13 Bullets Read online

  The vampire’s mouth drew back in a kind of sneer. Then a long gray tongue snaked out between all those teeth and started lapping hungrily at the blood in the beaker, licking long black streaks up the side. It was gone in mere seconds.

  9.

  “I t will start with palsy. Uncontrollable shaking. Then she ’ll begin losing tissue mass. The skin will peel back from her hands and then the muscles will rot. They’ll become lifeless claws. Her legs will atrophy even more quickly and become nothing but dead stumps. In time her eye will dry up and collapse.”

  Hazlitt sat on top of an antique electrocardiogram machine, its pens splayed outward, and puffed occasionally on a cigarette that mostly sat ignored between two fingers. “Maybe, eventually, she’ll die. We don’t know.”

  “If it keeps her from making more vampires I don’t care,” Arkeley said. “Is there a real reason why we’re bothering with this?” he asked.

  In the center of the room, near the coffin, Justinia Malvern sat in her wheelchair, the empty blood beaker clutched in one near-lifeless hand. Her other hand rested on the keyboard of a laptop computer perched on top of the coffin.

  “You know she can’t speak. Her larynx rotted away years ago. This is the only way she can express herself.” Hazlitt rubbed the bridge of his nose with one thumb. He smiled at his charge as she worked up the strength to peck at one of the keys with a talonlike finger. “You should be more patient, Arkeley,” the doctor said. “You might learn something from someone so old and wise.” When she had finished, she folded her hands in her lap and looked up at them, her face quivering with emotion. Hazlitt turned the laptop around so they could see the screen. In thirty-six-point italic letters Malvern had spelled out:

  my Brood shall Devouer ye utterly

  Arkeley chuckled. Then he stood up and started walking out of the room. “I’ll be back to check on you both,” he told Hazlitt. “Frequently.” Caxton followed him out.

  In the white light of the hallway Caxton blinked and rubbed at her eyes. She followed Arkeley’s footsteps around to a desk in the hub of the building where a corrections officer with a sergeant’s bars sat watching a portable television, a sitcom maybe. The reception was so bad that the laugh track was indistinguishable from static.

  “What can I do you for, Mr. Marshal?” The CO slowly took his feet down from the desk and picked up the keyboard of his computer.

  “Good evening, Tucker. I need some information on the staff here. More specifically I need to know the name and current address of everyone who worked here in, say, the last two years. I need to know if they still work here and if not, why they left. Can you get me that information?”

  “Not a problem.” Tucker fiddled with his mouse for a while and hit a key. Down the hall a laser printer rattled out three sheets of paper.

  Arkeley smiled, an altogether warmer and more human smile than he’d ever given Caxton. “You have to love this modern world. It used to take days to get a report like that. Listen, Tucker, what’s the turnover here?”

  The guard shrugged. “Shit, it gets creepy at night. Some people can’t take it. Others, like me, we’ve got balls enough to stick around. I’d say half of the faces I see come through here don’t last a week. Maybe ten guys in the last year. Then there’s cleaning, maintenance, construction crews, safety inspectors, whatever. They come through here so fast they never introduce themselves.”

  Arkeley nodded. “I was afraid of that.” He turned to Caxton. “Any of those people could have had contact with Malvern.”

  “Which means any of them could be our vampire now,” Caxton responded.

  Arkeley nodded. She’d gotten something right. She felt embarrassed and vindicated at the same time. Arkeley grabbed the sheets of paper off the printer and jogged back to where she waited. “Hazlitt is supposed to keep her in isolation, but you saw him. He’ll do whatever she asks.” Arkeley shook his head in disgust. “Every doctor we bring in here falls in love with her.”

  “Does she hypnotize them?” Caxton remembered that part of the report.

  “She has far more to offer them than just her piercing gaze,” Arkeley replied, scanning the sheets.

  “So why not drag him out of here right now, have him replaced?” Caxton demanded. “You have some funny ideas about police work.”

  Arkeley nodded, accepting what she said. “Listen,” he told her, “if somebody wants to be your enemy, there’s only one thing you can do. You give them exactly what they want. It confuses them and makes them wonder what you’re up to. If I fired Hazlitt tonight he would start thinking about ways of breaking Malvern out of here. If I let him keep her company at least I know where to find them both.” He shook his papers. “Alright. Now we go home and get some rest. In the morning we’ll start running down these names. It’s always better to hunt for vampires by daylight.”

  Caxton could understand the good sense in that. They headed back out to the parking lot, where dew had collected on the hood of the car and fogged up the windows. Caxton got the car started and drove back out toward the nearest highway, Route 322, which would take them most of the way back to Harrisburg.

  She turned up the heater, trying to dispel the chill of the night air. It was hard to get warm after the things she’d seen and been exposed to in the previous two days. The cold seemed to have seeped into her flesh. It made her bones hurt. She wanted to turn on the radio but didn’t dare—what if Arkeley disapproved of her taste in music? It wouldn’t be worth the fight, or what it might do to her self-esteem. She got it, really: she was just a highway patrol trooper, he was some kind of big-time Fed. She was willing to bow to his experience, to treat him with respect. Yet whenever he chastised her she felt as if she were a complete failure. She needed to grow a thicker skin, at least when she was around Arkeley.

  She was surprised, so deep in these thoughts as she was, when he was the one to break the silence. She was almost shocked when he commended her. “You asked some excellent questions back there,” he said. “With some training you might make an adequate detective some day.” She had imagined, in her private thoughts, that when he said such a thing (presumably after he found her standing over a heap of dead vampires) he would sound a little sheepish, as if he should have seen the potential in her all along but had been blinded by his own arrogance. Instead he sounded like he always had—like an elementary school teacher handing out report cards. But this one had a B-plus on it. She would take what she could get.

  “I need to learn about these monsters,” she said, “if I’m going to be any help to you. And I want to be a help to you.”

  “You will, one way or another. And I’ll help you, too. No matter what happens, this is going to be a big case. When I went up against Lares it meant a big step up in my career,” he told her. “You will no doubt be promoted if we can stop this thing from killing too many people.”

  She shook her head. She hadn’t really thought about that. “I didn’t become a trooper to get sergeant’s bars. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t mind a raise in pay grade. I’m in this car, though, because I believe in what I do. When we graduate from the academy, they make us say the honor call. They make us say it a lot, until we start believing it. ‘I am a Pennsylvania state trooper. I am a soldier of the law. To me is entrusted the honor of the force.’ They used to really mean that bit about being soldiers. Troopers weren’t allowed to marry and they lived together in barracks, just like soldiers. They didn’t let women join until the seventies.”

  Arkeley was quiet for a while. When he spoke again he sounded almost pensive. “It must not have been easy for you to enter such a conservative organization. I imagine there would be some resistance to women being in your position, even now.”

  “Wow, you’re preaching to the choir,” she laughed.

  “In fact you’ve probably faced some direct adversity yourself. A woman doing a man’s job—there would have been talk. Idle talk, in the locker room, perhaps.”

  “Sure. A lot of the guys like to mouth
off,” she said.

  “They would have made you a figure of fun. They would have names for you. Hurtful names, though perhaps accurate.”

  Caxton started to blush. She wasn’t sure where he was going with that line of inquiry. “Yes, they call me names. They call everybody something, so—”

  “They probably make a good deal out of your lesbianism.”

  Her lips pressed together and she heard a roaring in her ears. She watched the other cars passing them in the left lane. She was driving too fast and she made herself ease up on the gas.

  “You are a lesbian, aren’t you? I made the assumption based simply on your haircut,” Arkeley told her. “I could be wrong.”

  She shifted in her seat and glared at him. “Yes, I’m gay!” she shouted. She couldn’t seem to control her voice. “Which means what to you? I don’t care if you know. I don’t care who knows. I’m proud of who I am. But that doesn’t give you a right to—to—it should mean nothing. It has nothing to do with this fucking case!”

  “Quite true,” he agreed, looking completely unruffled.

  “Then why would you say something like that to somebody? Goddamn it, Arkeley!”

  He cleared his throat. “I took the time to play this little game with you because I need to train you out of the habit of bullshitting me, Trooper. You may talk about being a soldier of the law all you like. You may say you want to help me. It’s completely immaterial. You’re in this car for only one reason.”

  A metallic blue Honda shot past them going at least ninety and stopped him from finishing his thought. The unmarked patrol car rocked on its shocks with the near collision and Caxton slapped her horn. The Honda slowed down just enough to pull right in front of them, dangerously close.

  “What the hell?” she demanded, and hit the horn again. She took her foot off the gas completely and went for the brake.

  Another car, a Chevrolet Cavalier that desperately needed a wash, came up on her left. It matched her speed. As she tried to slow down, the Chevy’s driver copied her. In the rearview mirror she saw a third car coming up from behind. They were boxing her in. She glanced across at the driver of the Chevy just as he looked at her. His face was torn to ribbons.

  10.

  “T hey’re following me—they were at my house and now they’re following me,” Caxton said. In the rearview she saw her half-dead pursuer drift ever closer toward the bumper of her patrol car.

  “I doubt it,” Arkeley told her. “Hold on.” The car behind them—a Hummer H2—smashed into them and the patrol car shrieked as metal tore into metal. The half-dead back there wasn’t trying to make them crash. Caxton had enough experience with police pursuits to understand. The driver behind her was showing her the limits of the box. She sped up a little, keeping just inches away from the car boxing them in from the front, and whirled around in her seat to keep all three assailants in sight.

  “They’re not here for me?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t think so.” Arkeley took his weapon from its holster. “When I took down Lares he was feeding his ancestors. He brought them blood. I did some more research and I found others who’d seen similar behavior. Vampires lust for blood, but they worship the creatures who gave them the curse. When I threatened Malvern back in the hospital I brought this on us. Roll down your window and lean back.”

  She did as he asked only a moment before he lurched across her body and fired two shots into the Chevy on her left. The half-dead driver threw his hands across his face, but they exploded in clouds of bone fragments and withered flesh. His head cracked and pulled apart, and the car spun off the road and smacked into a tree. Caxton watched in her rearview as the Chevy’s headlights swiveled out crazily, pointing in different directions, a moment before they went dark.

  From behind the Hummer H2 rammed them again. The half-deads were not pleased. Caxton grabbed the steering wheel so hard she felt it in her shoulders. “Okay, my turn,” she said. She spun the wheel and stamped on the gas. The patrol car shot forward and smacked into the rear right wheel of the Honda in front of them. The tire slipped on the pavement and the car spun out to the left, letting Caxton surge forward and around the out-of-control vehicle. Like everyone in the highway patrol, she’d had three days’ training in pursuit evasion tactics. As they sped into the darkness ahead, finally free of the box, she turned to grin at Arkeley, truly pleased with herself. “Do you know how to use the car radio?” she asked him, gesturing at the dashboard set with her chin. “Go ahead and call Troop H dispatch. We need every available unit.”

  Arkeley stared at her. “You little idiot,” he breathed. She didn’t look at him, just focused on keeping control of the car. She was doing better than ninety on a road rated for sixty at the most. “If we had let them, they would have taken us right to their master.”

  “To the vampire,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “But you shot that guy!” she protested.

  “I had to make it look like we weren’t just playing along.”

  Caxton gritted her teeth and glanced in her mirrors. The Hummer H2 was still back there, laboring to keep pace with her. She eased off the gas a hair—not enough to make him think she was letting him catch up. The Honda was still trying to get turned around after its sudden stop. A green traffic sign flashed by. “The exit for New Holland is coming up. Do I take it or not?”

  “We’ll have to try to guess from their behavior which way they want us to go.” Arkeley bit off the words and spat them out. He was holding on to the door handle with one hand while the other held his weapon up, barrel pointed up. If the bouncing, jostling car made him fire by accident the bullet would exit the car as quickly as possible through the roof. “If he starts to weave to the left—”

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Two motorcycles came screaming up the on-ramp behind them and rumbled quickly up behind the patrol car. The riders weren’t wearing helmets, but then they didn’t have faces, either. One of the half-dead riders pulled up on the right of Caxton, forcing her into the left lane, away from the New Holland exit. At least that answered her question. The other motorcyclist gunned his engine with a sustained explosive noise and pulled up next to her left front wheel.

  The motorcycles weren’t much of a threat on their own—she could ram them off the road with one swivel of her wheel. The rider on her right, though, had a big rusty hunk of metal in his hand, a cleaver, at least eighteen inches long. He brought it back with a straight arm and swung it right into the side of the car. There was more noise than damage to the car’s body, but her right-side headlight flickered out in a shower of sparks and she was half blind, hurtling through the Stygian woods at eighty-five miles an hour. Reflexively, even as he was pulling his cleaver free, she swerved to the left to get away from him. The biker on that side swung out wide and narrowly missed getting clipped by her left front wheel. Glass and bits of metal smacked and skittered and danced across the windshield as the patrol car rocked up and down on its shock absorbers and the wheels slipped away from her.

  Caxton struggled to regain control of the car. Her remaining headlight washed the road surface from left to right as the car sagged on its tires, but she was good at this. She’d had years of practice driving under hazardous conditions, and she didn’t panic. She straightened out the car and poured on a little more speed. Maybe the Hummer would have trouble keeping up, but she figured the bikers knew where they were taking her.

  “Are you sure they’re not trying to kill us?” Caxton demanded.

  “Ninety percent so,” Arkeley replied. “Normally half-deads herd victims to the master. After all, if we die out here the vampire can’t drink our blood. Then again, if they think I’m enough of a threat they may not want to take any chances.”

  “You’re a known vampire killer,” Caxton said. “If I were them I’d consider you a pretty serious threat. Can we just call for some damned backup?”

  He nodded. He didn’t waste time suggesting that maybe she was right for once a
nd maybe he was wrong. He picked up the radio handset and called it in, just like he should have ten minutes earlier. Dispatch from Troop H started calling in cars.

  Then an orange sign flashed by them so fast she could barely see it, its phosphorescent paint glowing eerily in the near-total darkness. She didn’t have a chance to read it, but she knew what the color meant: road work ahead.

  She took her foot off the gas. The Hummer behind her grew bigger in her rearview, but she tried not to sweat it. She had no idea what was coming—anything from a lane shift to a complete road closure. She could feel panic rising in her chest.

  The biker on her left had a monkey wrench. He started to draw back his arm, clearly intending to smash in her remaining headlight. There were no streetlamps on this stretch of highway—this was a rural route where people were expected to bring their own lights. If he smashed her lamp she was going to be blind.

  With a desperation she’d never felt before, she rolled the wheel over and slammed right into him. The bike twisted under the impact, its front wheel flying up. The biker, pinned against the side of the patrol car, shot out his hands and tried to grab onto her door, but his skinless fingers scrabbled uselessly on the slick metal and glass. He disappeared from view, there one second, far behind her in the dark the next. His motorcycle spun on the asphalt, kicking up sparks.

  She stood on the brake and the Hummer swerved to avoid hitting her. The other biker passed her by, his broken face turning to watch her go. While he wasn’t watching the road, his machine continued in a perfectly straight line, right into an orange traffic cone. The PVC cone was meant to survive even the worst collisions, but his bike wasn’t. It flipped end over end and landed on top of its operator.

  Caxton pumped the brakes. She could read the signs now. There was an emergency detour she couldn’t quite make. There was a complete closure of the road in front of her. Behind her the Hummer stopped short, its brakes howling.