13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “I’m so, so sorry,” Clara said, and reached for her, but Caxton shrugged her away.

  “I can’t feel anything right now,” Caxton tried to explain. She didn’t know if the grief was just too big and she was defending herself from it, or if Reyes was in control of her emotions. To him Deanna’s death was regrettable only in that all that blood was going to waste.

  It helped that there were a lot of phone calls to make and a lot of questions to answer. Somebody had to be calm and in charge.

  Elvin wasn’t home. She left a message for him to call her back. Someone came and asked her about organ donation. She told them to take what they could. Deanna was wrapped up, taken away. They brought her back—her tissues weren’t good candidates for donation. She’d been dead too long for the major organs to be useful, and her skin and eyes weren’t the right type. Caxton called Elvin again. Someone from the transplant center came down and demanded to know who she thought she was, offering up Deanna’s body parts for donation, when she wasn’t even a relative. That conversation took far too long. For perhaps the first time she actually wished she’d bothered to get a civil union. It wouldn’t have given her any more rights, but it might have forestalled a few of the less comfortable questions. She finally got hold of Elvin and he said he would come right away. He would bring Deanna’s mother. Caxton flipped shut her phone and put it away. She turned around and there was Clara.

  “How long have I been making phone calls?” she asked. She had a feeling a lot more time had passed than she was aware of. She was in a lounge, for one thing. Hadn’t she just been in the morgue? Somehow she’d been moved to a well-heated lounge with a big window and comfortable chairs and lots of tattered magazines. Maybe Clara had brought her there.

  “Well, I already had lunch. I got you a sandwich.”

  Caxton took the offered bag and opened it up. Tuna salad, white flesh in white mayonnaise on white bread. It didn’t appeal to her at all. She wanted roast beef and felt almost childishly peevish about it—why couldn’t Clara have gotten her roast beef? Why couldn’t she go right now and get a big rare steak, all full of juice, of, of—of blood?

  She clamped down on that thought immediately and started eating the tuna sandwich. She was not going to let the vampire live vicariously through her.

  “Listen, there’s something I haven’t heard anyone mention, but I think it’s important,” Clara said. She frowned and pursed her lips and finally spat it out. “Do we need,” she said, pronouncing each word separately, “to consider, well, cremation.”

  Caxton blinked rapidly. “You mean for Deanna?” she asked. “Of course you do. I mean, nobody else is dead right now. Yeah. Right. Cremation.” She didn’t so much think it through as let it come bubbling up in her head. “No.”

  “No,” Clara repeated, tentatively.

  “No. You saw all that blood. No vampire would leave so much blood on a body. It was just an accident, Clara. Just a stupid fucked-up accident, the kind that still happens, you know? Not everybody gets killed by monsters.”

  Clara nodded supportively, then opened her mouth to speak again. She stopped when the door behind her burst open. An enormous man with thin, straight red hair that fell past his shoulders came storming in. He wore a sheepskin coat and a look of absolute befuddlement. Behind him followed a woman with hair dyed to match his, though it showed gray at the roots. Her face was a mess of red blotches, as if she’d been crying, or drinking. Most likely both.

  “Who’s this, your new girlfriend?” Deanna’s mother asked.

  “Hello, Roxie,” Caxton tried. She glanced up at the big redheaded man. “Oh, Elvin, I’m so sorry.”

  He nodded his massive head. “Yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot,” he said. He looked around as if unsure of where he was.

  “I’m going to go now,” Clara said.

  “Jesus, don’t leave on my account.” Roxie Purfleet sneered at Caxton. “You work fast, huh? One of them’s not even cold and you’re on to the next.”

  Clara slipped past her without further comment. Caxton sat the Purfleets down and started to explain what had happened.

  48.

  Deanna was dead. It wasn’t hard to accept on a factual basis. Caxton could hold the knowledge in her head, she could walk around it, see it from all angles. She could see the repercussions, the paperwork she would need to file. She would have to cancel all of Deanna’s magazine subscriptions, for instance. She would have to change their insurance coverage, a precariously balanced set of documents that allowed Caxton to pay for Deanna’s medical bills with her own state employee insurance.

  That didn’t begin to explain how she felt, however. The nitty gritty details of Deanna’s life didn’t add up to what had just happened. Deanna was dead. It was like the color blue had stopped existing. Something Caxton had always counted on, something she had built an entire life around, wasn’t there anymore.

  It wasn’t fear of loneliness or loss of companionship that bothered her most. It was this existential hole in her worldview. Deanna was gone—forever—and it had happened just like that, in the time it took to say out loud: Deanna was dead.

  She found herself driving home, much, much later, an hour or two after sunset. Roxie Purfleet had taken over her duties at the hospital, convinced she knew best what her daughter wanted done with her mortal remains. She’d refused to let Caxton even help plan the memorial service. Deanna’s body would go back to Boalsburg, where she’d been born. Caxton had listened a million times to Deanna moan and bitch about the place, about how she’d longed to get away from it as early as elementary school. But that’s where she would be forever, now.

  Driving—Caxton was driving, she needed to focus on that. She watched the yellow lines on the road but soon found herself fixated on them, unable to look away. She forced herself to check her mirrors and her blind spot.

  Deanna was dead. She wanted to call Deanna up and talk to her about what had just happened. She wanted to sit on the couch with the TV turned off for a second and just talk about what it all meant. Who else could she trust with such monumental news? Who else could she go to first?

  Driving. Right. Caxton squinted as a semi roared past in the other direction, its headlights smearing brilliant light across her face. She blinked away the afterimages and focused on the car, on the speedometer, on the gas gauge. Anything to keep her in the here and now.

  Elvin, who was perhaps the only person in the world with less of a grip on what had happened than herself, had been kind enough to drive her back to Troop H headquarters, where she’d left her car. It hadn’t been moved since she’d suited up to get onboard the Granola Roller. She’d gone up and touched the patrol car’s metal skin as if it were a special machine that could take her back in time, to before Deanna died, to before she became half of a vampire. Then she’d turned around because she felt Elvin behind her, just standing there. His body sort of hovered halfway between leaving and coming closer, a mass being turned this way and that by some sort of emotional physics. Looming was the word that came to mind. He loomed over her and frowned, deep and long, and finally spoke.

  “She really loved you,” he said. “She swore it. When I first found out she was a fag I was going to cream her, but then she said she really loved you, and I figured that made it okay. I mean, you don’t pick who you love. Nobody does.”

  “I suppose not,” Caxton had replied, unsure what he wanted. A hug? A reminiscence of his sister? “Thanks for the ride,” she’d said, and he had nodded, and that was that.

  She blinked back a half-formed, inexplicable tear. Oh, God, driving—she had to watch where she was driving. She’d just missed the turn-off. She stopped the car and looked behind her. There was no one on the road back there. Slowly, with a noise of rumbling gravel, she backed up and maneuvered until she was headed back the right way. Then she drove up to the house without losing track of time even once. She switched off the car. The headlights disappeared and everything was dark. She sat in the cooling car and stared at the da
rk house. Deanna had always left a light on for her before.

  It was only the whining of the dogs that spurred her to action. She had forgotten them—how could she forget them? But she had. She had forgotten her dogs, and they hadn’t eaten in over a day. They were watered automatically with a gravity bottle, but they hadn’t eaten. They would be starving. She didn’t even go into the house, just ran back to the kennels and grabbed a twenty-pound bag of kibble. She switched on the lights inside the kennel and gasped.

  The dogs looked okay—but something had tried to tear their cages open. The greyhounds lay curled up behind warped and bent bars, crying and whining and yawning in fearful confusion. Blood and what looked like a strip of cloth hung on the bars near her. Caxton stepped closer and touched the damaged cage. It wasn’t cloth. It was corroded flesh, torn off in a hurry. A half-dead had been there, and not very long before. Clearly it had meant to kill the dogs, only to get its arm torn open instead.

  She let the dogs out and hugged them and poured them bowls of food. Hunger won out over their bewilderment, and they ate greedily. She squeezed vitamins from a plastic bottle into the kibble and left them at it. Then she went back to her car and retrieved her Beretta and the box of cross points. With fumbling, half-frozen hands she loaded the pistol, then went to the front door of the house.

  Why had they come? She had expected they would leave the house alone, if nobody was inside. She couldn’t figure it out. She touched the knob of the door and knew instantly that it was unlocked. Careful, wary of anyone who might be waiting just inside, she slipped on her flashlight and stepped through the door.

  Cold silence blew past her, cold air rushing through the house. It leaked in around the cardboard over the kitchen window, the window that had killed Deanna. It swept down the hallway toward their bedroom. She reached for the light switch, but it did nothing when she flicked it. She looked up and saw that the light fixtures in the hall had been smashed, all the bulbs broken.

  Even in the darkness she could see the house had been ransacked. Sheets lay twisted and strewn across the hall as if they’d been dragged off the bed. Plates and pots and the iron skillet had been jumbled all together and thrown in a corner. Some were broken, but there had been no method to it. Whoever had done this had been in a hurry, or perhaps a frenzy. The pictures were torn off the walls and thrown on the floor. Her flashlight beam struck one of them and dazzled her with the reflection off the glass. She looked closer. It was a picture of Deanna and Caxton at a canine agility tournament, the two of them bent low, beckoning Wilbur across a balance beam. God, what an amazing day that had been. The glass was cracked and the frame broken. She fished the photo out and put it in her pocket, trying to save something.

  The bedroom was a mess. Sharp claws or maybe knives had torn up the mattress and bits and pieces of foam rubber were scattered everywhere. Caxton’s closet had been rifled through, most of her clothes just dumped in a heap. It was going to take so long to clean this all up. She turned around and gasped again when she saw that the intruder had left her a message. It covered half the bedroom wall and looked like it had been painted in blood:

  NO LIFE = NO SLEEP BE WITH ME

  She didn’t need a signature to know who had sent the message. Scapegrace, the last of Justinia Malvern’s brood. He wanted her to finish the transformation that Reyes had started. He was waiting for her to commit suicide and come be his partner in reviving Malvern. He must have somehow convinced himself that destroying her home would be an incentive toward that end. Maybe he thought it would depress her.

  The piece of Reyes still curled around her brain pulsed, rejecting the idea, and she understood, a little—or rather she knew how little Scapegrace understood. Vampirism had been a dark gift as far as the teenager was concerned. How could anyone not want that power and strength? He was telling her that she no longer needed to sleep, that she could break out of the prison of her frail human flesh and emotions and become so much more.

  “Then why does he cut off his own ears every sundown?” she asked, but Reyes fell silent on that matter. Thinking of the dead boy made her more sad than angry. Petty destruction of other people’s property was the only outlet left for his rage, now that he had destroyed himself.

  She checked the rest of the house, but there was no one there. Scapegrace and his minions were long gone. She took another look at the bed and realized she would never be able to spend the night there. She decided to call Clara and see if her invitation still held. To get a better signal she headed out back, toward Deanna’s shed. The door stood unlocked and ajar, of course. Scapegrace had tried to hurt her dogs. He hated everything about the living. He would have destroyed Deanna’s art as well.

  She stepped inside and closed her phone before she’d even found Clara’s number. She switched on the lights and they actually worked, the bare hundred-watt bulbs in the ceiling flaring to life. The shed looked completely untouched. The three sheets hung slack from the ceiling, the light filtering yellow and red through the cloth. Perhaps Scapegrace had seen something in Deanna’s art. Maybe he approved of using blood as a medium—though surely he wouldn’t have known what kind of blood it was. She turned to head back outside, then stopped. She heard a footfall, but it wasn’t hers.

  “Laura,” someone said, and for a moment she thought it was her father’s ghost inhabiting the sheets, just as he had inhabited the teleplasm in Urie Polder’s barn.

  It was Arkeley who stepped out from behind the artwork, however.

  “Special Deputy,” she said, her heart racing at first. It slowed down as she watched him come closer. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  His face was creased with sorrow. “Laura,” he said again, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to bring you this far into this.”

  Was he actually apologizing for getting Deanna killed? Grief was like some kind of thicker skin she’d put on. Whatever he was saying just didn’t get through to her. “It’s alright,” she said. It wasn’t, but the words came out of her like a yawn, completely unavoidable.

  “I needed bait, you see. I needed you because they needed you. The only way to escape a trap is to spring it before they’re ready, remember?”

  “You’ve taught me so much.” It was her body talking, not her heart. Her body wanted to go to bed. Clara. She had to call Clara. Clara had to come pick her up. It would be at least an hour before she could sleep. She started texting Clara because it was easier somehow than talking to her on the phone. She was done talking for the night.

  “You don’t understand—” Arkeley insisted, but she shook her head. “Laura, you need to focus right now.” He stormed toward her and she was sure he was going to hit her again. She stopped breathing and her eyes went wide.

  “What is so important?” she asked, finally finding her own voice. “What is so fucking important that I have to listen to you, tonight of all nights?”

  Arkeley drew his weapon. A little gasp came out of her—she had no idea what he was doing.

  “They’re outside,” he told her. “Waiting for us to walk out of here. Dozens of half-deads and at least two vampires.”

  49.

  “What do you mean, two vampires?” Caxton demanded. “We killed them all except for Scapegrace. You don’t mean Malvern—you can’t mean that.”

  “No, I don’t,” Arkeley said. He checked the action on his Glock 23. He gestured at the Beretta that lay inert in her hand. She checked to see there was a round in the chamber, then raised the weapon to shoulder height, the barrel pointed at the ceiling. “Malvern is still at Arabella Furnace. I had Tucker check on her fifteen minutes ago and there was no change in her condition. So we have to assume that we made at least one mistake.”

  “We saw three coffins at the hunting camp,” she insisted. She didn’t want to hear what he said next, even though it was already echoing in the dark cloister of her own skull.

  “That doesn’t mean there couldn’t have been another one somewhere else.” Arkeley moved toward the light s
witch, careful to stay out of the shed’s wide doorway. “Let’s go over what I do know. I came here tonight to officially relieve you of duty. I was going to send you back to the highway patrol. Then I saw that something was wrong. There were maybe ten cars and trucks parked out on the road. I looked around, but none of your neighbors were having a party. I abandoned my own vehicle and came in here on foot, through the woods. By then they were already setting up their ambush. There are six half-deads hiding out by the driveway, there are five of them stationed in the yard next door, and three more of them on the roof of the kennels. There will be more—those are just the ones I found. I saw one vampire giving them orders. His ears were docked, so we have to assume that was Scapegrace. Then another vampire climbed out of your bedroom window.”

  “You’re absolutely sure it was a vampire you saw coming through the window? How good a look did you get?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t be certain of anything. But I saw something with pale white skin and long ears. Its hands were stained red.”

  Caxton moved up to the other side of the doorway, just as she’d been trained. When they left the shed they would go together, facing in slightly different directions so they could cover each other’s back.

  She texted Clara and told her to summon reinforcements. She called in to headquarters to report an officer under fire. She knew nobody could get there in time—the closest barracks was miles away. They were going to have to fight their way out on their own, just the two of them. She looked up at Arkeley. “Do we have a plan?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he told her. “Shoot everything that moves.”

  Together they stepped through the doorway. Arkeley raised his weapon and fired even before her eyes had adjusted to the darkness. She saw a shadow coming toward her, a shadow with a broken face, and she shot its center mass. It crumpled and fell without a sound.

  Suddenly they were everywhere.