Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “Wait,” Simon said.

  She looked at him expectantly.

  “Wait. Am I—okay, I’m in trouble. I understand that. Now, I’m not confessing to anything. But if I answer your questions—”

  She shook her head. “I can’t coerce you to talk to me. That means I can’t offer you any deals to get you to speak, either.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded. “There has to be something we can do, though. If I agree, of my own free will, to answer your questions, maybe you won’t just dump me in a cell and let me rot.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not my decision whether to press charges or not.” That was the truth. Fetlock would make that decision, when the time came, based on Caxton’s advice. “However, as a U.S. Marshal one of my duties is to transport prisoners from place to place. I can transport you to a different detention facility. Say, one in Pennsylvania, where you can be with your sister.”

  He stared at her with wide eyes for quite a while. Then his chin bobbed up and down. It took her a second to decide that was a yes, and not just a muscular tremor.

  “Okay,” she said. “First. Tell me exactly what happened at the USMS archives. I want to know who told you to do it, and who told you what to do. I want to know how you did it, and I want to know where the files are now.”

  After that he opened like a can of peas.

  His story began just after the massacre at Gettysburg, where Caxton and Glauer had faced down an army of vampires—and lost. Jameson had saved Caxton’s life there by finishing off the vampires who were too tough for her. “He truly believed he would be able to do that, then have the strength of will to turn himself in. Turn himself over to you, I guess. For disposal.”

  “That’s an odd way of putting it,” Caxton said.

  “But accurate, I think. It was supposed to be nice and tidy, he would just come back to you, let you put your gun up against his chest, and it would be over. He thought his life was over, anyway, before he made the change. He’d been crippled. He was a vampire hunter who could barely climb a flight of stairs, much less shoot straight. He felt like his only reason for living was gone. That’s why he made the choice he did. He told me about that first night as a vampire, though, and the strength he had, and the things he could see. They can see farther into the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum than we can. Into the near infrared. I can’t even imagine it—the things he described, the way the sky glowed, the way trees pulsed with life and every animal—”

  “Was full of blood,” Caxton interrupted. “I know they can see our blood, even in the dark.” She shook her head. “You’re making it sound pretty good.”

  “Well, maybe it kind of was. I mean, at first. He swore he would never harm a living human. All he wanted was another night like that—and another after that. He realized that he hadn’t wanted to kill himself at all. That he’d just been feeling sorry for himself. I think he still believed he could do good. Kill more vampires—you know, working from the inside. When he first contacted me, that was the sense I got.”

  “When was this?”

  Simon rubbed his forehead. “October. Late October—I remember there was a paper jack-o’-lantern on my door that night.”

  So Jameson had been active for nearly a month before he contacted his son. She wondered what he’d been doing before that—staying up late with Dylan Carboy, talking about how much Carboy hated school? Drinking blood out of a plastic bag and hoping it would be enough? She couldn’t imagine what he’d done, what he’d thought, in those early days. Not yet. “How did he contact you? Did he come to you in person?”

  “No,” Simon said. “By telephone.”

  “Do you remember what number he called you from?”

  “This was on my home phone. I don’t have caller ID.”

  Caxton nodded. She leaned back in her chair. “Did he tell you at any time where he was, or at least where he was calling from?”

  “Of course not,” Simon said. “He only called me a couple of times. The first was to, well, to see how I was doing. You can imagine how I reacted to that, my dead father calling me on the phone to see how my grades were. I freaked out and hung up on him. The next time he called—I didn’t hang up.”

  Caxton tried to channel Glauer with his people skills and guess why. “You missed him,” she suggested.

  “Fuck, no,” Simon spat. “You have to understand, he had never called me at school before. I mean, when he was living. I barely saw him when I was in high school, he was always away at some seminar on vampires or some police training thing or running around some far corner of Pennsylvania because someone had seen an albino man with pointed ears going through their trash cans and it turned out it was a coyote. No, I didn’t miss him. I never really had a father. But after that first call, I kind of felt—this is so stupid, but—I felt like I did have somebody, for the first time. When he called again, I was happy to hear his voice, even as changed as it was. That’s when he told me about what it was like for him, and how much he wanted to stay alive, and how you were gunning for him. He told me there was something I could do to help him, to help keep him alive.”

  “And you said yes?”

  Simon shrugged. “I took some coaxing. But in the end he was still the same guy. The guy who, every time I saw him, knew exactly how to get a reaction out of me. He knew how to push my buttons. How to make me feel sorry for him. He told me how lonely he was, and how desperate. How everyone wanted to hurt him. That was all an act, wasn’t it? Don’t answer that, I know the answer. They can hypnotize you if you look into their eyes. I think, maybe, they can do it with their voices, too. Or maybe—maybe I was just an easy mark.”

  He kept talking then, without any prompting, telling a story that had gained its own momentum. “A couple days later I got an envelope in the mail, with no return address. The postmark said Bellefonte. Inside was a security card on a nylon string. It was his old card from when he worked for the USMS. It was my job to go find all his old files and steal them. The hard part was getting down to Virginia. I had to take a train, then walk five miles from the station. At the door there was a bored guard who barely glanced at the card, then let me in. Same thing at the archives. I signed for the files, not using my own name, of course, and then I took them and walked back out the same way I’d come in. Just like that. I walked back to the train station, went in the bathroom, and changed my clothes and messed up my hair. If anybody had been looking for me they wouldn’t have recognized me after that. I took the next train back to Syracuse and I was in class that evening at five-thirty. Intensive French 206. I couldn’t miss it. I took it every weekday, for two hours and fifty minutes, and at the end of the semester I had nine credits and I’d completed my foreign-language requirement. If I missed one class I lost a letter grade.”

  Caxton sighed. “Where are the files now?”

  “He told me there were things in those papers that could hurt him. That could lead you right to him. A list of places he thought would make good vampire lairs. Personal stuff about his family. A lot of stuff about Malvern.” He held up his hands. “I burned them. You have to understand. I thought I was doing a good thing. I thought I was helping my dad. Then, at the fake funeral, when you were talking about how you were going to kill him—”

  “Yeah,” Caxton said. “You thought he was still a good guy. Until…?”

  “Right up until he killed my uncle.” He inhaled deeply. “That was when I got a lawyer. That was why I refused your protective custody. He kills people because they know something. He kills people because they get in his way now. He’s not the man I spoke to on the phone.”

  “He’s not your father,” Caxton said.

  “Actually—in some ways he’s more like my father than ever.”

  Caxton thought maybe she could see that. “Okay. Next question. When was the last time you spoke with him?”

  “That was the last time, when he asked me to get the files. I haven’t heard from him since.”

  Caxton nodded, making
a note on her pad.

  “Although I spoke to Malvern like three days ago.”

  She nearly lost control of her pen.

  42.

  “Malvern—you’re in contact with Malvern.” Caxton caught her breath. “Is this a recent development?”

  Simon shook his head. “It started years ago. Before you even came along. My freshman year in college, actually.”

  Caxton bit her lip. “That was what, two years ago? At that time Malvern was being held in a half-abandoned hospital. She was the only patient there. I saw the place. I nearly died there. The security was pretty tight, since your father oversaw it. There’s no way you could have broken in there and spoken with her, and I know he would never have allowed you to go there unsupervised.”

  “Well, yeah,” Simon said. “I never actually met her. We corresponded by email.” He smiled. “My father was good at a lot of things, but he never really mastered computers. For some reason Malvern had a laptop there—”

  “Yes,” Caxton interrupted. “It was her only way to communicate with her keepers. She can’t talk, she’s too old and decayed for that. She talks by tapping out messages on the keyboard.”

  Simon nodded. “Right. And obviously she wasn’t supposed to be able to get a line out. She was behind a firewall. I knew about her through my father—when he was home, on those rare occasions, he talked about vampires all the time. He talked about her a lot. As soon as I got to Syracuse I decided I wanted to talk to her. I had a friend who was majoring in computer science and he established a VPN connection right through the firewall. She was pretty surprised, but she was desperate to talk to anybody and she was more than willing to keep our conversations secret. I talked to her a lot that semester. I had a million questions and she was happy to answer them.”

  Caxton could guess why Malvern would have been happy to talk to the boy. She was always looking for some angle, some new way to improve her condition—to acquire blood, the only thing that could heal her ravaged body. Jameson had thwarted every one of her plans. It wasn’t a big logical jump to see how much she would enjoy getting her hooks into his only son. Maybe she had wanted to turn Simon into a vampire, to torture his father. Maybe she just liked the irony. She couldn’t see why Simon would take such a risk, though. “Weren’t you worried you would get caught?”

  “Of course. If my father knew what I was doing he would have killed me.” The boy blanched. “I mean, he would have—he would have been angry. But it was so worth the risk. I told you when I met you that I was studying biology. That’s kind of true. Actually, my major is in teratology. The study of monsters.”

  Of course it is, she thought. Growing up the son of Jameson Arkeley, America’s last vampire hunter, what else would the boy have chosen to study?

  “You have to understand, it’s not much of a field. Most monsters were driven to extinction long before anybody bothered to study them in a proper scientific manner. There’s some fossil evidence, and a few so-called historical accounts. Firsthand data is nonexistent. There’s a stuffed werewolf in a museum in Moscow, but a lot of people think it’s a fake—and they don’t let first-year students from American universities just fly over to poke and prod at it. Yet there I was with access to a living, well, an undead vampire. The very last one, as far as anyone knew.”

  Caxton closed her eyes. If only.

  “Can you even imagine how tempting that was?” Simon looked at his hands, unable to meet her gaze. “So of course I talked to her.”

  “She taught you about vampires. Did she ever—did she ask you for anything in return?”

  “I had a sense she was leading up to that. She kept sending me emails about how badly she needed blood and how my father was starving her. I said that was a shame but there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe she would have gone further, but then one day I emailed her and there was no response. I didn’t hear from her again for a long time. I left the VPN connection in place, just, you know, in case she got in touch again. Later I heard the story of how she created those new vampires, and how you and my father met, and I realized the dates matched up. She stopped emailing me when she started making new vampires. I guess luring me into accepting the curse was just taking too long.”

  “But now she’s in touch with you again.”

  “Yeah. About two months ago, when my father did—what he did.” Simon shrugged. “The connection came back on. There was a message waiting for me. It was different from before, though.”

  “How?”

  “Before, she would take a long time to write an email. Days and days—I would ask her the simplest question and have to wait a really long time to get a reply. When she started talking again she was emailing two or three times a day, really long messages about how much our contact had meant to her and how she wanted to meet with me in person now. Her spelling was better, too, and there was actual punctuation in the messages. I guess maybe when she went away with my dad she didn’t have to write in secret anymore and she had more free time to—”

  “No,” Caxton said.

  “No?”

  Caxton frowned at him. “Her spelling and punctuation get better when she’s recently fed. It’s easier for her to type now because she’s stronger. Your father has been feeding her regularly, and it won’t be too long before she can call you on the phone. Until she can talk again.”

  “Really? You can’t imagine how much there still is to learn from her.”

  Caxton restrained herself from slapping his stupid face. “You should have told me all this when we first met. You should have told someone, someone in law enforcement, the second she got back in touch with you.”

  He shook his head. “There was nothing in those messages that would help you. It was mostly personal stuff. And there’s no way to trace the connection and figure out where she is that way.”

  “Are you so sure? You’re not a detective, Simon. You don’t know how we work. How we can figure things out even from seemingly meaningless clues. I could have used that information. If I’d had it,” she said, knowing she was about to drop a bomb, that what she was about to say might traumatize him for life, but not really caring, “maybe I could have found their lair by now. Maybe I could have saved your uncle. Or your mother.”

  Simon’s face went blank suddenly. “But it was all harmless stuff! My mom—”

  “You know she’s dead, right? I had to break the news to Raleigh.”

  The boy’s mouth was a flat line across his face. “I…know. I guess I didn’t let myself think about it until now. She’s dead. She’s really dead.”

  Silence filled up the room like fog. Simon sat very still, his hands on the table, and stared into space. “And I had a part in that. Oh, shit,” he said, very softly. “Oh God. I didn’t…I didn’t think.”

  In a moment her anger, her terrifying resolve, just broke. He wasn’t evil. He hadn’t withheld that information to thwart her. He just hadn’t realized how desperate the situation was. Until a few days before, he’d still thought his father was a good man.

  The boy in front of her started crying. Not sobbing, not uncontrollable weeping. Tears were just rolling down his face. He didn’t look like he was even aware of them. She had pushed him too hard. Laid too much guilt on him. Some people weren’t as strong as she was, sometimes. Some people weren’t as practiced as she at handling the guilt of lives lost, of culpability. She had to remember that.

  Glauer was supposed to handle the emotional scenes. Glauer was the people person. She was the one who shot vampires. Even Caxton could see the grief that was about to crush the boy like a closing fist, though. She reached over and took his hand.

  “Hey. We’ll never really know how things could have been different.” He lowered his forehead to the table. She tried to think of anything else she could say. “I lost my mom when I was fifteen,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense. Mothers are bigger than we are. They’re more durable. Or they’re supposed to be.”

  He turned slowly to look at her.
“Thanks. I think I might want to be alone for a while. Are we done?”

  “Sure,” Caxton said. She got up and stepped out of the little room. She left him handcuffed to the wall.

  She was still a cop, after all.

  43.

  Caxton woke up because her phone was ringing. She tried to ignore it, but it was set to vibrate as well, and it chattered painfully against her ribs. She sat up.

  It had been a long night. She’d overseen a team of Feds who went to Simon’s apartment and seized his computers; she’d gotten them started downloading anything that remained of years of correspondence between the boy and the vampire. Something might come of it—it was true that sometimes innocent-seeming clues could tip over an entire investigation. It would take time, though, before they learned anything. As the computer techs got to work she’d realized she wasn’t going to be any help, so she’d returned to the jail and stood guard, along with every Fed she could mobilize in the middle of the night.

  And nothing had happened.

  She had finally fallen asleep about five in the morning, sitting upright in a chair in a disused room near the holding cells in the basement. She’d pulled her winter coat over her shoulders in lieu of a blanket. The phone was in one of the pockets.

  She tried to open her eyes, but they were bleary and glued shut with sleep. She struggled to sit up and her body complained. Every muscle was stiff, every joint ached. She beat at her coat with one hand until she found the pocket holding the phone, then drew it out and answered it.

  “Hello? Who’s calling?” she said. That was about all she could manage.

  “It’s Deputy Marshal Fetlock. Are you alright?”