She had changed, Bill, to take on your face.
It was the barest of illusions, & easily pierced, yet I knew if I wished it she could speak with your voice, and hold my hands as you once did. Disgust, first, consumed me, but not for long. In time I came to understand she was giving me some gift, some favor, & I admit, it was good to see you again.
Then it was she spoke to me direct, using thought in place of word.
—LETTER OF ALVA GRIEST (UNPOSTED)
71.
The vampires came toward them in a square formation, lined up abreast in at least a dozen ranks. They wore nothing but rags, tatters of old uniforms, loose trousers torn at the cuff. A few had tunics on, colorless in the dark. Their skin was easier to see, pale, pale white even in the gloom. Their faces were hairless and gaunt, their cheeks sunken in.
They were big. They were fast and dangerous. They moved in an eerie lockstep, as if they were one being with many bodies. She could see their teeth glinting in the starlight, she could see their enormous, powerful hands.
One vampire could kill her. That was all it would take. One vampire had nearly strangled her. It would have been just as easy for him to tear her into little pieces. Now she was facing an army of them.
I can’t do this, she thought.
I am going to die here, she thought. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. She felt bewitched.
Still they came on. Their feet moved together. Left. Right. Left. Right. An army—not just a gaggle of them, not just a mob. A literal army.
Well, yes. Because that was what they’d been when they were alive. “They’re soldiers,” Caxton said, and it broke the spell. Breath plumed out of her. She drew oxygen into her lungs. “They’re marching.”
Arkeley would not have hesitated. Arkeley would have been braver. She channeled him, forced herself to think the way he would. Vampires were deadly, they were strong, but they were not invulnerable. She lined up her first shot, held it. One of the front rank, to the left of the center of the formation. She looked for her vampire among the ranks but couldn’t find him. She’d expected him to be at the front, leading the charge, but he must have been hidden in among them.
They were thin, painfully, horrifyingly thin. They looked starved and bedraggled.
Their eyes, however, were bright. Glowing like smoldering embers. Even in the dark they seemed to glow. She held her shot.
“Go for the hearts,” she said, loud, so the others would hear her. “Every time.”
Around her troopers and LEOs and guardsmen and local cops lifted their patrol rifles. Some knelt down, elbows on thighs to steady their aim. Others aimed from the shoulder, ready.
The vampires came on so fast, their feet barely brushing the ground. Their arms swung at their sides and their eyes stayed facing front, never looking to the side, never betraying them. If they saw Caxton and her troops they didn’t show any sign of it. They certainly didn’t show any fear.
She had worried they would split up. Worried they would head in a hundred different directions, that she would never catch them all. That wasn’t going to be a problem. The vampires were soldiers, and they’d been drilled in nineteenth-century battle tactics. Which meant staying together and walking right into fire. That standard operating procedure hadn’t worked so well during the Civil War, when men had marched right into cannon fire.
Closer—always closer. It was so dreamlike, so wrongly surreal that Caxton couldn’t get a sense of how far away they were. She held her shot. Corrected her aim. They were closer, well within range.
“Fire at will,” she shouted, and the night blew apart. Patrol rifles barked and jumped in the men’s hands. Caxton took her own shot, felt the weapon kick her shoulder. The recoil wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. She kept her eye on her target, watched a dark hole open in his chest. The vampire’s arm flew up and he turned at the waist, his chin hitting his shoulder.
The formation stopped in place. The vampires stood there, still, perfectly still, as if in surprise. Their eyes burned.
The one she’d shot slumped to the ground. His eyes stopped glowing, stared upward, into the sky. Here and there in the front rank others fell. Two—no, three of them down. The rest stared down at their bodies, at the holes that riddled their chests and bellies and their faces, looked from side to side, to one another.
The three who were down stayed down. The others grimaced as their flesh filled in around the bullet holes, as their bodies healed. It couldn’t have taken more than a second or two.
“Keep firing!” Caxton called. The rifles jumped and spoke. Another vampire fell, and then one on the end of the line spun around and grabbed at the vampire next to him. The rifles roared and vampires jumped, stepped backward, moved aside to let the ones behind pass.
They were moving again. Coming closer. So fast.
“Hold your positions,” Caxton shouted as the men behind her wove back and forth, looking for shots, some of them walking backward, trying to keep their distance. “Hold on,” she shouted, over the noise of the rifles. Vampires collapsed in the front line, but others moved forward, more of them. There were so many and they were so close, moving so fast. “Hold on!” she shouted again. She fired again and corroded brass buttons flew off a dark tunic. There was no blood; they had no blood in them to leak from the wounds. No way to tell if any given shot went true or wild. Some of the vampires who had fallen to the grass, their limbs wild and askew, started to get back up.
They moved fast. They were closer than she wanted them. She grabbed a pair of ear protectors from around her neck and pulled them on over her head, checked to make sure the others had theirs. Then she pulled a grenade out of her pocket and tore open its plastic wrapper.
It felt weird in her hand, like a can of soda more than a miniature bomb. It was painted a matte black, cylindrical and heavy, with circular holes punched down its length. She’d never seen one like it before, but she knew what it could do.
“Eyes,” she shouted, and pulled the pin. She threw it like a softball and it bounced harmlessly off a vampire’s shoulder. The vampire turned to watch it drop to the grass.
Even as she pulled her rifle back around to a firing position, Caxton squeezed her eyes shut. When the grenade went off she still saw stars.
Normal fragmentation grenades would be useless against vampires. The burst of shrapnel might slow them down for a moment or two, but the shards of metal would never reach a vampire’s well-protected heart. When the National Guard had asked her what kind of armament might be more useful she’d had a real inspiration, for once. She remembered the way Harold the night watchman’s flashlight had bothered her vampire and she had asked for flashbangs—stun grenades, in other words. The guard called them XM84s.
The grenade she threw held only about four and a half grams of magnesium and ammonium perchlorate. That was more than enough. When it detonated it pumped out more light than a million burning candles and a noise nearly one hundred and eighty decibels, loud enough to leave an unprotected human being staggering and dazed. To Caxton, even with her ear guards on, it sounded like a bomb had gone off right next to her face.
When the flash and noise were over she cautiously opened her eyes again, praying the grenade had been effective. What she saw almost made her smile.
Vampires were nocturnal creatures, unable to stand any bright light. They were also predators with exceptionally acute hearing. They were also well over a hundred years old and could not have imagined what she was throwing into their midst. Many of them must have turned to look right at the grenade. All of them had heard the noise. Their advance had halted and the majority of them were down, rolling on the grass, clutching their triangular ears. The glow in their eyes had brightened considerably until the red embers looked like they were sizzling away painfully in their sockets. One, she saw, was reaching up toward the stars as if to fend off some unseen blow. One had dropped to his knees and was clawing his own eyes out with talonlike fingers.
They were no more tha
n ten yards away. If she had hesitated for another second they would have been on her, all over her, devouring her troops. “Get around them,” she shouted, looking back to see her men tearing off their ear protectors. She reached up and took off her own. “Circle them, now, this is the best chance we’ll get!” She had another flashbang in her pocket, but she knew better than to underestimate vampires. They would know what to expect if she tried that trick again.
Her feet slipped as she ran through the long grass, but she didn’t fall. She came around behind the mass of vampires and lifted her weapon. It hardly seemed sporting, but she was beyond caring about that. One shot, then the next she lined up, executing the monsters, blowing out their hearts. They writhed and moaned beneath her, their white bodies luminous in the dark. An absurd deadly chant rang through her head, syncopated with the reports of her weapon. One vampire two vampires three vampires four. She did not stop or slow down until Glauer grabbed her arm.
“What?” she demanded. “What now?”
He pointed and she saw one of the dazed vampires blinking his eyes rapidly. He was sitting up, slowly regaining his composure.
“Shit,” she said.
She had known they would recover from the flash. She had really, really hoped it would take longer than it had.
72.
I thought it would be hard to find volunteers. Yet again I was wrong. It was a shock to me, as it must be to any man who had not seen this war at first hand, to learn just how many dying soldiers there were in Maryland, wounded in battle, victims of dread pestilence, or simply broken in spirit and in mind. How many who had so little left to live for, who would gladly welcome one last chance for glory before they must go on to meet their rest.
I was not stopped by dint of volunteers. In fact, I had to turn many away, men who still possessed some spark of life, and healthy frames, whose only infirmity was despair. Though I could not give particulars to any, though the word “vampire” never passed my lips, still, there were so many. Far, far too many.
Procuring the supplies I needed was easy enough as well. A few demijohns of prussic acid were requisitioned and readily available, for the troops used it to poison rats in their camps. Coffins were easily obtained, of a necessary quality and stoutness. This government has assured there will never be a shortage of coffins. A railroad car, fitted up for transporting dead soldiers home, was waiting for me in Hagerstown. And the most necessary item, Miss Justinia Malvern, I had accessed already. She was most tractable, and accommodating, as long as each night she received her ration of blood. More than once I provided this from my own veins.
—THE PAPERS OF WILLIAM PITTENGER
73.
“Damn it. Get back, get back,” Caxton called.
Some of the men around her obeyed at once, falling back, some running. Others stood their ground and kept shooting vampires, their weapons pointed down, the muzzle flashes going off in stuttering bursts.
More of the vampires started getting up, getting to their feet. The ones still rolling around on the ground were getting picked off, but there were still so many of them.
“Get back!” The only advantage the humans had was range—if the vampires recovered too quickly they would make short work of the troopers and LEOs and guardsmen. “Get back!” she screamed again.
More of her troops peeled away and ran off into the dark. More than a few, however, didn’t seem to hear her at all. Maybe their ear protectors hadn’t protected them from the bang. Maybe they were deafened—or maybe they were just so scared that they didn’t understand what she was telling them.
On the far side of the formation a vampire leaped up off the grass and tore into a trooper, tore his uniform shirt open and much of the skin beneath. Caxton raised her weapon and tried to cut the vampire down, but she couldn’t get a clear shot. The .50-caliber bullet in her rifle could cut through an engine block; it would pass right through the vampire and the trooper as well. There was nothing she could do for the man.
Right next to her a rifle jumped and danced, spitting bullets. The LEO there had switched to automatic fire and was hosing down the vampires with .50-caliber rounds. He was wasting ammunition—the vampires he hit jerked in place as if pulled by strings, but he was firing blind and had little or no chance of getting a clean heart shot. She screamed at him, but she couldn’t hear herself over the noise, could barely see from the muzzle flashes. She grabbed at his arm, trying to pull his hand off the trigger, but even as she did his weapon went dry.
“I’m out,” he called, and turned around, to go back, maybe to get more ammunition, maybe just to run. She grabbed a spare magazine out of her pocket and brandished it at him, but then she heard a local cop on her other side scream.
Her heart stopped beating in her chest as she swiveled around to see a wave of white skin and moldering cloth crash over her head.
So fast—they moved so fast, even after a century and a half in the ground—they were—they were everywhere—
The men bellowed and fired wildly, their muzzles pointing in every direction, tracking, trying to find targets. Caxton ducked low as a hot flash hider swung over her head. The noise as it fired deafened her, but she looked up and saw a vampire not ten inches from her face, watched as his red eyes flickered out. His pale hands beat at her shirt, at her arm, but there was no strength there.
“Come on,” Glauer said, right next to her.
Around her men were dying, left and right. Much faster than the vampires had. She saw a guardsman get torn in half, saw a white face bury itself in his red flesh. She saw necks twisted, saw vampire teeth ripping through navy windbreakers, digging through Kevlar vests. She heard screams all around.
She heard someone praying, a sound that ended abruptly.
Glauer grabbed her hand and she nearly dropped her rifle. “Regroup! Regroup!” she shouted, even as she danced away from a vampire running right at her, his shoulder down, his claws scooping at the air where she’d been. She managed to get her rifle back up, fired three shots, without aiming, into his face, his chest, his groin. The vampire jerked spasmodically and tripped over his own feet. She lined up a shot on his back, fired, watched him jump and fall face forward on the cold grass.
“Fall back,” she shouted, unsure if anyone was listening. The field was a mess, a chaos of bodies struggling in the darkness.
“Spread out,” one of the guardsmen shouted. “Get clear!” A vampire’s fingers were tangled in the combat webbing of his body armor. He swung around, trying to get free, and the vampire’s other hand snatched off his helmet. Blood fountained from his neck and Caxton saw his head dangle forward, attached by nothing more than scraps of flesh. The vampire leaned forward to lap at his blood.
“Help me!” someone barked. She turned and saw an LEO surrounded by three vampires. He was firing his patrol rifle from his hip, his other hand holding a big shiny Desert Eagle. He shot out a vampire’s eye and the vampire smiled wickedly, then grabbed him up in a bear hug so tight that Caxton could hear the man’s vertebrae pop inside his windbreaker.
She tried to go to his aid when a cold hand grabbed her leg and pulled her off her feet. It was the vampire she’d shot in the back, rolled over and facing up now. She had lined up a perfect shot—but now she realized her mistake. From behind she’d gotten her left and right confused. At worst she had shot him through a lung he didn’t need anymore.
His face opened wide, his mouth enormous. He pulled her toward him, hand over hand. His eyes blazed and she felt her spiral pendant warm up in her hand. He was trying to hypnotize her.
A vampire leaped over her head, deeper into the fray. She looked back down to see two bony white hands dragging her ankle up toward that gaping cavern of a mouth. She struggled to spin around, to get her weapon up. Swung the flash hider down between her knees, jabbed it like a bayonet into his flesh even as the teeth sank effortlessly into her calf.
She squeezed the trigger and the vampire screamed, releasing her leg. She rolled away from him and onto her
knees, her weapon pointed right at his chest, right at his heart. He was already dead. It didn’t matter.
There were plenty more all around.
Two came at her, one from either side. Their hands came up, ready to tear at her, to pull her apart. She shot one in the chest and he fell away, screaming, but the other collided with her, his fingers grasping at her tie, her shirt. He yanked and her throat closed up, her own tie crushing her windpipe. She tried to pull her weapon around, but he was right on top of her. She could feel his cold flesh against her own, smell his stink of putrefaction. She started to scream but the noise couldn’t get out of her throat. White spots drifted across her vision.
She heard gunshots. They sounded as if they’d come from far away. She could barely connect the sounds to the fact that the vampire’s head had split open in a white, pulpy mess, brain and bone flicking away in pieces. The vampire let go of her and she slid out from underneath him, tore open her tie. But even as she tried to get her feet under her the vampire was healing, his head knitting back together, his eyes glowing with pure rage.
Glauer grabbed her arm and helped her up. He brought his patrol rifle up and ready. He brought his arm up, sighted, and shot the vampire right through the heart.
74.
This is the sworn affadavut of Rudolph Storrow, of the 1st US Sharpshooturs, and all of it tru. On 27 Joon I came to Maryland to visut with my old pal Alva Griest, who was sick and in bed. Cornel Pittenger sent me.
They gave Alva a littul room at the garrisun and it was clean and it was bright with windas and nice enuff, yet full of stink, for his woond had ternd gangreenus, I am told. I sed nothing of the smell, for me and Alva are old frends.
99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale Page 22
