13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1) Page 14

"What about garlic?" Caxton asked. By day the dead trees that lined the highways looked a lot less threatening. She supposed it helped that the vampire was dead. There were some half-deads out there unaccounted for-the one driving the Hummer-2 that rammed them and the one-armed one that had scared the hell out of her, at least-but by all accounts they would be easy to round up and subdue now that their master was gone. The vampire was dead-it made the whole world look better. She was finally giving in to her curiosity, which she had kept leashed before because she was terrified of the answers to her questions. Now they seemed harmless, academic. "Will garlic keep a vampire away?"

Arkeley snorted. "No. In '93 I did a little extemporaneous experimentation on Malvern. I brought a jar of minced garlic into her room and when Armonk wasn't looking I dumped it all over her. It made a pretty good mess and it pissed her off but no, no lasting harm. It might have been mayonnaise for all she cared."

"How about mirrors? Do they show up in mirrors?"

"From what she's said she loved looking at her reflection back in the good old days. She doesn't like the way she looks now, that much is certain." He shrugged. "I suppose that one has a grain of truth in it. The old ones will break any mirror they see. The young ones don't care."

"You already ruled out crosses. What about holy water, communion wafers, hell, I don't know. What about other religions? What about the star of David or statues of Buddha? Do they run away from a copy of the Koran?"

"None of that works. They don't worship Satan-and yes, I did ask-and they don't practice black magic. They're unnatural. If that makes them unholy, well, it doesn't seem to hurt them any."

"Silver," she tried. "Or is that werewolves?"

"It was vampires, originally. Hollywood came up with the idea that werewolves can be killed with silver bullets. No one has actually reported a werewolf sighting in two hundred years so I couldn't tell you about their vulnerabilities. As far as vampires go, silver has no effect." He shifted in the passenger seat. He looked a lot less flexible than he had the day before. Fighting vampires took it out of him, she guessed. "We tried all these things out on Malvern in the first couple of years, back before Armonk started worshipping her and moaning about her rights. Sunlight, we found out, is obnoxious to her. It doesn't set her on fire but it causes her pain. Pretty much every kind of light causes her pain. She has to sleep during the day, there's no way to keep her awake. Her body literally changes while the sun is up, repairing whatever damage she took during the previous night. You'll have to come see the metamorphosis some time. It's gruesome but fascinating."

"No thanks," Caxton said. "When this case is closed I'm done with monsters. You can keep your title as the only American vampire hunter. I think I'll stick with DUIs and fender-benders. So how did all these stories get started if nothing works?"

"Simple. Nobody likes a story with an unhappy ending. Until the last century-and the advent of reliable firearms-vampires pretty much had their way with us. The poets and the writers changed the details so as not to depress their readers with how bad the world could really be."

"But if they had the reality to compare to-"

"That's just it, they didn't." Arkeley sighed. "Every time a vampire pops up people say the same thing. 'I thought they were extinct'. It's because there's never more than a handful of them anywhere in the world at a given time. And thank God for that. If they were any more common, if they were better organized, we'd all be dead."

Caxton frowned with the effort of trying not to think too hard about that. She drove the rest of the way to Caernarvon and the hunting camp without small talk. Arkeley was good at silence, a fact she was just beginning to appreciate. Some things weren't worth talking about.

Patrol cars from three different jurisdictions sat parked on rolling grass near the hunting camp when they arrived-State Police, the county Sheriff and a sole vehicle for the local policeman, a middle-aged man in a dark blue uniform who stood outside looking like he wanted to throw up. Technically it was his crime scene and he had to authorize Caxton and Arkeley before they could go in. They waited till he felt well enough to check their ID.

"Are you going to be able to handle this?" Arkeley asked her. It didn't sound like a dare, but that was how she intended to take it. "This won't be pretty."

"I've scraped prom queens off the asphalt, tough guy," she said. "I've dug teeth out of dashboards so we could match dental records."

Arkeley gave her a dry little chuckle for her bravado.

It didn't look so bad from fifty feet away. The camp itself was a more elaborate affair than Caxton had imagined. It stood next to a chirping stream, protected in the shadow of some sixty foot willows. Most camps in Caxton's experience were drafty little log cabins with steeply peaked roofs so they didn't collapse under the weight of winter snows. Farrel Morton's place might more accurately have been deemed a hunting lodge. A big main structure with lots of windows branched off into a newer wing and what Caxton judged had to be a semi-detached kitchen, judging from all the chimneys and vents. A porch ran the full length of the building, well supplied with rocking chairs made of rough-hewn logs with the bark still on. Under the peak of the roof Morton had mounted a brightly-painted hex sign, an old Pennsylvania Dutch ward against evil.

Apparently it hadn't worked too well. Cops with their uniform shirts unbuttoned and their hats set aside were digging holes in the kitchen yard and out around back. They didn't have to dig too deep.

"I thought the vampire's victims all came back as half-deads," Caxton said, looking down at a pile of bones and broken flesh that had come out of one of those holes. Maggots made the ribcage quiver. She had to look away. This was worse than traffic fatalities. Those were fresh and the colors were normal. These smelled bad. Really bad.

"Only if he bade them to rise," Arkeley explained. "He wouldn't need very many servants, especially if he was trying to stay under our radar. Half-deads can't disguise themselves as well as vampires can. His bloodlust would force him to keep taking more victims, but he wouldn't want thirty slaves wandering around, doing nothing but drawing attention to themselves."

"Closer on a hundred, if you count the ones inside." It was the local cop. He still looked green but he had their identification in his hands. He returned it to them and let them head inside.

Caxton almost wished he'd refused them when she saw the kitchen. The scene inside made no sense and her brain refused to accept it. The smell kept screwing with her head. It was bad, extremely bad, but more than that it was wrong. The reptilian part of her brain knew that smell meant death. It knew enough to want to get away. She could feel it squirming at the base of her skull, trying to crawl away down her spine.

She focused on the details, trying not to see the big picture. That was tough. There were cops everywhere in different uniforms, milling around, bagging evidence, doing their jobs. She could barely see them for the bones. It was like a crypt in there, not like a house at all. Bones were stacked like cordwood along the wall, on top of the white enamel stove, shoved into closets. Someone had sorted them into skulls, pelvises, ribs, limbs. "Obsessive compulsive disorder," Caxton breathed.

"Now that may be something real," Arkeley told her. "In Eastern Europe they used to sprinkle mustard seeds around a vampire's coffin. They thought he would have to count them all before he could move on and if they left enough he would still be counting when dawn came. We don't know much about what vampires and half-deads do when they're not actively hunting. We know they don't watch television-it confuses them. They don't understand our culture and it doesn't interest them. Maybe they have their own entertainment. Maybe they sit around sorting their bones."

Caxton moved into the main room, mostly just wanting to get away from all the bones. What she found in the living room was worse. She crossed her arms across her stomach and held on tight. A couch and three comfortable-looking chairs stood in a semi-circle around a big fireplace. Human bodies in various states of decomposition sat as if posed, some with their arms around others, some leaning forward on their elbows. Baling wire had been used to keep them upright and in comfortable-looking postures. "Jesus." It was too much. It made no sense. "I don't get it. The vampire ate all these people. He kept their bodies around. Then he killed Farrel Morton and his kids and he felt like he needed to hide their corpses. Why the sudden change? What was different about Morton?"

"Somebody might miss him." It was a photographer from the sheriff's office. She was an Asian woman with long bangs draped cross her forehead. Caxton had seen her before somewhere. Some crime scene or other. "As far as we can tell the victims here are all Latino and Hispanic males, between fifteen and forty years of age."

Arkeley, strangely enough, squinted in confusion. "And what does that suggest?"

he asked.

It was Caxton's turn to shine, finally. Her nausea was swept away by her need to impress Arkeley. "It suggests they were migrant workers. Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians-they come up here every year to work in the mushroom sheds or picking fruit in the orchards. They move from town to town according to the growing season and they pay cash for whatever they buy so they don't leave a paper trail."

"Illegal immigrants," Arkeley said, nodding. "That makes sense."

"It's smart," the photographer said. She looked angry, pissed off even. Caxton knew some cops turned their fear and disgust into rage. It helped them do their job. The photographer lifted her camera and snapped off three quick shots of a defleshed pelvis sitting on the coffee table. Someone had used it as an ashtray. "Real fucking smart. Nobody keeps track of migrants. Even if somebody back home misses them, what are they going to do? Come up here and ask the American police for help? Not a chance. They'd just get deported."

"So the vampire was living here for months, feeding on invisible people," Caxton said. "Then the owner showed up with his kids. Damn," she said, thinking it through.

"They weren't taking the bodies off to make half-deads out of them. They were going to dump them some place else, to draw attention away from here."

"Yeah," the photographer spat. "Don't want to shit where you eat." She snapped another picture, this time of an umbrella stand half full of umbrellas and half full of femurs.

"Alright, Clara." A burly sheriff's deputy grabbed the photographer's arm.

"Alright, we have enough pictures." He looked up at Arkeley and Caxton. "Have you two seen the basement yet?"

Caxton's mind reeled. The basement. The camp had a basement. What kind of vault of horrors awaited them? They passed through a mud room and down a flight of stairs, Caxton holding one hand against the smooth drywall, the other gripping the banister. They headed down through shelves of preserves, thick and cloying in their Mason jars. They climbed over stacks of scattered sports equipment and roofing supplies. At the far end of the narrow cellar a group of state troopers wearing latex gloves stood in a semi-circle. What were they guarding? They stepped aside when they saw Arkeley and his star.

Caxton moved forward. She felt like she floated rather than walked. She felt like a ghost in the haunted camp. She pushed through the standing troopers. Beyond them in a shadowy alcove stood three identical coffins, all of them open, all of them empty.

Three coffins. "No," she blurted. "No." It wasn't over. There were more of them, more vampires out there.

Arkeley kicked one of the coffins shut with a hollow sound.