13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “North Carolina, originally,” he replied. “Make a left.”

  Fuming a little, she crept forward onto the road he indicated. It looked more like a nature trail. In the headlights she could see it had been paved once with cobblestones, but time had turned them into jagged rocks that could pop a tire if she drove too quickly. The drive wound between two copses of whispering trees, mixed maple and ash. Leaves had fallen in great sweeps across the way, suggesting that this road led nowhere but the ancient past. Yet perhaps not—the way was never actually blocked. Someone might have tried to make the place look forbidding, but they had stopped short of actually cutting off access.

  “There’s no parking lot; there hasn’t been for fifty years. You can just drive up onto the main lawn and stop somewhere unobtrusive,” Arkeley told her.

  Main lawn? All she could see was increasingly dense forest, the thick dark woods that had given Pennsylvania its name centuries earlier. The trees rose sixty feet high in places, in places even higher. She switched on her headlights—and then she saw the lawn.

  It was not the manicured stretch of bluegrass she had expected. More like a fallow field aggressively reclaimed by weeds. Yet she could make out low stone walls and even, in the distance, a dry fountain streaked green and black by algae. She stopped the car and they got out. Darkness closed around them like a fog once the car’s lights flicked off. Arkeley started at once toward the fountain and she followed him, and then she saw their destination looming up in the starlight. A great Victorian pile, a gabled brick mound with wings stretching away from its central mass. On one side stood a greenhouse with almost no glass left in it at all, just a skeletal iron frame festooned with vines. A wing on the far side had completely collapsed and partially burned, perhaps having been struck by lightning. A concrete bas relief above the main entrance named the place:

  ARABELLA FURNACE STATE HOSPITAL

  “Let me guess,” Caxton said. “You’ve brought me to an abandoned lunatic asylum.”

  “You couldn’t be less correct,” he told her. The smile on his face was different this time. It almost looked wistful, as if he wished it were an asylum. They approached the fountain and he laid a hand on the broken stone. Together they looked up at the statue of a woman pouring out a great urn that rested on her hip. The urn had gone dry years before. Caxton could see rust inside its mouth where the waterworks had been. The statue’s free arm, maybe twice the size of a human appendage, stretched toward them in benediction or welcome. Her face, whatever expression it may once have offered to visitors, had been completely eroded. Acid rain, time, maybe vandalism had effaced it until the front of her head was just a rough mask of featureless stone.

  “This wasn’t an asylum, it was a sanatorium. They used to bring tuberculosis patients here for a rest cure,” Arkeley explained.

  “Did it work?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Three out of every four patients died in the first year. The rest just lingered on and on. Mostly the health authorities just wanted them out of the way so they wouldn’t infect anyone else. The cure amounted to fresh air and simple manual labor to pay for their keep. Still, the patients received three meals a day and all the cigarettes they could smoke.”

  “You’re kidding. Cigarettes for people with a respiratory disease?”

  “The cigarette companies built this place, and all the other sanatoria like it all over the country. They probably suspected a link between smoking and tuberculosis—smoking made you cough, after all, and so did consumption. Who knows? Maybe they just felt sorry for the infected.”

  Caxton stared at him. “I wasn’t expecting a history lesson tonight,” she said. He didn’t reply. “You said that I couldn’t be more wrong. How else was I wrong?”

  “Arabella Furnace was closed in the fifties, but it isn’t abandoned. There are still patients here. Well, one patient.”

  She was left, as usual, without further information. She had to imagine what kind of hospital would be kept open for a single patient.

  They entered through the front door, where a single watchman in a navy blue uniform waited, an M4 rifle slung over the back of his chair. He wore the patches of a Bureau of Prisons corrections officer. He looked bored. He appeared to recognize Arkeley, though he made no attempt at greeting the marshal.

  “I’ve never heard of this place,” she said.

  “They don’t advertise.”

  They passed through a main hall with narrow spiral staircases at each corner, leading both up and down. Large square vaulted chambers stood at every compass point. Arches here and there were sealed off with bricks, then pierced with narrow doorways with elaborate locks. Power lines and Ethernet cables hung in thick bundles against the walls or stretched away across open space, held up by metal hooks secured in the ceiling.

  Caxton touched the dark stone of a wall and felt the massive coolness, the strength of it. Someone had scratched their initials in the wall right next to where her hand lay, a complicated acronym from a time of rigidly defined names: G.F.X.MCC., A.D. 1912.

  Arkeley didn’t allow her to absorb the atmosphere. He strode forward briskly, his squeaking footfalls rolling around the ceiling, echoes that followed her close behind as she rushed to keep up. They passed through a steel doorway and she saw where the paint had been rubbed away from the jamb by countless hands over time. They moved through a white corridor with plaster walls, studded by a dozen more doorways, all of them wreathed with cobwebs. At the far end a sheet of plastic hung down over an empty doorway. Arkeley lifted the plastic aside for her, a strangely comforting gesture, and Caxton stepped inside.

  The ward beyond was bathed in a deep blue glow that came from a massive lighting fixture in the ceiling. The bulbs up there had been painted so that everything red in the room appeared to be black. The contents of the room were varied, and somewhat startling. There were rows and racks of obsolete medical equipment, enameled steel cabinets with Bakelite knobs that might have been part of the hospital’s official equipment. There were laptop computers and what looked like a miniature MRI scanner. In the middle of the room was a tapered wooden coffin with brass handles and a deeply upholstered interior. Cameras, microphones, and other sensors Caxton couldn’t identify hung down over the coffin on thick curled cables so the coffin’s contents could be constantly and exhaustively monitored.

  An electrical junction box with a single button mounted on its face stood next to the doorway. Arkeley pushed the button and a buzzer sounded deep inside the sanatorium. “You read my report. You know I set fire to all the vampires on that boat in Pittsburgh.”

  Caxton nodded. She could guess what came next.

  “You’ll also remember Lares only had enough blood to revivify three of his ancestors. There was a fourth one who went without nourishment. Strangely enough, the ones with skin and flesh burned just fine. The one without was merely charred. She survived the blaze.”

  “But vampires are extinct in America,” she protested.

  “Extinct in the wild,” Arkeley corrected her.

  A plastic barrier lifted at the far side of the room and a wheelchair was steered into the coffin chamber. The man who pushed it wore a white lab coat with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was a little skinny—otherwise he had no distinguishing features at all. Then again, he was likely to appear nondescript in comparison to his charge. The woman in the wheelchair wore a tattered mauve dress, moth-eaten and sheer with use. She was little more than bones wrapped in translucent white skin as thin as tissue paper.

  There was no hair on her head except for a few spindly eyelashes. The skin had broken and parted from the bones of her skull, in places having worn away altogether, leaving visible shiny patches of bone. She had one plump eyeball, the iris colorless in the blue light. Her ears were long, sharply triangular, and riddled with sores. Her mouth looked broken, somehow, or at least wrong. It was full of shards, translucent jagged bits of bone. Caxton slowly made out that these were teeth. The woman had hundreds of the
m, and they weren’t broken. They were just sharp. This was what she had read about in Arkeley’s report. This was one of the creatures he’d set on fire in the belly of the boat—a vampire, an old, blood-starved vampire. She’d never seen anything more horrible, not even the near-faceless half-dead who had peered in through her window the night before.

  “Hello, Deputy. You’re on schedule—it’s just about feeding time at the zoo.” It was the man in the lab coat who spoke. He pushed the wheelchair closer to them than Caxton would have liked. She felt nothing from the vampire, no sense of humanity, just coldness. It was like standing next to the freezer cabinet in a grocery store on a hot summer day. The chill was palpable, and real, and wholly unnatural.

  “Special Deputy,” Arkeley corrected.

  “Feeding time?” Caxton asked, appalled.

  The vampire’s eye brightened noticeably.

  8.

  “This blue light we ’re standing in,” Caxton said. “It must be some, I don’t know, some wavelength vampires can’t see, right? So she can’t see us?”

  “Actually, she can see you just fine. She would see you in perfect darkness. She’s told me,” the man in the lab coat said. “She can see your life glowing like a lamp. This light is less damaging to her skin than even soft white fluorescents.” He held out a hand. “I’m Doctor Hazlitt. I don’t think we’ve met.”

  Caxton tore her gaze away from the vampire’s single, rolling eyeball to look at the man. She began to reach for his hand, to shake it. Then she stopped. His sleeve was rolled up to his bicep and she saw a plastic tube embedded in the soft flesh inside his elbow. A trickle of dried-up blood, perfectly black in the blue light, stained the end of the tube.

  “It’s a shunt,” he told her. “It’s easier than using a syringe every time.”

  Arkeley squatted down to look at the vampire eye to eye. Her fleshless hands moved compulsively in her lap as if she were trying to get away, as if he terrified her. Caxton supposed she had every right—the Fed had once set her on fire and left her for dead. “Hazlitt here feeds her his own blood, out of the goodness of his heart,” Arkeley announced. “So to speak.”

  “I know it seems grisly,” the doctor told her. “We tried a number of alternatives—fractionated plasma and platelets from a blood bank, animal blood, a chemical the Army is trying out as a blood surrogate. None of it worked. It has to be human, it has to be warm and it has to be fresh. I don’t mind sharing a little.” He stepped over to a workbench a few yards away from the wheelchair and took a Pyrex beaker out of a cabinet. A length of rubber tubing went into the shunt, its free end draped over the lip of the beaker. Caxton looked away.

  “Why?” she asked Arkeley. “Why feed it at all?” Her first instinct as a cop—to ask questions until she understood exactly what was going on—demanded answers.

  “She’s not an ‘it’! Her name,” Hazlitt said, and he stopped for a moment to grunt in moderate-sounding pain, “is Malvern. Justinia Malvern. And she was a human being once. That might have been three hundred years ago but please, show some respect.”

  Caxton shook her head in frustration. “I don’t understand. You nearly got killed trying to destroy her. Now you’re protecting her, here, and even giving her blood?”

  “It wasn’t my decision.” Arkeley patted his coat pocket as if that should mean something to her. It didn’t. He sighed deeply and kept staring at the vampire as he explained. “When we found her at the bottom of the Allegheny, still in her coffin, we didn’t know what to do. I was still in the hospital and nobody much listened to me anyway. My bosses turned her body over to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian said they would love to have her remains, but while she was still alive they couldn’t take her. They asked us to euthanize her so they could put her on display. Then somebody made a mistake and asked a lawyer what to do. Since as far as we know she’s never killed an American citizen—she’s been moribund like this since before the American Revolution—the Justice Department decided we didn’t have a right to execute her. Funny, huh? Lares was up and moving and showing signs of intelligence, but nobody filed any charges when I put him down. Malvern here was half rotted away in her coffin, but if I put a stake through her heart they were willing to call it murder. Well, that’s how it goes. She had no family or friends, for obvious reasons, so they made her a ward of the court. Technically I’m responsible for her welfare. I have to clothe her, shelter her, and yes, feed her. Nobody knows whether cutting off her blood supply will kill her, but without a federal court order we’re not allowed to stop.”

  “She’s earned her keep a dozen times over,” Hazlitt said. He was dismantling the siphon that had drawn blood out of his arm. “I’ve been studying her for seven years now and every single day and night of it has been rewarding.”

  “Yeah? What have you learned?” Caxton asked.

  The vampire’s face curled up. Her nose lifted in the air and rippled obscenely. She had smelled the blood.

  “We’ve learned that blue light is best for her. We’ve learned how much blood she needs to maintain partial mobility. We’ve learned what level of humidity she likes and what extremes of temperature affect her.”

  Caxton shook her head. “All of which helps keep her alive. How does it benefit us?”

  For the very first time Arkeley looked at her with a light of approval in his eyes.

  “We’re going to find a cure here.” Hazlitt came around a bank of equipment, his face sharp. “Here, in this room. I’ll cure her. And then we’ll have a vaccine and that will benefit society.”

  “We don’t need a vaccine if they’re extinct,” Arkeley said.

  The two of them exchanged a hot stare for a moment of pure, easy hatred.

  “Excuse me, I really do need to feed her.” Hazlitt knelt before the wheelchair-bound vampire and held up the beaker to show her the ounce or two of black blood at the bottom.

  “Jesus, how long have you been studying her?” Caxton asked. “You said you’ve been doing this for seven years. But she must have been here for two decades. Who worked here before you?”

  “Dr. Gerald Armonk.”

  “The late Dr. Armonk,” Arkeley said.

  Hazlitt shrugged. “There was an unfortunate accident. Dr. Armonk and Justinia had a very special relationship. He used to feed her directly, cutting open the pad of his thumb and allowing her to suck out his blood. She had a bad spell of depression in the nineties, you see, and even attempted to hurt herself a few times. Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest thing to do, to feed her that way, but it seemed to cheer her immensely.”

  “Armonk had a doctorate. From Harvard, if you can believe it,” Arkeley said.

  “For the first few days that I worked here, she was flush with life and really, actually, quite beautiful,” Hazlitt said. “Then she began to fade like a wilting rose. What little blood I had for her just wasn’t enough.” He raised the beaker as if to press it to her bony lips. Arkeley grabbed it out of his hands, sloshing the thick liquid.

  “Maybe not quite yet,” he said.

  The vampire lifted a shaking hand. Anger flared in her eye.

  For a lingering moment no one said anything. Hazlitt opened his mouth only to shut it again quickly. Caxton realized he must be terrified of Arkeley. He had recognized the marshal when he arrived, had even spoken to him with a certain familiarity. How many times in the previous twenty years had Arkeley come to this little room, Caxton wondered? How many times had he grabbed the beaker?

  But no. This was a familiar scene for everyone but herself. Yet she understood, from the relative postures of the two men, that Arkeley had never interrupted the ritual before this night.

  It was Arkeley who broke the silence. Clutching the beaker in both hands, he looked right into the vampire’s eye. “We’ve had reports of half-dead activity,” he said, quietly. Softly, even. “Faceless. The woman over there saw one. I burned its arm this morning. There’s only one way to make a half-dead, and it takes a young, active vampire. A new vampire. Have y
ou been naughty, Miss Malvern? Have you done something foolish?”

  The vampire’s head rolled to the left and then the right on the thin column of her neck.

  “I have a hard time believing you,” Arkeley said. “Who else can make a vampire but you? Give me a name. Give me a last known address and I’ll leave you alone. Better yet: Tell me how you do it. Tell me how you birthed the monstrosity.”

  The vampire didn’t reply at all, except to let her one eye roll downward until it was focused on the blood in the beaker.

  “Don’t be a bastard,” Hazlitt hissed. “At least not more than usual. You know how much she needs that blood. And look. It’s already clotting.”

  “Alright.” Arkeley lifted the beaker and pressed it into the vampire’s outstretched hand. She clutched it in a shaky death grip that turned her knuckles even whiter. “Enjoy it while you still can.”

  “What is your problem?” Hazlitt nearly shrieked.

  Arkeley straightened up and tapped his jacket pocket again. It made a tiny snare sound—there was a piece of paper in there. “I said we couldn’t cut off her blood supply unless we had a court order. Well, this new vampire activity lit some fires under some very important posteriors.” He drew out a long piece of paper embossed with a notary’s seal. “You are hereby ordered to cease and desist feeding this vampire as of right now.” He smiled quite broadly. “Sometimes it helps to be the guy who guards courthouses.”

  The vampire stopped with the beaker halfway to her mouth. Her eye swiveled upward to squint at Arkeley.

  “If you were human you would try to make it last,” the Fed told her. “You’d know it was your last taste, ever, and you’d try to savor it. But you’re not human, and you can’t resist, can you?”