13 Bullets Read online

  She rolled toward a stop, the car unwilling to slow as quickly as she wanted it to. Sheer willpower wasn’t helping. The road surface was covered in a chalky dust, and in places it had been peeled away to reveal a much rougher layer below. The car jumped and bounced, and Arkeley shoved his handgun into its holster. Finally, at last, the car ground to a halt, sliding the last few feet. It rocked forward, then back, throwing the two of them around in their seat belts. Dust drooped from the air, settling again on the road, and silence fell with it.

  Directly in front of them stood a roadblock of sawhorses and bright yellow collision barriers. Beyond, the road surface had been completely cut up and torn through, leaving a six-foot-deep pit in the earth. Mud-spattered construction vehicles, abandoned power tools, boxes of rags and supplies, and stacks of traffic cones littered the hole. Overhead an ancient and gnarled silver maple arched across the roadway, its twinned propeller-like seeds spinning down through the night air.

  High up in the mostly denuded branches something huge and white caught a few rays of light from Caxton’s headlamp. As she watched, about a quarter of the white thing broke off from the main mass and fell like a stone. It hit the hood of her patrol car hard enough to make her scream. When she’d recovered herself she looked through the windshield and saw a construction worker in an orange vest staring back at her with dead eyes. His throat had been completely torn out, as had part of his collarbone and shoulder. His skin was pale, and there was no blood on him at all.

  Before the car had time to stop trembling from the impact, the vampire leaped down from the tree to land right next to her, separated from her fragile body by only the width of her door. His eyes met hers and she could not look away.

  11.

  T he vampire stood at least six and a half feet tall. He was not as muscular as she had expected—perhaps she had thought every vampire would be as big as Piter Lares. This one had a thin, whiplike quality that made her think of a predatory cat—fast, vicious, overdesigned. He was completely naked and completely hairless. His ears stuck up on either side of his head and came to sharp points.

  Caxton studied him. He didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry—it was as if he would kill them when he felt like it, when he got around to it. His eyes were reddish and bright. Seed pods from the maple tree had stuck to his skin here and there—a faint sheen of sweat covered him from head to toe. His skin, which had looked so white before, actually had a slight tinge of pink. He had just sucked the blood of the dead construction worker, after all. The poor dead man must have been the only one around the work site, perhaps a night watchman.

  The vampire cleared his throat as if he wanted her to look at him some more. Was he vain? Did he want her to think him beautiful? Did she find him beautiful? Like Malvern in the hospital, he radiated no humanity at all. It was strange: she would never have said that Arkeley was particularly human-seeming. Yet the Fed gave off some kind of aura, a human warmth, or perhaps it was just a smell. The vampire had none of this. The only comparison she could make was that the vampire was like a marble statue of a person. Its lines and contours could be perfectly carved, immaculately replicated, but you would never mistake him for something alive. He was like Michelangelo’s statue of David. Perfect but hard and cold. His penis drooped flaccidly against his thighs and she wondered if he had any use for it. Did he find humans attractive? Did vampires have sex with their own kind?

  He padded closer to the car and placed one hand on the frame of the open window. He bent down to look inside, his lower jaw falling open to show his frightening number of teeth. From behind her Caxton was aware of an irritating buzz like the droning wings of a mosquito. As the vampire’s face came closer to her the noise doubled in volume. It really was quite annoying. It was Arkeley, she realized. He was saying something, but she couldn’t make out the words. Well, he’d never said anything she particularly wanted to hear before, so she saw no reason to pay attention to him now.

  The vampire’s hands came down around her, his powerful fingers clutching at her uniform shirt and her belt. She moved through space, dragged inexorably along by his power. In one slightly sickening, perfectly fluid motion she was outside of the car and dangling from his hands. She was floating, weightless, and she felt like a little girl again; she felt as she had when her father used to pick her up and carry her around. How wonderful it had been to surrender everything to that embrace. How much joy she had taken in being a doll in her father’s arms.

  She looked for the vampire’s eyes again, but his face was turned away from her. She frowned, wanting very much for him to look at her once more. A hole appeared in his forehead, a gaping, fluttering black hole that spat dark fluids and fragments of bone. A second hole appeared in his cheek. She saw the back of his head burst open and suddenly, quite suddenly, she was falling.

  Bang—she hit the ground. And pain flashed like lightning in her arm.

  The ground drove the wind from her lungs. She gasped. She hadn’t realized she had been holding her breath. She could hear again—she hadn’t know she was deaf a moment earlier. She looked down at her hands, then up at the vampire. There was no marble statue up there. There was a beast, a thing of sharp teeth and bloody eyes, and it was going to kill her. In fact it—he—had been in the process of killing her when Arkeley shot him twice in the face.

  “Jesus!” she shrieked. “Jesus!” The vampire had been shot twice in the head and all he did was drop her. He was hit—hit badly—but she knew it wouldn’t be enough. She raced away from him, scuttling on hands and feet. Panic erupted in her throat and she nearly threw up.

  The fucker had hypnotized her. She grabbed for her gun and turned to shoot him in the heart, as many times as possible.

  Before she could do more than free her weapon from its holster the vampire’s hand closed on her neck. As fast as she had moved away from him, he had come at her even faster. He picked her up and threw her away, even as two more gunshots made the night air jump and shiver. She was flying and this time she knew she was going to hit hard, knew it was going to hurt. She collided with an orange-and-white sawhorse. It caught her right below her navel, right at the top of her thighs, and she kept going, twisting over it, agony jarring through her femurs as they flexed and twisted and nearly shattered. She slumped forward and her momentum carried her right over the barrier and into the exposed pit beyond, the place where the road had been peeled away.

  Caxton fell for six feet that felt like six miles, her hands clawing at naked air, her legs pinwheeling. She landed with a splash in a puddle of freezing cold mud that got in her eyes, her mouth, her nose, threatening to choke her, to drown her. She sputtered, clawed at her face, and sucked in one painful breath that made her ribs ache.

  She was still alive.

  Up above, beyond the pitch-dark wall of the trench, two more gunshots sounded. Then another one. She waited for a fourth shot, but it didn’t come. Was Arkeley dead? If he was, she was all alone in the bottom of the hole. She sat up and looked around but couldn’t see any way out—no ladder, no ramp, not even a rope she could climb. Given enough time, she could probably find a way up to the top. She doubted she would be given enough time.

  Even as she thought it, the vampire appeared on top of the barricade. He looked down at her and his eyes were red mirrors that caught the starlight and reflected it down to her. With a wave of nausea she tore her gaze away from his.

  “You.” His voice was thick, and low, and it had a raspy, rumbling growl in the back of it. “Are you Arkeley?”

  He didn’t know? He’d laid such an elaborate trap to catch the Fed, but nobody had bothered to tell him if Arkeley was a man or a woman? Caxton didn’t think before she answered. “Yeah, I’m Arkeley.” He looked doubtful, so she tried to convince him. “I’m the famous vampire killer, bloodmunch. I tore your daddy’s heart out, that’s right.”

  He stared down at her and she looked at her feet. She could feel his gaze on her like the laser sights of two sniper rifles painting her back
. Finally she heard him laugh. It sounded a little like a dog choking on a half-swallowed bone.

  “Little liar,” the vampire said, still chuckling. “Lares was no kin of mine. You’re the other one, the partner. I’ll be back for you,” he sang. And then he disappeared from view.

  “Damn,” she said, not entirely sure why she’d wanted to pretend to be Arkeley. Surely if he’d believed her the vampire would have come down and snuffed out her life on the instant. Yet perhaps that would have given the real Arkeley a chance to get away, or at least to gather reinforcements. That idea was based on the presumption, with no basis in known fact, that the vampire hadn’t already killed the Fed.

  She pounded at the walls of the pit with her fists, scattering clods of dirt and pebbles and achieving nothing whatsoever else. “Fuck!” she shouted.

  As if in echo, she heard another gunshot, this time from a different direction.

  12.

  “F reeze!” someone shouted, and she heard a whole volley of shots. “This is the state police!” came next. It was followed by horrible screams.

  The pit was full of road grading equipment and supplies. Caxton searched through boxes of tools, looking for anything she could use to help her get up top again. Her reinforcements had arrived—the backup Arkeley had called for, back when the half-deads were chasing them. The troopers had arrived and they were getting slaughtered.

  Two beams of light shot over her head—someone had a car up above and had turned on the headlights. The vampire must have been right in the path of the beams. She heard him hiss in pain. He appeared at the top of the pit again, this time as a silhouette against the new light, his left forearm pressed tight against his eyes. A severed human head with part of its neck still attached dangled by its hair from the curled fingers of the vampire’s left hand. Caxton prayed silently that it wasn’t Arkeley’s head.

  Exit wounds appeared on the vampire’s back, dozens of them spraying bloodless translucent tissue. The vampire staggered backwards until it was crouched on top of the barricade, howling in pain. Caxton drew her own weapon and sighted on his back.

  He dropped the head. He lowered his forearm. Then he fell backwards like a tree falling in the woods. When his long body hit the ground at the bottom of the pit it cracked the loose pavement there.

  Caxton remembered Arkeley’s report, had all but memorized it. She knew that unless the vampire’s heart was destroyed it would get up again. She had only a few seconds. Bullets were pretty much useless—even if she emptied her clip into his chest she knew she couldn’t be assured of hitting the heart dead on. She looked to her side, to the boxes of tools, and found what she wanted. A pile of palings had been left in the pit, the kind of wooden poles surveyors use to mark out where a new highway will go. She lifted one, a square-cut, mud-stained length of unfinished wood maybe six feet long and an inch and a half thick. It even had a Day-Glo orange ribbon tied to its flat end like a pennon on a lance. She took it up in both hands, lifted it over her head to stab directly downwards.

  With all of her strength she brought it down, sharp end first, right into the vampire’s rib cage, right into that white skin like carved marble. It might as well have been stone she attacked. The stake shivered all the way up its length, driving long splinters into the meat of her hand. Its point splayed out, twisted and broken.

  She brushed away the debris and found a tiny pink point on the vampire’s skin where she’d stabbed him.

  “That skin is tougher than steel,” Arkeley said. She looked up and saw his head and shoulders above the barricade. He had a bad scrape up one side of his face but otherwise looked unharmed. While she stood there, surprised, he lowered himself down into the pit to stand next to her. She didn’t think to ask him to help her out of the pit until it was too late.

  The vampire didn’t move, didn’t so much as breathe. He was a dead thing and he looked far more natural that way. Caxton lifted her hand to her mouth and tried to pull out a splinter with her teeth. “What do we do next?” she asked, as blood welled up out of the ball of her thumb. In the dark she could barely see it drip, a tiny fleck of it splattering on the vampire’s foot.

  The effect, however, was sudden and electric. The vampire sat up and his mouth opened wide. He swam toward her out of the sharp shadows at the bottom of the pit, some deep-sea fish that could swallow her whole. She started to scream, but she also started to jump out of the way. It wasn’t going to matter—the vampire was faster than she was.

  Luckily for her, Arkeley had been ready all along. He fired one of his cross points right into the vampire’s mouth and broke off a dozen of his teeth. It didn’t look as if it even hurt the monster, but it changed his course, slightly, enough that his leaping attack missed Caxton by a hairbreadth.

  “Help me,” Arkeley insisted. Caxton slowly got to her feet, badly shaken by the near miss. “I can’t hold it for long,” he shouted, and she shook herself into action. Arkeley fired two shots into the vampire’s center mass. He must be running out of bullets, she realized.

  He had slowed the vampire down, at least. The monster knelt in the mud, his balled fists punching at the ground, his head bowed. He started to get up and Arkeley shot him again. He’d had thirteen bullets to start with—how many did he have left?

  Caxton looked at the tools around her, but she knew they wouldn’t be enough. She ran to the far side of the pit and found what she wanted. It was a compact little vehicle with an exposed driver’s seat and a simple three-speed transmission. It was designed to cut very narrow defiles through concrete or asphalt. To this purpose its entire front comprised a single three-foot-wide wheel rimmed with vicious shiny steel teeth. On its side the manufacturer’s name was painted in black letters: DITCH WITCH. Caxton jumped up into the driver’s seat and reached for the starter.

  Nothing happened. She slapped the control panel in frustration when she saw there was no key in the ignition. The cutter had been immobilized for the night, presumably so teenagers wouldn’t steal it and go for joyrides, cutting up the highway.

  Arkeley fired again but the vampire was on his feet. He tottered back and forth, then took a step toward the Fed. It was impossible for someone to take so much damage, to incur so much trauma, and still walk, but the vampire was doing it. He was perhaps six feet from Arkeley. He would close that distance in seconds.

  Caxton grabbed the gearshift of the Ditch Witch and threw it into neutral, then shot back the hand brake. She jumped off the back and shoved the machine forward. The pit’s floor was slightly uneven and the whole compact mass of the construction machine rolled slowly, inexorably forward. Caxton drew her own weapon and fired at the vampire’s head, one shot after another, blasting apart his eyes, his nose, his ears.

  The vampire laughed at her, at the futility of her shots. His shattered eyes repaired themselves as she watched, filling in his broken eye sockets. Yet in the second or two it took him to heal he was blind. He couldn’t see the Ditch Witch rolling right toward him until it was too late.

  The toothed wheel dug deep into his thigh, his groin. He fell backwards as the mass of the machine rumbled on top of him and stopped, pinning him to the ground. He tried to get up, tried to shift the Ditch Witch’s mass, but even he wasn’t strong enough to lift a half-ton vehicle with almost no leverage.

  “Hey,” someone shouted. Caxton looked up and saw a state trooper on the rim of the pit, his wide-brimmed hat silhouetted against the low light. “Hey, are you alright down there?”

  “Get the power on!” Arkeley shouted. “There should be a master switch up there. Get the power on!”

  The trooper disappeared from view. A moment later they heard an electric generator sputter to life, then settle down to a throbbing growl. Caxton had no idea what Arkeley had in mind. A trooper brought a portable floodlight up to the barricade and blasted the pit with white light that made Caxton look away. The vampire, still trying to free himself, let out a yowl like an injured mountain lion. They didn’t like light, she decided. Well, they w
ere nocturnal after all. It made sense.

  Arkeley limped over to the tool cases. He found what he wanted and plugged it into a junction box. Caxton could hardly believe it when he came to stand next to the vampire’s side, an electric jackhammer in his hands.

  He shoved the bit into the vampire’s chest, just to the right of his left nipple. The same place Caxton had hit him with her wooden stake. Arkeley switched on the hammer and pressed down hard with all his weight. The vampire’s skin resisted for a moment, but then it split wide open and watery fluids—no blood, of course—gouted from the wound. As the hammer’s bit dug through the vampire’s ribs the monster started to squirm and shake, but Arkeley didn’t move an inch. Strips of skin and then bits of muscle tissue like cooked chicken—all white meat—sputtered out of the wound. The vampire screamed with a noise she could hear just fine over the stuttering racket of the power tool, and then…and then it was over. The vampire’s head fell back and his mouth fell open and he was dead. Truly dead. Arkeley laid the jackhammer down and reached into the vampire’s chest cavity with his bare hands, searching around inside to make sure the heart was truly destroyed. Eventually he pulled his hands free and sat down on the ground. The body just lay there, inert, a thing now, as if it had never been a person.

  The troopers lifted them both out of the pit and Caxton saw what had happened up top while she was trapped. Two dozen state troopers had shown up to support her. Five of them were dead, their bodies torn to pieces and their blood completely drained. She knew them all by sight, though thankfully they were from a different troop than her, Troop H, while she was Troop T. She wouldn’t have called them friends. She felt a lightness in her head, in her spirit as she passed by the bodies, as if she couldn’t quite connect with what had happened.

  Caxton was barely aware of her own body when they sat her down in the back of a patrol car and made sure she was okay. An EMT checked her for injuries and the surviving troopers asked endless questions about what had happened, about the car chase, about the naked vampire, about how many times she’d discharged her weapon. She would open her mouth and an answer would come out, surprising her every time. She was in shock, which felt pretty much like being hypnotized by a vampire, she realized.