13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1) Page 32

Caxton couldn't figure out how to strap the vest around her stomach. One of the guys from the Area Response Team had to pull it tight behind her back and buckle it there. He also helped her with the knee, shin, and shoulder guards. She figured out the helmet for herself. "Larry Reynolds," he told her, and stuck out a gloved hand. She shook it and introduced herself.

"I'm sorry I'm so unfamiliar with this stuff. This is my first time in riot gear." She squirmed for a moment, embarrassed, then admitted, "normally I'm highway patrol."

"You were in on that vampire kill a couple of nights ago, right? That's what they told us when we got assigned to this detail." Reynolds had black paint under his eyes and it made it hard to read his expression. She couldn't tell if he was annoyed to be saddled with such an untrained whelp as herself and was hiding it well or if he was honestly trying to be friendly. "Stick with us, keep your head down, and you'll be alright."

Another ART Detective came up and slapped Reynolds on the top of his helmet.

"Keeping his head down is about ninety per cent of Larry's job." Reynolds faked punching the new guy in the kidney and they broke away, laughing, dancing around each other like Caxton's greyhounds. "I'm DeForrest, and I'll be your stewardess this morning," the new guy told her. He had Reynolds in a headlock. "We hope you enjoy your trip with Granola Roller airlines."

Caxton had no idea what he was talking about but she smiled anyway. It had taken a lot of pleading to get assigned to this detail and she didn't want the ART

guys to resent her presence. When a woman in riot gear came and offered her coffee from a thermos she took it as graciously as she could.

Truth be told, she needed the caffeine as much as she needed to be accepted. She hadn't slept, even for a moment, not since she'd woken up the day before and realized why the vampires had decimated Bitumen Hollow. Her hands were shaking and if she looked at anything too closely or for too long its outlines grew fuzzy and indistinct.

"They're infantile, I know, but they're good men," the woman with the coffee said. "DeForrest was a firefighter before he took this job. He was bored, he said. I assumed the first time I met him that he just wanted to play with guns, like a lot of people who sign up for the ART. He's never discharged his weapon, not once, since he came to work with us, even when bad guys have fired on him. Reynolds dislocated his shoulder last year getting a five-year-old out of a trailer knocked over in a tornado."

"Wow," Caxton said.

"I'm Suzie Jesuroga. Captain Suzie," the woman said, and shook Caxton's hand.

"Laura Caxton. Trooper."

Captain Suzie smiled. "I know exactly who you are. We've all been briefed about that vampire kill you pulled off over on Route 322. The Commissioner made us go over all the details. Today's trip should be a little less hairy, considering we've got good daylight conditions and the extra precautions we're taking, but I'm still glad to have you along. You want to get started?"

The four of them finished suiting up and ran through an equipment and weapons check. They'd been issued M4 carbines, military-grade assault rifles with underslung shotgun attachments. Caxton also carried her Beretta, loaded up with cross points. The others had their own personal weapons-combat knives, revolvers, tear gas and smoke grenades. The ART had a little latitude, it seemed, in how they kitted out for an operation. Together they headed up, out of the locker room of the Harrisburg HQ

and down to a parking lot secluded by a line of trees. Darkness tinged the deep, rich blue of an impending dawn lay over the lot like a comforter. Arkeley waited for them there, wearing no protective gear at all, just his overcoat. It hung open and she could tell he wasn't carrying anything other than his Glock 23 with its thirteen bullets.

"Captain," he said, when they greeted him, "I'll express one more time my desire to leave this vehicle behind." He nodded his chin at a giant white truck that took up two spaces in the parking lot. It was based on the chassis of a Humvee, Caxton thought, but it had been uparmored as if it were meant to roll through Tikrit instead of Scranton. Heavy metal plates had been welded to its doors, its hood, its roof, and all of the windows had been almost completely obscured except for small slits. Even the truck's tires had been reinforced with heavy chains. What looked like a home-made air cannon had been mounted on the roof.

"It's pretty noisy when it gets up to speed, I'll admit," Captain Suzie told Arkeley. "Are you afraid we'll wake the vampires?"

Arkeley's upper lip twitched in distaste. "No. Vampires don't sleep during the day. They literally die anew every morning. It's the half-deads I'm worried about."

Captain Suzie just shrugged. "The Commissioner gave me my orders himself. You can talk to him if you want to change the plan, but he doesn't even come in to the office until nine. I'd just as soon get on the road now."

Arkeley narrowed his eyes but he nodded and stalked off toward his own car, an unmarked patrol car that looked puny by comparison.

One by one the ART climbed inside the armored vehicle. The interior was packed with so much gear and the Team members were so bulky in their riot armor that there was barely room for the four of them. Reynolds drove and DeForrest took shotgun-almost literally, since he rode with his weapon in his hands. Captain Suzie rode beside Caxton in the back seat.

A man came out of the main building, his uniform shirt unbuttoned and his face unshaven. Caxton recognized the Range Officer from the less-lethal weapons test area, the one who had supplied her with her cross points. He popped open the hood of the armored vehicle and played around with the engine for a minute.

"It's the old man's baby, and he never lets it out without a personal inspection,"

DeForrest told Caxton, craning around in his seat to look at her, his helmet catching on the headrest of his seat and tilting over one eye. "He built the Granola Roller nearly from scratch."

"I'm guessing I'm sitting in the very same Granola Roller," Caxton said. Reynolds snorted. "Yeah. It was never really meant for hunting vampire. The old man designed it for crowd control, you know, at demonstrations and protests and riots and such. Sometimes we call it 'Extra Chunky,' too."

Caxton tried to figure it out but her fatigued brain couldn't make sense of the name. "Why's that?" she finally asked.

"Because," DeForrest said, barely able to contain his mirth, "when you run over a hippy with this thing, extra chunky is about all that's left."

"Don't be gross," Captain Suzie said as DeForrest and Reynolds laughed in each other's faces. She turned to Caxton. "I'm sure that I'll have to do this about a hundred times today, but now, for the first time, I officially apologize for my men. Reynolds, have you forgotten how to drive a stick shift or are we waiting for the vampire to die of old age? Let's get moving!"

"Yes, Ma'am," Reynolds said, and he started up the armored vehicle with a noise like boulders falling down a mountainside. The Range Officer waved them off and started buttoning his shirt.

They followed Arkeley's car onto the highway and settled in for the long ride to Kennett Square, which was all the way down by the border with Delaware. The armored vehicle's groaning and grunting engine noise made it impossible to speak and be heard inside the cabin but Caxton didn't mind so much. She could barely form a coherent sentence in her head, much less make one come out of her mouth. She had to hunch over against the door to look out the view-slit in her window, which meant exposing her bones to a constant jouncing vibration as the heavy truck ground over every minor imperfection in the roadway. Somehow she survived, though. She watched suburban lawns speed by, silver with frost and dark with fallen leaves. As they rolled out into more rural zones she let her eyes linger on the geometric regularity of farmers' fields or the shaking, surging rattle of dark tree branches that leaned close over the road.

Every time she closed her eyes she saw a death's head, and felt wriggling finger bones rattling in her hands. She saw Deanna covered in blood. She remembered what it was like to be hypnotized by a vampire, to feel as if she were drowning in death, as if the air had turned to glass and she were suspended inside of it. She reached up and touched Vesta Polder's amulet through the thick layers of nylon and kevlar of her ballistic vest.

As the sun began to climb up from behind the ridges, a lemon-colored sliver on the horizon, she began to feel a little better. She was taking action, taking up arms against the thing that was trying to kill her, which had nearly killed Deanna. Arkeley, when he heard she had requested to come along on this raid, had said absolutely not. While he had never expressly forbidden her he had thought, he told her, that he had made himself quite clear. He didn't want her endangered. He didn't think she could handle it.

She had told him about torturing a half-dead, how she had pulled the bastard's fingers off, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, he had come around. He'd never actually said it was alright, but he had stopped insisting she stay behind quite so strongly. It was as good as she was going to get, she knew.