She froze as she heard the vampire out in the hall. “What are you doing in there?” he asked, half of a chuckle in his voice. The voice confused her. It sounded different, somehow, from the voice on the recording that had lured her to the facility. Less guttural, less—inhuman.
She didn’t bother to answer. She pulled herself upward, hauling herself hand over hand until she was perched on the top of the locker’s side wall. She could look down the other side into the locker to her right. Cardboard boxes, a pair of skis, plastic milk crates full of old vinyl records filled the narrow space. From where she was perched she could slip down into the corridor, though the vampire was waiting for her there, alerted by all the noise she’d made. Vampires had far better reaction time and reflexes than human beings. Trying to pounce on one from above was probably suicide.
Not that she had much choice. She leaned out just a little and looked down into the corridor. She saw the white bald head of the vampire below her. He was leaning up against the door of the empty locker, one triangular ear pressed up against it, one long pawlike hand splayed against the white metal.
She drew her weapon—and leapt. With as little thought as that. She landed hard on his shoulders and must have caught him off balance, because he went sprawling down on the floor on his back with her on top. She flipped off her safety and fired in one fluid motion, not even taking the time to aim. Her bullet blew open the skin of his shoulder and sent bone chips flying, and realizing her mistake, realizing she’d missed his heart, she brought her arm back and pistol-whipped him across the mouth.
His fangs snapped and shattered and flew away from the blow. He started gagging and coughing and then he spat out the broken fangs, revealing round white normal teeth below them. She stared wildly into his blue eyes, and saw the shiny gloss of stubble on the top of his head.
“Oh, shit,” she said. She grabbed one of his triangular ears and yanked it off. It was made of foam rubber.
3.
Outside a SWAT team crouched in the snow, high-powered rifles leveled at the glass doors of the lobby. Blue and red lights flashed in Caxton’s eyes and she blinked them away. “Move, you idiot,” she said, and shoved the subject forward, out into the street. He whimpered as the broken bones in his shoulder rubbed against each other. The SWAT team relaxed visibly when they saw the handcuffs binding his arms together, but they didn’t stand down completely until she gave the order.
“Glauer,” she called, and the big cop came running around from the back, where he’d still been watching the fire exit. Good soldier, she thought. “Glauer, call an ambulance. This one’s wounded.”
He stared at her in total incomprehension. The job of the SSU wasn’t to arrest vampires, and it certainly wasn’t to get them medical attention. It was to exterminate them.
“He’s a wannabe,” she explained. She tore off the subject’s other rubber ear. Revealed beneath was a round, normal, flesh-colored human ear. She had to admit the subject had done a good job of faking it. In poor light conditions even she hadn’t been able to tell the difference between this kid and a real vampire.
Of course, she should have been able to. Real vampires were unnatural creatures. If you got near them you felt how cold their bodies were. The hair on the backs of your arms stood up. They had a distinctive, bestial smell. There was no way for the wannabe to fake that, and if she had kept her wits about her she would have noticed. She had been so desperate to find Arkeley, to finish her job, that she had made a bad mistake. What if she had killed him? What if she had pumped three shots into his heart, just on principle?
The wannabe had killed two people and then discharged a firearm toward a police officer conducting a criminal investigation. Had she killed him, that would have been enough to keep her out of jail. It was close to the textbook definition of permissible use of force, but even if the state police’s internal investigation cleared her, it couldn’t shield her from a civil action if the kid’s family decided she’d acted excessively.
The special subjects unit was brand new. It couldn’t survive lawsuits—or dumb mistakes like this—and without the SSU the people of Pennsylvania would be at risk. People everywhere would be at risk. She couldn’t afford to screw up that way.
Glauer brought his car around, a marked patrol unit with the SSU acronym painted on its hood. It was their only official car. Caxton helped shove the wannabe into the back, pushing his head down so he didn’t smack it on the doorjamb. He could sit there until the ambulance arrived.
She’d already got a field dressing on his wounded shoulder. A bad bruise had lifted on his lower lip where she’d pistol-whipped him, but she couldn’t do much for that. “Take these,” she told Glauer. She handed him the wannabe’s shotgun and the bloody hunting knife she’d taken off his belt. She was willing to guess he’d used the knife on the two bodies in the lobby. It had a nasty serrated edge he could have used to saw off the janitor’s arm. She shook her head in disgust and stared down at her hands. They were covered in blood and white greasepaint. She didn’t want to wipe them on her pants—her best pair of work pants—so she grabbed up handfuls of snow off the ground and scrubbed them together.
“What’s your name?” Glauer asked. He was squatting next to the subject, talking through the open door of the cruiser. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Is there anybody you want us to call?”
Caxton stared at her officer as if he was crazy. Then she realized that he was just trying to calm the subject down. One reason Caxton needed Glauer on her team was for just this—for talking to people who were scared and in pain. Caxton had never been much of a people person herself.
“Rexroth,” the wannabe said.
“You have a first name? Or is that it?” Glauer asked.
Caxton leaned against the side of the cruiser and closed her eyes. It would be a long wait until the ambulance arrived, and even then she wouldn’t be done with this guy. What a waste of time.
“Make sure he’s aware of his rights,” she said, just by reflex.
Glauer stayed focused on the subject, though. “What were you hoping would happen tonight?”
Rexroth—almost certainly an alias, she decided—started crying. He couldn’t wipe the tears and snot off his face with his hands cuffed behind him, so they gathered in oily beads on his painted face. “I was supposed to die. She was supposed to kill me.”
Caxton’s body stiffened. The guy had wanted to commit suicide—suicide by cop, they called it in the papers. He’d wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, and maybe take the famous vampire hunter Laura Caxton with him. Maybe he thought that would be enough to turn him into a real vampire. You had to commit suicide to join that club, one way or another. Of course, you also had to be exposed to the curse—which meant a face-to-face meeting with an actual vampire.
The closest this kid had probably ever got to a real vampire was seeing some bad movie on a Sunday afternoon. She stared into the darkness, willing the ambulance to hurry up. The sooner it could arrive the sooner she could get back home, and back into bed. She doubted she would sleep at all, but at least she could lie down and close her eyes and pretend.
Something in her chest loosened up and she sagged against the side of the car. Suddenly she cared very little about this idiot Rexroth, or anything else keeping her away from her bed. How long had it been since she’d had a true night’s sleep? Even a fitful six hours she could call her own? She couldn’t even remember. There was too much in her head these days to let her ever truly relax.
“Trooper?” Glauer asked.
Her eyes snapped open. How long had they been closed? She didn’t know.
“What do you want me to do?” the police officer asked.
“His rights,” she told Glauer. “Read him his rights now. Then take him to the hospital. When they discharge him, take him to a holding cell somewhere. Process him and book him with the two homicides. With—Christ, whatever. With endangering a police officer. With whatever else you can think of.”
>
“A holding cell where?” he asked.
It was actually a good question. The SSU didn’t have any dedicated lockup facilities. She hadn’t considered they might ever need a cell of their own. “The local jail is fine. Coordinate with the locals—this can be their case, it’s outside our brief.”
He nodded, but he didn’t look satisfied.
“What?” she demanded.
“Don’t you want to interrogate him yourself?” he asked.
“Not right now.” She looked for her car, found it where she’d parked it when she arrived. Back when she thought she might be driving to her final showdown with Arkeley. What a joke. She started walking away.
“Hey,” he called, “aren’t you going to stick around?”
“No,” she said. “In four hours I need to get up and get dressed again. I’ve got a funeral to go to.”
4.
The sun had turned the kitchen windows a shade of pale blue by the time she’d finished her breakfast and started getting dressed. Out back it touched the dark shape of the empty outbuildings behind the house. It lit up one wall of the shed where Deanna’s artwork used to hang, before she’d taken it down and folded it carefully and put it in a trunk in the crawl space, with the rest of Deanna’s things she hadn’t had the heart to throw out. It lit up the kennels, too—also empty. The last three dogs she’d boarded there, a trio of rescue greyhounds, had all moved on to better homes. She hadn’t had a chance to pick up any more dogs since, though there were plenty who needed her help.
The house felt cold and dark, even as the sun grew stronger. Laura knotted her tie on top of her white dress shirt and then pulled on her one pair of dress pants. She looked around for her black blazer and realized she’d left it in the bedroom closet.
She was about to go and get it when Clara came out of the bedroom already dressed in a modest black dress. Her silky black hair, cut just below the ears, was clean and shiny. Laura had worked hard at being quiet so she wouldn’t wake Clara up, but she must have been getting ready the whole time.
“Here,” Clara said, handing her the blazer. “We need to get moving. It’s at least an hour-and-a-half drive. Longer if we’re picking up the Polders.”
Laura took a deep breath. “I said you didn’t have to come. You always hated him.”
Clara smiled warmly. Far more warmly than Laura deserved. “I did, and still do. But funerals are one of the few times I actually get to spend time with you, these days.”
Laura stepped closer to take the blazer, then pulled Clara into a deep hug. She didn’t know what to say. That she would try to change that, to spend more nights at home? She couldn’t make that promise.
Clara was the one spark of light left to her. The only thing that felt good. She was losing her, and she knew it.
“Okay. Do you want anything to eat?”
“I’m fine for now,” Clara told her. “Do you want me to drive?”
Laura did.
The two of them had gone to a lot of funerals together in the previous two months. Gettysburg had been a success from one point of view—from the point of view of the local tourism board. The civilian population of the town had survived, because Caxton had them evacuated the day before the fighting began. From a law enforcement perspective it had been a fiasco. Local cops, SWAT officers from Harrisburg, even kids from the National Guard, had died by the dozens. They had laid down their lives to keep the vampires from getting out into the general population. More than one family had sent Caxton hate mail after that, but she had made a point of going to every funeral she could.
This one was a little different. No, it was a lot different.
They didn’t talk much on the way to Centre County. Laura found herself nodding off and then jerking back to wakefulness every time she got near to real sleep. It was a familiar feeling, if not a welcome one. Before they reached State College Clara pulled off of the highway and took them deep into a zone of high ridges and dead fields, brown and golden and slathered with snow. They passed weathered farmhouses and barns that looked like they’d been hit by bunker-busting bombs, some of them slumped over on their sides. They passed a herd of unhappy-looking cows, and then Clara turned off once again, onto a dirt path that was easy to miss if you didn’t know where to find it.
They pulled up in front of a farmhouse that looked in better shape than most, with a well-kept barn and a silo hung with hex signs. The Polders were waiting outside for them. Urie Polder, still wearing his Caterpillar baseball cap, had put a black parka over his stained white T-shirt. It hid most of his wooden arm, but not the three twiglike fingers that stuck out the end of the sleeve. He used them to scratch at his freshly shaven cheek and Laura saw them move, as prehensile as human fingers. That weird hand was actually stronger and more deft than his normal one. Vesta Polder was dressed in the same dress she always wore, a long-skirted black sheath that buttoned all the way up her neck and down her wrists. Her wild blond hair was pinned back, though, and she wore a black veil that completely obscured her face.
They were the strangest people Laura had ever met, but they had also proved themselves good friends.
When the car stopped, Urie gestured back at the house with his wooden hand and the door opened. A little girl, maybe twelve years old, came racing out. She wore a smaller version of Vesta’s dress but her blond hair was covered by a white lace bonnet. Her eyes were very wide.
Laura was a little shocked. She’d known for some time the Polders had a daughter, but she’d never actually been introduced to her. As the couple settled into the backseat of the car, the girl perching on her mother’s lap, Urie cleared his throat noisily and then said, “This here’s Patience, she’s a good girl, ahum.”
“It’s very nice to meet you, Patience,” Clara said, leaning over the back of the driver’s seat. “I’m Clara and this is Laura.”
“Yes’m, I know ye both,” the girl said. “The cards showed ye. You’re the lover, and she’s the killer.”
Laura’s lip curled back in a sneer. It wasn’t how she’d expected this meeting to go. She looked at Vesta, but the older woman didn’t correct or even tsk her daughter.
“I suppose that’s accurate,” Clara said, refusing to be taken aback. She looked at Urie. “Maybe this isn’t my place, but I’m not sure this is going to be appropriate for a little girl. Couldn’t you get a sitter?”
Urie Polder grinned broadly. “Little Patience ain’t been under the care of no one else, not since she was born. We don’t look to break that streak now.”
“Oh,” Clara replied. Without another word she put the car in gear and got them back in the road.
The funeral was to take place in a cemetery outside of Bellefonte—not much farther away. They passed the main campus of Penn State, then rolled into the quaint little Victorian town. The road took them along the shore of a frozen pond ringed with gazebos and houses decorated with gingerbread-like carvings. Laura always thought the town looked like the kind of place where a parade might spontaneously break out, with a full brass section and prom queens in the backseats of open cars. It was a glimpse of Pennsylvania the way it had been decades earlier, back before the coal mines all dried up and the steel mills closed down, unable to compete with foreign production. The Pennsylvania her grandparents had grown up in.
Arkeley had once had a house in Bellefonte. It had been his base of operations for nearly twenty years. Now he was going to be memorialized in the same town.
The cemetery, just outside town, was a vast expanse of rolling yellow hills, the dead grass sparkling with frost even so late in the morning. Most of the snow had melted or been removed from the plots. Clara had downloaded driving instructions from the cemetery’s website, and she steered them confidently through endless lanes lined with obelisks and family crypts. Smaller, more modest gravestones stuck up in neat rows. She drove them deeper into a less populated region. A freshly washed pickup truck with an extended cab stood parked in the road and Clara took her spot behind it. Then the
five of them clambered out and walked over the crunching grass to where three other people already waited for them. An older man, dressed in an outfit very similar to Urie Polder’s, but more threadworn around the knees of his jeans—and two young people, the age of college students. Arkeley’s children.
5.
“I still think this is a lousy idea. Is this supposed to give comfort to the family, or to mock them?” Laura asked Vesta Polder.
It was Urie who answered, though. “This is for you, ahum.”
“What?”
“So’s you can get used to the idea he ain’t human anymore. So you won’t think, when you meet him again, that he’s the same man.”
Laura shook her head in bewilderment. She didn’t have the mental energy left to work that one out for herself. She would have asked more questions, but suddenly they were within earshot of the trio at the headstone.
She took off her sunglasses, as calmly as she could, and studied the marker. It was a simple stone with no complicated inscription:
JAMESON ARKELEY
MAY 12 1941–OCTOBER 3 2004
She was pleased, she thought, to see it didn’t read “Rest in Peace” or give some description of how he had lived or died or been reborn. Just the name and dates had some kind of dignity, and as desperate as she was to find Arkeley and put him down, she couldn’t begrudge him that. The stone’s cold shape, its solid physicality, calmed her a little. Enough that she could look up and study the people who were patiently watching her. The oldest of the three—Arkeley’s brother, Angus—had the same wrinkled face she knew so well, though there was a merriness behind his eyes that Arkeley had never possessed. He shook her hand and mumbled a pleasantry she didn’t catch. The two children were dressed more conservatively than their uncle, but their faces shared a certain family resemblance to the man memorialized at their feet.
Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale Page 2