13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale Read online

  There was something about them that made my skin crawl. It took me a long time to realize what it was: The bones in those coffins weren’t dead. They were moving. Just barely, almost imperceptibly, but the bony hands were reaching out. The necks were craning forward. They wanted something. They were desperate for it, desperate enough to strain their dried-up sinews to get at it. As decayed and dilapidated as they might be, these corpses were still undead and still aware of their surroundings. Vampires were supposed to live forever, if they weren’t killed. I guess maybe they didn’t stay young forever, though. Maybe that was too much to ask.

  Lares caught my attention as he started moving around the little space. He looked different. I focused my eyes and saw that the curly hair on top of his head had been a wig—it was gone now, and his head was as white and as round as the moon. Triangular ears poked out on either side. Those weren’t human ears. I was finally seeing what a vampire really looked like. It wasn’t pretty.

  Lares knelt next to one of the coffins, his hands bracing him on the wooden lip. He lowered his head over the body and his back began to shake. One of his laughing eyes kept me pinned the whole time. With a horrible retching sound he vomited a half-pint of blood into the coffin, right over the corpse’s face. He clutched at his sides and heaved again, and again, until the skull was bathed in clotted gore.

  Steam rose from the hot blood in the cold room. Steam wreathed the skull, the rib cage of the corpse. Steam coalesced like watery light around the bones, wrapping the vampire’s remains in illusory flesh and skin. The body plumped out and began to take on something like human form as the blood dripped into the corpse’s mouth.

  Lares moved to the next corpse. He started coughing and blood flecked his lips. Like a mother bird feeding her young, he coughed himself into a spasm until blood dangled in thick ropes from his mouth. Where it touched the corpse, steam rose up and a second transformation began. Skin like old mildewed paper rattled as it stretched around the second corpse’s ruin. Dark skin, crisscrossed with scars. This one had a tattoo on his bicep. It read “SPQR” in jagged, sloppily done letters.

  The pink hue I’d seen in Lares’ cheeks before was gone. He was white as a sheet again. If he was going to feed all of his ancestors, he would need to find another blood donor, and soon.

  I didn’t like my chances.

  He managed to vomit up blood all over a third corpse, just with what he had inside of him. He was throwing up death. The death of the waitress in the diner. The deaths of the SWATs we’d foolishly thought were safe under twenty pounds of crosses. He was throwing up bits of Webster, the good cop, throwing up part of Webster’s body.

  Lares turned to look at me directly. His whole body was shaking. Trembling, even shivering. Feeding his grandparents had taken everything he had. Before he’d fed on the waitress in the diner, had he been this shaky? He tried to meet my gaze, but I refused to let him hypnotize me again.

  I looked down at my right hand. I was still carrying my sidearm. How I could have held onto it through being carried over Lares’ shoulder, through the shock of hitting the river, through being dragged into the boat, was a mystery. The cold must have turned my hand into a solid claw around the weapon.

  Lares lurched toward me. His speed was gone. His coordination was shot. However, he was still a bulletproof vampire.

  I knew it was hopeless. The SWATs had hit him center left with full automatic machine-gun fire, but the bullets had never even pierced his skin. They hadn’t even grazed his heart, his only vulnerable part. I had nothing better to do at that moment, though, than to shoot every last bullet I had.

  I discharged my weapon into his chest. I shot him. Again and again until I was deaf with the noise and blind with the muzzle flash. I had three bullets left in my gun and I put all of them into his chest. The hollow-point rounds tore him open, splatted the boat’s hold with bits and strips of his white, white skin. He tried to laugh, but his voice came out as a weak hiss, air escaping from a punctured tire.

  I saw his rib cage torn open, exposed, flayed. I saw his lungs, slack and lifeless in his chest. He came closer. Closer. Closer. Close enough—I reached out with my left hand and grabbed at the twisted dark muscle that had once been his heart.

  He howled in pain. So did I. His body was already repairing the damage I’d done, his cells knitting back together around the gunshot wounds. His ribs grew back like scissor blades crunching down on the more fragile bones of my wrist, trapping my hand inside of his body. His skin grew back over my arm and pulled at me, pulled me toward him.

  I plucked his heart out like pulling a peach off a tree.

  Lares’ face turned dark with horror, his eyes wild, his mouth flapping open as if he couldn’t control it, blood and spit flying from his chin. His nostrils flared and a stench like an open sewer bellowed up out of every one of his orifices. The heart leaped in my hand, trying to get back where it belonged, but I used the tiny shred of strength left in me to squeeze, to hold on. Lares slapped at me with his hands, but there was no real strength left in his muscles. He dropped to his knees and howled and howled and howled. It started to sound like mewling after a while. He was even losing the strength to scream.

  Still he wouldn’t just die. He was holding on to what strange kind of unlife he had ever possessed, clutching like a junkie at an empty syringe, trying through sheer willpower to not die.

  His eyes met mine and he tried to suck me in. He tried to hypnotize me, to weaken me once more. It didn’t work.

  When he finally stopped moving it was nearly dawn. I held his heart in my clenched fist and it felt like an inert stone. The other vampires, the decayed ones, came slithering out of their coffins, reaching for him, reaching for me. They didn’t understand what had happened. They were blind and deaf and dumb, and all they knew was the taste of blood. I kicked them away and, through the pain, through the shock, managed to get to my feet.

  I found a can of gasoline in the engine room. I found a matchbook in the disused galley of the boat. I set them all on fire and stumbled up and out into the cold rain, pitched headlong onto a narrow wooden dock, and waited for the sun to come up, waited to see if the local police would find me first, or whether hypothermia and my injuries and shock would finish me off.

  4.

  Twenty years later:

  Pennsylvania State Trooper Laura Caxton pulled apart a road flare until red sparks shot across the leather elbow of her uniform jacket. She dropped the sputtering flare on the road and turned around. She’d felt something behind her, a presence, and on this particular night she had reason to be seriously creeped out.

  The man behind her wore a tan trench coat over a black suit. His hair was the color of steel wool, cut short and close to his head. He looked to be in pretty good shape but had to be at least sixty. Maybe seventy. In the flickering light of four in the morning, the creases on his face could have been wrinkles or they could have been scars. His eyes were hooded by deep, pouchy lids, and his mouth was nothing more than a narrow slot in the bottom half of his face.

  “Good evening,” he said, his voice thick and a little hoarse. His face folded up like a gas station road map. He was smiling, the kind of smile you give a child you don’t particularly like. The smile submerged his tiny eyes entirely. “You don’t have a badge on your uniform,” he went on, making it sound like she’d forgotten to wash behind her ears.

  “We don’t wear them,” she told him. This guy was starting to piss her off. “The state policeman’s good conduct is the only badge he needs,” she said, more or less quoting what she’d been taught as a cadet. The black suit and the trench coat gave him away at once—he might as well have had FED written on his back in big white block letters—but she scanned his chest and found his badge, a five-pointed star in a circle. The badge of the U.S. Marshals Service. “The Sergeant said he was going to call the FBI,” she said.

  “And they called me, just like they’re supposed to. I only live a few hours away, and you could say that I’ve
been waiting for this for a very long time. Please, don’t make me wait any longer. When I arrived your sergeant told me to find you. He said you were the last one still here who saw what happened.”

  Caxton nodded. She unstrapped her wide-brimmed trooper’s hat and scratched the top of her head. Fatigue and shock were fighting over which got to make her sit down first. So far she’d beaten both of them back. “I suppose that’s right.” She held out her hand. Maybe her dislike of this man merely stemmed from how much she disliked this night in general.

  He didn’t take her hand. He just stood there as if both of his arms were paralyzed. “My name is Special Deputy Arkeley, if that’s what you wanted. Can we just get on with this and worry about the civilities later?”

  Maybe he was just an asshole. She shrugged and pushed past him, assuming he would probably follow. When she got to the top of the rise she turned around and pointed at the roadblock just in front of the Turnpike on-ramp. The DUI enforcement trailer stood in the middle of the road, abandoned for the time being. Orange lights up on sawhorses stabbed at the dark, their light skittering around the dead tree branches that arched over the road. The strobing light made Caxton’s eye sockets ache. “We’re Troop T. We’re highway patrol for the Turnpike, and that’s all. We were not prepared for this.” He didn’t look like he cared. She went on. “Three fellow officers and I were working a standard sobriety check right here. Nothing special, we do this every Saturday night. It was about fifteen minutes past ten and we had three cars lined up for us. Another car, a late-model black luxury vehicle, stopped about fifty feet short of entering the line. The driver hesitated, then attempted to perform a U-turn. That’s something we see a lot of. People realize they’re going to fail the tests, so they try to evade us. We know how to handle it.”

  He stood there as quiet as a church mouse. He was just listening, his posture said. Absorbing whatever she was going to give him. She went on.

  “Two units, troopers Wright and Leuski, had been at station in their patrol cars there and there.” She pointed to where the cars had been waiting on the shoulders of the road. “They engaged the subject in a classic pincers maneuver and forced him to a stop. At that time he opened the door of his car and rolled out onto the road surface. Before Wright and Leuski could apprehend him, he ran to the west, toward that line of trees.” She pointed again. “The subject evaded arrest, though not before he left some evidence behind.”

  Arkeley nodded. He started walking away from her, toward the subject’s abandoned vehicle. It was a Cadillac, a CTS with a big blocky nose. A little pale mud flecked the running boards, and there was a bad scratch down the driver’s-side door, but otherwise the car was in immaculate condition. It had been left just as it had been abandoned except that its trunk had been opened. Its flashers pulsed mournfully in imitation of the brighter lights up at the roadblock.

  “What did your people do then?” Arkeley asked.

  Caxton closed her eyes and tried to remember the exact series of events. “Leuski went after the subject and found the, well, the evidence. He came back and opened the subject vehicle’s trunk, believing he had enough in the way of exigent circumstance to warrant an intrusive search. When we saw what was inside we realized this wasn’t just some drunk running away so he didn’t have to face the Intoxilyzer. Wright called it in, just like he was supposed to. We’re highway patrol. We don’t handle these kinds of criminal matters; we turn them over to the local police.”

  Arkeley frowned, which fit his face a lot better than his smile. “I don’t see any of them here.”

  Caxton almost blushed. It was embarrassing. “This is a pretty rural area. The cops here work weekdays, mostly. Someone’s always supposed to be on call, but this late at night the system tends to break down. We have a cellular number for the local guy, but he isn’t answering.”

  Arkeley’s face didn’t show any surprise. That was alright. Caxton didn’t have the energy left to make excuses for anybody else.

  “We put in a call to the county authorities, but there was a multi-car pileup near Reading and the sheriff ’s office was tied up. They sent one guy to collect fibers, DNA, and prints, but he left three hours ago. They’ll have more people here by morning, they said, which leaves us standing watch here all night. The Sergeant noticed this.” She indicated the car’s license plate. It was a Maryland tag. “There was clear evidence of an alleged criminal crossing state borders. And it was bad, pretty much bad enough that the Sergeant felt that bringing in the FBI made some sense. Now you’re here.”

  Walking around behind the car, Arkeley ignored her as he studied the contents of the trunk. She expected him to gag or at least wince, but he didn’t. Well, Caxton had met plenty of guys who tried to look tough when they saw carnage. She stepped around to the trunk to stand beside him. “We think there are three people in there. A man and two children, genders unknown. There’s enough left of the man’s left hand to get prints. We might get lucky there.”

  Arkeley kept staring down into the trunk. Maybe he was too shocked to speak. Caxton doubted it. She’d been working highway patrol for three years now and she’d seen plenty of wrecks. Despite the barbarous nature of the murders and despite the fact that the bodies had been shredded and heavily mutilated, she could honestly say she’d seen worse. For one thing, there was no blood in the trunk. Not so much as a drop. It also helped that the faces had been completely obliterated. It made it easier to not think of them as human beings.

  After a while Arkeley looked away. “Alright. This is going to be my case,” he said. Just like that.

  “Now, wait a second—you were brought in as a consultant, that’s all.”

  He ignored her. “Where’s the evidence the subject left behind?”

  “It’s up by the tree line. But goddamn it, tell me what you meant by that. How is this your case?”

  He did stop then. He stopped and gave her that nasty smile that made her feel about six years old. He explained it to her in a voice that made her feel about five. “This is my case because the thing that killed those people in that trunk, the thing that drank their blood, was a vampire. And I’m in charge of vampires.”

  “Come on, be serious. Nobody’s seen a vampire since the eighties. I mean, there was that one they caught in Singapore two years ago, the one they burned at the stake. But that was a long way from here.”

  He might as well not have heard her. He walked up toward the trees then, and she had to rush to catch up. He was about four inches taller than she was and had a longer stride. They pushed a few branches aside and saw that the wild trees grew only a single stand deep, that beyond lay the long perfect rows of a peach orchard, its dormant trees silver and gnarled in the faint moonlight. A wicked-looking five-strand barbed-wire fence stretched across their path. They stopped together when they reached the fence. “There it is,” she said. She didn’t want to look at it. It was a lot worse than what was in the car’s trunk.

  5.

  Arkeley squatted down next to the fence and took a small flashlight out of his pocket. Its beam was impressively bright in the gloom. It traveled the length of the evidence, a human hand and part of a forearm. The skin had been torn right off, leaving exposed bone and tendons and flayed blood vessels like fleshy creepers. At the stump end the blood vessels curled up on themselves while the remaining flesh looked crushed and raw, hacked at with a not-so-sharp knife. The arm was tangled inextricably into the barbed wire. There would be no way to remove it without cutting the fence.

  Caxton had seen lots of bad things. She’d seen decapitations and eviscerations and people whose bodies were turned almost inside out. This was worse. Because it was still moving. The fingers clutched at nothing. The muscles in the forearm tensed and pulled and then fell back, exhausted. It had been doing that for nearly six hours since it was torn off the body of the subject.

  “What does it mean?” Caxton asked. She was tired of fighting and thought Arkeley might actually know. “How does that happen?”

&n
bsp; “When a vampire drinks your blood,” he told her, his voice almost friendly, “his curse gets inside of you. It eats at you, at your corpse. He can make you rise and you do his bidding because he’s all that’s left in your heart and your brain. You live for him. You serve him. The curse burns inside of you and makes you an unclean thing. Your body starts to decay faster than it should. Your skin peels off like a cast-aside shroud. Your soul curdles. We call them half-deads. In Europe they used to be called the Faceless.”

  “This guy was a vampire’s slave?” Caxton asked. “I’ve heard about vampires having slaves, but I didn’t know you could cut their arms off and they would keep moving. They don’t talk about that in the movies.”

  “He was disposing of his master’s victims. That’s why he didn’t want to be stopped. He was heading out to the woods to bury the bodies in shallow graves. Shallow enough, maybe, that when they came back to life they would be able to claw their way out and rise to serve their new master. We need to cremate the corpses.”

  “The families might not like that. Especially since we don’t know who they are.” Caxton shook her head. “Maybe we can post a guard down at the morgue or something.”

  “I’ll take care of the paperwork.” Arkeley took a Leather-man multitool out of his breast pocket and snipped at the barbed wire with a tiny bolt-cutter. Soon enough he had the flayed arm free. He clutched it to his chest, where the fingers tried to grasp at his buttons. They were too weak to get a good grip.

  “I assume you’re going to take that thing without even giving me a receipt,” she said as he stood up, cradling the arm like a pet. “I could shoot you for interfering with an official investigation. You’re supposed to be a consultant!”