She picked one. The one with the hammer. He didn’t look as scared as the others. Taking her time, lining up her shot, she aimed right at his heart and fired, thinking even as she squeezed the trigger, Four.
The half-dead’s chest burst open and a stench of rotten meat rolled across her. The others drew back.
Then they started moving toward her again. Their weapons brandished in their pale hands, they advanced on her as if they knew exactly what she was thinking. As if they’d been counting her shots, too, and knew she didn’t have a chance.
She fired again, wildly, cursing herself even as she snapped off an unaimed shot. If it hit anything, she didn’t stick around to see. She ran back along the corridor, back the way she’d come. She could feel them behind her, chasing her. She could hear their feet slapping on the linoleum in the dark. Could they see better in the gloom than she could? She didn’t know. She didn’t know at all. She flicked on her light, more interested in seeing where she was going than in hiding her position.
She pushed open a door and skidded around a corner, nearly colliding with a filing cabinet somebody had left in the middle of the hall. She pushed it over, adrenaline giving her the strength, and its clattering fall echoed all around her. Maybe one or two of the half-deads would trip over it.
Her breath froze her throat as it rushed in and out of her, and she ran, the light of her flashlight jumping up and down on the walls and floors ahead of her.
56.
Caxton rushed around a corner into a narrow hallway with no windows. She crouched down in the dark and tried to control her heartbeat and her breathing. Her blood was beating so loudly in her ears that she thought anyone nearby must be able to hear it.
Blood. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She was full of blood. The half-deads wanted to spill it, maybe in revenge for what she’d done to them and their masters. Maybe because when you were undead all you had in your heart was jealousy directed at the living. They wanted her blood. Then there was the vampire, the unknown vampire haunting the sanatorium, also searching for her, also wanting her blood. But for a different reason.
She heard a half-dead moving nearby. Its feet made less sound on the linoleum than a cat might make padding through a garden, but she heard it. Nothing like fear to concentrate the senses.
She had three bullets left. She knew better than to think they would be any use to her. She could put one of them in her own heart—that way she would at least not come back as a vampire.
Alternatively, she could put one in her head. Then she would come back.
Would that be so very terrible? It would be a betrayal of Arkeley, true. But he had never liked her. If she made herself a vampire at least her life wouldn’t end. It would change in many ways. But it wouldn’t end.
“Yes,” Reyes said, inside of her head. He’d been quiet all night. Either he was losing his grip on her, fading away, or he was just biding his time.
“Yes,” someone else agreed. “In the head.” Someone else.
A full-body shiver made her twitch in the shadows. She heard the prowling half-dead stop, not ten feet away. She held her breath until he walked past her hiding place. When he was gone from earshot she let herself exhale a little.
Somebody else had spoken to her from inside her head. It hadn’t sounded like Reyes at all. Somebody else was in there.
“All of you can just shut the hell up,” she told them. A splintered chuckling sounded in the back of her throat as if she’d been laughing to herself. Not nice, she thought, but she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of a response.
She got up and made her way to the end of the dark hallway, using little bursts of light from her mini-Maglite to find her way. The corridor opened out at its end to a wider hallway full of flats of building supplies—stacks of shingles and neat bundles of replacement floor tiles, pallets of lumber, row after row of sealed white plastic buckets full of plastering compound. Moonlight streamed in through a hole in the ceiling and painted everything a ghostly silver, but even in that eerie light Caxton could see the supplies must have been left there untouched for years, bought for some project that had never really gotten started. Maybe they’d planned to fix the hole in the roof. The wood was worm-eaten and slimy to the touch, while some of the buckets had corroded away and spilled white powder in long sinuous drifts across the floor. She approached carefully, knowing that anything could be hiding in the shadows just outside the patch of moonlight. She glanced down at the powder spread across the floor. The wind coming down from the ceiling listlessly stirred the plaster. Slowly it worked at filling in a line of footprints. Laura was no tracker, but she could see the feet were no bigger than her own. The tracks were fresh, too, sharply defined. A barefoot woman had come that way recently.
“Laura,” someone said in a room nearby. Or had they? Caxton’s mind wasn’t just playing tricks on her, she had a whole Vegas-quality magic show going on in there. She couldn’t be sure of anything. What she had heard had sounded like a cough more than a word. And it sounded more like the building settling than like a cough. If she hadn’t known better, she could have convinced herself it was just her imagination.
The footprints led her eye to a wide set of double doors across the hallway. Black paint on the doors said INVALID WARD. Someone was sending her a message—she was supposed to go through those doors. It was a trap. Arkeley had taught her about traps. Shaking more than she would have liked, Caxton stepped up to the doors and pushed one of them open. It slid away from her easily, its hinges creaking softly.
The room beyond was cavernous and extremely dark. Her light showed her that it had been stripped bare of anything that could be moved. All that remained in the room were cast iron bedframes painted with flaking white enamel. There were dozens of them, maybe a hundred. Some had been pushed into a corner and some effort had been made to stack them on top of one another. The majority remained exactly where they’d been when the sanatorium was abandoned, standing in neat rows that ran away from her into impenetrable darkness.
How many people, how many generations of people, had died in that room? How many men had lain in those beds, coughing away their lives until someone came to cart their lifeless bodies away? How many ghosts did they leave behind? Caxton’s father had died like that, one little hitching cough at a time. He had died in a bed like—
Feather-light and soft, something tapped her shoulder.
A fear leaped on her then, not an emotion but a living, breathing thing that crawled around her shoulders and neck as if looking for someplace to hide. Caxton wanted to run. She wanted to scream. She tried to turn around and found that her body was completely paralyzed by fear.
Caxton stopped in her tracks and flicked off the light. Concentrating, she slowly began to breathe again.
“Laura.” Wind in some trees, maybe, making branches rub together. Yeah, sure. Trees. She might have believed that the first time. Through sheer dint of repetition she knew what it had to be. It was a vampire, and the vampire was playing with her like a cat playing with a wounded starling. The skin on her arms erupted in goose pimples.
It might be Malvern. The bath of blood might have given the moribund vampire enough strength to call out like that from the other side of the sanatorium. Or it could be the other vampire, the unknown.
A cold breeze brushed across Caxton’s face, ruffling her hair. There had been no wind in the passage before. Either someone had opened a door somewhere or—or—
She couldn’t help it. She had to know. She flicked on the flashlight just in time to see a pale hand flash away from her, dripping red. She gasped in horror and spun around, trying to find where the owner of the hand had gone. She couldn’t see anything. She flicked the light off again and brought her weapon down to low ready. Three.
A second passed, then another, and nothing happened.
Caxton wanted to turn the light back on. She told herself she was only handicapping herself by not having it on. Vampires could see living people in the dark
. They could see their blood. She imagined the vampire looking at her at that very moment. Would the vampire see her frightened face or just the blood surging inside her veins? She imagined what that must look like: the branching network of her blood vessels, as if they’d been carefully surgically removed and hung from the ceiling by wires. A human-enough shape, but empty, a throbbing tracery, bright red jagged lines pulsing tremulously in the cold air.
The vampire had to be within striking distance. At any moment he or she could pounce and tear Caxton apart. What was the holdup? Standing there waiting for her own destruction, imagining the pain to come, was almost worse than actually dying.
She flicked on the light and held it straight out, daring the vampire to show itself. The vampire obliged, stepping right into the path of the beam.
Thirty feet away, or maybe farther, the light revealed little more than a pale human outline. The vampire wore a white lacy dress that looked oddly familiar to Caxton, as if she’d seen it in a magazine. The colorless hands were full of blood.
Caxton had seen this apparition before. In the car, when she had passed out because she was so frightened. She had seen this vampire with bloody hands, beckoning, calling to her. Now the hands lifted, palms held out as if to catch Caxton’s light. The red fell away through the fingers. It wasn’t blood at all, Caxton saw. It was hair, clumps of short, red hair.
“It all came out at once, Pumpkin,” the vampire said, moving closer. She moved so easily, she might have been skating across the floor. “I thought you might like to see it one last time before it’s gone.”
Caxton’s bones hardened in place. She felt as if she were being fossilized. The sound that creaked up out of her wasn’t a name, it was the noise rocks make when they freeze in the winter and crack and split. By the time it reached Caxton’s lips, though, that noise sounded an awful lot like Deanna’s name.
57.
Deanna touched Caxton’s mouth, her chin. Her fingers trailed down across Caxton’s throat and wove themselves around her belt. In the blue, uncertain light of the tiny flashlight Deanna didn’t look half bad. Even if she was undead.
“It’s good to see you,” she said, very softly.
“Dee,” Caxton sighed. “Dee. You can’t be. You didn’t—you didn’t.”
“I didn’t kill myself?” Deanna asked. Her voice had that growling quality they got. Her skin was the color of skim milk. She could probably tie a steel bar in knots with her bare hands.
But she was Deanna, alive again. Or almost.
“I broke that window with my own hands. I cut myself up.” Deanna’s eyes wandered upward to Caxton’s. “I guess that counts,” Deanna said. Under the growl there was a breathy quality to the voice. A sexy kind of flutter. It made Caxton’s skin itch.
It would be technically incorrect to say that Caxton thought Deanna was actually alive. She knew better than that. Or rather, her brain knew better. Her body had its own ideas and its own memories. It remembered the shape of Deanna, the shape of Deanna when she was alive. It remembered her smell.
“How could you do this to us? You know what I am. What I’ve been working on,” Caxton said. She stepped closer and touched Deanna’s strangely lumpy jaw. “You’re so cold,” she said. She leaned forward and touched her forehead to the vampire’s forehead. They used to do that, when they were alone and things were quiet. They used to press up against each other. It felt pretty much the same this time.
“I didn’t have a choice. I mean—except I did. Congreve.” The vampire closed her eyes and pressed her hands against her toothy mouth. She shook with weeping.
Caxton couldn’t stand to see it. “Shh,” she said. “Shh.” She put her arms around Deanna’s slender form. She wanted to press her tight until she warmed up again. Until she was a real girl again. A sob died in the middle of Caxton’s throat. It didn’t make it up to the surface. “How do you know about Congreve?”
Deanna pushed Caxton away. She used just enough of her strength to get out of the embrace, but underneath Caxton could feel just how much more power Deanna had, if she chose to use it. It was like being shoved gently away by a pickup truck.
Deanna wouldn’t hurt Caxton, though. She would never harm her lover. Caxton could feel it in the way Deanna touched her, in the way they moved around each other.
“They’re going to let us be together forever. That wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.”
Caxton shook her head. “Forever. Sure. Forever like one of them. Have you seen Malvern?”
Deanna laughed and it almost sounded like her old laugh. “Of course I have. She called me here.” She was gone then, away from Caxton’s body, and that felt wrong. Deanna sat down on one of the bedframes and hugged herself. Caxton kneeled down to bring their faces closer together. “Justinia is the one who made this possible. I was going to die, Pumpkin. I was going to die and I didn’t know how else to save myself.”
“Shh,” Caxton said, and she reached with her thumbs to dry Deanna’s tears. What leaked from the corners of the vampire’s eyes wasn’t water, though, but dark blood. Caxton wiped her fingers on her pants.
“Maybe you’d better tell me how this happened,” Caxton said. Yes. That was good. She had to start thinking like a cop again. But it was so hard with Deanna right there, a Deanna who still moved and spoke and wept.
“Congreve was going to kill me. It wasn’t anything personal. He was just in the neighborhood, hunting, and he found me. He came to the house one night when you were out at work. The dogs started singing and the light in the shed went on. I went to see what was happening. I grabbed the long screwdriver from the toolkit and I went back there and said, ‘Whoever’s in there, you’d better fuck off out of here. My girlfriend’s a cop.’ But nothing happened. So I went to the door of the shed, and that’s when he grabbed me.”
“Congreve?” Caxton asked. But how was that possible? She and Arkeley had killed Congreve long before Deanna’s accident.
“Yes. His hands were really rough with calluses, and they held me so tight. He told me I was going to die, and I started screaming and begging. He told me to shut up and I tried. I really tried. He asked me if I was the artist, if the blankets in the shed were mine, and I said no, because I thought maybe he was some crazy religious guy or something and he wanted to kill me for my art. He made me look into his eyes then, and I saw he wasn’t human at all. I couldn’t lie to him then, not even if I’d wanted to. I said yes.”
“Oh, God,” Caxton moaned. “He hypnotized you. He transmitted the curse to you and you couldn’t even know what was happening.”
Deanna shrugged. “I don’t like to think of it that way. He was an artist too, he said. A musician. He really got my work, Laura. That has to count for something, right? He said talent like mine shouldn’t be wasted. He asked me if I wanted to live or die. Just like that. You know, I actually had to think about it.” Deanna looked down at her hands. She picked at the front of the dress. Caxton realized, suddenly, where she’d seen it before. It was the Best Person dress that Deanna had worn to her brother’s wedding. Had the Purfleets buried her in it?
“He made you like him. You must have said you wanted to live,” Caxton said, trying to get back on track.
Deanna nodded. “Then he went away. And I started having those dreams. The dreams about you bleeding to death.”
Caxton crab-walked backwards and sat down on a bedframe so she could face Deanna. They were two women, two living women sitting on beds, their knees almost touching. Two women just having a conversation. That was all, she told herself.
Deanna lowered her face until her voice was muffled by her folded arms. “I fought the curse, as much as I could. I tried not to sleep. It’s in your dreams that they make you hurt yourself. But that’s the merciful part, isn’t it? You don’t feel a thing as long as you’re dreaming. I wish I’d known what it was going to be like so I wouldn’t have been so afraid. I’m really sorry, Laura. I’m sorry I got so scared. Otherwise I wouldn’t have told them about y
ou.”
“What are you talking about?” Caxton asked, trying to keep her voice gentle.
“I told them I couldn’t do it alone. I couldn’t be one of them if it would mean leaving you behind. Mr. Reyes said he had the answer for that, though. He said they could take both of us. He really seemed to like the idea.”
No, it hadn’t happened like that. It couldn’t have. Caxton felt like she’d gotten to the end of a jigsaw puzzle and found the picture didn’t match the cover of the box. She shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense, Deanna. Your story is all mixed up.”
“What do you mean?” the vampire asked.
“This—this case—was all about me, at least, it was about me first. Because I stopped the half-dead at my sobriety checkpoint. That was how Reyes found out about me.” That was the one thing she actually knew for sure, the one clue she’d really had firm and solid in her mind the whole time. It was why Arkeley had drafted her into his crusade in the first place. It was why the half-dead had followed her home. Because the vampires wanted her as one of their own.
“Pumpkin,” Deanna said. “Does it really matter who did what first?”
“Of course it does.” It meant everything. The vampires had come after her. They’d been obsessed with her. “This all began on the night of my sobriety check. When the half-dead followed me home.”
Deanna shook her bald head, just a little. “No, Laura, no. It started weeks before that.”
“Bullshit,” Caxton huffed. She wrapped her arms around herself. “Anyway, how could you know that?”
“Jesus, stop already. You’re not this stupid!” Deanna stood up and Caxton followed, but it felt as if she got to her feet first. Deanna was still rising. Eventually she raised herself up to a considerable height. Had she grown after being dead? Or maybe her posture was just better. “That half-dead didn’t just accidentally run across your sobriety check. He was coming to get you.”
13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale Page 29