“Hello, Officer,” Hazlitt said. She didn’t look at him. He sighed and tried again. “I know you have no reason to like me just now,” he went on. “In a few hours, though, we will be allies. That’s how this is going to work out. Can’t we be civil to each other now?” When she didn’t answer, he started up the car and turned onto the highway headed southeast. Toward the tuberculosis sanatorium where Justinia Malvern waited so patiently.
They were going to make her kill herself. She’d understood that before, but she hadn’t considered how it might happen. Reyes had wanted it to be her own choice, and he had nearly succeeded in talking her into shooting herself. He’d wasted time trying to convince her—and before he could finish with her the sun had come up. Scapegrace wasn’t going to make the same mistake. He would force her hand. Judging by the methods of persuasion he’d used so far, she imagined he would torture her until she begged for death. Then he would give her the means to do herself in.
Arkeley couldn’t stop them this time. Arkeley was dead. Tonight I’m going to die, she thought, and then tomorrow night I will rise as a vampire.
She wanted to fight them. She wanted it so badly—her body was wracked with the urge to attack, the need to kill the vampire and the doctor. Whitecaps of adrenaline surged through her bloodstream, beckoning her on. But how? She had no weapons. She didn’t know any martial arts.
On the verge of panic, she started breathing fast and shallow. Hyperventilating. She knew it was happening, but she didn’t know how to make it stop. Hazlitt glanced over at her, concern wrinkling his face.
In the backseat Scapegrace seemed bigger than he actually was. He was like some enormous growth, white and flabby like a cancer, filling half the car. “She’s just afraid. Her pulse is elevated. She might pass out.”
“Yes, thank you,” Hazlitt shot back. “I know the symptoms of an anxiety attack. Do you think we should sedate her? She could hurt herself or someone else.”
“She might hurt you,” Scapegrace said, laughing a little. “Don’t worry. I’ll grab her if she has a seizure or something.”
Tiny sparks of light flashed inside Caxton’s eyes. They swam across her vision and were gone as quickly as they’d come. Her throat felt dry and thick and very cold, with the air howling in and out of her body. She could hear her own heartbeat pulling in her chest. Then bars of darkness appeared at the top and bottom of her vision, like when they played old movies on television. The bars thickened and a high-pitched whining filled her head. Everything went soft and fuzzy and out of focus.
She could hear Hazlitt and Scapegrace talking, but only as if they were shouting through thick layers of wool. They were drowned out by the ringing in her ears. She could feel her body around her, but it was completely numb, rubbery, and dead. She could move if she really wanted to, but just then she didn’t really want to.
The fear was gone altogether.
That was the best part. She knew things were still bad and that they wouldn’t end well, but her fear was gone and she could think clearly again. She didn’t want to sit up—that might break the spell—but she looked forward, through the windshield, and tried to see where they were going. There was something out there, but it wasn’t the highway. It was pale and big and it had long triangular ears. It was a vampire, maybe Malvern. The vampire raised its hands to her and they were full of red blood. It was offering that redness to her, like a gift.
Scapegrace slapped her across the back of the head and her eyes whirled around in her head. She was back, the ringing gone from her ears.
“I said, are you okay?” Hazlitt yelled. He had one hand on her neck, maybe feeling for her pulse.
She wanted to bat him away, but she looked down and saw she was still holding the baby skull. Whatever had happened, she’d managed not to let it fall out of her hands. She remembered she wasn’t allowed to let go of it. She pulled away from Hazlitt as best she could with her shoulders. “I’m fine,” she managed to say. Her voice sounded weaker than she felt. “What happened?”
“You swooned,” the doctor told her, his voice thick with gloating.
She scowled. She wasn’t the kind of woman who swooned. She thought about it, though. Once, when she and Ashley (Deanna’s predecessor) had been in Hershey on vacation, she had drunk chocolate martinis until she had literally passed out. She had woken up on the floor of the ladies’ room with a crowd of scared-looking cocktail waitresses peering down at her. It had felt a lot like what had just happened—but even that hadn’t made her feel so much shame.
Wow, she thought. If Arkeley could have seen her just then, he would have had concrete proof of all the horrible things he’d ever said about her. Thank God he wasn’t in the car. Because he was dead.
She worked her face muscles, stretching out her jaw, puffing out her cheeks, trying to revive herself. By the time they reached the hospital she felt pretty much recovered. Hazlitt drove up onto the main lawn next to the statue of Hygiene and they piled out of the car, Caxton very careful not to drop the skull even though her palms were clammy with sweat.
Twelve or thirteen other cars were already parked haphazardly on the grass. They were all empty. A bonfire burned close to the front doors of the hospital. Caxton was pretty sure that the corrections officers who ran the place weren’t just having a weenie roast. She was right. As they walked up toward the entrance she saw the COs lined up on the ground near the fire, their hands tied behind their backs, their faces down in the grass.
She thought they must be dead. It was almost a relief to think that. When one of them moved, her body sagged with brand-new horror.
Tucker, the guard who had helped Arkeley find out Reyes’s personal information, strained his neck trying to look up and see who had arrived. Caxton did everything she could to look away, to not be seen, but it didn’t work. His eyes met hers for a moment and it was as if they had a conversation, as if they had some of the magic of the vampires and they could communicate with just the firelight that shook in their eyes.
I’m so sorry, she tried to say with her eyes. But there’s nothing I can do.
His eyes were easy to read, even from twenty feet away. Help me, they said. Please. Please help me.
That was her job, of course. Helping people. At the moment she was indisposed, however. Tucker was going to die because she hadn’t been strong enough. Just like everybody else. There was blood on her hands—the metaphorical kind, anyway.
“That guy means something to you?” Scapegrace asked. He didn’t give her a chance to deny it. He stormed over to where Tucker lay on the grass and scooped up the big CO in one arm. Tucker outweighed the vampire by probably a hundred pounds, but it didn’t seem to matter. Scapegrace fastened his big toothy mouth around Tucker’s neck and bit down, almost gently. Like he was biting into an apple and didn’t want to spurt any of the juice. Then he began to suck.
Caxton had no recourse but to scream for him to stop. She might as well have yelled at an avalanche—if anything, she just spurred him on. The CO’s face went gray, then white. It never got as white as the vampire’s skin. His eyes rolled around in his head and his body quivered, but he never screamed. Maybe Scapegrace had crushed his larynx. When it was over the vampire just threw the body down on the ground. It was useless. Blood ringed his mouth, bright red blood. “They’re all going to die,” he told her. Some of the other COs whimpered. One began praying in a sobbing, warbling voice. Scapegrace took him next.
After the third or fourth victim had been drained, Hazlitt cleared his throat. “Leave the rest for now,” he said. “Justinia wants to talk to our guest.”
Scapegrace jumped up and ran his forearm across his wet mouth. He moved across the grass so quickly that he left trails in the air. Suddenly he had his hands around Hazlitt’s neck. He forced the doctor down to the ground until he was kneeling on the wet grass, looking up into the vampire’s eyes, sheer terror beading waxy sweat on his forehead.
“You’re not one of us yet,” Scapegrace said. “You think you c
an remember that?”
The doctor nodded emphatically. The vampire let him up and they all went inside.
52.
The tiny skull in Caxton’s hands quivered and she nearly dropped it. She did let out a little squealing noise. Scapegrace and Hazlitt stopped to look back at her. The vampire grinned cockily at her predicament.
A millipede with long, hairy feelers had crawled out of the skull’s left eye socket and was working its way across the back of her hand. Its body looked wet and slimy. Its legs made her skin itch. It was all she could do not to jerk her hand away. If she did, though, she knew that Scapegrace would cripple her instantly. The teenaged vampire would probably put the millipede in her hair, afterwards, just to torture her.
She bent her knees and gritted her teeth and tried not to care. It was just a bug, she told herself. It was extremely unlikely that it was poisonous.
Carefully she raised the skull to the level of her mouth. She took a deep breath and blew on the millipede, trying to knock it off her hand. Its head waved in the jet of air, but then its back legs anchored between two of her knuckles. She blew harder, and harder, until she thought she might pass out again.
Scapegrace snorted out a mocking laugh. She sucked in air and then spat it at the millipede until it finally flew off of her hand. The vampire shook his head in amusement and then gestured for her to follow. “This way,” he said, “if you’re okay, now.”
Hazlitt ran ahead into the darkness and switched on a light in the corridor ahead. All but one of the fluorescent tubes in the corridor had been smashed. They hung above her like jagged glass teeth, sparking now and again. What little light remained was barely enough for her to find her way to the far end of the passage. They were headed directly for Malvern’s private ward—she recognized the route they took from her previous visits.
Scapegrace glanced at Hazlitt, then lifted aside the plastic curtain and went inside. Caxton started to follow, but the doctor touched her arm and shook his head. Together they waited for long minutes, listening to Scapegrace retch up his cargo of stolen blood. Tucker’s blood, Caxton thought. Maybe Arkeley’s blood. He was feeding Malvern, of course, just as Lares had the night that Arkeley killed him. When Scapegrace was finished and the noises had stopped, Hazlitt nodded at her. She pushed through the plastic curtain and stepped into the blue-lit room. Her eyes went out of focus for a moment, adjusting to the new light, and her head grew light. She thought she heard someone calling her name and she swam back to lucidity. She was so scared she thought she must be going crazy. “Laura,” she heard, again, a woman’s voice. Was it Malvern? No, that was impossible. Malvern’s vocal cords had dried up a hundred years ago. “Laura.” It was as clear and as loud as if someone stood behind her, calling her. She turned, but she knew nobody would be there. It was as if a ghost were talking, like the ghost in Urie Polder’s barn.
“Officer?” Hazlitt said, looking concerned.
“Nothing,” she said. Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the blue light. She saw that the room had been changed around some. The medical equipment had all been shoved back into the corners, and the microphones and probes that had once hung down from the ceiling to constantly measure Malvern’s status had all been cleared away. The laptop remained, sitting alone on a metal stool. Caxton glanced down at the coffin, which was propped up on its sawhorses. Blood filled the coffin almost to the rim. She was sure Malvern was in there, submerged under the dark fluid, but she couldn’t even see a shadow beneath the still surface. Then, as if in response to her stare, a ripple ran across the blood and five tiny peaks appeared in the surface. They pressed upward out of the coffin and she saw they were fingernails.
Malvern’s hand lifted from out of the blood, clotted fluid dripping and falling away from the fingers. There was more flesh on the bones than before—clearly, being soaked in human blood was having the desired effect on Malvern. She was rejuvenating, revivifying. Her hand reached for the laptop keyboard and she began to type. Character by character, she spelled out a message for her new guest:
well come, laura
When the vampire was done typing, her hand slithered back inside her coffin. It was all so quiet and stately and polite that Caxton felt an absurd urge to curtsy and thank her hostess for her kind hospitality. Scapegrace tapped Caxton’s shoulder, then, and she turned back around, losing her breath at the sight before her. A noose hung from the ceiling, hovering over a simple wooden chair. “That’s—for me,” she stammered. “So I can—so I can—finish myself off and complete the rite.”
“Yes,” Hazlitt told her. “I want you to know I opted for a lethal injection. I have one made up for myself. They wouldn’t hear of it.”
“It’s how your mother did it, right?” Scapegrace asked. He sounded almost solicitous, as if he really wanted to make sure he’d gotten it right. “She hanged herself? The symmetry of it appealed to us.”
“Yes, that’s right.” She nodded, trying to fight back by being more nonchalant than he was. Her stomach boiled with acid, but she refused to let it show. Symmetry. The kind of thing that would appeal to a vampire’s spiky, twisted, obsessive-compulsive mind. “She hanged herself. When I was very young. Is it time, now?” she asked, a lump in her throat. “Is it time for me to…” She couldn’t finish the sentence. “You know.”
“We’re not quite finished,” Scapegrace said.
A half-dead entered the room and climbed up a stepladder to hang a pair of thick iron chains from the ceiling. When he was done he took his ladder away and made room for two more half-deads, who dragged a big canvas sack into the room. There were ugly stains on one end of the sack. They grunted and cursed as they struggled with their burden, but they didn’t complain openly. From time to time they looked up at Scapegrace as if they expected him to pounce at them and tear them apart just for fun.
Finally they got their bag open. Inside was a human body, a big one, dressed in a dark suit. There was so much blood on the hands and face that Caxton couldn’t determine the race or even the sex of the cadaver.
No—wait, she thought. It wasn’t dead. It moved, though surely only by reflex, a twitch here or there, a last shudder before the body could finally succumb to mortal wounds. The half-deads attached the dangling chains to the body’s ankles and started hauling it up into the air. Scapegrace moved forward to help them lift it up, over the coffin, until the body dangled over Malvern’s submerged form with its outstretched fingertips nearly brushing the surface of the pooled blood.
The body swung from side to side, first left, then right. Scapegrace and Hazlitt both kept looking at her face as if they expected her to have some kind of reaction. She’d seen worse, she wanted to tell them. She’d scraped prom queens off the asphalt. Then she realized why they wanted her to see this particular body.
It had a small silver badge on its lapel, a star in a circle. The badge of a special deputy of the U.S. Marshals Service.
53.
“Arkeley,” she said. “Oh God, it’s Arkeley. You’ve killed him.” She had already known that he was dead, had already accepted it, but this—this was proof. Tears shot out of her eyes and splashed on her shirt.
“Oh, there’s plenty of life left in him yet,” Scapegrace announced. “There had better be.” The half-deads shrank away from the coffin and she understood intuitively. When they attacked her house they had been under Scapegrace’s orders to take both cops alive. Caxton so she could be turned into a vampire, and Arkeley so Scapegrace could torture him to death for what he’d done to Reyes and Congreve and Lares and Malvern and every vampire he could get his hands on.
Hazlitt touched the Fed’s throat. “He still has a pulse. It’s thready, but it’s strong. And he’s definitely breathing. Unconscious, though.”
Scapegrace smiled. “So let’s wake him up.” He stepped over to the dangling body and took Arkeley’s left hand in his own. He stroked the bloodstained skin for a moment, then lifted the hand to his mouth and with one quick motion bit off all four fingers do
wn to the palm.
Fresh blood poured out of the wounds and mingled with the blood in the coffin. Arkeley’s eyes flicked open and a mewling, catlike sound surged from his chest. He sucked in a horrible breath that caught on something broken inside of him, then he moved his lips as if trying to speak.
Scapegrace spat the severed fingers into Malvern’s coffin. They sank into the blood without a trace. “What’s that, Deputy? Speak up.”
“Spuh,” Arkeley rasped. It sounded like two pieces of paper being rubbed against each other. “Spesh.”
“Special Deputy,” Caxton said for him. A kind of gruesome smile, but yes, an actual smile appeared on the Fed’s upside-down face.
“Cax,” Arkeley sputtered. “Caxt—you. You knee.” He took another grating breath. “Need to…” He couldn’t seem to finish his thought.
Scapegrace didn’t like it at all. He reached for Arkeley’s other hand. “Do you have something more to say?” he asked. “Some last kind word for your young friend here? You’ve failed her, old man. She’s going to die, you’re going to die. Everyone is going to die. You’ve failed everybody. Maybe you’d like to say you’re sorry. Go ahead. Whisper in her ear. We’ll all wait here patiently for you to think up your dying words.”
Caxton leaned close against the edge of the coffin. Her shirt trailed in the blood. “Jameson,” she whispered. She’d never used his first name before and it felt strange in her mouth. “Please don’t apologize.”
“Kneel,” the Fed told her. It wasn’t what she was expecting. “Kneel before her.”
She recoiled from the words, from the very idea. She sought his eyes, wanting to let him know how angry she was that he would just surrender like that, that he would want her to embrace her doom so wholeheartedly. The light in his eyes was wrong, though. There was a distinct streak of defiance in the wrinkles around his eyes.
13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale Page 27