The Beretta 92 she’d carried since her first day as a state trooper had a magazine that held fifteen rounds. Jameson had seen that gun a thousand times while they’d worked together. He had assumed that she would still be using the same weapon. But the new gun held seventeen bullets.
Jameson nodded sagely, as if she had finally impressed him. Maybe for the first time. “But I think you’re empty now.”
“Unless I loaded a round in the chamber before I came down here,” Caxton agreed, keeping the gun pointed at his chest. “That would have been the smart thing to do, don’t you think?”
Before Caxton had met Jameson, before she’d ever worked on a vampire case, she used to keep a bullet in her chamber all the time. It meant she was ready to shoot as soon as she drew the gun from her holster, rather than having to fully cock the weapon to load the first round.
Jameson, on the other hand, had never walked around with a cocked gun. He had equated doing so with driving while not wearing a seat belt. He had entered law enforcement many years before she had, back when small arms occasionally discharged by accident. That almost never happened these days, but Jameson had always been pathologically cautious.
What he didn’t know—what he didn’t have to know, as far as Caxton was concerned—was that she had looked up to him so much, had copied him in every form and move so well, that she had trained herself not to load a round in her chamber anymore. She had broken herself of the habit.
Her weapon was completely empty.
“The smart thing,” he said, taking a step sideways. He was so light on his feet that it looked more as if he was sliding across the floor, as graceful as an ice-skater. “You’re doing the smart thing these days? Because the smart thing would have been to shoot me already, instead of standing here talking about it.”
He leapt then, his whole body bounding effortlessly into the air, huge and powerful and coming right for her. Jumping away herself would have been useless—he was too fast. Instead she jabbed the gun at him as if it were a knife and squeezed the trigger again, even as she leaned back. He threw his arms up to protect his face and his leap fell short by inches. Her gun didn’t fire—the trigger didn’t even move—but he had doubted himself for just long enough that she survived the attack.
If she wanted to stay alive, she needed to run.
She ran.
58.
Caxton knew she’d bought at most a second or two of time. Jameson wouldn’t stop to mourn his daughter, not until Caxton was dead—and he wasn’t going to give her another chance to be tricky.
She also knew he wouldn’t come after her himself, at least not right away. He would send his half-deads after her first. It was an age-old tactic of the vampires, one of the many he’d studied back when he was alive and fighting them. Disarmed, barely able to breathe, weak and alone, Caxton had all the same proved that she was dangerous when cornered. The half-deads would harass her, tire her out, maybe even wound her—and then he would swoop in and finish her off.
She was not wholly defenseless, even without bullets in her gun. As she ran she grabbed the ASP baton off her belt and flicked it open, letting its weighted end bob along beside her as she hurried down the corridor. She had all her other cop toys as well, some of which were more useful than others.
Numerous side galleries flashed by her as she ran, all of them dark, some breathing hot vapors at her, some cool and empty. All of them were tempting. In the well-lit main corridor she felt vulnerable and exposed. Before she could turn off the main passage, though, she needed to catch her breath. In the smoky tunnels that meant just one thing—she had to recover her backpack.
It lay just where Raleigh had thrown it, about halfway up the tunnel that led back to the bootleg mine entrance. As she scooped it up she looked up the passage toward the room where Raleigh had almost emptied her weapon. It was tempting to think she could just run up there, climb up through the trap door, and run for her car. There were more bullets in the trunk, a handful of Teflon rounds and a full box of conventional ammo. That would be more than useful right then. There was only one problem—the half-deads had almost caught up with her. She could hear them behind her, their footfalls echoing around a bend in the tunnel that just hid them from view. There was no way she could reach the entrance and make her way to the surface before they caught up with her.
Which left just one option. She ducked down a dark side gallery, one that looked empty and less smoky than the rest, and pressed her back up against the wall of rock. As quietly as she could she opened her backpack and pulled out the emergency respirator. It came in two parts, a mask she could strap over her face and an oxygen bottle she could clip to her belt. She slipped it on and twisted the nozzle, then sucked at the mask until clean oxygen hit her mouth and throat, so pure and sweet it made her dizzy. She closed her eyes and just breathed for a moment. The backpack fell out of her hands and clunked to the floor.
“Did you hear that?” someone whispered, in a high-pitched, almost cackling voice she knew all too well. The half-dead was whispering, but the mine gallery had weird acoustics. She couldn’t tell what direction the voice came from, but she could hear it plain as day.
There was no response. Normally half-deads gave themselves away by talking too much—they were cowardly creatures and they needed constant reassurance to keep them focused on their tasks. This bunch were too well trained for that, however. She tried to listen for their footsteps, for the sound of their clothing rustling as they moved. Instead she heard only her own breath hissing in the mask.
They had to be close. They’d been only a few seconds behind her before she turned down the gallery. She readied herself, then waited for ten heartbeats, then forced herself to wait for ten more. Her pulse was racing so fast that it was no longer a reliable measure of time.
She thought she heard a rubber shoe sole squeak on the rock just around the corner. That was the best sign she was going to get. She swung out, into the lighted corridor, her baton whirling around in a deadly one-handed blow. The half-dead was there—and about six inches from where she’d expected it to be. Her baton hit the rock wall with a thud that jarred the bones of her arm.
The half-dead grinned wickedly, its torn face literally splitting. It was carrying a shovel and it drew back for a counterattack that she would not have been able to dodge. She grabbed for her pepper spray with her free hand. She brought it up and squirted pure capsicum into what was left of the half-dead’s face. It started screaming instantly.
She didn’t bother looking to see if there were any more behind it. She spun back around and hurried down the dark tunnel.
The light from the corridor behind her touched the walls on either side, the sheared-off faces left over when the longwall plow carved away all the coal it could reach. Miners called those faces ribs, and they knew to watch out for them—the ribs were not solid rock, but conglomerations of many different kinds of rocks pressed together by their own weight. Chunks or slabs of the rib, some weighing tons, could fall away at any time. Loose rock and tailings strewed the floor, and she had to be careful or she would stumble and break a leg. The sides of the tunnel were littered with old sacks of supplies, cast-off equipment, and tangled snakes of hoses and cables. The light caught an abandoned glove, striped with reflective tape, now smeared with coal and rock dust. It had probably lain undisturbed there for decades.
The passage curled away from the main corridor, following a long played-out coal seam. The light from the corridor couldn’t reach around that curve. Soon she was in utter darkness, so thick it made her eyes hurt. There was nothing for it but to take her pistol off her belt and turn on the flashlight slung under the barrel.
The batteries would last for an hour. The oxygen tank at her belt that slapped against her leg with every step wouldn’t even last that long. If she ran out of light deep in the stygian tunnels—well, if she was alive in an hour, she decided, she could worry about that then.
The half-deads were still behind her, picking th
eir way down the tunnel. One of them must have seen her light come on. She could hear them crowing in jubilation. She knew what her next move had to be.
When they caught up with her—three of them, moving slowly, their hands filthy where they ran them along the wall to find their way—they probably expected her to shine her light in their faces. Instead she had flicked it off, and lay in wait behind a rock twice her size. When they had just passed her—she could hear every step they took—she jumped up from behind and flicked the light back on. Barely able to see, she crushed one half-dead’s head with a fist-sized rock from the floor, then, before it even collapsed, she threw the rock like a softball and hit another one in the stomach. It dropped the short-handled pickaxe it had been carrying. The third one came running at her and she smashed its left kneecap with her baton.
Another half-dead had been following the three of them at a distance. She nearly missed it, but when it heard the screams of its fellows it came hurrying toward them. It had a breaker bar, a three-foot-long iron rod with a sharp pointed end, which it swung at her like a sword.
Caxton barely got her baton up in time. The half-dead’s bar weighed a lot more than the baton, and its momentum carried it through hard enough to smack her shoulder and leave it tingling and numb. At least she had partially deflected the blow—it had been aimed for her head. The half-dead pressed its ruined face close to hers, its broken teeth glinting in the light of her flashlight. It pushed her back toward the wall, sliding its bar down across her baton, trying to get the weapon free. She smashed at the side of its head with the butt of her pistol, sending long shadows and fragments of light flashing around the walls, lighting up the streaky coal beds that shone like diamond dust. Eventually its grip on the breaker bar let up and the half-dead fell away from her, its skull fractured and its eyes rolling up into their sockets.
She shoved it away in disgust, then grabbed at her shoulder and squeezed. There wasn’t much pain there, which was a bad sign. She was sure if she took the time to look under her sleeve she would see nasty bruises already forming. She didn’t have the time for that. She picked up the breaker bar with her good hand and walked over to where the other half-deads lay. One had its face caved in and wasn’t moving. The other two were whimpering and trying to crawl away.
She smashed in their heads with the bar until they stopped moving.
Her baton was badly crimped in the middle where the bar had struck it. It wouldn’t collapse and she knew if she tried to use it again it might just bend at exactly the wrong moment. She threw it away. She liked the breaker bar for its weight and its pointed end, but it was too heavy and her left arm was barely obeying her commands. She couldn’t really close that hand. Her shoulder might be dislocated, she decided, or even broken. The numbness meant possible nerve damage.
Nothing fatal. She picked up the short-handled pickaxe in her right hand and tested its weight. It would do, she decided. She could carry the pistol—and its all-important flashlight—in her left hand and hope she didn’t drop it. She had to get moving again, had to press on. Maybe she could find another exit from the mine, though she doubted it. Maybe if she moved fast enough she could shake off any pursuit until dawn, still hours away. Maybe she could get lost in the lightless tunnels and eventually die of asphyxiation or thirst.
She pressed on. The corridor started to descend ahead, following the coal seam. The temperature rose as she went down until she felt as if she were walking into a very large oven. She was afraid she knew what that meant. Taking a few precious seconds, she opened the backpack again and pulled out the Nomex suit. She could just get it on and close the Velcro storm flaps with her one and a half working hands. She could not—and didn’t have time for it anyway—get the face mask or the booties on, and when she tried to pull on the gloves she found that they just made her left hand useless, so she left them behind. She moved on, and started to sweat inside the suit instantly. She didn’t regret putting it on, though, because after another hundred yards the light of her flashlight seemed to change color, growing redder with each step. She experimented by flicking it off. A very faint, very dull orange glow filled the mine ahead of her. It lit up the swirling dust that filled the passage and made it sparkle. Another few steps and she started to hear the roaring.
Ahead a wooden sawhorse stood in the middle of the passage. A signal light had been mounted atop it, but the batteries had died years ago. Beyond the sawhorse the corridor was neatly cut across by a fissure in the rock, a nine-foot-wide gap in the floor she couldn’t cross. Black smoke shot through with brilliant orange flecks billowed up from the crack to disappear again through a matching crack in the ceiling.
Her eyebrows curled and singed as she peered over the side, exposing as little of herself as possible. In the momentary glimpse she allowed herself, she looked straight down into the fire that possessed the Centralia mine. Through the smoke she could make out nothing but an orange glow that pulsed and shimmered, popped and spat as the coal down there succumbed to hellish flame.
There was no way she could jump across that gap. Even if she could, she would have been fried in midair as she leapt. The hallway she’d chosen was a dead end.
59.
Caxton had no choice. She backed away from the fissure, the sweat on her face drying instantly to a crusty mask of salt. The Nomex suit protected the rest of her body from the heat, but still she felt sluggish and tired, and her shoulder had started to really hurt.
She wasn’t sure what more she could do. The possibilities that offered themselves up to her were limited in appeal. She could head back toward the main corridor, and if she was lucky enough to get there unmolested she could try to slip down another of the dark galleries. She could find some place in the rib where the rock had parted from the coal seam and maybe made a crack big enough to hide in. She could—
She heard light footfalls coming up the gallery, and instantly she flicked off her light and crouched low along the rib. She could almost see by the orange light that splashed along the ceiling, she could make out the lines of shadows that crept and slouched along the walls—yes. There.
Four of the half-deads were destroyed, she’d made sure of that. The fifth had to be the one she’d hit with her pepper spray. A human being with that much pepper spray in his eyes would still be rolling around on the floor in agony. Maybe, she thought, half-deads were more resistant than humans were. Maybe it was just afraid enough of its master to press on even in the midst of unrelenting, incapacitating pain.
Caxton bent low, and changed her grip on the pickaxe. She was already hurt—her left arm was twitching with pain—and she couldn’t afford another wound, not if she was eventually going to have to face Jameson. She watched the shadows, and listened to the echoes, and timed her attack perfectly. She would swing up and through, and catch the half-dead in its stomach, a blow that would knock it down so she could finish it off safely.
The footfalls came closer. There. She leapt up with a shout and swung.
The pickaxe connected with flesh, and sank deep through muscles and dead, motionless internal organs. The blade of the axe grated on bone deep inside the half-dead’s body and she thought maybe she could kill it with one stroke.
There was only one problem.
It wasn’t a half-dead she’d hit. It was Jameson.
The vampire roared in pain and stared down at his abdomen. The point of the pickaxe had gone right through the waistband of his pants and continued through his flesh, but his sinews and muscles were already knitting themselves back together, his skin growing back over the blade. It was all Caxton could do to tear it free again before the healing wound grabbed the axe right out of her hands.
Jameson stared down at her with glowing eyes. He started to reach for her and she swung again: this time the point went through his vest, right below his trauma plate. Twaron provided very little protection against knives or, say, wooden stakes, the armorer had told her. The axe parted the bullet-resistant fibers easily, and split right through
Jameson’s rib cage. It missed his heart by a few inches.
She yanked the weapon back and staggered backward as fast as she could. Jameson closed the gap effortlessly. She swung a third time—and his mangled, fingerless hand came out of the air and the pickaxe cut right into his palm and passed through. Jameson made a little grunt of annoyance.
She yanked at the axe to free it again, to make another swing, but she couldn’t get it loose. Jameson brought up his good hand and grabbed the shaft away from her. Then he tore the pickaxe out of his own hand. Instead of pulling it out the way it had gone in, he dragged it forward, through bones and muscles and the round stumps of his missing fingers. His hand flopped nervelessly, bisected nearly as far as his wrist. He shook the hand vigorously and when he stopped the wound had healed up completely. Then he turned and threw the pickaxe at the far wall. It clanged deep into a soft coal seam, burying its head so far in that she knew she would never be able to pull it out again.
Then he reached down, picked her up easily, and threw her against the rib.
She went limp in the air and took the pain of the impact across most of her body. If she hadn’t, she would have collided with the rock hard enough to break her spine. She’d been thrown around like this before and she’d learned how to take a fall. Collapsing to the floor like a boneless rag doll, she tensed the muscles in her legs and got ready to roll away when Jameson followed up with an attack.
Of course, he knew she would be expecting that. So instead of attacking, he took a step back.
She scrambled upward—not nearly as fast or as gracefully as she would have liked—and rose, tottering, to her feet. Her breathing mask had skewed around on her face and she reached up to push it back into place. Jameson allowed her to do so.
Her left arm screamed with agony and refused every command she gave it. Her legs still worked. She aimed a vicious roundhouse kick at Jameson’s face, but he pulled his head back at the last moment and grabbed her extended ankle with his good hand. He yanked upward and she collapsed to the floor again. Again, she braced for his attack, and when it didn’t come she carefully, slowly, climbed back up to her feet, bracing herself on the wall.
Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale Page 30