Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “Of course you wouldn’t. Yet I find I don’t have any compelling interest in speaking with you further. I only called today out of a sense of courtesy.”

  “Your husband is killing people,” Caxton said, trying not to shout.

  “Allow me to correct you on that misapprehension. I doubt very much that you are initiated into the secret doctrine of theosophy, so I will attempt to explain what I mean. The murderous creature you are attempting to apprehend is not my husband. When he took his own life, my husband ceased to exist in this plane. His soul was lost. As a result he’s certain to regress in his path and be reincarnated as an insect or, if he is lucky, some variety of plant. It’s a shame, as I was hoping the two of us could evolve together, but that’s impossible now. His body may continue to move and to operate after a manner, but it is not Jameson, nor any part of the true being once called Jameson. Do you understand this?”

  Caxton slapped the steering wheel. “No!”

  “I was afraid you would not. In time perhaps you will learn to look within. Now I’m afraid I must go. As we will not be talking again, I wish to thank you.”

  “Thank me? For what?”

  “For making the last year of Jameson’s life more comfortable. The physical pleasure you gave him must have been some kind of solace. I’m sure you received something from your couplings as well, of course. He was an experienced and passionate lover, as I remember.”

  Caxton put a hand over her mouth to stifle an abrupt laugh. “You think I was sleeping with him? Oh, come on.”

  “It’s an age-old story, Officer. When you put a man and a woman together in a perilous situation they will be drawn together, as irresistibly as magnets. There’s really no need to pretend that it was otherwise, dear. Honestly, I forgive you both. Good day.”

  The phone rattled, an old-fashioned sound as if an antique handset were being placed on its receiver.

  “Magnets! Yeah, maybe, except this magnet is a fucking lesbian,” Caxton howled, as if Astarte could still hear her. She slammed the steering wheel with the palm of her hand again and then, when she was finished fuming, got the car back on the road.

  Astarte wouldn’t talk to her. Wouldn’t help her. Well, she thought, at least she and Clara would have something to laugh about over lunch. She couldn’t remember the last time the two of them had shared a real laugh.

  She hurried back to Harrisburg, to the PSP headquarters, and parked in the lot behind the building. A couple of troopers were having lunch at a picnic table by the rear door—men with close-shaved heads wearing fleece-collared standard-issue jackets, their Smokey Bear hats sitting next to them on the benches. They were eating big hoagies full of ham and provolone cheese, and Caxton’s mouth started watering when she saw them. She hadn’t eaten anything all day, and though her morning nap had thrown off her sense of time it couldn’t convince her stomach she wasn’t hungry.

  “Trooper,” one of the men said when they caught sight of her. He stood up, though he didn’t salute. “We heard about last night, and we just wanted to—”

  “I’m okay, thanks,” Caxton said, barely slowing down. She pushed open the swinging doors and went inside, into a wave of furnace-heated air. She hadn’t realized how cold it was outside until she came in. Her hands suddenly felt like icy, bony claws, so she rubbed them together until they started to hurt.

  Down in the basement she saw Glauer organizing the library in the briefing room—he was probably desperate for something to do. She waved at him, then headed into her own office at the end of the hall. It was a cramped little space, its cinder-block walls painted glaring white, but the paint had chipped, revealing a sickly beige underneath. They had the same color and texture as rice crackers. Heavily insulated pipes ran across the ceiling and down one wall. Ever since autumn had turned to winter sometimes they dripped on her desk and even, alarmingly, on the monitor of her computer. The only thing on the walls was the certificate she’d received when she graduated from the academy, making her an official state trooper. Maybe the Feds would give her one for her ascension to special deputy, she thought.

  She had just sat down at her desk and started paging through her email when a knock came on the door. She stared at the screen, at a very long email from the U.S. Marshals Service describing what kind of health insurance she was now eligible for, and called out, “Come in, Glauer.”

  The hands that grasped her shoulders from behind were female, though, with small, thin fingers. They dug into the muscles there, gouging away at the tight knots of her neck.

  Caxton let her head fall forward and tried to enjoy the massage. “You’re fantastic,” she said. “Nothing has ever felt this good.”

  Clara laughed, then grabbed her chin and lifted her head for a deep, soulful kiss. “Invite me to lunch more often and maybe you’ll feel something even better.” The smaller woman’s face clouded then. “If you called me every day at a specific time, just to let me know you were alright—”

  “—then you would just worry more than you do now if I was late making the call,” Laura replied, pulling her partner down onto her lap. She frowned. “It was pretty bad. I’m sure you heard all the gory details. But I know what I’m doing.”

  “What’s this?” Clara asked.

  Laura looked down and saw her running one thumb over the badge on her lapel.

  “I’m a special deputy now,” she said. “I’m working for the Marshals Service. Apparently that makes me an honorary cowgirl.”

  “A special deputy. Just like he was.”

  Laura shook her head. “It’s just a formality, really. It gives me federal jurisdiction and apparently I can spend taxpayer money on the investigation. It’s a tool. Something to help me do this job.”

  “First he put you in danger. He made you his vampire bait. Then he made you a badass, a real vampire killer. Now you’re turning into him for real. Maybe you’ll end up just like he did. Willing to do anything to keep fighting. Willing to do horrible things.”

  “No, no, no,” Laura said, pulling Clara into a tight hug, burying her face in her girlfriend’s neck. “It’s not like that.” But it was, of course. She had to become more like Jameson every day. She had to—the alternative was getting killed in some stupid way or, worse, far worse, letting the vampires get away.

  “Let’s just go to lunch. It’s already two o’clock.” Clara pulled away and stood up. She leaned against the door of the office, not even looking at Laura. “Is there someplace you want to go to? What about that Greek place?”

  Laura bit her lower lip. She got the message that Clara was sending—the conversation was over. They would talk about nothing but gossip and trivia at lunch and not address any of their real problems. She could play that game, too. “That place is so expensive, though.”

  “Considering how often you take me to lunch, we can afford it.”

  Laura stood up and started putting her more lethal gear away in a cupboard by her desk—her handgun, her pepper spray, her collapsible ASP baton. All she needed for lunch was her wallet and her cell phone. “Actually,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about that. About a way we could have lunch together almost every day.”

  She followed Clara out into the hallway. Clara turned to look at her with mistrusting eyes but half a smile. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Laura began, but just then Glauer came running up the hall. “You need to see these,” he insisted, and shoved a heavy plastic bag into her arms, so forcefully that he nearly shoved her backwards. She looked down at the bag and saw it contained three spiral-bound notebooks, the top one stained with a bloom of dried blood.

  16.

  “Jesus, Glauer. I thought I told you to drop this.” Caxton had humored him enough to take the bag into the briefing room and spread its contents over some of the desks. One of the notebooks literally came apart in her hands and turned into a pile of random sheets of paper. The bloodstained one proved hard to open—the blood had soaked right through the pages, and each time she turned to a new le
af the notebook would creak and rip and spill shiny maroon powder down her pantleg. She quickly put that notebook down and took up the one that was in the best shape. Rexroth—or Carboy, that was his real name—had decorated its cover with a crude picture showing a jack-o’-lantern with vicious fangs, much like a vampire’s. “I guess this was the Halloween issue,” Caxton said, flipping open the cover.

  The next page contained only six words, but they were inscribed in giant jagged letters, outlined and embellished liberally. They’d been written in ballpoint pen, and Carboy had pressed down so hard that he’d torn the paper in places. The message was simple enough:

  Caxton grunted. She didn’t know how to react to that. So she turned to the next page. This proved to be some kind of journal entry, written in a cramped, sloping hand she could barely make out. The corners of the page were decorated with crude line drawings of vampires. One of them had baby-sized legs sticking out of its mouth. She studied the text and quickly found her name, repeated several times, usually in the middle of an elaborate threat. “Laura Caxton is going to, to,” she read. “What’s this? Oh, I’m going to pay. I’m also, apparently, going to bleed—it’s repeated three times—and then he’s going to dance in my blood wearing his favorite pair of boots. He’s going to chop me into tiny bits, and when the kids come by on Halloween he’s going to give pieces of me away as treats. Apparently I deserve this because of what I did to Kevin Scapegrace. Interesting.”

  “You remember that name?” Glauer asked. “Scapegrace?”

  “Yeah. Of course I do. Teenaged vampire.” She shrugged. “He went down as quick as the rest of them.” Her bravado couldn’t quite keep her from drawing her shoulders in closer to her body and wrapping her arms around her chest. Scapegrace had captured her and tortured her before he died. She didn’t like to think about it.

  “I think you should read the rest,” Glauer insisted. “I haven’t had a chance to go through it all myself, but—”

  “No,” she said.

  “What do you mean? This doesn’t worry you?” he asked, turning the page to show her a picture of a state trooper hanging from a noose, her Smokey Bear hat still perched on her head even though her face had turned blue and her tongue hung out of her mouth. “This doesn’t bother you?”

  “It would bother me a lot more if Carboy wasn’t already in custody,” she admitted. “But he is. So—so what? According to this I was supposed to die by Halloween, and that was over a month ago. He was late even by his own schedule.” She grabbed the cop’s arm. “Listen. I appreciate your concern. But Dylan Carboy was just a lonely kid with nothing better to do than scribble threats in a journal and fantasize about being a vampire. He probably got my name out of the newspaper and just fixated on it. It’s truly sad that nobody stopped him before he got as far as he did, but now he’s going to jail, probably for the rest of his life, and I’m safe.” She dropped the notebook on one of the desks. “Now put this all back together and take it back to Mechanicsburg.”

  Glauer shook his head. “I think that would be a mistake. There’s something here. I can feel it. Just let me take one more look,” he pleaded.

  Caxton rolled her eyes. “Fine. But you don’t have a lot of time to waste here. After last night things are going to get very busy, very fast. In fact, you’d better come to lunch with us—we have a lot to talk about.”

  Clara had been waiting outside the briefing room the whole time. She looked slightly confused when she heard that Glauer was going to join them, but she said she didn’t mind at all. She and the giant cop had always gotten along, though they rarely saw each other.

  Caxton and Glauer took her Mazda—Clara had come in her own car—and drove out to the Greek place, which was only a few minutes away. Over dolmades and feta she told the two of them about Fetlock and her battlefield promotion.

  “They can just do that? Wave a wand and, poof, you’re a Fed?” Glauer asked. “I thought you had to take all kinds of tests and then go through their academy and everything.” Back when Caxton had formed the SSU she had tried to get Glauer made into an instant state trooper and been told the process was much more complicated. Technically he was still on the payroll of the Gettysburg Borough Police Department, though the PSP reimbursed Gettysburg for his salary and he hadn’t checked in with his chief in weeks.

  “Apparently the Marshals do it differently. It’s just like a sheriff riding into town and deputizing the local gunslingers to take down the black hats. It’s just as temporary, too. For now, though, it makes me the national go-to person for all vampire cases, and it gives me some police powers I never thought I’d have.”

  “Okay,” Glauer said, “but what does it mean for us?”

  “Well, first things first. We’re both getting a big raise.” The three of them smiled at that. “It also means I can finally, officially hire you on.” She reached across the table and shook his hand. “Welcome aboard. Fetlock tells me I can hire anyone I want, including somebody to do all our paperwork.”

  “That’ll be a relief,” Glauer laughed. He picked up his large Diet Coke and sipped thirstily at it. “You’re probably going to want to bring in some other people, too, right? I can recommend some guys we should have with us. Johnson, from Erie—he used to be a linebacker in high school, he’s one tough son of a gun.” Glauer shifted his own massive bulk around on the chair—he barely fit in it. “Then there’s Eddie Davis, from Troop K. I’ve never seen anybody who could drive like that guy, he could be your automobile specialist, and—”

  “Actually,” Caxton said, “I kind of like having most of our people just be on call. I want to build a core team of just a few people. I was thinking three of us. You, me, and her,” she said, grabbing Clara’s wrist.

  Clara had been tearing her paper napkin into a pile of tiny pieces. “Bullshit,” she said.

  Caxton frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Clara looked to Glauer for support. “You’re spouting bullshit. What do you mean, me? I’m not part of your team.”

  “I’d like you to be, though,” Caxton said.

  “To do what? Every time I see a vampire I can scream, so you know it’s nearby? Or maybe I can startle them with the flashbulb of my camera. That’s what I do, Laura. I take pictures of crime scenes and dead bodies and gross stuff. I’m very good at it, but I don’t think you need a photographer in your core team.”

  “You could be my forensics guy. Like on CSI: Miami,” Caxton said. “You could do all my hair and fiber and DNA research.” The idea had come to her when Fetlock had mentioned his own forensics team.

  Clara just laughed. “Huh? You do realize those guys go to school for that. They’re scientists. They train for years and years and read scientific journals and go to conferences to talk to other eggheads about just how many legs a certain species of cockroach has. I went to Slippery Rock for art photography, and I don’t even use anything I learned.”

  Caxton shook her head. “I don’t expect you to just pick it all up by reading a couple of websites about forensics. But you can coordinate with the people the Marshals Service uses. You can manage them—you know a lot more about vampires than they do, by now, so you can tell them what to look for, or how to interpret what they find.”

  “There are so many people better qualified than me,” Clara protested. “Why on earth would you pick me for this?”

  “You said we weren’t spending enough time together,” Caxton admitted. “You said I spent all my time at work and never got to see you at home. Well, this way we’d both be at work all the time. We could see each other a lot.”

  Clara shook her head in disbelief.

  “Well?” Caxton asked. “Are you going to give me an answer?”

  “No!” Clara said. “At least—not right away.”

  17.

  They polished off a good-sized moussaka without saying much more. Clara excused herself before the baklava arrived, saying she had to get back to work. “That goes for us, too,” Caxton told Glauer. “Come on. We can
take dessert to go.”

  The two of them headed back to HQ together, Caxton enumerating the things they had to get done as she drove. “We have to try to make some kind of ID on the half-dead from the motel. There’s not a lot to work with, but maybe we can get some idea of what he looked like and run it against the missing persons list. Who knows, maybe we’ll turn up a match. Then there’s the field out behind the motel—I had it searched once, but maybe we missed something in the dark. Get some people over there to have a look around. When you get a chance we need to contact the Feds and see if they have a file on Angus Arkeley—he said he had some trouble with the law a while back. He wasn’t clear on whether he’d actually been processed or convicted, but there might be something there. Oh, and I put a guard on his body, but they need to be relieved, so find somebody who can go over to the morgue and take care of that. I’m going to try to get in touch with his family and get permission to have him cremated as soon as he’s been autopsied.” It was standard practice to cremate the remains of vampire victims. Otherwise the vampire could call them up as half-deads whenever he chose.

  By the time they got back to the HQ building it was already four o’clock. The sun was starting to set and pink clouds streaked the sky. Stepping out of her car, Caxton studied the horizon as if there were some clue there. Night was falling, which meant Jameson Arkeley would be active again. He had killed at least twice so far. Would he kill again tonight? she wondered.

  All vampires started as people with individual personalities, with moral codes all their own. Eventually they ended up all the same. How long had Jameson lasted before he killed his first victim? Probably longer than most. He had fought it, she was sure, with every fiber of his being. He must have spent night after night curled around himself in his lair, desperate to go outside, to hunt, but knowing what it would make him.