“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.
He’d never been wrong before. She dropped to her knees and lowered her head as if she were praying in church. She knew very well that it would take more than a simple prayer to save herself, though.
Down on her knees, she saw something—a shadow tucked away in the near-perfect darkness under the coffin. She saw the triangular shapes of the sawhorses and between them something else, something flat and angular. She squinted and saw that something had been secured to the bottom of the coffin with a silver X of duct tape. She squinted again and finally understood. It was a handgun. A Glock 23.
He must have put it there earlier. Perhaps back on the night when Scapegrace and Reyes had come for Malvern and he had threatened to tear out her heart. He must have planned for this, just as he planned for every possible contingency. That was how you fought vampires—you never let them get the drop on you.
She glanced up at Arkeley’s face. He wasn’t giving anything away. She looked back at the pistol. She knew it held thirteen bullets—there would be nothing in the chamber. She looked up and around the room. “Scapegrace,” she said.
The vampire stepped closer. He was no more than five feet away. “Hmm?”
“Catch,” she said, and tossed the skull into the air. Instantly its high unearthly shriek split the air. Scapegrace grabbed at it, his white hands up and reaching.
She tore the Glock free from the bottom of the coffin. She worked the slide to chamber a round and saw the vampire’s red eyes go wide. His brain understood what was happening, but his hands kept going for the skull. He caught it and crushed it unthinkingly between his pale fingers. Fragments of yellow bone and clods of dirt swarming with worms trickled down the front of his shirt. The shrieking stopped.
Caxton pressed the barrel of the pistol against his chest and fired. He fell backwards, his head smashing on the concrete floor. His eyes swiveled around to fix on her. “Pretty good,” he said, and tried to get a knee under himself so he could rise and kill her. His limbs didn’t seem to want to cooperate. “Shit,” he said, and fell back.
“Go! Get help!” Hazlitt shouted at the half-deads. One of them rushed for the far exit, for the darkness there. Caxton pivoted on her heel and snapped off a shot and the half-dead’s back erupted in a cloud of rotten flesh and torn clothing. She turned to shoot the next one but it was gone, already having fled the room. The third half-dead crouched down on the floor and hugged his knees.
She turned to Hazlitt next. She didn’t point her weapon at him—you never pointed a weapon at a human being until you were prepared to shoot him. He stepped behind a cart of medical instruments and raised his hands. He was too smart, she decided, to actually try something.
Scapegrace had rolled over onto his side and was pushing himself up into a sitting posture when she looked again. His eyes wouldn’t meet hers. “You nicked it,” he said.
“What?”
“You nicked my heart,” he finished. He pushed upward with one knee, but his arms were trembling. “That was pretty tricky.” He got up on both knees. “You waited until I’d given all my blood to Her. You waited for the moment when I would be at my weakest. Pretty tricky. Listen,” he said, rising to his feet. He lifted his hands into plain sight. “I’ll go quietly, okay? Don’t kill me.” He wheezed as he spoke—had she punctured one of his lungs? She would have given anything for a chest x-ray just then. “Please,” he continued. “You can lock me away forever, whatever you want. But please don’t kill me. I’m not even eighteen years old.”
“Don’t,” Arkeley breathed behind her. Don’t listen, he was trying to say. Arkeley. Was he still alive? He wouldn’t be for long unless she got him down and bandaged his wounds. She turned halfway around to look at him.
It was the opening Scapegrace had been waiting for. He flew across the room, a pale streak of lightning. Red blood erupted from Hazlitt’s throat and chin as the vampire tore off half of the doctor’s neck. Hazlitt gurgled out a scream. Caxton fired a round into the back of Scapegrace’s head, just by instinct. It didn’t even slow him down. She fired again into his back, but he just redoubled his efforts, pressing his face and his rows of triangular teeth deep into the hole he’d made in Hazlitt’s neck.
Every drop of blood he drank would make Scapegrace stronger. He would be bulletproof in seconds. She needed to kill him instantly. Carefully, holding her breath, she lined up another shot and fired through the back of his T-shirt. The bullet tore through the vampire’s body and made him double over in howling pain. He staggered away from Hazlitt and fell across a rack of IV stands. They clattered to the floor as his hands clutched and clutched at nothing, at air. His legs shook like rubber bands and he collapsed to the floor and finally, convulsively, died.
Hazlitt took one last look around the room, his face and chest and the whole front of his body one continuous sheet of flowing blood. Then he slumped to the floor as well, as dead as the vampire.
The half-dead in the corner jumped up and started running for the door. Caxton fired reflexively and missed him. She fired again and pulverized his left arm. The half-dead whined in pain but didn’t stop. She fired a third time and his whole body blew to pieces.
54.
“F ive,” Arkeley moaned.
She shoved the handgun into the empty holster at her belt. It almost fit. Climbing the stepladder, with shaking hands she managed to lower Arkeley to the floor. She found rolls of gauze and surgical tape in a rolling cart.
“Five,” he said again, as if he’d just remembered something.
His injuries were terrible. The half-deads had really worked him over—his skin was a maze of cuts, most of them inflamed, and the skin that wasn’t sliced or torn was bruised and even chewed in places. His eyes were swollen shut and his mouth was black and swollen with bruising. Then, of course, there were the fingers that Scapegrace had torn off. Caxton wrapped his left hand in gauze that instantly turned red with bright arterial blood. She wound more and more bandaging around the wound, tight but not too tight. At least it was his left hand. He would still have the use of his right hand. He could still shoot.
Except—he wasn’t doing any shooting anymore. Not that night, probably not for months. He couldn’t even sit up.
A cold flash went through her when she realized she had been expecting him to get up this whole time and reclaim his gun. She had really thought that her part was done and she could let him mop up.
“Five,” he mumbled.
“Shh,” she said.
It wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t going to fight the half-deads. He wasn’t going to walk out of Arabella Furnace. It was up to her to get out, to run and get help. Maybe—maybe—she could save his life, but it was all up to her.
“Five.”
“Okay already,” she said. “Five what? Five half-deads? I think there were more than that when I came in. If you tell me there are five active vampires here I’m going to soil my uniform.” She smiled and patted his good hand.
He sucked in a painful breath and spoke in a rush. “There’s only one more active vampire,” he said. He waited a moment, then finished. “There are five bullets remaining in your clip.”
Slowly she removed the Glock from her belt. She ejected the clip and counted the remaining rounds. There were only five left, just as he had said. That was impossible—she couldn’t possibly have already fired eight bullets, could she? She went over the recent combat in her head and realized she had.
She slipped the clip back into the handgun and holstered it again.
“Be more careful,” he said, his head rolling back and forth. “From now on.”
She n
odded in agreement. He probably didn’t see it, though, because just then the lights went out.
It happened so quickly that Caxton thought it had to be in her head. She blinked, but the blue light didn’t come back. Featureless darkness filled all the available space around her, so thick she felt as if it were rubbing on her dry eyeballs.
“Oh God,” she said. “They know. They know something’s up. What do we do now?”
Arkeley didn’t answer. She reached over and grabbed his bloody wrist. He had a pulse, still, but he must have fallen unconscious.
Caxton searched her pockets, hoping she had some kind of light source on her. Something—anything. Scapegrace had taken most of her gadgets away from her: cell phone, PDA, handcuffs. “Oh, thank you,” Caxton whispered, not knowing whom she was talking to. The vampire had ignored her mini-Maglite. He’d probably figured she couldn’t hurt anyone with it. She took it out and pointed it at Arkeley. The miniature flash-light spat out a foggy cone of pale blue illumination that dazzled her eyes for a second. It gave off just enough light for her to see that he was still breathing.
A telephone was mounted on one wall. She grabbed the handset and pressed it to her ear. No dial tone rewarded her. She flicked the hook a couple of dozen times, trying to make it work, but no dice. Whoever had cut the power must have cut the sanatorium’s phone lines, too.
Which meant they had to know everything. They knew where she was and what her first move would be.
If the half-deads—and the remaining vampire—knew she was in Malvern’s ward then her first goal had to be to get away. She couldn’t move Arkeley—he outweighed her considerably and she couldn’t drag him—so she would have to leave him there on the floor. If the bad guys killed him out of spite, she would hate herself forever. She hoped they would be too preoccupied trying to kill her.
Waving her light around, she found the exit from the ward and slipped along the wall of the corridor beyond. The Glock stayed in her holster to prevent her from wasting a bullet if she jumped at her own shadow. That was an Arkeley kind of thing to do, and she was proud that she had thought of it. Of course, Arkelely would already have a plan by this point. He would already be putting it into effect.
“Think,” she said, trying to break the layer of fear that covered her brain like frost. “Think.” What could she realistically hope to achieve? She wasn’t tough enough to take on another vampire and an unknown number of half-deads on her own. She’d only beaten Reyes because of Vesta Polder’s amulet, and Scapegrace had died of surprise, not any special quality she possessed. So if she couldn’t fight, what could she do?
She could run. She could get out of the hospital and call for backup. It was the only realistic plan. The half-deads would try to stop her, she knew. She tried to think like a faceless freak. They hadn’t attacked her directly yet—no, they wouldn’t. They were cowards. Arkeley had told her as much. They would fall back, take away her ability to see and her ability to communicate. They would try to flush her out, to make her walk right into their traps. The half-deads would have secured the main entrance. Going out the way she came in would be suicide. She ducked down the first side corridor she saw.
She remembered her first visit to the sanatorium. She’d thought it was a big spooky maze then. With the lights out it was a lot more unnerving and a whole lot harder to find her way around. She knew generally what direction she was headed in: southeast, toward the greenhouse wing. Yes, that would be good. If she could just get outside, she would feel much safer. The moonlight might actually reveal something useful.
Her flashlight speared out before her, illuminating less than she would have liked. The corridor it lit up was a gallery of dim reflections and long shadows. Anything could be ahead of her, waiting for her. Anything at all. She kept her back to the wall and edged forward, a step at a time. There was nothing else for it.
She was halfway down the corridor, her eyes watching every doorway, when she began to hear a noise like something moving around inside the wall at her back. She shied away from it and heard it dash away from her, as if they’d scared each other off. It was a rhythmic skittering sound, or rather a whole group of sounds, the patter of tiny claws on wood, the thumping of a soft body dragging across broken plaster. Ahead of her, down the hallway, something oozed out of the wall and dropped to the floor.
She swung her light around and speared a rat with her flashlight beam. Its tiny eyes blazed as it looked back at her. Its nose twitched and then it bolted away.
“Nothing,” she said, trying to reassure herself. It came out a little louder than she’d meant it to.
Ahead of her, at the end of the corridor, a half-dead hissed, “What was that?”
She stopped in her tracks. She stopped breathing. She switched off her flashlight. There was a tiny bit of light coming in through square inset windows in the double doors at the end of the hallway. A shadow moved across that light, a shadow like a human head.
“Did you see that?” someone else asked, with the same kind of squeaky, ratlike voice. Another half-dead. “Somebody had a light on and they switched it off.”
“Get the others,” the first voice said.
The double doors slammed open then, and what looked like a never-ending stream of human silhouettes flooded into the hall.
55.
C axton reached for her weapon but stopped. She could hear dozens of feet pounding down the corridor toward her. She had only five bullets left. There was no way she could take on all the half-deads using the gun.
She switched on her light and pointed it at them. Their torn faces and their glassy eyes reflected the light perfectly. They were dressed in filthy clothes. One wore eyeglasses. A couple were missing hands or arms. There had to be at least twelve of them, and they were all armed: with kitchen knives, with sharpened screwdrivers, with hatchets or cleavers. One had a pitchfork. When the light hit them, their mouths went wide and they ran at her even faster.
If she stayed where she was they would simply cut her down. She flicked off the light and dashed sideways toward an empty doorway. The door itself lay flat on the floor of the room beyond, as if its hinges had rotted away.
There was a window at the far end of the room, but she could see that it was barred. The room looked like a jail cell. Had it been the psychiatric ward?
She could hear them coming. She’d run into the room on pure instinct, just trying to get away. Had they seen her? She didn’t know if half-deads saw any better in the dark than human beings. Had they seen her? She threw herself against the wall to one side of the door and breathed through her mouth. She heard them outside in the hallway, their feet pounding on the linoleum tiles, their hands thumping against the plaster walls. Had they seen where she’d gone? They had to be close. They had to be getting closer.
She thought she heard them walk right past the door. She had to be sure. She leaned out through the doorway to get a look and found one of them staring right back. His face was striped and raw where he’d torn away his own skin. His eyes were less hateful than pathetic, full of a weary sadness more profound than anything she could imagine.
Without even thinking about it, she reached up with both hands, grabbed his head, twisted, yanked, and pulled. He screamed but his flesh tore. It felt less like grappling with a human body than like pulling a branch off a tree. Bones crackled inside his neck as his vertebrae gave way, and suddenly she was holding a human head. The eyes looked right into her, sadness transformed entirely into fear. The mouth kept moving, but it no longer had the breath or the larynx to scream with.
“Ugh,” she said, and threw the head into a shadowy corner of the room. Out in the hall, the half-dead’s body kept walking but had lost all its coordination. It was just muscles twitching with no purpose. Guilt and disgust erupted inside of her and she thought she would throw up. She glanced into the dark corner, wondering if the head was still moving. Wondering how much that hurt, to be beheaded but not killed outright.
Then she remembered the half
-deads who had taunted her on the roof of Farrel Morton’s camp. She thought about the one who had attacked her with a shovel—and the one who had stood outside her window and tricked Deanna into cutting herself to ribbons. The guilt flew away on moth wings.
The headless body kept walking, and soon enough it came up against a wall and started beating itself to pieces, its shoulder digging into the wall as if it wanted to push its way through.
The rest of the half-deads turned to look. They stood in the hallway in loose formation, their weapons out and ready but not pointed at her. They had walked past without knowing she was in the room—if she hadn’t looked, they might have gone right past her. It was hard to tell in the dark hallway, but she thought they looked surprised.
The pitchfork the headless body had been holding on to bounced with a jangling sound on the floor. She scooped it up in both hands and felt its weight. It was heavy and overbalanced, the metal tines drooping low to the floor when she tried to lift it. It was a ludicrous weapon and one she’d never been trained to use.
She dropped it. It clanged on the linoleum. Then she drew her Glock.
The crowd of half-deads moved backwards. Away from her. That was good. Some of them raised their hands, though they didn’t drop their weapons.
She pointed the handgun at one of them, then another. She made them wince. They couldn’t know how many bullets she had left. She stepped out into the hallway, keeping them covered. She would shoot the first one that moved. Maybe that would scare them enough that they would scatter like frightened rats. She really hoped so.
One of them had a pair of kitchen shears. He worked them nervously, the blades glinting in the few stray beams of moonlight. Another one wore a dark blue Penn State sweatshirt with the hood up around his ruined face. He was carrying a ball-peen hammer. He could break her arm in a second if he got too close.
She took a step backwards. The half-deads took a step forward. It wasn’t going to work. They would stop being scared in a moment and would rush her. There was no way she could survive if they all attacked her at once. If she didn’t shoot one of them soon, they would call her bluff and it would be over.
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