Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  The manager was a young guy in a plaid shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. He sighed with impatience and asked her what he could help her with.

  Caxton cleared her mind by rubbing at her face with both hands. Was she really going to do this? The lair was underground, probably full of carbon monoxide gas, and the temperatures down there could reach a thousand degrees. Nothing in the store could keep her alive through that.

  If she could just get close, though—close enough—

  “I need a Nomex flash-resistant suit,” she said. “Gloves, booties, the whole package. I need a face mask, too, and a hard hat. And a portable air supply, the longest-lasting one you’ve got.”

  The manager stared at her openmouthed. “You fighting a brush fire, ma’am?” he asked.

  “Worse. I’m going into a coal mine fire.”

  “Like the one in Centralia?”

  Caxton gave him a weak smile. “Exactly like the one in Centralia. You have what I need?”

  He shrugged and walked down an aisle, calling over his shoulder, “Is this going to be cash or credit?”

  Fifteen minutes later she was back in the car, headed northeast. Toward the closest thing to hell you could find in Pennsylvania.

  Centralia. Every kid in the Commonwealth knew about Centralia, about the fire under the town that had been burning since the sixties and still had enough fuel to continue to burn long after they, and their grandchildren, were dead. It was a place where the ground opened up and swallowed people and houses whole. It was a place where the earth was so hot underneath that flowers bloomed on the surface, even in the middle of winter.

  Caxton drove through the night, staying off the highways. Taking the back roads took longer but lowered the probability that she would be spotted by a highway patrol cruiser and pulled over. She had little doubt that by now her license plate number had been memorized by every state trooper on the road.

  Just as Jameson had learned all the tricks of being a vampire long before he even considered becoming one himself, Caxton knew how to move around the state without being spotted. She had, after all, spent years in the highway patrol. She knew the location of every radar trap and sobriety checkpoint in Pennsylvania, and she knew what roads were never watched. She drove carefully, as tired as she was, taking pains not to weave across lanes, to drive at just the right speed. If you drove too slow, you drew attention to yourself. If you kept exactly to the speed limit, you drew attention. She stayed just over the limit, but no more than five miles an hour over, in case she wandered past a local cop looking to make his quota of speeding tickets for the month. She signaled every turn and every lane change well in advance.

  Centralia. Once it had been a thriving town. Caxton herself had grown up in a series of mining patches, little company towns too small to have their own police. Her father had been the only law some of those places had ever seen. Centralia had a population in the thousands once, but by the time Caxton was born it was a ghost town, too small to even be called a patch. The fire had started as an accident. The local mining company had taken to burning its garbage in a played-out pit mine just southeast of the town. It must have seemed more economical than hauling the trash to a landfill. It turned out the pit hadn’t been as empty as they thought. There must have been some coal still down there, because in 1962, it ignited, and started a fire that couldn’t be stopped. Coal is a fossil fuel and it combusts well, even in low-oxygen conditions. The burning coal in the pit had in turn ignited a coal seam connected to the underground mines near the town. Once that seam caught, the fire just grew and grew. The mines had to be abandoned, but for twenty years nobody had considered it a serious problem. There were mine fires all over the world, and most of the time it was more cost-efficient to just let them burn themselves out. They’d figured Centralia would do just that in a couple of years.

  They were wrong.

  She pulled over to get her bearings. Centralia wasn’t on her road map. Nobody was supposed to go there anymore. She knew where it was, though, and when she put her finger on Route 61 she saw that it was less than two miles from Mount Carmel, Dylan Carboy’s hometown. Less than a mile from the location of the abandoned grain elevator lair. “Son of a bitch,” she murmured. Jameson had been right under her nose the whole time.

  She knew she was getting close when she saw reefs of pale smoke winding between the trees on either side of the road. The coal company had drilled holes down into the inferno to release the buildup of smoke and toxic gases. It hadn’t been enough. In the eighties the surface of Route 61 had started to crack and buckle. A whole new highway had been constructed that went around the affected area. Then sinkholes started collapsing all around town. One had nearly swallowed up a small boy. About that time the government bought up as much of the town as it could and relocated all the citizens to nearby boroughs. A very few stubborn holdouts had stayed, and survived the best they could, even knowing the risks. As of the last census, the population of Centralia had sunk as low as twelve.

  It was the most desolate, the most hazardous, the most environmentally toxic place in the entire state. Temperatures underground could reach a thousand degrees in the heart of the fire. That heat seeped up through the soil and melted snow before it could even collect on the ground.

  Caxton saw the wintertime flowers, even in the dark. Wild-flowers, tiny blossoms on thin stalks that fluttered in the night breezes. In the moonlight, surrounded by the dead trees, they were eerily beautiful.

  She parked her car near where the center of town had been once. There were roads crisscrossing a grassy field, but the houses were all gone. Here and there she could see an overgrown foundation, the crumbled remains of a brick chimney, but that was all. A couple of small houses remained on the edge of where the town had been, but only one had any lights on.

  She had arrived. She was armed. She was ready.

  The government had tried a few schemes for putting out the fire, but none had been successful. The coal continued to burn. Caxton had heard there was enough coal down there to keep burning for another two hundred and fifty years.

  One thing the government had done was to close off every entrance to the underground mine. They hadn’t just strung up fencing or boarded over the entrances, either—they’d been blasted shut, in the hopes of cutting off the fire’s oxygen supply. The pit mines nearby had all been filled in with sterile fill, crushed rock, and nonflammable soil. That was good, from one perspective. The lair was down in the mine, and the fewer exits the mine had, the harder it would be for Jameson to escape when she came for him.

  It did present one dilemma for her, however—knowing exactly where the lair was didn’t help if she couldn’t find her way in.

  She had an idea about how to fix that. She started walking toward the house with the burning lights, intent on seeing who was still awake.

  54.

  The house was filled with birds. The birds would drive Caxton crazy, she thought, if she had to live here.

  “You say you’re not with the government,” the old woman said, and brushed her thinning white hair back over a bald spot. She was wearing a shapeless polyester housecoat. A chipped enamel tea mug sat by her elbow, untouched.

  Caxton had its twin—the only other one the woman owned—on a coffee table in front of her. On the floor by her feet she had the Nomex flash-resistant suit and her other equipment folded neatly into a special backpack. Not that she intended to use it that night, but she wanted to be prepared in case she had a chance to do some impromptu spelunking. “Not anymore. I know they’ve approached you about buying your land—”

  “And I told them, no.” A sharp fluttering of wings nearly drowned out the softly spoken words. The old woman frowned and peered through heavy eyelids at Caxton, sizing her up. “One day that fire’s goin’ out. Then they’ll have to come to me if they want the coal down there. I own mineral rights on half this town, and I’m not giving that up without a fight.”

  A canary chirped next to Caxton’s shoulder. The b
right yellow birds were everywhere, dozens or maybe as many as a hundred crowded into wire cages lined with ancient, brittle newspaper. The cages hung from the ceiling of every room, or sat on end tables. Some were even tucked away on the floor, behind the furniture.

  It was quite possible the old woman loved the birds, but they weren’t pets.

  “You keep these,” Caxton said, “to test for carbon monoxide, right?” The gas was constantly rising from the mine fire in tendrils of pale smoke. It gathered in basements and lingered outside windows like insubstantial tentacles tapping for entry. Even in very mild concentrations, as little as five parts per million, it was toxic, and a sudden puff of vapor could suffocate the old woman in her sleep at any time. Canaries were famous for their sensitivity to carbon monoxide and other poisonous gases. If they started keeling over, the old woman would have a few seconds’ warning to pull a gas mask over her face and avoid breathing in her own death. Gas masks were almost as common in the house as canaries—there was one in every room, at least.

  “I treat ’em well, feed ’em twice a day and keep ’em clean,” the old woman insisted. “You from the ASPCA?”

  “Maybe I used the wrong term. Perhaps,” Caxton said, “I should have said they were to test for white damp.”

  Miners referred to poisonous gas outbreaks as varieties of damp, probably from dampf, the German word for steam. There were fire damps, black damps, choke damps, and stink damps. The most common and the most deadly kind was white damp, but any of them could kill you before you smelled them.

  The old woman sat up and scratched at her wrist. It was as if Caxton had spoken a code word the old woman had been waiting to hear. Still her eyes were suspicious. “You’re no miner, lady,” she said.

  Caxton smiled. “No. But I grew up around coal mines. I was born in Iselin, and I went to school near Whiskey Run. I don’t want to run you off your ground, ma’am. All I want to know is whether there are any bootleg mines around here.”

  “If you’re who you say you are you’ll know that bootleg mining’s a thing of the past.” The old woman shook her head. “There’s no man alive who could dig enough coal in a day with his own hands to make a living.”

  Caxton had heard that before—and knew it was like an Italian-American claiming there was no such thing as the Mafia. “He might dig enough to warm his house in winter, and cut down on his heating bills.” Caxton picked up her tea mug and rolled it back and forth in her hands. She was getting frustrated and she wondered if there was a quicker way to find the information she needed. She supposed she could pull her gun on this old woman—but no, that was beyond even her level of desperation. “Anyway, the one I’m looking for isn’t currently in use. At least, not by the living.”

  The old woman leaned forward in her armchair. “I’m not sure I heard that right.”

  Caxton sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “I’m after a vampire. I know he’s holed up in the mine, but I don’t know how he gets in or out. I thought—”

  The old woman held up her hands. “That’s what I thought you said.” She tapped at a cage on top of her television set, which set the birds inside fluttering and chirping. Picking it up by one handle, she walked toward her front door. “You’d better follow me.”

  Caxton got up and pulled on her backpack, not wanting to leave it behind. They went out into the dark and cold night, the old woman not even bothering to put on a jacket. They didn’t have far to go. Caxton followed her down a road cracked and overgrown with weeds, then into the weathered foundation of an old house that had long since been torn down. A pile of old rags and plastic bags had gathered where a bit of the foundation stuck up in the air higher than the ground around it. It looked just like a heap of trash. The old woman put down her cage, though, and brushed the refuse away, revealing a wooden trapdoor.

  “He came here about two months gone, your fella. We all saw him out our windows—he didn’t make a pretense of hiding. Why should he? We hid from him. Every time he comes in or out we hunker down.”

  “And you never called the police,” Caxton said.

  “If we did, we knew what would happen to us. There’s just a handful of us left in Centralia, and we can’t afford people coming ’round asking lots of questions. Not if we’re going to preserve the claim on what’s ours. Nobody wants the police crawling over this ground, looking for evidence and getting in our business. Your kind aren’t welcome here.”

  Caxton sighed. “I’m not a cop. Not anymore.”

  Someone was standing behind her.

  Caxton whirled around, her weapon out of its holster and pointing before she even saw what she was aiming at. The laser sight made a bright spot on the chest of a massive young man in a red plaid hunter’s coat. He raised his hands slowly and looked from Caxton to the old woman and back.

  “What’s going on, Maisie?” he asked. “I saw you come out your house just now and I saw where you were going.”

  “That’s just my cousin Wally. Don’t you shoot him,” the old woman insisted.

  “Why don’t you both just back up, okay?” Caxton said, in her cop voice.

  “You don’t want to go down there,” Wally said. “There’s something down there you don’t want to see.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” Caxton slowly rose to her feet and holstered her weapon. “Anyway, I don’t intend on going down there, not tonight. It’s barely eleven-thirty. I’m going to wait until dawn.” The only sane time to enter a vampire’s lair was when you had plenty of daylight to burn. “I know you think the vampire might hurt you if he sees me here. You’ve got to trust me, though. I’m going down there tomorrow and I’m going to kill him. You’ll never have to worry about him again.”

  “That’s fine,” Wally said. “But what about her?”

  Caxton spun around again, but she was far too slow. The trap had lifted at an angle and a white shadow was snaking out of it, reaching for her. Raleigh’s hands fastened around her ankles like a pair of vise grips and pulled her roughly down into the darkness before she could even start to scream.

  She saw the old woman’s face recede above her as she was carried downward. “Like I said,” the old woman said, “you aren’t welcome here, lady.”

  55.

  Caxton’s face collided hard with a wall of solid rock and bright flecks shot through her vision. Then everything went dark. She thought maybe she had a concussion or even that she was dead, but in fact the trapdoor had just closed over her, and she was faced with the most profound darkness she’d ever experienced: midnight in a coal mine.

  A thin hand grasped one of her ankles. She was dragged across the stone floor, rough still with the marks of where some old miner had cut this chute with a shovel and a pickaxe and maybe a few sticks of stolen dynamite. The entrance to the lair was through a bootleg mine—a narrow passage cut by night down toward a coal seam the miner didn’t own. Maybe just one man, maybe an entire family, had worked for years chopping through the soil and rock looking for the black glint of coal. The ceiling, Caxton knew, would be held up only here and there by rotten timbers. The passage would be no wider than a man’s broad shoulders. She pushed out her arms and felt the uneven wall on either side. She tried to grab on, but Raleigh was much stronger than Caxton now, and Caxton couldn’t get enough grip on the rock to even slow the vampire down.

  For a long time she was carried along like that, her face bouncing on the floor, the skin of her ankle crying out in pain where Raleigh held her. Then the forward progress stopped, and Caxton’s leg was dropped to the floor. Still she couldn’t see a thing, though she knew that Raleigh would be able to see her just fine—at least, she could see Caxton’s blood, her arteries and veins and capillaries lit up in the pitch darkness like an inward-curling maze of neon tubes.

  Caxton fully expected to die in that darkness, unable to see when the vampire descended on her and tore out her throat. Maybe she would have a fraction of a second’s warning. Maybe she would feel the cold and sickly aura that emanated fr
om Raleigh’s being before the bite came. Or maybe not.

  Then there was a clicking sound, and lights sputtered to life all around Caxton, glaring down at her from a ceiling high above. Caxton rolled onto her back, the backpack squishing uncomfortably beneath her, and tried to sit up. A white hand pressed down on her throat and she lay back down—she had no choice. Raleigh easily overpowered her, and there was no point in fighting.

  Caxton still had her pistol in its holster at her belt. She darted her hand downward and tried to grab at it, but Raleigh was ready for that, too. She got to the gun first and drew it neatly, then twirled it on her finger.

  The vampire was still dressed in the remains of her winding sheet, with duct tape bunching it around her hips and throat. Over top of that she had put on a ballistic vest. A type IIIA, of course, with a steel trauma plate over her heart. “This,” she said, lifting the gun in her hand, “is useless. How many times did you shoot Daddy with it? And he barely felt it.”

  Raleigh threw the weapon into a corner of the room. Caxton watched it, trying to see where it landed. In the process she finally saw where she was: a chamber about twenty feet square. This wasn’t part of the bootleg mine, but a chamber of the original company mine, and it contained supplies abandoned when the mine was shut down. There were boxes that would have held dynamite and blasting caps, as well as enormous pieces of mining equipment, roof bolters and rod chargers. In one corner, leaning up against the wall, stood a pair of six-foot-long handheld drills that would have done wonders at boring through that trauma plate and impaling Raleigh’s heart—if there had been anyplace to plug them in. The equipment was falling to pieces, eaten at by rust or just general decay. It must have been sitting down here for decades after the mine was abandoned. If there was any dynamite in those boxes it would have gone bad before Raleigh was even born, most likely.