Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  REXROTH

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  RALEIGH

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  SIMON

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  JAMESON

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by David Wellington: 13 Bullets and 99 Coffins

  Also by David Wellington

  Copyright

  For my parents

  1.

  A crystalline sweep of snow flashed across the road as her headlights gouged white tracks through the darkness. It wasn’t far to Mechanicsburg, to the address the special subjects unit dispatcher had given her. In the middle of the night there was no traffic, just white lines in the road to follow. She arrived still partially asleep, but that changed the instant she popped the door and stepped out into the freezing winter air.

  It was just past Thanksgiving. Arkeley had been underground for two months and she’d been chasing him night and day, but maybe this was where that trail ended. Where her guilt, and her duty, ended. Maybe.

  “Support’s on the way, ETA ten. In thirty we can have this place buttoned up,” Glauer debriefed her, not even bothering with hello. He was a big guy, a head taller than her and far broader, and the epitome of a Pennsylvania police officer—bad haircut, thick but not bushy mustache, pasty white except where the sun got his ears and his neck. He wore the uniform of a Pennsylvania state trooper—the same as Caxton. Once he’d been just a local cop, one who’d never even visited a murder scene. He’d seen a lot of terrible things since he met Laura Caxton, but now at least he’d reached a higher pay grade. After the massacre in Gettysburg—his hometown—she had him assigned directly to her SSU. He was a good man, and a great cop, but he still had visible fear lines etched into the crinkles around his eyes. “I figured maybe we could wait this one out.”

  “That’s not how it works,” she told him. She followed him as he strung up caution tape around the entrance to the self-storage facility. He had a patrol rifle on a strap over his shoulder. “He taught me that.”

  “He taught you to go running into an obvious trap?”

  She tried to peer in through the glass doors of the storage center’s lobby, but she couldn’t see anything from the street. Glauer had already checked the place out and reported two bodies—dead, of course, very dead—but she needed to see for herself. She needed to see how far down Arkeley had fallen. “Yes,” she said.

  The lobby was a glaring space of white light in the night, all plaster and scuffed drywall. She could see a counter inside where the night watchman should have been sitting, a white countertop marred with dripping red splotches.

  “I’m going to have to go in there,” she said. “How many exits does this building have?”

  Glauer cleared his throat noisily. “Two. This one in front and a fire exit in the back. The one in the back has an alarm, but I haven’t heard any bells ringing so far.”

  “Of course not. He’s waiting for me inside. He won’t wait forever, though. If we sit tight until the reinforcements arrive, he’ll come out that door so fast you’ll never get a bead on him.” She tried to give him an ingratiating smile, but he wasn’t buying it. Instead he turned away and spat on the frozen pavement.

  She understood his reluctance. This was a bad situation, a real death trap. Not that she had any choice in the matter. She slumped a little inside her heavy coat. “Glauer, this is the best lead we’ve had. I can’t let it go.”

  “Sure.” He finished up with the caution tape, then jogged around the side of the building without waiting for further orders. He knew exactly what to do. Stand by the fire exit and keep his eyes open. Blast anything that came through.

  His concern—and the careful way he let it show—meant something to her. It really did. But not enough to stop her. She pushed through the glass doors and walked into the lobby, her Beretta already in her hand but with the safety still on, one more thing Arkeley had taught her. She approached the desk as if she wanted to rent a storage locker, then leaned over it to look at the floor behind the counter.

  The carpet there was slick with coagulating blood. There were two bodies behind the counter, as advertised. One wore a uniform shirt and sat slumped forward over a security monitor, his neck torn open in a wide red gash. The other wore a janitor’s coveralls and his open eyes stared up at the acoustic ceiling tiles. His right arm was missing.

  She backed up a step, then turned to look at the elevator bank at the left side of the lobby. One of the elevators stood partially open, the door kept from closing by something wedged in the jamb. She bent down and saw exactly what she expected. It was the janitor’s missing arm that held the door, the fingers pointed inward like a sign telling her where to go next.

  That kind of thing passed for a joke among vampires. She’d learned not to let their sick humor get to her. She picked up the arm—she had no worries about ruining fingerprints, since vampires lacked them—and placed it as reverently as she could to one side. Then she stepped into the elevator and let the door close behind her.

  Someone had already pushed the button for the third floor.

  Exactly twenty-seven minutes earlier, according to Caxton’s watch, someone had placed a call to the SSU’s tip line. That wasn’t so uncommon. Ever since the massacre at Gettysburg people were seeing vampires in their back gardens and going through their Dumpsters and loitering outside of shopping malls all the time. Caxton and Glauer had run down every one of those leads and found nothing worthy of note. This call had been different, however. She’d heard a recording of the call and it had made her skin creep. The caller’s voice had been inhuman, a rough growl, the words slurred as they were drooled out through a mouth full of vicious teeth. The caller hadn’t wasted any time, instead just reeling off a street address in Mechanicsburg and announcing, “Tell Laura Caxton I’m waiting for her there. I’ll wait until she comes.”

  A trap, an obvious trap. Arkeley had loved it when the vampires would set traps—because then you actually knew where they were. The vampires loved traps because they were predators, and often lazy, and they loved it when their
victims came to them. Now Arkeley was one of them, but she had somehow expected more of him.

  The arm in the elevator door wasn’t his style either. But that didn’t mean anything. It had been two months since he’d changed, since he’d accepted the curse. He’d done it for all the right reasons, of course. He’d believed it was the only way to save Caxton’s life. He’d probably been right about that, as he was with most things.

  There had been only one flaw in his reasoning. When a human being dies and returns as a vampire, he loses some of his humanity. With every night that passes he loses a little more. Arkeley had been a passionate crusader once, a killer of monsters. Now every time he crawled into his coffin a little less of him crawled out. In the end every vampire became the same creature. A junkie for blood. A sociopath with a sadistic streak. A pure and ruthless killer.

  A bell chimed inside the elevator door and then the door slid open.

  She stepped out onto the third floor with her handgun at the level of her shoulders, clutched in both hands. She kept her ears and her eyes open and she tried to be ready for anything. She tried to be ready to see him, to see Arkeley, and to be ready to shoot on sight.

  Arkeley had never thought of himself as her mentor. She’d been useful to him in a very limited way and so he’d requisitioned her as a partner. Sometimes he’d used her to do his legwork, the way she used Glauer now. More often Arkeley had used her as bait. She’d had to learn not to take that personally—he hadn’t meant it to be personal. He was driven, obsessed, and he had found her useful. By letting him use her she had learned so much. Everything she knew about vampires had come from him, either from grudging answers to her incessant questions or by way of his example. She had worried often enough when he was alive—and far more often since he’d died and come back—that there were things he’d never bothered to tell her. Secrets he’d kept for himself.

  Time to find out, she guessed.

  A long corridor stretched out before her, metal walls painted a glaring white, studded with countless locker doors. Some were the size of closets and some were wide enough to drive a car into. She looked at their latches. Every door she saw had a hefty padlock, some of them combination locks with purple or yellow dials, others that required keys to open. Was Arkeley inside one of these lockers? she wondered. Was it his lair? Maybe he hung from the ceiling by his feet like a giant bat.

  The thought almost made her smile. Vampires and bats had nothing in common. Bats were animals, normal, natural organisms that deserved a lot more respect than they got. Vampires were…monsters. Nothing else.

  She studied the doors, looking for one that didn’t have a lock. Even a vampire couldn’t lock himself into a storage space from the inside. She looked down the row of doors, all the way to the end where another corridor crossed laterally. She counted off the locks in her head—lock, lock, lock. Lock. Another lock. Then—there. Near the far end, one narrow door had no lock on its latch.

  It probably wouldn’t be that easy. Still, she had to check. She moved slowly down the hall, her back to one wall, her weapon up and ready. Her shoes clicked on the unfinished cement floor, a noise anybody could have followed. When she reached the unlocked door she stood to one side and slid the latch open with her left hand. The door rattled noisily and then opened on creaky hinges. Nothing jumped out.

  She pivoted on her heel until she was facing the locker. She slipped off her pistol’s safety lever. She glanced inside—and saw immediately that it was empty. There had been no lock because no one had rented this particular locker, that was all.

  Caxton let herself exhale. Then she froze in midbreath as raucous laughter ran up and down the hallway, echoing off the row of doors and making them all shake on their hinges. She swung around quickly, unable to tell which direction the laughter came from, and—

  At the end of the hall, back by the elevators, a pale figure stood in the shadow between two light fixtures. It was tall and its head was round and hairless and flanked by long triangular ears. Its mouth was full of long and nasty teeth, row after row of them. Her heart stopped—then started up again twice as fast when she saw the vampire held a shotgun.

  2.

  Caxton’s brain reeled, leaving her unable to react for a critical second. Vampires didn’t carry guns. Ever. They didn’t need them—at Gettysburg she had seen a single vampire mow down squads of National Guardsmen carrying assault rifles. Their claws and especially their teeth were all the weapons they ever needed.

  The Beretta in her hand forgotten, Caxton could only stare at the shotgun as the vampire brought it up and pointed it in her direction. She barely managed to duck as his white finger closed around the trigger.

  Somehow she recovered her wits enough to roll to the side, behind the open door of the empty storage locker. Buckshot pranged off the door and dug hundreds of long tracks through the white paint on the walls. When her hearing recovered from the noise of the shot she heard his bare feet slapping on the cement floor, running toward her, as she ducked into the locker and closed the door shut behind her.

  Stupid, she thought—she’d done something very stupid. There was no way out of the locker, and no way to lock the door from inside. The door itself would be little barrier to a vampire, especially one that had already fed on the two men down in the lobby. Vampires were strong enough at any time, and close to bulletproof, but they grew exponentially tougher after they drank blood.

  She backed up, feeling behind her with one hand until she found the back of the unit, and raised her pistol in front of her. When he tore the door open to get at her she might have one chance—she could fire blindly through the door and hope that somehow she hit him squarely in the heart, his only vulnerable part. If she shot him anywhere else his wounds would heal almost instantly. All the bullets in her gun wouldn’t even slow him down.

  She pointed the nose of the pistol at the door. She aimed for a spot at the level of her own heart, then raised her aim about six inches. Arkeley was taller than her, she remembered. Arkeley—

  The image of the vampire in the hallway was seared into her mind’s eye. She couldn’t not see it standing there, leveling the shotgun at her. Holding the shotgun with both hands.

  Vampires healed all wounds they took after their rebirth, but any old injuries left over from their human lives lasted forever. Arkeley the vampire would still be missing all the fingers from one hand. This vampire had ten fingers, all the better to hold a shotgun with. Crap, she thought.

  It’s not him.

  It wasn’t Arkeley. She hadn’t been able to process that fact while he was shooting at her, but as she waited for him to come and kill her she couldn’t deny it anymore. Whoever the vampire might have been, whatever he had become, he wasn’t her former mentor.

  Which made things much worse.

  There was only one way for a vampire to reproduce, and it involved direct eye contact. There were only two vampires at large in the world who could pass on the curse—Arkeley, and Justinia Malvern, a decrepit old corpse that Arkeley kept close to him at all times. If the two of them were creating new vampires, if Arkeley had become a Vampire Zero—

  The door rattled in front of her. She steeled herself, adjusted her grip on the Beretta. She would shoot in just a second, when she thought her chances were best. She would let him start to tear the door open first.

  The door rattled again. She heard a metallic click and knew instantly what had happened. The vampire wasn’t going to tear open the door at all. Instead he’d closed the latch with a padlock, sealing her inside. He must have had one in his pocket, just for this eventuality.

  Whoever he was, he was smart. Smarter than she, apparently. She cursed herself. You never ran into a place with only one exit—that was one more thing Arkeley had taught her. She should have remembered.

  “Who are you?” she shouted. “Don’t you want to kill me?”

  She didn’t really expect him to respond, and he didn’t. She listened closely as her voice echoed around the metal walls
of the locker, listening for any sign that he might be standing directly outside the door. She heard nothing.

  Then, a moment later, she heard his feet slapping on the floor. Moving away.

  “Damn it,” she breathed. Was he running away? Maybe her backup had arrived and he was fleeing the scene. She couldn’t let that happen—she couldn’t let another vampire get away. Every one of them out there meant more sleepless nights, more searching. She had always pitied Arkeley for the way his hopeless crusade had devoured his life—he had spent more than twenty years trying to drive vampires to extinction, only to fail utterly at the last minute. She was beginning to understand what had pushed him so hard, though. She was beginning to understand that sometimes you had no choice, that events could drive you regardless of what you wanted. If she could get this guy, and Arkeley, and Malvern—all the vampires she believed to exist—if she could get them all she could stop. Until then she could only keep fighting.

  There had to be something she could do. She looked at the walls around her, but they were made of reinforced sheet metal. She would never be able to kick her way through them. The door was fitted neatly into its frame. There was no way she could pry it open, no way to get her fingers around its edge and pull.

  Then she looked up.

  The lockers didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling—there was a foot and a half of open space up there. The ceiling of the locker was nothing more than a thin sheet of chicken wire. The wire was higher up than she could reach, but maybe—maybe—she could jump up and grab it.

  Shoving her Beretta in her holster—safety on, of course—she rubbed her hands together, then made a tentative leap. Her fingertips brushed the wire, but she couldn’t get a grip. She tried again and missed it altogether. Third time’s the charm, she promised herself, and bent deep from the knees.

  The fingers of her left hand slipped through the wire. She closed her fist instantly as she fell back—and pulled the wire back down with her. The wire tore the skin of her fingers until they were slick with blood, and the noise was deafening as the wire shrieked and tore under her weight, but she was left with a hole directly above her that she could probably wriggle through. She grabbed the dangling wire with her other hand and started to pull herself up, a handful at a time. It felt like her fingers were being cut to ribbons, but she had no choice—she needed to get out.