13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

“Closer on a hundred, if you count the ones inside.” It was the local cop. He still looked green, but he had their identification in his hands. He returned it to them and let them head inside.

  When she saw the kitchen, Caxton almost wished he’d refused them. The scene inside made no sense, and her brain refused to accept it. The smell kept screwing with her head. It was bad, extremely bad, but more than that, it was wrong. The reptilian part of her brain knew that smell meant death. It knew enough to want to get away. She could feel it squirming at the base of her skull, trying to crawl away down her spine.

  She focused on the details, trying not to see the big picture. That was tough. There were cops everywhere in different uniforms, milling around, bagging evidence, doing their jobs. She could barely see them for the bones. It was like a crypt in there, not like a house at all. Bones were stacked like cordwood along the wall, on top of the white enamel stove, shoved into closets. Someone had sorted them into skulls, pelvises, ribs, limbs. “Obsessive compulsive disorder,” Caxton breathed.

  “Now, that may be something real,” Arkeley told her. “In Eastern Europe they used to sprinkle mustard seeds around a vampire’s coffin. They thought he would have to count them all before he could move on, and if they left enough he would still be counting when dawn came. We don’t know much about what vampires and half-deads do when they’re not actively hunting. We know they don’t watch television—it confuses them. They don’t understand our culture and it doesn’t interest them. Maybe they have their own entertainment. Maybe they sit around sorting their bones.”

  Caxton moved into the main room, mostly just wanting to get away from all the bones. What she found in the living room was worse. She crossed her arms over her stomach and held on tight. A couch and three comfortable-looking chairs stood in a semicircle around a big fireplace. Human bodies in various states of decomposition sat as if posed, some with their arms around others, some leaning forward on their elbows. Baling wire had been used to keep them upright and in comfortable-looking postures. “Jesus.” It was too much. It made no sense. “I don’t get it. The vampire ate all these people. He kept their bodies around. Then he killed Farrel Morton and his kids and he felt like he needed to hide their corpses. Why the sudden change? What was different about Morton?”

  “Somebody might miss him.” It was a photographer from the sheriff ’s office. She was an Asian woman with long bangs draped cross her forehead. Caxton had seen her before somewhere. Some crime scene or other. “As far as we can tell, the victims here are all Latino and Hispanic males, between fifteen and forty years of age.”

  Arkeley, strangely enough, squinted in confusion. “And what does that suggest?” he asked.

  It was Caxton’s turn to shine, finally. Her nausea was swept away by her need to impress Arkeley. “It suggests they were migrant workers. Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians—they come up here every year to work in the mushroom sheds or pick fruit in the orchards. They move from town to town according to the growing season and they pay cash for whatever they buy, so they don’t leave a paper trail.”

  “Illegal immigrants,” Arkeley said, nodding. “That makes sense.”

  “It’s smart,” the photographer said. She looked angry, pissed off even. Caxton knew some cops turned their fear and disgust into rage. It helped them do their job. The photographer lifted her camera and snapped off three quick shots of a defleshed pelvis sitting on the coffee table. Someone had used it as an ashtray. “Real fucking smart. Nobody keeps track of migrants. Even if somebody back home misses them, what are they going to do? Come up here and ask the American police for help? Not a chance. They’d just get deported.”

  “So the vampire was living here for months, feeding on invisible people,” Caxton said. “Then the owner showed up with his kids. Damn,” she said, thinking it through. “The half-deads weren’t taking the bodies off to make more half-deads out of them. They were going to dump them someplace else, to draw attention away from here.”

  “Yeah,” the photographer spat. “Don’t want to shit where you eat.” She snapped another picture, this time of an umbrella stand half full of umbrellas and half full of femurs.

  “Alright, Clara.” A burly sheriff ’s deputy grabbed the photographer’s arm. “Alright, we have enough pictures.” He looked up at Arkeley and Caxton. “Have you two seen the basement yet?”

  Caxton’s mind reeled. The basement. The camp had a basement. What kind of vault of horrors awaited them? They passed through a mudroom and down a flight of stairs, Caxton holding one hand against the smooth drywall, the other gripping the banister. They headed down past shelves of preserves, thick and cloying in their Mason jars. They climbed over stacks of scattered sports equipment and roofing supplies. At the far end of the narrow cellar a group of state troopers wearing latex gloves stood in a semicircle. What were they guarding? They stepped aside when they saw Arkeley and his star.

  Caxton moved forward. She felt like she floated rather than walked. She felt like a ghost in the haunted camp. She pushed through the standing troopers. Beyond them in a shadowy alcove stood three identical coffins, all of them open, all of them empty.

  Three coffins. “No,” she blurted. “No.” It wasn’t over. There were more of them, more vampires out there.

  Arkeley kicked one of the coffins shut with a hollow sound.

  15.

  Outside Caxton sat down on the grass and put her head between her knees. It wasn’t over. She had thought they were safe again. She had looked at all the dead human bodies in the camp and she had thought that yes, they were horrible, but it was okay, okay in some sad way, because the vampire was dead. Because nobody else was going to get torn apart, nobody else’s blood was going to be drained from a still-twitching carcass.

  “She said ‘brood.’ She said her brood would devour me,” Arkeley said. He stared out at a distant line of blue hills above the water. Mist rose from between the trees over there and it looked like ghosts to Caxton, like wandering ghosts coming out to plead, to beg for their life back.

  Ghosts. Ghosts could scare you, but they couldn’t hurt you, not really. They couldn’t pull you to pieces and suck your life out. They didn’t use your bones as furniture.

  “I was fooled. I thought she was being poetic.” Arkeley kicked at a spill of stones and they went clattering into the stream. “I thought Lares was pretty smart. He could pass as human, he was such a good actor. Malvern has real cunning, though. She knew I would be watching her. She knew that one vampire, just one, would be bad, would create all kinds of havoc. But it wouldn’t be enough. What does it cost her to birth one of these monstrosities? And to do it while she’s being monitored night and day. For twenty years I thought we were safe. Clearly she was just taking her time, gathering her strength.”

  Caxton’s chest heaved. She wasn’t sure if it was a sob or the precursor to vomiting. It was convulsive and spontaneous. It happened again, her ribs flexing as if something inside were pushing to get out.

  “Let’s go,” Arkeley said. “We have to start chasing down our leads. All we have to go on is the list of people who worked at Arabella Furnace. Who knows. Who the fuck knows? We might get lucky.”

  “Hold on,” she said. The thing in her midriff squirmed in annoyance. She wasn’t supposed to talk. A cough exploded out of her lungs.

  “We’re wasting daylight,” he told her. “Get up.”

  She shook her head. That was a bad idea. She hiccoughed and a ribbon of bile shot out from between her lips. Her breakfast came up in one great rush, a brown spray she couldn’t hold in. She rolled over on her side, her body shivering uncontrollably. “I don’t expect you to care about my feelings,” she whimpered. “But I can’t do this anymore.”

  He squatted next to her. He jammed two fingers into her neck, feeling for her pulse. He took his hand away and she looked up at him, her cheek against the cool grass, her eye following his face. Then he slapped her.

  The impact made her cry out, and her body shook. She rolled
up to a sitting posture and then forced herself to stand, pushing her back against the side of the building, pushing herself up to a standing position. She stared at him, hot, pure hate coming out of her. He stood there and took it.

  “There are dead people in that house,” he told her. “There will be more dead people tonight. And every night. Until we bag the other two.”

  Five minutes later they were in the car. He drove this time. He kept his speed low, kept his eyes on the road. She sat in the passenger seat with the window rolled down. It was freezing, but the icy air on her face seemed to help. She spent most of the ride on her cell phone, coordinating with the area response team, trying to eliminate some of the seventy-nine suspects on Arkeley’s list. It was tough even talking, much less trying to keep straight in her head the various units she was assigning to various missions. The Bureau of Forensic Services had to be connected with the records and identification unit so they could work up a profile of what a vampire killing looked like, which was then sent on to the Bureau of Investigation so they could detach units from the troop-level criminal investigations units. Meanwhile the media were yammering for details and interviews with the vampire killers. She was under orders from the Commissioner to send a prepared statement to his office for release to the press. She kept it as brief and nonsensational as possible. By the time she finished and signed off, they were nearing Centre County.

  When she hung up the phone she felt as if her soul was going ninety miles an hour in a school zone. “I’m not cut out for this,” she suggested.

  “What, working the bureaucracy? I’ve seen worse.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not cut out for vampire hunting.” She closed her eyes, but she just saw bones, human bones. “Last night the vampire hypnotized me.”

  “I remember,” he told her. “I was there.”

  “No, I mean, there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t fight it. What if the next one hypnotizes me, but you can’t shoot it in time?”

  “Then you’ll die.” His eyes stayed on the road.

  “I’m not a weak person,” she insisted.

  “That has nothing to do with it. Susceptibility to hypnotism is like hair color or height. It’s genetic and it means very little, most of the time.”

  “But I’m susceptible, that’s what you’re saying. I’m not strong enough, mentally, to fight vampires. Seriously. I’m not cut out for this. I can’t do it.” Fear ate her like a wolf swallowing a gobbet of flesh. She shivered and her teeth chattered and her skin stood up. Proud flesh, her mother used to call it. Her father called it goosebumps. Just sitting there, knowing she would have to face another vampire, was scaring the hell out of her.

  “When I slapped you, you were ready to bring me up on charges. And you would have been in the right. But you didn’t. Instead you came with me. That means you’re in the right place,” he told her.

  She shook her head. She needed to stop talking and start doing something. It might help, anyway. “What’s our next step?”

  Arkeley surprised her by pulling off the road to get some lunch.

  “You’re hungry? I feel like I got kicked in the belly,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Try not throwing up next time.” He rolled into the parking lot of Peachey’s Diner, right next to a shiny black Amish buggy. The horse gave Caxton a look as she stepped out of the car. It swished its tail and she made clucking noises to calm it down. Arkeley headed inside without waiting to see if she would follow. Caxton looked up at the ridgeline opposite the restaurant and sighed. In the deep, dark heart of her state the earth was wrinkled into high limbs of rock that blocked cell phones and radio waves and left the fertile valleys secluded from most of human society. It was why the Amish thrived there. Caxton had never liked this stretch of Pennsylvania too much, though. It was a place where her kind weren’t exactly welcome, a power center for the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis. Elsewhere in the state you saw billboards for Penn’s Cave or the outlet malls clogging up every roadside, but here they disappeared. In their place you saw smaller, less colorful signs sponsored by the local churches with messages like: “WORSHIP Your LORD In Fear” and “How did you SIN today?” This was the zone of central Pennsylvania called “Pennsyltucky” by outsiders, and they didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  She stepped inside. The restaurant was familiar to her. It was neutral territory where all the valley’s inhabitants could come together in peace. Peachey’s catered to farmers who needed to fuel up for a day of hard manual labor and also to people who liked huge portions and weren’t watching their cholesterol. Arkeley went through the buffet and heaped up a plate of fried chicken, German potato salad, and sweetened baked beans swimming with bits of gristly bacon. Caxton slid into an artificial wood-grain booth and ordered a small diet soda. She looked across the aisle at an Amish family: a gray-bearded patriarch with a mole on his cheek; his wife, whose face had the texture of a dried apple; and their two cherubic sons, who wore bright blue shirts and wide straw hats. Their eyes were closed, their hands folded. They were saying grace. The table between them was laden with plates of pork chops and bowls overflowing with mashed potatoes with brown bits of skin half-submerged under the starchy surface.

  Arkeley folded himself painfully into the booth and dug into his food. The thought of all that oily, greasy chicken being shredded between Arkeley’s teeth made Caxton look away. She studied a woman in an enormous sweatshirt with a howling wolf painted on the front. She was shoveling red Jell-O into her mouth. Caxton just closed her eyes and tried to breathe normally.

  “They drink blood, just like we eat food,” she said. Talking helped her ignore all the food being consumed. “You talked before about how they need more and more the older they get. Like those things in Lares’ boat.”

  He nodded. “Malvern would need to bathe in blood to restore herself. It would take half a dozen kills to make her whole again, and she would need that much blood again the next night. And every night after that.”

  “Christ,” Caxton said. The Amish man across the aisle shot her a nasty look for taking his Lord’s name in vain. She resisted the urge to show him her middle finger. “They always need more? It has to level out after a while, right? Otherwise there wouldn’t be enough blood in the world after a while.”

  “You’ve never seen evil before, have you?” Arkeley asked. He held up a spoon laden with ambrosia salad that vibrated with his breath. “Not true evil.”

  She thought about it for a while. The horrors of the hunting camp were still with her. She only had to close her eyes and she saw them again. Still. She had seen killers before, human killers, and they had failed to terrorize her like this. They had been sick, sad little people who lacked the imagination to solve their problems in any nonviolent way. That didn’t make them evil—it made them damaged, but certainly not evil. “I’m not sure evil exists, not like you mean.” She put both hands on the tabletop and pushed against the edge, stretching her arms. “I mean, there’s a moral component to our lives, sure, and if you know you’re doing something wrong—”

  “Evil,” Arkeley interrupted, “is never satisfied. Evil has no ending, no bottom.” He swallowed noisily. “If it isn’t stopped it will swallow the world. Vampires are unnatural. They are dead things that get up and enact a mockery of living and it costs them, badly, to do it. The universe abhors them even more than it abhors a vacuum.”

  She nodded, not really understanding. But she could feel how much of it he believed. How much he needed to destroy the remaining vampires. She could feel, also, the beginning of something inside of herself that matched his need. She wanted to close the remaining coffins. She wanted to destroy the vampires. She was standing on the edge of that desire and she wasn’t sure that, if she stepped off, there would ever be a bottom to her wanting. Which, she realized, was exactly what had happened to him. He wanted to kill vampires the same way vampires wanted his blood.

  “It’s dangerous, isn’t it, to learn too much about them?” she asked. “
You start becoming something unnatural yourself.” She looked around at the normal, healthy, happy people all just eating lunch. They weren’t monstrous. They weren’t disgusting. They weren’t good or evil. They were natural. “Why did you bring me here?” she asked. “None of the suspects lived this far west.”

  “I want you to meet somebody,” he said, and reached for the check.

  16.

  The road took them over a ridge and down the other side, then swerved to follow the course of a winding creek. The sun rode next to them, skipping along on top of the water. It kept getting in Caxton’s eyes and eventually she put on a pair of sunglasses, which helped a little.

  Arkeley turned again later to take them across a covered bridge. Though they rolled along at only ten miles an hour, the bridge rumbled and shook around them. Beyond, the valley turned golden and brown, the grassy pastureland changing to cornfields that stretched for miles. Ancient electric fencing stretched alongside the road, rusted and intermittent. They passed old shacks that had collapsed in the wind and the rain, their wooden planks silvered with decay. She saw an aluminum silo that had been struck by lightning years earlier, its domed top blasted open as if by a giant can opener.

  The road narrowed down to a single unpaved lane, but Caxton wasn’t worried about oncoming traffic. There was something old and quiescent about the valley they sped through. There were crows out in the corn, enormous black birds that took turns leaping into the air and scouting for danger. There were surely mice in those fields, and gophers and hares and snakes, but there were no people anywhere.

  “You sure your friend is out this way?” she asked. “It looks pretty deserted.”

  “That’s the way he likes it.” The road forked and Arkeley took a left. Within minutes the road had disappeared almost completely, replaced by a pair of narrow ruts in a strip of grass between two cornfields. The car bounced and jumped and threw Caxton around but eventually, finally, Arkeley pulled to a stop in a cloud of dust. Caxton got out and looked around, hugging her arms against the chill in the air.