99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale
Page 29
Alva Griest and his dead compatriots shall never wake, until the final Trump, and that is a blessing on us all. The world need never know what I did, though God saw. He alone shall be my judge.
—THE PAPERS OF WILLIAM PITTENGER
99.
Dawn came up and found her sitting outside the town hall, alone. Half an hour later the National Guard arrived, hundreds of men and women in full combat gear, trucks, helicopters. Even a small tank tied down on a flatbed trailer.
They brought plenty of medical personnel and equipment. They erected a field hospital in Lincoln Square with beds for two dozen patients. One by one the patients showed up, men with patrol rifles slung across their backs and sheepish looks on their faces. Some of them had gone to ground when the plan fell apart. Some had locked themselves in supply closets or public restrooms and waited out the night. Others had just gotten separated from the main group and had wandered out onto the battlefield, looking for vampires to fight and finding only ghosts. She counted twenty-three survivors—nearly a third of the men she’d brought to the fight. It wasn’t the kind of number that would help her sleep, but it was honestly more than she’d expected.
Every one of the twenty-three was injured. Most of them had lost blood. All of them had lacerations and contusions to treat. By midmorning most of them were cleared to go home. Then the dead started to arrive. Guardsmen carrying stretchers brought them up from the charnel pits of the Cyclorama and the visitor center, from the bloody patch of earth where the battle had begun. There were far too many of them for the field hospital’s limited beds.
By that time Caxton was the only patient still being treated. She was going to have her arm in a sling for a while, they told her, and she would need orthopedic surgery on her shoulder. There would be all kinds of drugs to take and physical therapy they promised her she would hate. But she would live.
Once she’d heard that, she got up and walked right out of the tent. There were a lot of things she still needed to do.
Teams of guardsmen combed the town looking for evidence. When they found some they brought it to her. By noon she had counted seventy-nine hearts, matched up with seventy-nine skeletons. The hearts looked charred or smashed or cut in half by rifle fire. She had each one put in a heavy-duty biohazard bag, which she planned to throw into an incinerator herself. She planned to watch each one burn until it was nothing but ash. Skeletons were notorious for not burning completely, so the bones went into a wood chipper. It was grisly work, but she did most of it herself, feeding femur after pelvis after phalange into the machine until dry yellow dust coated the legs of her pants. Someone was kind enough to give her a surgical mask and safety goggles.
She wanted to sleep. She wanted to see Clara. She wanted a lot of things she was not going to get until she had accounted for exactly one hundred hearts and one hundred skeletons.
Occasionally someone would call her cell phone. The Commissioner of the state police called and congratulated her on her amazing success. She wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He said her job in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation was secure, that he should never have doubted her. She thanked him and hung up.
Most of the calls she screened out. She felt she needed to answer when the governor called, though she kept the call short and told him she’d write up an official report for him. When Clara called she just said she would be home soon.
About four o’clock in the afternoon two guardsmen came toward her carrying a stretcher that didn’t have any bones on it. Instead there was a man, a living human, lying on the canvas. She frowned, annoyed at this interruption, until she realized it was Glauer. He looked pale and his face was streaked with dirt, but he was alive.
“I don’t know what happened—I don’t remember much,” he told her. “I woke up lying on somebody’s desk, bleeding all over their paperwork.”
She smiled then, though she didn’t have the strength to laugh. “I’m glad you made it,” she said. “You were a big help back there.”
“Listen,” he said, reaching out one weak hand to grab her good arm. “I know this looks pretty grim right now. But you saved my town. You saved seventy-five hundred people. Can I buy you a beer?”
Another smile. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow. I have to wait here until nightfall, at least.”
She could see the doors of the town hall from where she stood. Arkeley hadn’t come back, even though she’d waited until the sun rose. She promised herself that he was just caught out by the sun, that he had been unable to make it back in time.
She knew she was wrong.
All vampires are the same, he had taught her. They could start out as noble and compassionate people or total scumbags. Once they got their first taste of blood it didn’t matter—it made them wrong. Unnatural. Once they tasted blood they wanted to live, just to get some more. They wanted to live forever.
The sun set at seven o’clock that night. She had destroyed exactly one hundred hearts by that time. She’d found them all, just as she’d known she would. Arkeley had always been thorough. When the last pink light of dusk left the sky over Gettysburg, she was waiting by the town hall doors once again, her Beretta reloaded and in her hand. If he didn’t show up she would have to hunt him down. She figured she would give him one more night before she got started.
Acknowledgments
John Geistdoerfer is a real person, who does like vampires, but not overly much. His generosity earned him a place in this book, and his good humor earned him a very weird place in it. “Have fun with it,” he said, and so I did.
I spent a lot of time doing research for the portions of this novel set during the Civil War. A lot of people helped with that, answering my questions and keeping me honest. The staff and the reenactors at the Gettysburg National Military Park were extremely generous with their time and their knowledge. So too was Craig Young, who compiled a detailed account of what the Third Maine Volunteer Infantry did, where they slept, and what equipment they had for every day of the war. His work was of inestimable help in creating the timeline for my story.
Thanks also must go to Carrie Thornton, Jay Sones, and so many others at Three Rivers Press who helped make this book possible.
My wife, Elisabeth, showed me unwavering support during the writing process and deserves a lot more gratitude than I can express here.
About the Author
DAVID WELLINGTON was born in the South Hills of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1971. He attended Syracuse University, Penn State University, and the Pratt Institute. In 2003, he established the website www.monsternovel.com, where he began serializing novels online. Mr. Wellington currently lives in Manhattan with his wife, Elisabeth, and his dog, Mary.
ALSO BY DAVID WELLINGTON
The official reports say they’re dead—but the evidence proves otherwise
IT’S BEEN YEARS since any signs of an attack, but a Fed named Arkeley knows what most people don’t: there is one left. When a state trooper named Caxton calls the FBI looking for help in the middle of the night, it is Arkeley who gets the assignment—who else? Now there are only 13 bullets between Caxton and Arkeley and the vampires. There are only 13 bullets between us, the living, and them, the damned.
13 BULLETS • $13.95 paper (Canada: $17.95) • 978-0-307-38143-9
Available from Three Rivers Press wherever books are sold.
www.crownpublishing.com
ALSO BY DAVID WELLINGTON
Monster Island
Monster Nation
Monster Planet
13 Bullets
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by David Wellington
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, I
nc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wellington, David.
99 coffins : a historical vampire tale / David Wellington.—1st ed.
1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Fiction. 3. Pennsylvania—Fiction. 4. Gettysburg National Military Park (Pa.)—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Ninety-nine coffins.
PS3623.E468A616 2007
813'.6—dc22 2007027621
eISBN: 978-0-307-40693-4
v3.0