Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  The boy’s lip had curled up so far that she could see his teeth.

  “What I did read was kind of funny. ‘Laura Caxton will die by Halloween.’ But look, it’s almost Christmas, and here we are. I’m running around perfectly healthy, and you’re stuck in here, where you can’t even write bad poetry to entertain yourself.”

  His mouth opened and she thought words might spill out. Instead he carefully brought his teeth together and closed his lips. They were white with the strain.

  “I think,” she said, “that I’m going to make photocopies of some of the funnier pages, and share them with all my cop friends.”

  “I’d like to see those,” the CO behind her said, playing along. Good man, she thought. “I think all of us here would enjoy that.”

  Caxton nodded eagerly. “Sure. I’ll get your address before I leave so I can send them along. There’s one part that’s just hilarious. He talks about Jameson Arkeley—you know, the real vampire? Dylan here claims he actually spoke with him. Please!”

  The boy lunged forward, his teeth clacking together on the lapel of her coat. The CO rushed forward, but Caxton waved him back. Carboy growled and his feet kicked at the floor, but she easily held him down, pinning him by pressing his shoulders against the floor. The boy was as weak as a starved dog, and she wondered if he’d been eating in the jail—if he wanted everyone to think he was a vampire, he couldn’t very well eat solid food.

  Down on the floor Carboy writhed and moaned. “He came to me. He came to me! He knew I was worthy. He knew I could do whatever he asked, that I wouldn’t fail! I proved it to him. I proved I could kill anyone, anyone I loved. Just like him.”

  “And Malvern?” Caxton asked. “Did she come to you, too?”

  “Only in dreams,” the boy said.

  “Where are they, Rexroth?” Caxton asked. She thought appealing to his adopted vampire persona might get a better result. “Tell me where they are.”

  Carboy shook himself violently, trying to get free. The CO coughed, his way of telling her she was on the verge of being abusive. She didn’t ease up.

  “Tell me. If you know so much. If they really came to you, then tell me. Or I’ll never believe you. Where is their lair?”

  “I am still worthy! He’ll come for me again! He will free me!” the boy shrieked.

  “You’re lying. You’re a worthless lying sack of shit,” Caxton barked. “He never came for you. Why would he? You’re nothing. You’re nobody.”

  “I will never betray him! He warned me you would come. He told me to say nothing. Nothing! I am still worthy, Jameson! I am still worthy!”

  The CO coughed again, much louder this time. Caxton forced herself to let the boy go. She jumped up and back so he couldn’t bite her again, considered kicking him in the ribs, but finally she just walked out the door of the cell and into the corridor. The CO came out a few moments later and asked her if there was anything else she needed, but she didn’t even look at him. She was already heading for her car—and for Syracuse.

  36.

  Caxton was well onto the highway—I-81, which would take her all the way to Syracuse—when she realized her face was wet with sweat. She wiped at it with one hand and steered with the other. That could have gone better, she thought.

  She had wanted to hurt the boy. She had wanted to grind him into the floor of his cell until he told her what she wanted to know. Only the presence of the CO had stopped her. And yet she doubted that he even knew anything useful—Jameson was too careful, too good at covering his tracks, to let some crazy kid in on his biggest secret, the location of his lair. For all she knew, despite any evidence suggesting the contrary, Carboy had never even met Jameson. Glauer had her half convinced otherwise, but there was still part of her that thought Carboy had made it all up, that his stories of talking to vampires had been some deluded fantasy. The boy was, without a doubt, mentally ill. Sane people didn’t murder their families, then dress up like vampires and go gunning for state troopers. But was he lying, or not?

  She had gone to see him because she couldn’t afford to leave any stone unturned. Because she was running out of ideas. That made her scared—and her fear had made her violent. She had to get control of her fear.

  She tried to focus on her driving. She let the lines on the road occupy her full attention so she didn’t have to think about anything else. Two hours into her drive it started to work—mostly because the driving became a lot harder the farther north she went. The road turned white with snow, first as broad fan-shaped sweeps of powder that rolled across the asphalt, then as a thin sheet of slush embossed with the chevron-shaped tire marks of a snow plow that had gone before her. North of Binghamton, just across the state line into New York, the snow turned into a thick carpet of pure white and she started losing traction. She had to stop and put chains on her tires at a rest stop. She worked quickly, both because she didn’t want to lose any more time and because it was cold out, colder than she’d expected, and her hands stung every time she touched the metal chains. She cursed herself, wishing she’d bothered to check the weather report. Her Mazda wasn’t suited to extreme-weather driving—if she’d thought this through better she could have requisitioned a patrol cruiser or even something with four-wheel drive.

  She had to keep her speed down when she got back on the highway. The chains gave her a better grip on the road, but it was still slick enough to be dangerous. Up past Cortland she caught up with the storm and suddenly the sky was as white as the road, full of big puffy flakes that splattered on her windshield. Headlights speared through the falling snow, dazzling her, while the brake lights of the cars ahead made pink roses bloom across her windshield. A flashing warning light like a strobe made her blink and nearly go off the side of the road. Up ahead a snow plow was thundering north, a fountain of wet snow blasting out from either side of its blade. It couldn’t be going more than thirty miles per hour, but she had to fight her instinct to pass. As bad as the snow was behind the plow, it would be impassable in front. She kept both hands on the wheel and tried to stay in the plow’s tracks, two dark gullies full of slush. The tracks were the only way she had of knowing where the road curved—in the torrent of snow she couldn’t even see the guardrails.

  It took another three hours before she reached Syracuse, and even longer to weave her way through the maze of the city’s surface streets. Some of them had been plowed, leaving one narrow lane open and mounds of snow on either side six feet high, with here and there a car buried so deeply in the drifts that she wondered how they would ever be dug out. The Victorian houses she passed were half snowed-in, their roofs weighted down with thick layers of snow like frosting on a cake. Even the street signs were often obscured by clumps of snow that clung to them, and more than once she had to stop in the middle of a street and study her map. It was four forty-five when she reached the university campus, already after dark, though it was hard to tell. The sky had taken on an uncanny blue-gray color, a haze of light from the city’s buildings trapped under the heavily laden clouds. The streetlights looked like showerheads gushing down diamond-bright snowflakes, and trails of mist wandered the streets like freezing ghosts looking for some warm place to haunt.

  The main campus of the university loomed up out of the storm as she rumbled past. She saw brick dormitories with fogged-up windows, libraries and classroom buildings made of big flat slabs of concrete stained dark by melting snow. She saw a massive gray building with a black mansard roof, just dripping with gables and dormer windows. It reminded her of the Addams family house from TV. Following the directions Fetlock had given her, she took a left turn and drove past a massive park, the rolling hills of which looked like an ocean of heaving white waves, then another left on Westscott Street, where little shops and businesses spilled yellow light across the submerged road. She passed a big New Age bookstore and finally arrived at her destination, the corner of Westscott and Hawthorne. On every side of her, two-story houses from the turn of the century hunkered down in the snow.
They were painted in bright colors turned pastel by the snow, and all of them, for some reason, had balconies on their second level. She wondered what this place would look like in summer, but couldn’t really paint the picture in her mind. It was so encrusted with snow that she couldn’t imagine winter ever ending.

  She pulled up behind an unmarked white van, a Ford E-150 with tinted windows. It was buried in snow up to its wheel wells, but the windshield had been scraped clear, and recently. It was so obviously a police surveillance van that she winced when she saw it. Apparently the local Feds had never heard of discretion. Maybe, she thought, Simon would have been so busy with his studies that he wouldn’t have noticed it was parked outside his house for two days in a row. Of course, she’d never been that lucky before.

  Fetlock had tasked his own men, U.S. Marshals, with this stakeout, thinking they might do better than local cops. It wasn’t Caxton’s job to second-guess that decision.

  When she killed her engine and switched off her lights the van’s rear doors popped open and a gloved hand waved her over. Popping her own door, she jumped out and hurried up into the back of the van, yanking the door closed behind her as a wraith of snow whirled and howled in through the gap.

  Inside, three men with silver stars on their lapels just like her own sat in swiveling captain’s chairs, passing around a thermos of coffee. They all wore parkas, gloves, and hats, and massive boots. One of them half rose from his place to shake her hand. “Deputy Marshal Fetlock told us you’d be coming. Caxton, right? I’m Young, this is Miller, and that fellow over there is Benicio.”

  “Call me Lu,” Benicio said, waving at her. “Short for Luis, but nobody can pronounce that right. Even though it’s a common name where I come from.”

  “Where’s that?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Utica.”

  Her feet squelched on the carpeted floor, which was flooded by half an inch of murky water. Plastic water bottles floated in the muck, each filled with a yellow liquid she did not care to identify. They competed for space with the soggy wrappers of microwave burritos and fast-food cartons. It was cold enough inside the van to see her breath, though not so bad as it had been outside. She plopped down in a fourth chair and nodded at the introductions. “You guys have been here awhile, huh? You picked a great day for it.”

  Young laughed. “What, you mean the weather? This is nothing. We’re all from the local Syracuse office of the USMS, so we’re used to it. Syracuse is the snowiest city in the contiguous forty-eight. We get what, a hundred and fifteen inches a year?” Miller nodded animatedly. “Lake effect snow, mostly. It hits pretty hard, then melts after a couple of days. Wait till January, if you want to see some snow. When it gets so deep you can’t open your front door, that’s when we start to worry.”

  Caxton shook her head. Pennsylvania was like the Tropics compared to that. “How’s our person of interest?” she asked, leaning forward to look through the windshield. The van had a good view of the house across the street that was Simon Arkeley’s last known address. It was a two-level Victorian just like all the rest, painted white, so it blended in with the sky and its yellow-lit windows seemed to hang in the air. She could see into its porch, which was crammed with patio furniture and unrecognizable junk, and also into its balcony, which was mostly clear.

  Lu came to squat next to her and hand her a pair of field glasses. Only two of the windows were lit. “He’s got the one up there on the second floor. He’s been in there reading a book all afternoon.”

  She looked where he pointed and saw someone sitting in the window, though she could only make out a rough silhouette in the bad light. It had to be Simon Arkeley. As advertised, he had a book in his hands and his head was bent over it. She watched him turn a couple of pages, then sank back in her chair.

  “Who’s on the ground floor?” she asked. She couldn’t see anybody through that window, just the occasional blue flicker of a television set.

  “Building manager,” Lu said. “Old guy, drunk most of the time. He hasn’t been out all day, except once to get beer down at the liquor store.”

  Caxton sighed and looked out the van windows. She doubted Simon would be going out that night, not with the heavy snowfall. It looked like she was going to be sitting in the cold van for a long time.

  “What’s your plan?” Lu asked. “I’m guessing you didn’t come all the way up here to make a fourth for bridge.”

  She smiled, remembering the casual camaraderie of stakeouts. She’d done her share of them on the highway patrol. “Well,” she said, trying to think of her next move by talking it out, “I’m going to—”

  She didn’t get any further, though. Her phone rang. It was Fetlock.

  “We found a lair,” he told her.

  37.

  “Is he there? Is Malvern there?” Caxton demanded.

  “No, neither of them,” Fetlock said, sounding almost apologetic. “And it looks like they haven’t been for a while. Let me just give you the details, alright?”

  Caxton closed her eyes and sank back into her chair. “Alright,” she said, holding the phone against her shoulder. She reached into her pocket and took out a small notebook, then snapped her fingers at the three Feds in the van and mimed writing something down. Lu handed her a pen.

  “We eliminated all the other possible lairs from your list,” Fetlock told her, “by about two o’clock this afternoon. Some of my men out of Reading were about to eliminate the last one, but they knew it was getting late and they didn’t want to be there after sundown.”

  “Good,” Caxton said, “smart.”

  “Well, you did warn us. They approached the site and made a quick reconnaissance. The site was an abandoned grain elevator just outside Mount Carmel. They saw definite signs of recent occupation—someone had forced their way into an outbuilding, tearing the chains off the door and not bothering to replace them. They assumed it was probably some petty criminal looking for anything they could steal. After making sure there were no half-deads lying in wait, a three-man team entered the building and found some empty plastic bags. IV bags, like from a hospital. The kind of bags that whole blood is stored in.”

  “What about human remains? Furniture made out of bones, bodies wired into lifelike postures, that sort of thing?” That was what you expected to find in a vampire lair. It was the kind of thing she’d seen in vampire lairs before.

  “Nothing of the sort, but if the blood bags were enough to pique their interest, there was also a coffin in there. A very old, very cheap coffin that had fallen to pieces. They did what they’d been told to do and called in reinforcements. Lots of them. When no vampires showed up they sent in heavily armed units to secure the site and retrieve all the evidence. They did so, then immediately departed the scene, at approximately four-thirty, just as the sun was going down.”

  Caxton sighed almost happily. Fetlock seemed to get how this worked, if nobody else did. You didn’t stick around a vampire’s lair at twilight, no matter how abandoned it might look. That was asking for trouble.

  “The evidence was taken back to your HQ building in Harrisburg. I brought in my forensics people and also your team lead—Clara Hsu—to supervise.”

  “Clara was part of this investigation?” Caxton asked, a little surprised. “How was she at—I mean, did she prove useful?”

  “Yes,” Fetlock said, and Caxton’s eyes opened wide as he added, “She’s clearly not trained for forensics work, but she asked a lot of interesting questions and she even cleared up one mystery for us. There were some skin samples in the coffin. Just a few flakes, like dandruff, but when we tried to run a DNA test nothing whatsoever came up.”

  “There was no match in the database?”

  “No,” Fetlock said, “I mean there was no DNA. Which confused the hell out of my forensics team. Then Clara pointed out that vampires don’t have human DNA.”

  Wow, Caxton thought. Clara had been paying attention. She’d made the connection. Caxton would have felt gushingly proud of h
er girlfriend if she didn’t feel so guilty for not believing in Clara before.

  “They were able to carbon-date the skin samples,” Fetlock went on. “They look to be a couple hundred years old, at least.”

  “So they came from Malvern,” Caxton said. “Malvern was in this lair. She can’t go anywhere without Jameson’s help, so they must both have been there.”

  “Not just them. We also found some fingerprints on the blood bags. When we ran those through the database a match came up right away. The prints belong to Dylan Carboy, aka Kenneth Rexroth.”

  “Seriously?” Caxton asked. She wanted to slap herself on the forehead.

  So Glauer had been right. Carboy did have some tangible connection with Jameson. It seemed she was going to have to make some apologies.

  “That’s all we have so far, all the hard evidence,” Fetlock went on. “My people were willing to make one more conjecture, though. Judging by the amount of dust on the coffin and the blood bags, they say nobody had been in that lair for weeks. They won’t testify to that in court, but they sounded pretty sure.”

  “That’s great,” Caxton said. “That’s a lot of information we didn’t have before. That really helps flesh out the narrative. Blood bags—it sounds like Jameson used this lair before he went rogue, before he killed anybody. He would have been hungry, though. Desperate for blood. He must have had Carboy steal blood from a local hospital or blood bank—but that wouldn’t work. Vampires can’t drink cold blood. It has to be fresh or warm for them to get any benefit from it.”

  “Okay,” Fetlock said. “Not my area. I’ve got the site under constant surveillance—from a distance. If anyone tries to go in or out during the night, I’ll let you know.”