses, museums, inns, tourist centers had to be searched. Schools, the hospital, every building of Gettysburg College (especially there, no stone could be left unturned there). The fire station, the old houses that were headquarters for ghost tours or guided tours of the battlefield. Restaurants, gift shops. The 7-Eleven. There were plenty of buildings that were too small to hold all the coffins, but they might have basements.

  There were phone calls to be made. Always there were more phone calls.

  Caxton called the state police barracks just outside of town, and the one in Arendtsville. She needed more eyes, more cops, more people to come and help look for coffins. She waited on hold for long minutes, far too many of them, just to talk to the Commissioner up in Harrisburg. She called the National Guard armory, only to be told that they couldn’t mobilize without a direct order from the governor.

  The governor wasn’t available to take her call.

  She oversaw roadblocks being thrown up across the major roads. Local cops from Harrisburg, Arendtsville, and Hanover could man those. She oversaw hospital staff, doctors, nurses, orderlies, and maintenance men as they packed up necessary equipment, spoke in low tones with administrators about moving patients out of their rooms, out to the available beds in nearby towns. Always someone wanted to argue, someone wanted to claim that a given patient couldn’t be moved, that their condition was too delicate. The vampires wouldn’t care, she tried to explain. They didn’t care if somebody was dying of leukemia or brain cancer or pernicious infections. Blood was blood, and if the donor couldn’t get up and run away, all the better.

  She scared a lot of people. She saw their faces go white, saw their hands tremble as they failed to meet her gaze. Laura Beth Caxton’s heart went out to them. Arkeley would have been pleased—if they were scared they would move faster. It would inspire them to get away. She needed to be more like Arkeley. When their voices broke, when they begged her to understand, she hardened herself and told them what was coming.

  More calls. She called in school buses, talked to principals and superintendents, called the local Greyhound station. Called the National Guard again and asked if they could send troop transports. A lot of people had already left Gettysburg, including most of the tourists. A lot of the townies had stayed put. She needed to get more than five thousand people out of harm’s way and she needed to do it before six o’clock, her absolute, positive deadline for the evacuation. The National Guard had a fleet of vehicles fueled up and ready to go, but they couldn’t dispatch them without the approval of the governor, or, if he was completely unreachable, the lieutenant governor.

  The lieutenant governor was away from his office at the moment. Did she want to leave a message? His personal assistant wasn’t really sure how to get hold of him, even if it was an emergency.

  Operations like this didn’t just happen. They had to be obsessively planned. Everyone wanted oversight and everyone wanted to cover their respective asses. People couldn’t be pulled away from necessary jobs, life-and-death-type jobs. There were authorizations she needed just to use the right kind of weapons—much less to requisition them. A police operation this size normally took months to organize, to get all the necessary people and equipment in place at the right time. She had just a few hours.

  Not every piece of news was cataclysmic. The Harrisburg Police Department had a long-standing agreement with the borough of Gettysburg, a convenient blurring of jurisdictions that had never been legally questioned. They were happy to send some men down. Would ten suffice? Caxton wanted a hundred, but she took what she was offered.

  “What about helicopters?” she asked. The coffins could be hidden somewhere out in the woods around the battlefield. They could be sitting on a rooftop somewhere, someplace her searchers couldn’t easily get to. Aerial support would help the searchers coordinate their efforts, too. Harrisburg had two helicopters, though one was in for scheduled maintenance. It could be prepped and fueled and in the air within a couple of hours. They’d send them down as soon as possible.

  The local Harrisburg PD had a special arrangement with the state police as well. They knew she was serious, and they wanted to help any way they could. She couldn’t thank them enough.

  Glauer called her several times. “Nothing,” he always said. “Nothing. A couple people wouldn’t let us search their houses, but these are good people, people I’ve known all my life.”

  “Make sure they get evacuated in the first wave,” Caxton said. “Then search their houses after they’re gone. This is an emergency.”

  They put an announcement on the radio, on TV and over the Internet. All citizens of the borough of Gettysburg should report to the closest school or government building and await transport out of town. Under
no circumstances should they try to leave town in their own vehicles. Caxton had seen how bad the traffic could get on a normal day—the streets of Gettysburg would have been hopelessly snarled, the evacuation hopelessly gridlocked in honking horns and flashing lights and road rage and minor accidents and maybe major accidents too. The rain would make it worse.

  Some of them tried. She got calls from all over town and had to send units to untangle the mess, to calm people down, to get them in line. Every officer she sent to chase down an unruly motorist was one less officer she had for the door-to-door search.

  A call came in from the mayor. Did she think she would find the coffins in time? Did she think that this could be resolved without loss of life? Did she think the mayor and his staff should be evacuated by the helicopter they’d seen circling the town?

  No, no, and no. Caxton closed her eyes for a moment and waited for the mayor to stop talking. She said no a few more times, barely listening to the questions.

  “Nothing to report,” Glauer said, over the radio in her car. “I’d estimate we’ve searched twenty percent of the buildings in town.”

  It was already three o’clock.

  Caxton sat up straight, hung up on the mayor. So much time had passed and there was still so much to do. People were lined up around the block at the post office, at the town hall, at the visitor’s center. Waiting for buses to take them away.

  She called the National Guard again. Begged.

  “The governor, or in an emergency, the lieutenant governor…”

  She flipped her phone closed. Tried to breathe through her nose. Then she opened the phone again.

  She called the state police again, got them to send every available liquor enforcement officer. Getting the LEOs onboard doubled the number of people she had who could work traffic details, man roadblocks, help search.

  The press called her. Over and over. Did she think they would find the coffins in time? Did she really believe that Gettysburg was about to be overrun with vampires? Didn’t she think that story was a little hard to swallow?

  She did not waste time on the press.

  More calls, more to do. She got through to the sergeant at arms at the Harrisburg headquarters. Outlined the equipment she needed as if she were ordering out of the L.L. Bean catalog. Except instead of sweaters and fleece vests she wanted patrol rifles and riot gear. The man hung up on her once, so she called back and threatened him, pulled rank. Then she pleaded: please, please, please.

  “Even if I have that stuff I need a special order, in writing, from the Commissioner, and he’s out of his office right now,” the sergeant at arms told her.

  The National Guard had everything she needed. They had piles of it, all kept in perfect working order, oiled up, ready to go. Mountains of ammunition, rack after rack of rifles. Plus plenty of people to carry them, including more than a few veterans from Iraq. Soldiers. Real soldiers.

  The lieutenant governor was meeting with an educational task force and no, his personal assistant didn’t think he could deliver a message right now.

  “Do you understand what is going to happen? Do you understand how many people are going to die?”

  He didn’t have to understand. That wasn’t his job.

  She called the Commissioner of the state police in Harrisburg. Got put on hold. She didn’t have time to wait on hold. She couldn’t afford not to talk to him. She put her phone on speaker, borrowed Chief Vicente’s cell, and kept making calls.

  By four-thirty the Commissioner was available to talk to her. “Yes, I understand how serious this situation is. I know it’s an emergency. You want to tell me what kind? I’m a little in the dark here. I sent you in there to chase one vampire, and you come back to me saying you might have a hundred of them. If this is a mistake, if you blow this—”

  “I won’t,” she promised. If she did blow it, if she failed, she doubted she would live long enough to have to worry about losing her job. “You have to trust me. I have a chain of evidence as long as my arm, I have information from trusted informants, but I don’t have time to write it up in a report and send it to you. I need you to just do what I say, and not ask any more questions. Otherwise a lot of people are going to die. Tonight.”

  “You don’t think you’ll be able to find the coffins before sunset?”

  The last report she’d had from Glauer said that they’d covered maybe forty percent of the town.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t. I’d like to say yes, but I can’t afford to be wrong.”

  There was a long, deadly pause on the line. Caxton could hear the Commissioner breathing, but that was about it.

  “Alright.”

  Caxton could hardly believe her ears. “You’re saying yes?”

  “I am.”

  She couldn’t thank him enough.

  The governor called her next. He apologized for taking so long getting back to her. Asked her how she was holding up, and what she needed, and what he could do to help. He would mobilize the National Guard immediately, send the troop transports she needed, send helicopters, soldiers, weapons. As fast as humanly possible. “A small force should arrive before sunset tonight. More will be sent out as they become available. Please, Trooper, I am asking you to please protect the Commonwealth.”

  “Sir, I’m truly grateful,” she said, meaning it. “I just—I didn’t expect you to—I didn’t—”

  “You have some interesting friends, Trooper,” the governor said. “So—is there anything else you need?”

  “Can you send any tanks?”

  He laughed, in a good-natured way.

  She ended the call. Dialed Arkeley. “I don’t know what you did, but—”

  He sounded distorted and weird. As if he were in a car moving under speed, or maybe it was just the rain interfering with the signal. She didn’t know where he was or what he was up to, didn’t have time to ask. His reply was to the point. “I’ve earned a lot of favors over the last twenty years, because I knew a day like this would come. I used up every ounce of political capital I had.”

  As a U.S. Marshal, Arkeley had guarded a lot of courthouses in his time and gotten to know a lot of judges. Politicians listened to judges. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what else to say.”

  “That’s enough.” Arkeley was silent for a moment. “There’s one more thing I might be able to do for you. It’s drastic.”

  “These are drastic times,” she said.

  “Okay. Let me get back to work.”

  Caxton agreed and hung up.

  One more phone call.

  She dialed her own home number, waited for Clara to pick up. It took six or seven rings.

  “Hello?”

  I need to tell you what’s happening, Caxton thought. I need to tell you what’s going to happen when the sun goes down.

  I need to tell you that I might get killed tonight. That I will probably get killed tonight. I need to tell you that.

  “Hello?”

  The words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. None of them.

  I need to say good-bye, she thought.

  “Laura? I know you’re there—I saw it on the caller ID. What’s going on?”

  Caxton opened her mouth. Forced something out. “I love you,” she said.

  Nothing from the other end. Then a low, soft sound. “I love you, too,” so low, whispered so gently that it could have been an echo on the line.

  Caxton flipped her phone shut. She couldn’t say another word.

  Shaking and dizzy with lack of sleep, lack of food, overdoses of caffeine and terror, she climbed out of her car for the first time in hours. She walked half a block down to the post office, where a big white uparmored personnel carrier was loading the very frightened citizens of Gettysburg. National Guardsmen in full uniform helped them climb up through the rear hatches, smiled at them, told them it was going to be alright.

  She looked at her watch: six-twenty-three.

  66.

  I hurried into General Hooker’s h
eadquarters as soon as I arrived and was directed to a room upon the second floor. Inside I found the female propped up by pillows in a comfortable bed. A single candle burned behind a silk screen, leaving the room in great dimness. Any more light would cause her physical pain, I was told. She was well provided with writing materials and much ink, and had already covered several pages with a fine and flowing hand. When she turned her singular eye upon me a chill flushed through me, as if the very marrow of my bones had been replaced with ice, yet I barely hesitated as I strode to the bed and kissed her rotten hand. I had been told she was a spy for the Union now, and had provided much useful intelligence, and was an honored guest of the general. I was also told she would drink my blood if she could. Yet she assured me she was sated, and that I should be at my ease. I did not enquire as to from whose veins she had drawn her rations that night.

  She told me much of her history; how she had been brought to America in the last century (and by her considerable decay I believed it), and how she had been an ornament in the house of the Chess family that whole time, unable to climb out of her gilded coffin. She told me of how she came to know Obediah Chess when he was a child, forbidden to approach her but unable to heed his parents’ good offices. It was only after the commencement of hostilities, however, that she had convinced the lad to join her in immortal unlife. He had honored her as a second mother (his first lost to a fever when he was a babe). He had fed her first from his own blood, then brought the vital fluid of others to her upon reaching his majority and accepting her curse. He had found it quite easy, she said, to procure the needed substance in time of war, when persons could go missing without question, especially slaves who might be believed to have run off in the chaos. She spoke fondly of that time, as others now speak of peacetime and the prosperity and abundance we once took for granted.