13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  Jesus, Caxton realized, it was Deanna. “You look like Frankenstein’s monster,” Caxton said.

  Deanna tried to smile, but the stitches in her jawline kept her from moving her mouth too much. “Pumpkin…you left me,” she mumbled. Caxton took off her hat and leaned down to kiss Deanna’s puffy lips. The obese woman in the other bed let out a half-gasp, half-cluck of disdain, but Caxton had learned to ignore that sound a long time before. She stood back up and took a better look at Deanna. The view didn’t improve the second time around. Glinting staples held the side of Deanna’s face together. The sharp ends of stitches, black and coarse like horsehair, stuck up out of the flesh of her chest and shoulders, while bandages wrapped her hands so that she looked like she was wearing bloody mittens. “You left me all alone,” Deanna said.

  “Don’t talk, Dee. Just rest.” Caxton reached down and gently brushed the staples in Deanna’s face. They were real, solid, and the flesh underneath was red and inflamed.

  A doctor came into the room. Caxton didn’t even look at him. She held Deanna’s eyes with her own and refused to let go.

  “I’d like to bring in someone to talk with her. I know you probably don’t want to hear that, but I’m not sure you have the right to stop me, either—do you have a civil union?”

  They didn’t. They’d never bothered, since it wouldn’t be legally recognized anyway. It didn’t matter. “I don’t object,” Caxton said. She started to reach for Deanna’s hands, but they were so badly damaged that she didn’t want to touch them. She held onto the railing on the side of the bed instead.

  Deanna started to protest, but Caxton just moved her chin back and forth a little and said, “Shh, it’s just to talk.”

  “She’s pretty lucky, all things considered. She could easily have died. She lost a lot of blood, and some of the fragments of glass went pretty deep. We’ll wait and see if there’s any nerve damage to her hands. The cut in her face is going to require reconstructive surgery, and even then there will be scarring.”

  Caxton held onto the railing as if she would be swept away on a dark sea if she lost her grip. It didn’t matter, she told herself. Deanna was going to live. At least, she would live until the next time someone tried to kill her. Maybe the next time Reyes would come for her himself. “I’m going to call in for a guard to stand watch outside this room, Doctor. This was an attempted murder.” The words sounded ridiculous coming out of her mouth, like something she’d made up. It was real, though, she needed to convince herself it was real. “I’ll stay with her until the first shift arrives.”

  “Very well.” The doctor moved to check on the obese woman in the next bed. “It’s almost two o’clock now, but I’ll call down to the desk and have them set something up.”

  “Two o’clock?” Caxton asked, surprised. She glanced down at her watch and saw he was correct. “Shit. Dee, honey,” she said, “I have to go.”

  “Whuh?” Deanna asked.

  “There’s someplace I have to be.” It was something she’d figured out in those long hours in the hallway. It was her next move.

  32.

  Caxton couldn’t figure out how to strap the vest around her stomach. One of the guys from the area response team had to pull it tight behind her back and buckle it there. He also helped her with the knee, shin, and shoulder guards. She figured out the helmet for herself. “Larry Reynolds,” he told her, and stuck out a gloved hand. She shook it and introduced herself.

  “I’m sorry I’m so unfamiliar with this stuff. This is my first time in riot gear.” She squirmed for a moment, embarrassed, then admitted, “Normally I’m highway patrol.”

  “You were in on that vampire kill a couple of nights ago, right? That’s what they told us when we got assigned to this detail.” Reynolds had black paint under his eyes and it made it hard to read his expression. She couldn’t tell if he was annoyed to be saddled with such an untrained whelp as herself and was hiding it well, or if he was honestly trying to be friendly. “Stick with us, keep your head down, and you’ll be alright.”

  Another ART detective came up and slapped Reynolds on the top of his helmet. “Keeping his head down is about ninety percent of Larry’s job.” Reynolds faked punching the new guy in the kidney and they broke away, laughing, dancing around each other like Caxton’s greyhounds. “I’m DeForrest, and I’ll be your stewardess this morning,” the new guy told her. He had Reynolds in a headlock. “We hope you enjoy your trip with Granola Roller airlines.”

  Caxton had no idea what he was talking about, but she smiled anyway. It had taken a lot of pleading to get assigned to this detail and she didn’t want the ART guys to resent her presence. When a woman in riot gear came and offered her coffee from a thermos she took it as graciously as she could.

  Truth be told, she needed the caffeine as much as she needed to be accepted. She hadn’t slept, even for a moment, not since she’d woken up the day before and realized why the vampires had decimated Bitumen Hollow. Her hands were shaking, and if she looked at anything too closely or for too long its outlines grew fuzzy and indistinct.

  “They’re infantile, I know, but they’re good men,” the woman with the coffee said. “DeForrest was a firefighter before he took this job. He was bored, he said. I assumed the first time I met him that he just wanted to play with guns, like a lot of people who sign up for the ART. He’s never discharged his weapon, not once, since he came to work with us, even when bad guys have fired on him. Reynolds dislocated his shoulder last year getting a five-year-old out of a trailer knocked over in a tornado.”

  “Wow,” Caxton said.

  “I’m Suzie Jesuroga. Captain Suzie,” the woman said, and shook Caxton’s hand.

  “Laura Caxton. Trooper.”

  Captain Suzie smiled. “I know exactly who you are. We’ve all been briefed about that vampire kill you pulled off over on Route three twenty-two. The Commissioner made us go over all the details. Today’s trip should be a little less hairy, considering we’ve got good daylight conditions and the extra precautions we’re taking, but I’m still glad to have you along. You want to get started?”

  The four of them finished suiting up and ran through an equipment and weapons check. They’d been issued M4 carbines, military-grade assault rifles with underslung shotgun attachments. Caxton also carried her Beretta, loaded up with cross points. The others had their own personal weapons—combat knives, revolvers, tear gas and smoke grenades. The ART had a little latitude, it seemed, in how they kitted out for an operation. Together they headed out of the locker room of the Harrisburg HQ and down to a parking lot secluded by a row of trees. Darkness tinged the deep, rich blue of an impending dawn, lain over the lot like a comforter. Arkeley waited for them there, wearing no protective gear at all, just his overcoat. It hung open and she could tell he wasn’t carrying anything other than his Glock 23 with its thirteen bullets.

  “Captain,” he said, when they greeted him, “I’ll express one more time my desire to leave this vehicle behind.” He nodded his chin at a giant white truck that took up two spaces in the parking lot. It was based on the chassis of a Humvee, Caxton thought, but it had been uparmored as if it were meant to roll through Tikrit instead of Scranton. Heavy metal plates had been welded to its doors, its hood, its roof, and all of the windows had been almost completely obscured except for small slits. Even the truck’s tires had been reinforced with heavy chains. What looked like a homemade air cannon had been mounted on the roof.

  “It’s pretty noisy when it gets up to speed, I’ll admit,” Captain Suzie told Arkeley. “Are you afraid we’ll wake the vampires?”

  Arkeley’s upper lip twitched in distaste. “No. Vampires don’t sleep during the day. They literally die anew every morning. It’s the half-deads I’m worried about.”

  Captain Suzie just shrugged. “The Commissioner gave me my orders himself. You can talk to him if you want to change the plan, but he doesn’t even come in to the office until nine. I’d just as soon get on the road now.”

&n
bsp; Arkeley narrowed his eyes, but he nodded and stalked off toward his own car, an unmarked patrol car that looked puny by comparison.

  One by one the ART climbed inside the armored vehicle. The interior was packed with so much gear, and the team members were so bulky in their riot armor, that there was barely room for the four of them. Reynolds drove and DeForrest took shotgun—almost literally, since he rode with his weapon in his hands. Captain Suzie rode beside Caxton in the backseat.

  A man came out of the main building, his uniform shirt unbuttoned and his face unshaven. Caxton recognized the range officer from the less-lethal weapons test area, the one who had supplied her with her cross points. He popped open the hood of the armored vehicle and played around with the engine for a minute.

  “It’s the old man’s baby, and he never lets it out without a personal inspection,” DeForrest told Caxton, craning around in his seat to look at her, his helmet catching on the headrest of his seat and tilting over one eye. “He built the Granola Roller nearly from scratch.”

  “I’m guessing I’m sitting in the very same Granola Roller,” Caxton said.

  Reynolds snorted. “Yeah. It was never really meant for hunting vampires. The old man designed it for crowd control, you know, at demonstrations and protests and riots and such. Sometimes we call it ‘Extra Chunky,’ too.”

  Caxton tried to figure it out, but her fatigued brain couldn’t make sense of the name. “Why’s that?” she finally asked.

  “Because,” DeForrest said, barely able to contain his mirth, “when you run over a hippie with this thing, extra chunky is about all that’s left.”

  “Don’t be gross,” Captain Suzie said as DeForrest and Reynolds laughed in each other’s faces. She turned to Caxton. “I’m sure that I’ll have to do this about a hundred times today, but now, for the first time, I officially apologize for my men. Reynolds, have you forgotten how to drive a stick shift, or are we waiting for the vampire to die of old age? Let’s get moving!”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Reynolds said, and he started up the armored vehicle with a noise like boulders falling down a mountainside. The range officer waved them off and started buttoning his shirt.

  They followed Arkeley’s car onto the highway and settled in for the long ride to Kennett Square, which was all the way down by the Delaware border. The armored vehicle’s groaning and grunting engine noise made it impossible to speak and be heard inside the cabin, but Caxton didn’t mind so much. She could barely form a coherent sentence in her head, much less make one come out of her mouth.

  She had to hunch over against the door to look out the view-slit in her window, which meant exposing her bones to a constant jouncing vibration as the heavy truck ground over every minor imperfection in the roadway. Somehow she survived, though. She watched suburban lawns speed by, silver with frost and dark with fallen leaves. As they rolled out into more rural zones she let her eyes linger on the geometric regularity of farmers’ fields or the shaking, surging rattle of dark tree branches that leaned close over the road.

  Every time she closed her eyes she saw a death’s head, and felt wriggling finger bones rattling in her hands. She saw Deanna covered in blood. She remembered what it was like to be hypnotized by a vampire, to feel as if she were drowning in death, as if the air had turned to glass and she were suspended inside of it. She reached up and touched Vesta Polder’s amulet through the thick nylon and Kevlar layers of her ballistic vest.

  As the sun began to climb up from behind the ridges, a lemon-colored sliver on the horizon, she began to feel a little better. She was taking action, taking up arms against the thing that was trying to kill her, which had nearly killed Deanna. Arkeley, when he heard she had requested to come along on this raid, had said absolutely not. He had thought, he told her, that he had made himself quite clear. He didn’t want her endangered. He didn’t think she could handle it.

  She had told him about torturing a half-dead, how she had pulled the bastard’s fingers off, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, he had come around. He’d never actually said it was alright, but he had stopped insisting quite so strongly that she stay behind. It was as good as she was going to get, she knew.

  33.

  They had to stop for gas outside of Lancaster. When the jumping, swaying truck finally came to a stop, the ensuing quiet and calm shocked Caxton. She climbed out of the Granola Roller to stretch her legs and then leaned against the side of the vehicle with Captain Suzie while DeForrest pumped the gas. He had to unbolt a layer of armor from the truck’s side to get at the gas tank. Inside the gas station the attendant watched them with dull eyes, as if he saw state troopers in full combat gear every morning. Eventually Caxton realized he was asleep, sleeping sitting up in his chair. They were probably the first customers of his shift.

  DeForrest froze, suddenly, even as Caxton was thinking about waking up the attendant to get some snacks. The ART guy let go of the nozzle and stepped away from the pump. He looked at Captain Suzie and without a word pointed up at a line of trees across the highway. “Over there,” he said.

  “Can you confirm his sighting, Caxton?” Captain Suzie asked.

  Fear stuck icy needles into her heart. “Confirm…what?” she asked. She scanned the dead trees for the broken faces of half-deads, the shocking white skin of vampires, even just for movement of any kind. Then she noticed flecks of darkness, like pieces of shadow, swooping and darting among the trees.

  A smile lifted her face a little and she turned around, shaking her head. The ART members behind her had dropped to shooting crouches, their weapons up and at their shoulders. They were deadly serious. They were terrified, and they were all looking at her.

  “Those are just bats,” she said. “They’re nocturnal, and the sun’s coming up. They’re flying home.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Bats.”

  Captain Suzie frowned and put her weapon up but didn’t move from her defensive crouch. “So there’s no danger?”

  “No,” Caxton said. “There’s no connection. That’s just a myth.” She realized with a start that the ART members didn’t resent her presence. As they climbed back inside the vehicle to resume their journey, she understood that they were glad to have her along. She was their trained vampire killer.

  She just hoped the mission’s success didn’t depend on her expertise.

  They pulled into Kennett Square just as dawn made the white lines on the road glow and seem to float above the dark asphalt. Maybe it was just Caxton’s lack of sleep. With the sun creeping up over the trees they moved through the quaint little town, which the map showed as being quite literally square.

  “What’s that smell?” Reynolds asked. Caxton had noticed it too, a thick, earthy smell that occasionally sharpened into something pretty nasty.

  “This is the mushroom capital of the world,” Captain Suzie told him. “Didn’t you know that? That smell is the stuff they grow mushrooms in.”

  DeForrest sniffed the air. “Shit?” he asked.

  Captain Suzie shrugged. “Manure, anyway. They have to cook it in these long sheds, night and day, to sterilize it. This whole part of the state smells like that, pretty much all the time. I used to live around here. You get used to it.”

  “You get used to the smell of cooking shit,” Reynolds said, as if he were trying on the idea for size.

  “So you hardly even notice it anymore,” Captain Suzie assured him. “After a couple of days you can get used to anything.”

  What about torture, Caxton wondered? Could you get used to torturing your enemies for information? She was afraid she knew the answer.

  They passed over a set of train tracks that made the Granola Roller rumble ominously, and then they were there—the substation. The hideout of Efrain Reyes, if they were lucky. Or maybe if they weren’t.

  Caxton checked her weapons, working the actions, chambering and unchambering rounds. The ART followed her example. Arkeley pulled up outside the substation’s fence and got out of his car. “What is he doing?” Captain Suzie a
sked.

  The Fed answered for himself, slipping a hands-free phone attachment over his ear. He touched the tiny mouthpiece bud and the armored vehicle’s radio squawked. DeForrest punched some buttons. “Say again, over,” he announced.

  “I was saying that I’m going from here on foot,” Arkeley told them. “You can follow however you choose, but this place was never meant for a military parade.”

  “He’s making fun of your truck,” Caxton told Captain Suzie.

  The other woman scowled. “He can make fun of my big nose, but I’m still not getting out and walking,” she said, but she wasn’t smiling.

  The substation took up about two acres of ground, all of it surrounded by brick wall or chain-link fence. The ART had secured the plans of the place. It had been decommissioned by the local utility provider a year earlier (a bigger, better, and safer substation having already been built and hooked into the grid), and work crews were still taking it apart. There was more to it than simple demolition—there were all kinds of nasty chemicals and compounds inside the giant transformers that made up the bulk of the substation’s equipment, from sulfur hexafluoride gas to liquid PCBs. The transformers had to be taken apart piece by piece by trained professionals. Electrical engineers, to be specific—men like Efrain Reyes before he died.

  Arkeley had gotten permission from the substation’s owners to search the place. They’d given him a key to the padlock on the gate. There had been some concern that Reyes might have changed the lock, but the key worked just fine. Arkeley pushed open the heavy gate and went inside.

  Reynolds put the Granola Roller into gear and crept forward, staying twenty-five feet behind Arkeley at all times. The Fed moved forward briskly, as if he knew what he was looking for. They passed down a narrow aisle flanked by two rows of tall switches adorned with stacks of round insulators that made them look like the spires of futuristic churches. Beyond lay the transformers themselves, thick, sturdy metal blocks standing in perfect rows.