Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “I spared your life once, at the motel. Maybe that makes us even.”

  She shook her head from side to side. “And what about at your wife’s house? You left seven half-deads to kill me.”

  “I knew you could handle those. They were only there to cover my escape. Now. Shh,” he whispered, and drew a finger down her cheek. He found her pulse point and tapped her skin in time with her heartbeat. His fingernail, she knew, was sharper than a wolf’s claw. He could cut her open right there and let the blood come rushing out. If he even scratched her, if even a drop of her blood was spilled, then nothing would hold him back. He would smell her blood fresh and warm on her skin and it would drive him into a frenzy. No moral compunction he’d ever had would be able to stop him then.

  He knew it, too. He lifted his finger away from her throat and then brought the nail down to touch her skin. It felt cold and hard. He started to press, gently at first, but she knew in a moment he would cut right into her.

  “Daddy,” Raleigh said then. Caxton’s eyes were still shut. She couldn’t see the girl. “Daddy, please, no. I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t hurt her.”

  She wanted to scream No, wanted to tell Raleigh to run, to get away. She couldn’t seem to get the words out of her throat.

  “Please, Daddy.”

  Jameson’s finger lifted away from her neck. The mangled palm of his left hand still held her wrist against the floor. She could feel his body moving above her, moving away from her, but still he held her fast.

  “Raleigh, I want to give you something,” he said. “Something wonderful. I was never a very good father.”

  “No, Daddy, don’t say that.”

  Caxton could feel his body shaking. “I was lousy. But I can make it up to you now. Come here. Come closer.”

  “No,” Caxton managed to shriek, at the same time as she heard something hard and metallic smash into Jameson’s skull. Her eyes shot open and she saw Violet standing over them both, a massive wrought-iron candelabra in her hands. One of the candles remained in its socket, guttering wildly.

  Jameson leapt up off of Caxton and backward, away from the girl’s follow-up attack. He laughed as she swept the candelabra across his face like a rake, laughed again as she swung it over her head and down into his ear.

  “Raleigh,” Caxton called, rolling over onto her stomach, “get the fuck out of here right now.”

  Jameson’s daughter nodded and disappeared through the doorway again. Caxton got her feet underneath her and half-crawled, half-ran toward where she thought her handgun had landed when Jameson threw it. In the dark hall she couldn’t see it. She had to find it. She had only seconds, she knew, before Jameson stopped laughing at Violet’s attacks and decided to do something about them.

  Where was the pistol? Where? She saw a shadow ahead of her on the floor and dove forward, her hands stretched out to grab it. Cool metal met her fingertips and she grabbed it up, ran her thumb across the safety, making sure it wasn’t on. She rolled over on her back and sat up, sighting on where she expected Jameson to be.

  She was off by yards. The gun barrel pointed at nothing but darkness. She spat out a profanity and swept the gun left—just in time to see Jameson lift Violet off her feet and into the air. His mouth sank into her chest and red blood rushed down her baggy shirt. Her candelabra lay on the floor beneath her, forgotten.

  “No,” Caxton moaned, and fired into Jameson’s back. The vampire cringed and then spun around, and she thought he might come at her again, might grab her again, and this time she knew he would kill her. Instead he tossed Violet’s body away like a doll and raced for the front door and out into the night.

  She followed as fast as she could, her body twitching with adrenaline. Outside the stars burned in a deep blue sky and lit up the snow with an unearthly pale radiance. She couldn’t see Jameson at first, and she worried he might have tricked her, that maybe he had just run out the door and stopped, put his back up against the ivy-covered wall to wait for her to run past him. That he would reach out of the dark and grab her and kill her easily.

  Then she saw him running ahead of her, his dark clothes a pillar of black against the snow, his legs and arms pumping. She dashed forward, her weapon raised, knowing it was pointless to shoot while they were both running. Worried it was pointless to shoot at all. How many times had she hit him? She’d barely slowed him down.

  He was running for the front gate, the iron gate with the cross on top. She could never catch him, of course—he was far too fast, his new body capable of converting stolen blood into incredible speed. On foot she was no match for him, and he must have known that.

  Luckily, she’d had time to prepare.

  She grabbed up her cell phone out of her pocket. Running as fast as she was, she couldn’t check the screen to see if she had any bars or not. She flipped it open anyway and hit the send key. Hours earlier she’d typed in the appropriate number and now the phone dialed automatically.

  Pressing it against her ear, she heard a single thready ring, the atmosphere tearing at her signal with invisible fingers. A second ring and then someone picked up on the other end.

  “Now,” she said, and light blasted through the gateway, dozens of headlights on high beam coming on all at once. If everything had gone according to plan there would be as many as ten patrol cruisers sitting out there, all of them loaded with local cops. After the disaster at Bellefonte she’d been leery of actually bringing them into the convent, but they could serve her just fine out there beyond the gate.

  The light hit Jameson like an artillery barrage. He threw his arms up across his face and dropped to his knees in the snow, hurt far worse by car headlights than by all the bullets she’d wasted on him. He was a nocturnal creature and his eyes were meant for night vision. They couldn’t handle all that light.

  Slowly he rose to his feet again, turning away from the gate, his face clutched in his hands.

  “There’s no escape that way,” Caxton shouted. “And I have guys waiting at the creek if you try to go that way.” She lined up a shot on his back. “I’m willing to give you a chance to surrender.”

  Jameson rose to his full height, still rubbing at his eyes with his hands. Behind him she could see cops milling about, poking rifle barrels through the gate, lining up shots. She didn’t know if they would have any more luck than she had, but there was one way to find out.

  He started to laugh then. Maybe it was the laughter of a man who knows there’s no way out, but she didn’t think so. She lifted the phone to her lips and said, “Fire at will.”

  31.

  The rifles cracked and spat fire and filled the air with whizzing bullets, but Jameson was already on the move. He leapt out of the light and landed on all fours like a cat on the shadowy snow, then swiveled around and jumped again as the rifles tracked him. Caxton ran out of the field of fire, terrified that she might be hit by a stray shot from one of the police guns.

  She could still hear the vampire laughing, a cold chuckle that rattled around inside her head like a dried pea in a cup. She jammed her fingers in her ears, which helped with the noise from the rifles but didn’t quiet the laughter at all.

  Moving faster than she’d ever seen a vampire move before, Jameson crouched low and dashed behind a statue of the Virgin Mary. A rifle shot took off part of her wimple in a puff of obliterated masonry, but already Jameson was moving on. A row of weathered headstones was his next cover, and she could just see his dark clothes in reverse silhouette against the faintly glowing snow as he pressed his back against one of the stones. For a moment he didn’t move at all, or no—his good hand was moving, working at his belt. Had he brought some weapon, a firearm, with which to fight back? She’d never seen a real vampire with a gun before. They didn’t need them. Maybe that was just hubris on their part, however. Maybe Jameson had decided to buck the trend.

  It wasn’t a gun he pulled out, though, as she watched. It was the belt of his pants. He whirled it around for a moment, then flung it
into the air. The rifles tracked it and one or two of the cops took a shot—but already Jameson was moving in the other direction.

  “Keep it together,” she shouted into her phone. “Don’t get distracted.”

  It was hard for her to follow her own advice, however. Ducking behind a massive boulder, Jameson nearly got away from her as he threw one of his shoes to the left and the other to the right. She tried to keep her weapon pointed at him, but the double feint dragged her attention away for a split second. In that time Jameson managed to duckwalk all the way to a massive fountain in the middle of the lawn.

  She could just make out the curve of his back behind the fountain. His body writhed like a snake and she wondered if maybe he’d been hit. That was probably too much to hope for, and anyway if he’d been hit anywhere but directly in the heart it would only take him seconds to regenerate. With Violet’s blood flowing through his veins he would be nearly impervious to harm.

  “Come on,” she said, urging him to move again, to expose himself for just a second. Instead he seemed to relax, his body sagging to the snow. “Come on. You can’t stay there forever.”

  He didn’t move at all. The rifles had fallen silent, as no target presented itself. She thought about telling the cops to move in, but she knew that would just put them at risk. Assaulting the fountain was up to her.

  “Hold your fire,” she said into her phone. Then she shoved it in her pocket, the call still connected in case she needed to issue another order. Keeping low, trying not to expose herself too much, Caxton moved step by step closer to the fountain.

  Jameson—what she could see of him—didn’t stir.

  He could be lying in wait for her. He could be just waiting for her to get close enough, just inside a crucial range where he could jump out and attack her. She kept her weapon up and held on to it with both hands. Another step closer and she could see his shirt, the sleeves stretched out as if he were hugging the round lip of the fountain. When he did launch himself at her she would have only a fraction of a second to respond. Another step, and she could see his pants, his knees bent like coiled springs. Without his shoes his feet would be nearly invisible against the snow, she thought. His skin was as white as the ground cover, and—

  His feet weren’t there. They weren’t just difficult to see. They were missing, as if they’d been cut off just at the level of his pant cuffs. She raised her weapon a fraction of an inch and saw that his hands were missing as well. What the hell, she had time to think, before she understood exactly what had happened.

  It was just his clothes, laid out to look as if he was still in them. A decoy.

  She spun around, grabbing her phone out of her pocket even as she searched the snow. “He’s moving,” she shouted. “He’s naked and moving! There, nine o’clock, somebody shoot him!”

  She could barely see him, wriggling along the ground, already twenty yards away. Completely naked, and therefore almost perfectly camouflaged. She ran after him, no longer caring if she was running right into a free-fire zone, and discharged her weapon every time she thought she had a clear shot.

  It was no use. Even down on all fours, scuttling like a crab, he was far faster than she was running at her top speed. In seconds he was up against the convent wall, a snowman glowing by starlight. Then he was up, his powerful legs carrying him over the wall in one spastic hop.

  “No,” she howled, racing back toward the gate. There was no way she could get over that wall herself, not without wasting a lot of time. At the gate a line of cops stared at her with shock and disbelief, but she didn’t have time to explain. Dashing around the side of the wall, she headed down a narrow decline, dodging tree trunks. She came around the corner of the wall and pushed on, intent on reaching the place where he had come over the top. In the dark, with pine needles overhead soaking up all the starlight, she could barely see anything. A tree root snagged at her foot and she bounced sideways, intent on not twisting her ankle, not now, not when he was so close. She struck a tree trunk with her hand, scraping half the skin off her palm, and kept running. She could not let him get away—not again.

  And yet that was exactly what happened. A rock shifted under her foot and she went sprawling, her hands down to collide with a frozen carpet of brown pine needles. She got slowly, painfully to her feet, knowing he’d already evaded her.

  She found the wall, and pushed her back up against it. Closed her eyes, tried to listen for any sound of running feet. There was nothing. She heard snow sliding down through branches fifty feet over her head. From far off, from inside the convent, she heard someone shouting. She heard the cops behind her climbing into their cars, slamming their doors. She heard the phone in her pocket chime. But no sound of a vampire anywhere.

  She let her pulse rate wind down. Caught her breath.

  Heading back toward the gate, she checked the phone and found she had a new text message:

  You almost had him tonight, didn’t you?

  Mayhaps the FOURTH time’s the charm.

  Malvern again. Malvern—who had some way of knowing that Caxton had failed. Caxton considered throwing the phone away into the trees, getting it as far away from herself as possible. It was government property, though, and she knew Fetlock would disapprove. So she just switched it off and shoved it deep into the bottom of her pocket.

  32.

  As usual, Jameson had left her quite a mess to clean up.

  Her first concern was for Raleigh. Sister Margot and several of the girls were waiting in the front hall and they demanded answers to their questions. She just pushed past them and into the hallway where she’d last seen Jameson’s daughter. The girl was there, curled up in a massive wooden chair. Her face was white with fear and her hands were clenched. She said she could not release them.

  “Just breathe,” Caxton said, kneeling in front of her. “Breathe.”

  The girl shook her head wildly. Caxton fought down the urge to slap her. She had work to do, but first she needed to make sure Raleigh was alright. She tried to imagine what Glauer would do in this situation. Glauer was much better at dealing with hysterical people. “Look,” she said. “It’s going to be alright. Yeah. Your father wants to turn you into a vampire, but—”

  “He wants what?” Raleigh gasped. She started breathing heavily. She was at risk of hyperventilating.

  “You’re safe right now. He won’t come back tonight. I promise. That’s his MO so far, one attack per night.”

  “Then what about tomorrow night?” the girl asked.

  “I’ll protect you then, too,” Caxton said.

  It wasn’t working. Raleigh’s fear level was ramping up and nothing Caxton said seemed to help. She headed back into the foyer, intending to ask Sister Margot for help. “Did Raleigh have any friends here she was especially close with?” Caxton asked. “I mean,” she said, after glancing at the corpse on the floor, “anyone other than Violet. Someone needs to sit with her. I don’t think she’s going to sleep tonight. Also, I need some Styrofoam cups, or whatever you have.” There were shell casings all over the floor, bullet holes in the walls, and worse, probably dozens of bullets out on the lawn. She needed to start identifying their locations. Normally she could have left that to someone else, but with the girls milling about in the foyer it was going to be hard to secure the scene. She scanned the floor with her eyes, finding her brasses, until she realized Sister Margot wasn’t answering her. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “You,” Sister Margot said, “have brought death into this sacred place. You will leave at once!”

  Caxton bit her lip.

  Sister Margot stamped her foot on the flagstones. “At once!”

  Caxton watched the young woman carefully. Sized her up. “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” she said.

  “This is a place of healing. Of peace! I’ve worked all my life to make it a quiet refuge and in one night you’ve ruined everything!”

  Not shrugging was the best Caxton could do to mollify the girl. “I�
�m going to need to bring in some forensics people, get this crime scene cleared, that’s going to take most of the night, then I’ll need to bring in some people to question everyone who was out in the halls before, so we can establish when the vampire came in and what route he used. Lastly I’m going to—”

  “Violet is lying there, dead!” Margot shrieked.

  “Yeah. I need to contact her parents immediately.”

  “I should hope you would. When they hear what happened I imagine—”

  “I’ll need to convince them into an emergency cremation. Whenever he wants, the vampire can bring her back from the dead. Meanwhile, I’ll get an armed guard in here to watch her for signs of reanimation.” It would be much easier, of course, to just cut off the dead girl’s head. Decapitated corpses didn’t come back as half-deads. But she supposed the family had a right to make that kind of decision. “Meanwhile, why don’t you get everyone back to bed, alright? My people will come and go and hopefully be done by the time you get up in the morning. Thanks, Margot.”

  The nun’s face was bright red. Caxton turned away to head back toward the gate, where she could make some phone calls.

  First things first—she called in an APB on a naked vampire, to be considered extremely dangerous. She called the local police chief and reported Violet’s homicide so he could get a file going. Not that it was going to require much in the way of investigation, but you had to keep the paperwork straight. Finally she called Fetlock—or rather, she started dialing his number. Before she had half the digits into the phone he called her instead.

  “Um, hello,” she said, answering his call.

  “Is she dead?” Fetlock asked.

  Caxton rubbed the bridge of her nose. “No. Raleigh—Raleigh’s alright. A little shaken up. How did you—?”

  “But Jameson got away. I just saw your APB.”

  Everybody knew about the mess she’d made. Malvern, Fetlock—when would Vesta Polder chime in? she wondered. “Yeah. Yeah, he got away. I’ll explain how later. Listen, Deputy Marshal, how do you know all this? It only just happened.”