13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  Clara slapped the bar. “Vampires are, too, sexy,” she announced, her tone jaunty. “Stop trying to ruin my schoolgirl fantasy! I don’t mind if they’re bald. I say, as long as we’re here in this bar, everything about vampires is sexy. Very, very sexy.”

  Caxton smiled in spite of herself. “Oh yeah?” she asked.

  “Hells yeah!” She reached over and grabbed Caxton by the bicep. “And big tough vampire hunters are even sexier!” They both laughed. That felt good, that comfortable, friendly laugh. “Don’t you think she’s sexy?” she demanded from the bartender. Her hand lingered on Caxton’s arm, doing nothing objectionable. Clara didn’t even look at her, just sucked at her beer bottle, but she didn’t take her hand away.

  “I’d do her,” the bartender said, watching the lingerie models make sausage with an industrial meat grinder.

  “I’ll be right back,” Caxton said, pulling away as she slid off her stool. Clara’s hand moved to the bar. Caxton ran back to the ladies’ room, where she threw some water on her face. Wow, she thought. Wow. The hand on her arm hadn’t just been warm. It had been hot, physically hot. She knew it was just an illusion, but wow. She hadn’t felt like that in a very long time. She missed feeling like that. She missed it.

  When she stepped out of the bathroom, Clara was standing next to the pay phone. She was smiling from ear to ear and her eyes showed nothing. She was trying to play it cool and be aggressive at the same time. Caxton remembered that dance, she even remembered pulling off the same moves. When Clara lowered her eyes and stepped to the left, just as Caxton was stepping to the right, she knew exactly how it felt: the little, trembling fears that multiplied the longer you held back, the big hope you shoved down so it wouldn’t overwhelm you, but that kept busting out.

  There was even a good song on the jukebox. She couldn’t remember the name of the artist or the title, but it was a good song.

  She missed that feeling: the butterflies in the stomach, the cold prickles on the back of her neck. She missed it so much that as Clara raised her hands she stepped right into them, closed her eyes as the hands touched her face, those hot little fingers tracing the smooth line of her jaw. Caxton just had time to exhale before Clara’s soft lips touched hers, moist, soft, exactly the right temperature. She had missed that most of all, those first, exploring kisses. The very first taste of a woman’s lips. Clara’s mouth started to move and Caxton raised her own hands, not to touch Clara’s face but to gently, ever so gently, break contact.

  Clara’s eyes were moist, her mouth a pursed question. “Aren’t you…?” she asked, a whisper.

  “I’m in a relationship,” Caxton said. She was sweating under the bandage on her shoulder. “I need to go home. To her.”

  Clara nodded and stepped to the right, to let Caxton past. Except Caxton chose the same moment to step left. They nearly collided with each other, and it was enough to break the tension. They both sighed out a little shared laugh. Caxton covered the bar tab and they climbed back into the sheriff ’s department car. They said very little on the ride to Caxton’s house, but a tiny smile played on Clara’s lips the whole time. When she stopped the car out front, they sat there for a moment listening to the dogs singing in their kennels. Normally her greyhounds were quiet, but Caxton wasn’t too concerned. They were reacting to the presence of a stranger. “I love dogs,” Clara said. “What kind?”

  “Rescue greyhounds,” Caxton said, as if she were admitting to a crime.

  Clara’s eyes lit up. “Maybe sometime you’ll introduce me to them?”

  “Sure—sometime, maybe,” Caxton said. She was blushing. Only when she popped open the door and felt the cold air on her cheeks did she realize she’d been blushing all the way home. No wonder Clara had kept smiling at her. “Thanks for the ride, anyway,” she said. “I’ll, uh, see you.”

  “Don’t worry,” Clara told her. “I can wait a while to get my cute little fangs in that neck of yours.” She was laughing as she drove off.

  Caxton fed the dogs—Deanna had forgotten again, even their water bowls were dry—and headed inside. She stripped in the kitchen and then dashed into the bed, burrowing under the covers before she could get cold. Deanna’s body under the duvet was sharp and angular, but Caxton snaked a hand around her lover’s stomach and up to cup one of her breasts. Deanna stirred in her sleep, and Caxton started kissing her ear.

  “Oh, Pumpkin, not tonight,” Deanna hissed. “You smell all bloody.”

  With the wounds on her hand and her shoulder, Caxton supposed that was fair enough.

  She sat in the shower for a long time, playing with the spiral pendant Vesta Polder had given her, watching the steam roll and roil around her until she finally, blessedly, began to nod off. It took the last of her energy to dry off and climb into bed, and she was asleep before she knew it.

  24.

  In the morning she played with the dogs for a while. It was cold outside and the kennels were well heated, so she stayed with them and let them dance around her, snapping their teeth at her hair and her face, the way greyhounds showed affection. They were beautiful, the lines of their bodies so sleek and perfect. Wilbur, who had only three legs but a truly beautiful blue fawn coat, kept curling up in her lap, twisting around and around as if trying to tie himself in a knot before plopping down on her folded legs. She rubbed him behind his ears and told him he was a good dog. Lola, an Italian greyhound who already had a good home lined up in upstate New York, kept pressing her long nose against the door, but whenever Caxton would push it open she would dance backwards from the frosty gust that burst in, snapping at the air with her teeth and rearing up on her hind legs to fight off the wind.

  When Deanna found her there, covered in greyhounds, Caxton felt almost human again. Deanna just smirked at her as if she’d caught her with her hand in the cookie jar. She handed Caxton her PDA and disappeared again without a word.

  She had a new email from “Hsu_C@lcsd.pa.us,” which she figured had to be Clara. Her hand trembled as she opened it—what if Deanna had seen it? What if Clara had called instead of emailing, and Deanna had picked up? But she was just being paranoid. For one thing, she’d done nothing wrong. She had stopped Clara before anything real could happen. For another, Clara’s email wasn’t embarrassing at all. It was one of the most professional correspondences she’d ever read, and it contained nothing except the sheriff ’s department report from Bitumen Hollow. There wasn’t so much as a cordial salutation.

  She actually felt a little let down. Clara coming on to her was a problem, really, but still…it had been so nice. She put the thought out of her mind and studied the report. It was cold and clinical and she tried to keep it that way, refusing to feel the horror of the people who had died in the sleepy village the night before. Most of the report was based on the eyewitness testimony of the assistant manager of the Christian bookstore, the one who had hit her with the big cross. Once he’d calmed down he had turned out to be a pretty good observer. He’d seen the vampires enter the main street of the town, both of them dressed in black overcoats with the collars turned up to hide their mouths. If they’d been trying to pass as human they needn’t have bothered. Everyone in Bitumen Hollow knew everyone else—the two giant vampires (both well over six feet tall) stuck out like torn-off thumbs. The first to die had been the teenaged girl, Victim #1, Helena Saunders. One of them picked her bodily up off the ground while the other tore open the sleeve of her coat and bit into her arm, in the words of the survivor, “Like you would gnaw on a ear of corn.” From there things just got nasty.

  There had been no attempt to defend the town. No one had even fought back, though a loaded hunting rifle was found under the counter of the coffee shop and the woman who ran the post office (Victim #4) had a licensed handgun in her car. No police presence reached the town until it was far too late. It didn’t surprise Caxton much. A town that small wouldn’t have a police department of its own, instead relying on the local sheriff.

  Caxton skimmed through much of
the report. There were fourteen victims in total and she really didn’t need to know how they all had died.

  Fourteen. The two vampires that had attacked Bitumen Hollow were pretty fresh. Their need for blood should have been easily quenched—at most they might have required a single victim each. Yet they had completely depopulated the village. Why? She thought about Piter Lares, who had intentionally overfed and stuffed himself full of blood so he could feed his elders, including Justinia Malvern. The new assailants (the report listed them as Actor #1 and Actor #2, police-speak for the person who “acted” upon the victims) could have been gorging themselves to feed Malvern, but no, they needed four vampires to restore her. Anyway, she was still safely behind stone walls at Arabella Furnace.

  As far as she knew.

  A cold finger ran down her spine at the thought that the vampires might have attacked the abandoned sanatorium, that even now Malvern might be free, but no, surely Arkeley would have called her to tell her as much.

  Unless they had attacked, and Arkeley had been killed.

  She quickly fed and watered the dogs and headed back into the house. She didn’t want to jump the gun on a paranoid whim, but she had to know. There was no listing for Arabella Furnace State Hospital in the phone book, and the state police databases she had access to via the Internet didn’t even list it. While she dressed she called the Bureau of Prisons to ask for the number, but they said any such inquiries had to go through official channels. The man on the other end of the line wouldn’t even admit that such a place existed, of course.

  “Look, the people there could be in danger. I know all about the place. I’ve been there. It’s a hospital for just one patient, and she’s a vampire. Justinia Malvern.”

  “Calm down, lady,” he said. “Look, we don’t do hospitals. We do prisons.”

  She somehow managed not to yell at him. He said he would pass on her message. Hanging up the phone, Caxton stormed into the bedroom. “Dee?” she yelled. “Dee? I need to borrow your car.”

  Deanna was in the living room, lying on the couch and watching television. The remote was clutched in one hand, which spilled down onto the floor and lay half-buried in the shag carpet. “I had one of my dreams about you last night,” she said. Caxton came storming in. “You were tied to a post and Roman soldiers were whipping your naked back. Blood was trickling down your hips in long, red tracks that looked kind of like chocolate syrup. I don’t think you should go anywhere today.”

  Caxton made a fist and shoved it into her pocket. She didn’t have time for this. “I really, really need to borrow your car.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Maybe I have things to do today.”

  “Do you?” Caxton asked. It wasn’t the day Deanna did the shopping. Most days her car sat unused in the driveway. “Look, this is super important. Seriously, or I wouldn’t even ask.”

  Deanna shrugged and looked at the TV. “Alright, if you want me to be a prisoner in my own home.”

  Caxton was holding her breath, she realized. She blew it out slowly and then inhaled, just as slowly. Deanna’s keys were hanging on a hook in the kitchen, right next to the closet where Caxton kept her pistol. She fetched them both. Outside the air was a little more than crisp. She pulled her uniform jacket around her chest and jumped into Deanna’s little red Mazda. She took off her hat and went to put it on the passenger seat, but the remains of a takeout lunch from McDonald’s, including half a hamburger, were spread across the already stained fabric. The narrow backseat was full of cans of paint and unopened packages of brushes and rollers, even though Deanna hadn’t painted anything in six months. She’d been restricting herself to the untitled project in the shed.

  Caxton balanced her hat on top of an open can of paint that had dried to the consistency of hard plastic and hoped for the best. Backing out of the driveway, she adjusted the mirrors and in minutes was on the highway, headed for Arabella Furnace.

  On the way she played with the car’s radio, looking for a news report. There was another IED explosion in Iraq and some kind of golf scandal—Caxton didn’t really follow sports and didn’t understand what they were saying. There were no reports of vampire attacks on abandoned tuberculosis rest homes, no bugles playing “Taps” for a Fed who had died in the course of his duty, but the lack of news failed to reassure her.

  By the time she arrived it was well past noon and sprinkling rain. The sun was blinking on the wet leaves that dotted the road, and the narrow track that led to the hospital had gone to mud. The little Mazda nearly got stuck, but Caxton had years of training in getting cars through bad patches of road. She pulled up on the lawn below the faceless statue of Health or Hygiene or whatever it was and felt a little relieved, but just a little, to see her own patrol car parked on the same stretch of grass. Arkeley had come to Arabella Furnace the night before. When he’d indicated he wanted to be alone, he must have gone to see Malvern.

  It occurred to her that he might have taken one look at Bitumen Hollow and known the vampires were gorging themselves and would attack that night. But then why would he have gone alone and left her behind?

  Because he didn’t trust her, of course. Because she’d acted like a wimp when she got stabbed with a shovel. Because she couldn’t watch him torture a half-dead. He’d decided she was a liability.

  The corrections officer at the front desk recognized her but still made her sign in. When she saw him she knew her worst fears hadn’t come true. Malvern was still behind locked doors.

  “What happened here last night?” she asked, placing the pen back down on his sign-in sheet.

  “Something happened, something big,” he said, his eyes wide.

  “Something? What kind of something?”

  He shrugged. “I just work days. This place, at night? You’d have to nail my feet to the floor to keep me from running away.”

  She wanted to ask him a million more questions but figured there might be better informants. From memory she tried to find Malvern’s ward, only to get lost and have to circle back. Finally she retraced her steps, took a left instead of a right, and saw the plastic curtain that sealed off the ward. The hospital was immense and most of it was dark. She could easily have gotten lost for hours if she hadn’t been shown the way before.

  She pushed through the plastic and into the blue light and there, of course, was Arkeley, sitting patiently in a chair. He looked healthy enough, though he appeared not to have showered since she’d seen him last.

  Malvern was nowhere to be seen, but the lid of her coffin was closed. Caxton went straight to Arkeley. “Are you alright?” she asked.

  “Of course I am, Trooper. I’ve been having a lovely chat with my old friend.” He knocked on the coffin. There was no answer, but Caxton assumed Malvern was safely inside. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  Caxton nodded. She looked around but didn’t see Hazlitt. Maybe he slept during the day. “I thought—I know it sounds crazy, but I had this idea. The vampires that slaughtered everyone in Bitumen Hollow last night were gorging on blood. I thought they might attack this place, that they were gathering blood for her. I guess I jumped to a dumb conclusion.”

  “Hardly,” he said. “They did exactly as you thought. Or at least they tried.”

  25.

  The previous night, when Caxton was being kissed by a pretty girl in a bar, Arkeley had been fighting for his life. He laid out the story for her quite calmly and without a lot of recrimination. He never once said he wished she’d been there to help.

  Arkeley had taken one look at the corpses in Bitumen Hollow and knew trouble was brewing. He had seen the number of bodies, and he knew how many vampires were responsible. He did the math in his head. Remembering the way Lares had fed his ancestors—“Not that I’d ever forgotten it,” he said, with a shudder of distaste—he had realized the vampires were through waiting. The two of them couldn’t hold enough blood to fully revivify her, but they could at least get her up and walking under her own power. They would strike that very night—h
e was certain of it. So he had taken the patrol car and proceeded immediately to Arabella Furnace.

  “Without me,” she said, in a partial huff.

  “Shall I finish my story, or should we argue?” he asked.

  He arrived at the hospital at nine o’clock. He warned the corrections officers about what was coming and then he went into Malvern’s private ward. He found her significantly decayed from when he’d last seen her, when he’d cut off her blood supply. She was unable to sit up and was reclining in her coffin. Most of the skin on her skull had worn away and her single eye was dry and irritated. One arm was crossed over her chest. The other hung limply out of the coffin, its talonlike fingers draped across the keyboard of a laptop computer. Arkeley had thought she had simply flung it out in despair, but her index finger trembled and stabbed at the “E” key, then fell back as if that slight effort had completely exhausted her.

  Hazlitt appeared, his manner suggesting he was unhappy about something. He explained that Malvern was averaging four keystrokes a minute. The doctor allowed Arkeley to view what she had written so far:

  a drop lad it is ye sole remedie a drop a drop one onlie

  “You’re killing her, Arkeley,” the doctor told the Fed. “I don’t care if she’s already dead. I don’t care if this can go on forever. To me it’s death, or worse.”

  “If she wants to live so badly she should conserve her energy,” Arkeley said. “Maybe you should take that computer away from her.”

  Hazlitt looked as if he’d been struck. “It’s the only connection she has to the outside world,” he insisted.

  Arkeley dismissed the argument with a shrug. He sent the doctor home at ten P.M., although Hazlitt had indicated he wished to stay with his patient. Arkeley assured him that he would keep her safe through the night.

  Alone with her, the only distraction the sporadic click of her withered nail on the keyboard, Arkeley drew his weapon and placed it on a heart monitor outside of Malvern’s reach. He did not, in fact, get a chance to use it.