Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “Thanks,” Caxton said, and ended the call. She was almost certain the old lair was abandoned, that Jameson had moved on to somewhere else, but it was good that Fetlock didn’t take chances.

  For a while she was buzzing with excitement, putting together jigsaw pieces in her head, adding the new stuff to what she already knew. Eventually, though, as the night wore on, that excitement faded.

  The new information was useful. But it didn’t change anything. Jameson was still at large. The evidence might help her catch him, eventually, but for now she still needed to focus on Simon. On keeping Simon alive.

  The adrenaline rush she’d gotten from the phone call turned to nervous tension all too quickly.

  She tried to relax, tried to listen to the conversation of the three Feds in the van. They were talking about the Orangemen, Syracuse’s basketball team. Apparently one of the star players had been caught smoking crack cocaine in the locker room. There was some discussion as to whether he would be allowed to finish out the season before he was prosecuted. “It’s not like he was dealing,” Miller asserted. “Just holding.”

  “With or without intent to distribute?” Young asked. He opened a fresh bag of corn chips and pushed a bunch of them into his mouth.

  Caxton looked out the side windows at the street, at the cross streets on either side. Something felt wrong. Maybe she was just too keyed up, too paranoid. That was probably it. Still. She hadn’t survived as long as she had by assuming things were okay. “You guys know this neighborhood?” she asked. “What’s behind this house?”

  Miller grunted. “Bunch of backyards, divided up by fences.”

  “Could someone have gone out a back door of the house and slipped away without you noticing? Hopped over the fence and got away by a side street?”

  Young sat up very straight in his chair. “Sure. If there was anybody unaccounted for. We thought of that, too, and we made damned sure to keep track of where Simon and the building manager were at all times. If your POI had left that window, one of us would have gone to cover the back of the house. But he hasn’t moved, not since lunchtime.”

  “Not even to go to the bathroom?” she asked.

  Miller shrugged. “Maybe once a couple hours ago, but he was back in a couple of seconds. Not long enough to do anything.”

  Caxton lifted the glasses to look at Simon again. The figure there was hard to make out, just a rough silhouette of a young man reading a book. A young man—

  “Shit!” she said, and slapped the armrest of her chair hard enough to make the men around her jump. “He made you. Goddamn it, he must have made you hours ago. Lu, you’re with me. Miller, Young, you stay here and cover us.”

  “What the hell?” Young asked. “What are you talking about? He hasn’t moved—”

  Caxton snarled her reply at him. “Look at his fingers. His fingers. Simon Arkeley doesn’t wear nail polish.”

  Lu already had the van’s back door open. He jumped down into the snow and she followed close on his heels. They slogged through the drifts that covered the sidewalk and up to the porch of the house, Caxton surging forward to pound on the door.

  “Open up,” she shouted. “Open up! Federal agents!”

  It seemed to take forever for the building manager to come thumping through the house to answer the door. When he cracked it open Caxton lifted her lapel to show him her star.

  “Jeez, what do you want?” the man asked. He was in his late fifties, about average height. Grizzly stubble coated the bottom half of his face, and his eyes were wet and red. Maybe he’d been sleeping. His breath was yeasty with beer. He looked from Caxton to Lu and back again.

  “Federal agents,” Caxton repeated. “We need to come inside. Can you step back, sir?”

  He was in his rights to demand to see a search warrant. Caxton wasn’t sure what she would do if he asked. After a moment, though, he lifted his shoulders and moved back so she and Lu could push inside the house. It was warm inside, almost stiflingly hot. The front hall was full of very old furniture—a sideboard, a cheval mirror, a sofa that might have been an antique if the upholstery wasn’t split and oozing stuffing.

  “It’s that kid upstairs, right? Arkeley? He do something bad? I always kind of figured he would get in trouble,” the building manager whispered. “He’s the only one here, anyway. Comes in all hours of the night, never seems to sleep, and I seen some of the books he brings in here, scandalous stuff—”

  “Which room is his?” Caxton asked, cutting him off.

  “Top of the stairs, on the left.” The building manager raised his shoulders again, a kind of lazy shrug. “I’ll be down here, you need me.” He shambled back toward his own room, where the television was blaring something about lingerie models competing to see who could eat the most bloodworms.

  Caxton was already hurrying up the stairwell. The banister was slick under her hand but marred by countless deep scratches and places where the varnish had been scuffed down to bare wood, probably from countless generations of students moving in and out. At the top of the stairs she turned left and found the door she wanted. She rapped twice on it with her knuckles, then drew her weapon.

  Behind her Lu’s eyes were wide, but he took out his own handgun.

  Caxton rapped again. It sounded like a hollow-core door, the kind you could just kick your way through. When no answer came, she started to do just that.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Lu said, grabbing her arm. She stared wildly into his face. “You can’t do that. It’s not kosher.”

  She knew perfectly well what he meant. Unless she had a search warrant or evidence of a crime being committed inside, she couldn’t just bust the door down, not legally.

  She didn’t have time to be legal. “The vampire is coming. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, but soon. You want this kid to get killed by his own father? Have his throat torn out and his blood splattered everywhere?”

  “No,” Lu confessed.

  She lifted her foot again, but once more he grabbed her arm.

  “I also don’t want to get put up against administrative review,” he told her. “Listen, I’ve only been on this job about a month. I was walking a beat in Tipp Hill before that, and I don’t want to go back. Young can be a real hard case when it comes to protocol.”

  “Then maybe he doesn’t need to know,” Caxton said. “Maybe the door was open when we got here and we have no idea how the lock got broken. Or maybe we thought we heard someone shouting for help from inside, but in the end it turned out just to be the old man’s TV.”

  Lu stared at her, goggle-eyed.

  “There’s nobody here to say whether it happened like that or not,” she said, “except you and me.” Then she kicked open the door. It flew open effortlessly, the lock’s bolt clacking in its receptacle.

  “Aw, hell,” Lu breathed. “You’re nuts, lady!”

  “I’m desperate,” Caxton said, and stepped inside the room.

  38.

  The room beyond seemed filled with books. They were heaped on the floor in enormous tottering stacks, they covered one of the room’s two tables, and more than a few had been laid out, evidently with some care, on the bed. There were hardcovers and leather-bound tomes and dog-eared paperbacks, quite a lot of pamphlets, some photocopied facsimiles of books, spiral bound and with clear acetate covers. There were textbooks so new they were still inside their shrink-wrap, and some books so old their spines were curling off and spilling red dust across the covers of other books. Caxton picked up a few at random. She found a paperback called Secret Societies, by Arkon Daraul, and a battered old text in Latin with a picture of a demon in its frontispiece, called the Lemegeton Clavicula Salmonis. She somehow doubted it had anything to do with the collarbones of fish.

  Caxton swung her weapon around, covering all the corners. She saw no kitchen at all, just a hot plate, which of course was covered in two neat stacks of books. She saw the bed was little more than a cot, the sheets made and unslept-in, and ducked to see dusty books shoved beneath
the bed frame. The closet was full of books, but also clothes—though there was no winter jacket inside. By the window she saw a chair, unoccupied, with a book resting open-faced on its seat.

  At the far end of the room stood another door, open, which revealed a bathroom also filled with books—they stood like makeshift walls on either side of the toilet and on top of its tank, and some even had been piled under the sink, where a dripping pipe had left them spotted with mold.

  A very frightened-looking girl with short dark hair wearing a tattered sweater sat on the edge of the tub, her hands up to protect her face. Her fingernails were painted black, just like the nails Caxton had seen through her binoculars.

  “Who the hell are you?” Caxton said, raising her pistol to point at the ceiling.

  “Linda,” the girl squeaked. “I’m a friend of Simon’s. He asked me to come up here and sit in the window.”

  “Why?”

  Linda shrugged. “He said the cops were watching him. He said he wasn’t in any trouble, though. He said he didn’t do anything. Is he okay?”

  Lu started to ask the girl a lot of questions, but Caxton didn’t bother to listen to them. Rushing back into the hall, she found what she expected to see—a broad window, propped open with a short piece of dowel. Beyond in the flurry of snow she saw a wooden scaffolding with steps leading down to the backyard of the house. A fire escape, a way for the inhabitants of the second floor to get out in case they couldn’t use the front stairs.

  On the steps of the fire escape she could just make out the round shapes of footprints sunk through the deep snow, mostly filled in again by the storm. She grabbed for the windowsill, intending to yank it upward and climb out, to follow Simon’s trail, but then realized that would be pointless. The boy would have made as quickly as he could for the street and out there his tracks would be lost altogether, churned over by passing cars or lost to the blizzard by the time she arrived.

  This was bad, very bad. Very, very bad. If she had lost him, if he’d gotten away from her, then she had no way of knowing whether he’d made contact with Jameson or not. She had to find him—more lives than just his own were at stake—but how?

  She had to think. If he had run out in the middle of the storm, Young and his crew would never have seen him. He had noticed their van and known he was under surveillance, then had gone to the trouble of calling in his friend to fool them into thinking he was still in his room, reading quietly. Either he just didn’t like being watched or he’d decided he had something he had to do and didn’t want the cops to see him doing it. He’d taken his winter coat—she had noticed its absence up in the room—but surely he couldn’t walk very far, not with the snow up to his knees in some places. She already knew from Fetlock that Simon didn’t own a vehicle; that was one of the first things you checked when you staked out a POI. He could have caught a bus, but she doubted it. Who would want to wait for a bus in this weather? She decided he must have arranged to have someone pick him up in a car. Which meant that someone would know where he had gone.

  The walkie-talkie in her hand kept chirping for attention. She ignored it. She headed down the stairs and burst in on the building manager just as he was cracking open a new beer can. His apartment had all of the house’s best furniture in it—a massive oak breakfront, a kitchen table with four matching chairs—but dust dulled all the colors and there were bags of trash stacked in the kitchen. No books anywhere.

  “Hell’s bells, what now?” the old man asked when he saw her.

  “I need some information, and I don’t have a lot of time, so forgive me if I sound impolite,” she said. “How long has Simon lived here?”

  “That Arkeley kid? Just this semester. Signed a one-year lease.”

  “Does he have a girlfriend?” she asked.

  The building manager laughed. “You mean that Linda? She comes sniffing around a lot, but you ask me, the guy’s gay. Never gives her a second look.”

  “Does he ever have any other visitors?”

  The old man scowled. “Hah! Yes, yes he does. The kind that stay all night and you have to listen to them talking and laughing while you’re trying to sleep. They put a towel under the door, too, but don’t think I’m so old I don’t recognize the smell of what they smoke up there, I was alive in the sixties and—”

  Caxton shook her head. “Just answer my questions, alright? As simply and as clearly as you can. Do you remember the names of any of his visitors? Did he ever introduce them to you?”

  “We’re not exactly on friendly terms, him and me,” the manager replied. He scratched at his stubble for a second, though, and said, “I guess there was one guy. Simon called him ‘Murph.’ Ugly little pothead with freckles and red hair. Comes around a lot, actually. Don’t know his last name.”

  “Do you know where he lives? Please, think hard.”

  The building manager shrugged. “South Campus, somewhere.” She must have looked confused. “There’s a secondary campus, called South Campus, about two miles from here down Comstock Avenue. It’s almost all residential buildings. Crappy little cinder-block shacks they rent out for next to nothing.”

  “That’s all you can tell me?” Caxton asked, desperate.

  “Maybe it’s enough,” Lu said from behind her. He took the walkie-talkie out of her hand. “Deputy Marshal Young, do you read me?”

  “Yeah, go ahead, Lu.”

  “Special Deputy Caxton would like you to call up the registrar’s office. We need to track down a student, partial name Murph, maybe Murphy. Not sure if that’s a last or first name. Last known address is South Campus and he may have a record for drug offenses. You think that might turn something up?”

  “We’ll get on it, maybe we’ll get lucky. Over.”

  Caxton nodded with excitement. “Good thinking,” she said to Lu. “Sir,” she said, turning to face the building manager, “thanks for your assistance.”

  “Simon’s not going to jail, is he?” the man asked.

  “I don’t have a warrant for his arrest,” she told him.

  “Good, ’cause he’s still got six months on that lease.”

  Caxton led Lu back down to the street and climbed into her Mazda, indicating he should take shotgun. “I need you to navigate,” she said. “We’ll head down to South Campus now and hope we have an address by the time we arrive.”

  “You got it,” Lu replied. “But what makes you so sure he went to hang out with this friend of his?”

  “Because I don’t have any other ideas,” she told him.

  39.

  Caxton left Young and Miller to watch the house, in case she was wrong. If Simon came back while she was gone they were under orders to sit on him—to watch his every move, and to follow him if he left the house. There was no point in being discreet anymore. If the kid was going to sneak out from under their noses and run around in the dark, she would do everything she could to keep him away from his father.

  If she didn’t, she was beginning to think she would have a second vampire on her hands, just as dangerous as the first.

  Simon’s reticence to talk to her, his obvious distrust of law enforcement: those she could have chalked up to youthful rebellion or just general stupidity. The trick with getting his friend to sit in his window for him suggested something more. Maybe he had something to hide.

  “When we get to this place,” she told Lu, “just back my play. I’ll do the talking.”

  “Right,” he said, sounding unconvinced. She’d pushed him to his limit when she broke down Simon’s door, and she wasn’t sure how much more he would let her get away with. Well, she would just have to find out.

  She kept her speed down on the way to South Campus. It wasn’t all that far away and the snow on the road made any kind of driving hazardous. Big trucks full of rock salt were carving out channels through the snowdrifts, but she didn’t want to take any chances. If she went off the road and disabled the Mazda, she would lose crucial time and mobility.

  “You’re from here, righ
t? From Syracuse? If we knock on the door of a drug scene, should we expect to be met with guns?”

  Lu’s eyes went wide. “Hell, no. The drug users here are just students—teenagers. They smoke pot, maybe drop acid sometimes. This is a college town, you have to expect that, a little. They rarely get violent. It’s too cold up here for that kind of stupidity.”

  “Good,” she said, and shifted in her seat, trying to relax.

  It wasn’t easy. This place they were going to—this apartment. Jameson could be there waiting for her. It could be a trap. He could have already passed the curse to Simon. The place could be crawling with half-deads.

  She could find anything there, anything at all.

  She turned off on a road called Skytop and got her first look at South Campus. The building manager’s description hadn’t been far off. The residential units were simple two-story dwellings built of cheap materials. They had few windows and they all looked exactly alike. They lay like scattered Monopoly pieces in a vast sea of salted gravel parking lots. Caxton could imagine few places more depressing to live—but she supposed, if they were cheap enough, students could put up with them.

  They pulled into a parking lot big enough for a shopping mall and then they sat. And waited. And waited some more. Caxton got impatient and punched the steering wheel a few times, but that didn’t help anybody, so eventually she stopped. Finally Young called her with an address. He’d turned up over a hundred students with the last name Murphy, and had gone through them all and ruled them out—either they were female, or they didn’t live in South Campus, or they didn’t have red hair—before trying it as a first name. There was only one student in the entire university with the first name of Murphy, and he both was male and lived in South Campus. If this wasn’t the guy they were looking for, he said, if Murph was just a nickname, then they were plain out of luck. He gave her the exact address and she got the car moving before she’d even thanked him.

  She pulled into a spot directly in front of the unit she wanted. It was rented, according to Young, to a junior named Murphy Frissell. Frissell was an environmental science and forestry major—what Lu said was locally known as a Stumpy. Frissell was believed to have one roommate, named Scott Cohen, who was studying music. Both of them had been arrested the previous year for possession of marijuana, but their sentences had been suspended. Frissell sounded exactly like the boy the building manager had described—Young had even downloaded a picture from the registrar’s office and confirmed that Frisssell had red hair.