13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  It was all he had to say. She had learned one thing, at least—she had learned to tell when he was through talking and there was no point in asking more questions. She let him ride in brooding silence until they arrived.

  Bitumen Hollow was just across the Turnpike, near French Creek State Park. It turned out to be a little depot town straddling the railroad line. A century earlier it might have served as a railhead for the local coal mines, judging by the giant rusting bins behind the town’s single real street. Now it served merely as a place for the local farmers to buy feed and fertilizer. Or rather it had served that purpose until a few hours previous. There was a little coffee shop, a Christian bookstore, a discount shoe store, and a post office. Lights burned in all four places of business, but nobody was home.

  A ribbon of yellow police tape stretched across the road at either end of the street. Inside that cordon there were no living people at all. There were plenty of human bodies.

  Arkeley wasn’t speaking to her. That was okay. She didn’t need any more guilt. She ducked under the fluttering tape and walked the length of the street. She counted fourteen corpses. She kept meeting their eyes, which were open and wide. A teenaged girl hung over a bench, her midsection crushed by some unspeakable blow. The sleeve of her puffy coat had been torn open and the arm underneath was little more than torn meat. Caxton couldn’t look away from the girl’s face. Strands of thin blonde hair draped across her forehead, her nose. They stuck to the drying saliva at the corner of her mouth. In the darkness it was hard to tell what color her eyes were, but they were very pretty—or at least they had been.

  In the Christian bookstore three bodies had been shoved behind the counter, all of their throats torn out. Whether they had run back there to hide or whether the vampires had stashed them back there for their own reasons, she didn’t know. There was a man who looked a little like Deanna’s big brother, Elvin. He was wearing a hunting cap with red plaid flaps.

  At the end of the street a late-model car, a Prius, had collided with a lamp post. The driver was spread across the front seats. Caxton couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman. The face was completely removed and the bloodless tissue underneath didn’t look like a human head at all.

  An explosion of light stunned Caxton. She blinked away the afterimage and looked up to see about twenty sheriff ’s deputies standing on the other side of the police tape. They waited respectfully, like people lined up to watch a parade. Clara, the photographer, had taken a picture—that had been the source of the flash. She’d been photographing the crashed car’s license plate. “Hi,” she said, and Caxton nodded back in greeting.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Trooper,” the sheriff said. “Take your time.” She realized they were waiting for her and Arkeley to finish their investigation. They had been given the right to the first look at the crime scene. The sheriff ’s department would take over as soon as they were done.

  “Arkeley,” she said, “are you finding anything useful?”

  The Fed was bent over the teenaged girl. “Nothing I haven’t seen before. Alright, let them in.” He walked past her and lifted up the police tape. “Maybe they’ll see something I’ve missed. I’m extremely tired, young lady, and I think I want to go home.”

  She blinked at him, then stepped aside to let the sheriff ’s deputies pass under the tape. “Alright,” she said, more than a little surprised. “Let me bring the car around.”

  “Actually,” he told her, “if you don’t mind, I’d like to be by myself. I’m sure the sheriff can give you a ride home.”

  Very strange, she thought. Arkeley had to be up to something. He was going to do something he didn’t want her to see. “Okay,” she said. She was pretty sure she didn’t want to see it, either. She handed over the keys to the patrol car. “Come pick me up tomorrow, whenever,” she told him, but he was already walking away.

  “What’s eating him?” Clara asked her, but Caxton could only shake her head.

  22.

  Clara knelt down on the pavement to get a picture of the teenaged girl’s hand. There was a bloodless laceration running down the side of her palm. “This looks like a defensive wound,” she said, her uniform tie dangling between her knees. “Don’t you think?”

  “I’m not really trained for that sort of stuff,” Caxton apologized. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was still doing in Bitumen Hollow except waiting for a ride home. She checked her watch and was surprised to find it was only half past eight. The fight with the half-deads had felt like it took all night, but in fact little more than an hour had passed, even with all the time they spent waiting on the camp’s roof.

  She had been following Clara around because the photographer was a familiar face, the only member of the Lancaster County sheriff ’s department whom she knew by name. Supposedly she was keeping control of the crime scene, which technically belonged to Arkeley and the U.S. Marshals Service. From time to time one of the sheriff ’s detectives would come up to her and get her to sign off on a form or a waiver. She didn’t even bother reading them. It was pretty clear Arkeley wasn’t interested in traditional police work. His modus operandi was to put himself (and everyone around him) in danger and then let violence work everything out.

  Where he had gone—by himself, in a state police patrol car that she was responsible for—remained a mystery to her. She recalled him talking about torturing half-deads for information. She had said she couldn’t sit by and watch that happen, and he had suggested he would just do it while she wasn’t looking. Yet there were no half-deads in police custody. Where would he find one?

  She might have been more diligent in trying to unravel his mystery if she hadn’t been so tired. She sank down on a bench in front of the Christian bookstore and rubbed at her eyes. Clara came and stood next to her. “Do you need something?” she asked. “I’ve got a whole pharmacy in my purse. It’s back in my car—I’ll go get it.”

  “No, no,” Caxton said, waving one hand at the photographer. “I’ll be fine. I’ve just been running on fumes for a while. A good night’s sleep and I’ll be one hundred percent.” She smiled at the sheriff ’s deputy, who just shrugged. Clara went over to the corpse of a farmer in a leather jacket who lay sprawled across the pavement not ten feet away. One of the farmer’s arms had been torn off and thrown in a trash can. Much of his chest was missing altogether, as well as all of his throat. Clara hovered over him, not eighteen inches from the slack white skin of his face, and took a picture with her digital camera. “You’re fearless,” Caxton said, admiring the other woman. “I can’t handle the gore.”

  Clara stood up and stared at her. “I thought you were in on that vampire kill last night on three twenty-two?”

  “That’s different. When you’re fighting for your life the adrenaline keeps you going. But when it’s dead bodies just lying there, I can’t handle it. Too many traumatic memories, you know?”

  Clara nodded and came over to the bench again. “It used to bother me too, and I mean a lot. Let me show you a trick, though.” She handed Caxton the camera and mimed taking a picture. Caxton pointed the camera at the dead man in the road and studied the small LCD screen on the back of the camera. She wanted to turn away, but Clara stopped her. “No. Look. Is the picture too dark?”

  “Well, yeah,” Caxton said. “It’s nighttime. You need the flash.”

  “Right.” Clara indicated the flash button and Caxton turned it on. “Now try to frame the picture better. Get all the details in, but without too much background. Now, how’s the color balance?”

  Caxton got the point all at once. “Yeah. Okay. It’s not a human being anymore. It’s a picture of a human being. That’s not so bad.”

  Clara nodded happily. “It’s all just colors and shadows and composition. I worry more about getting the color of the blood right than how much blood there is. Now,” she said, but she stopped and turned her head as if she’d heard something.

  Caxton jumped up. “What? What is it?” But then she heard i
t as well. It wasn’t difficult. Someone was screaming. A man, screaming, distant and muffled as if he were trapped underground. Caxton followed the sound until she saw a manhole cover in the middle of the street. Shouting for help, she and Clara got down on the road surface and tried to pry open the cover with their fingers. It was like trying to push a dead patrol car uphill. A sheriff ’s deputy with a crowbar rushed up and shifted the lid with a lot of grunting and straining. When the lid came off, the streetlights revealed a rusted metal ladder leading downward into pure black darkness. Caxton took the lead, her feet dancing down the groaning rungs until she reached the bottom. She felt sewage squishing under her feet, and the smell nearly overpowered her. She reached into her pocket and found her Maglite. Its narrow beam showed her weathered brick walls that curved up over her head, and she felt as if they would close in on her at any moment.

  She shined the light farther down the passage and caught the shaking figure of a man clutching a large wooden cross in his arms, the wood maybe three feet long and two wide. His eyes flashed terror when the light hit him, and he screamed again. “No, no,” he gibbered, “no, no, no. Keep away, keep away from me, behind me, get behind me, the Lord, the Lord, the Lord!”

  Caxton moved toward him slowly, one hand outstretched to show him it was empty, the other holding the light. He was no vampire and no half-dead, but he clearly wasn’t thinking straight, either.

  “I didn’t mean to scream,” he whispered. “I didn’t want to give away my position! Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord. They can’t have me. They can’t have my blood!”

  “I’m with the state police, sir,” she said, her voice low and soft and almost crooning. “Everything’s okay now. The vampires are gone.” She was close enough to touch him, almost. She reached out to touch his shoulder, the way she’d been trained. A nice, reassuring touch that wouldn’t threaten anyone.

  “The power of Christ compels you!” he shouted, and swung his crucifix at her like a baseball bat. It caught her in the stomach and knocked the wind right out of her. She dropped her Maglite in the muck and doubled over, the sudden darkness falling on her like a cave-in. “The power of Christ preserves me!” he screamed, and tried to hit her again. She heard the cross whistling through the dark air and shot out her hand to stop it. Twisting from the waist, she pulled it away from him. The effort made her see stars. She dropped the cross and grabbed him around the waist, catching both of his arms. She hoped he didn’t try to bite her. She brought her knee up into his groin, hard enough to do serious damage.

  Someone came up behind her with a more powerful light, and she saw the man’s pupils constrict wildly. His face was inches from her own, his mouth open wide, his teeth glinting with saliva. But they were human teeth. He was gasping for breath—she had squeezed him so hard he couldn’t breathe.

  Dumb, she thought. Fighting with vampires had made her forget everything she knew about subduing human beings. She could have really hurt the guy, whose only real crime was being scared. She released him, and sheriff ’s deputies pushed past her to cuff him and check him for weapons. “He’s not a perp,” she said, one hand over her face, deeply ashamed. “He’s a survivor.”

  Up top, up on the street level again, she examined her own injuries. Just a bruise on her stomach, but it was tender and would be yellow and purple come morning. Well, she thought, she could just add it to the cut on her hand and the shovel wound on her shoulder and call it a night’s work.

  “Listen, somebody else can take the pictures,” Clara said. “I’ll take you home now.”

  Caxton nodded, but she wasn’t quite finished with Bitumen Hollow. “Who is he?” she asked.

  “The assistant manager of the bookstore,” Clara told her. “He calmed down once we got him out of the sewer. As far as we can tell he’s the only one in the entire town who made it.” She frowned in anger. “He says he doesn’t remember how he got down in that sewer. The deputies are with him right now, working the virtual Identikit on the sheriff ’s laptop.”

  There had been no ID on the vampire they’d killed. What if they got a facial recognition match on one of the others? It could be a good break, just the kind they needed. “I need whatever they find sent right to my PDA, okay?” she said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Clara told her. “I’ll send you the full report and all my pictures if you have the bandwidth.”

  Caxton nodded. The state police were testing out new handhelds that had more memory and better wireless Internet connections than the laptops in the patrol cars. “I can handle it. Now,” she said, scratching her nose, “let’s get me out of here.”

  “I’ll just sign out with the sheriff.” Clara dashed off and left Caxton there to nurse her new bruise. When she returned she’d taken off her tie and undone the top button of her uniform shirt. “Come on,” she said. “You can sleep in the car.”

  23.

  She couldn’t sleep in the car. Clara’s car was a rebuilt Crown Victoria like almost every other police car in the world. It was a lot like Caxton’s own patrol car. It was designed to provide a cop with all the information she needed to do her job. The dashboard was studded with instrumentation: the readout for a radar gun, the ubiquitous mounted laptop for checking license plates, the video recorder that monitored everything that happened both inside the car and from the perspective of its front bumper. The various radios squawked and muttered at random intervals. The seat couldn’t recline because of the bulletproof partition immediately behind Caxton’s head to protect the driver and front-seat passenger from anyone in the rear compartment. The car was a workplace, not a bedroom. After trying to relax for fifteen minutes, she grabbed handfuls of her hair and pulled, too frustrated to even speak.

  Clara glanced over at her. “I know what you need,” she said, and took the next exit. She pulled into the lot of a one-story building with white Christmas lights strung up under its eaves. A little tavern, bright, cheery light leaking from all its windows, along with the muffled sound of a jukebox playing some bad country song. They went inside and grabbed a couple of bar stools and Clara ordered them Coronas with extra lime. “There’s no way you’re going to sleep now. You’re wound up as tight as a spring.”

  Caxton knew it was true. She didn’t particularly want the beer, though she didn’t refuse it. She wasn’t much of a drinker—she was a morning person, really, and had never managed to close out a bar in her life. Yet with the cold wet bottle in her hand and the taste of the lime on her lips, she realized she’d been missing for a long time the easy good humor that comes from sitting in a bar with friendly people around you. She probably hadn’t been in a place like this since she’d met Deanna.

  A fifty-inch plasma screen at the far end of the bar showed a football game. Caxton didn’t watch much television, either, and the bright light and constant motion kept drawing her eye. She didn’t care whatsoever about football, but the bland normalcy of it was kind of nice.

  Slowly her shoulders slid down away from her neck. Slowly her posture let up a little and she slumped forward on the bar stool. “This,” she said, “is not so bad.”

  “Hey, look,” Clara said, pointing at the television. The local station had cut away to a news report. It was just ten o’clock. They were leading with video shot out in the woods, with lots of strobing lights and a reporter who kept looking back at the camera with wide eyes and a tightly pursed mouth. Caxton had no idea what was going on until she saw her own face, looking pale and ghostly as it swam up out of the darkness to be flooded with video camera lights. “Turn on the sound, will you?” Clara asked the bartender.

  “I don’t remember any cameras,” Caxton said, realizing that she was looking at the scene of the vampire kill. The aftermath, anyway.

  “Still haven’t been allowed to see the body, I have to say,” the reporter droned, “there’s a real sense of secrecy here, as if the Marshals Service is covering something up. We have no information on the alleged vampire yet, even twenty-four hours later. Authorities haven’t even released h
is name.”

  Twenty-four hours? Had it really been only one day? Caxton put a hand over her mouth. On the television screen her emotionless face kept turning away from the light. She had a vague memory of being annoyed by a light, but she hadn’t realized at all that the media were there while she was being debriefed. The fight with the vampire had shocked her so much that she must have been in a daze.

  “A source in the Pennsylvania State Police gave us an interview this afternoon under condition that we didn’t reveal his identity. He says the alleged vampire was not given any kind of warning or any chance to surrender to authorities. Diane, there’s sure to be a lot more to this story in the coming days.”

  “Thanks, Arturo,” the anchorwoman said. She looked calm and unfazed. “Stay tuned for more coverage of—”

  “That what you wanted to hear?” the bartender asked. When Clara nodded, he muted the sound again and switched over to a reality show about lingerie models working in a butcher’s shop.

  “Wow, you’re going to be a celebrity, you know that?” Clara asked. “Every news station in the country is going to want an interview.”

  “Assuming I survive long enough,” Caxton said, under her breath.

  “What?” Clara asked. When Caxton didn’t reiterate, she shook her head. “Wow. So what was the vampire like?”

  “Pale. Big. Toothy,” the trooper answered.

  “I was so obsessed with vampires when I was in high school. My friends and I would put on capes and fake fangs and make little movies of us hypnotizing each other with our best sexy looks. Man, I looked pretty good as a vampire.”

  “I doubt it,” Caxton said. Clara’s eyebrows went up in what could have turned into real offense. “Don’t get me wrong. I bet you looked great. But not if you looked like a vampire. They’re bald as cue balls, for one thing. And those pointy little fangs? Believe me, you don’t want to see the reality.”