13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1) Page 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 of it 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. But this was worse. This was the thing that was going to make her throw up, if she looked at it too hard. 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 she thought Arkeley might actually know. "How does that happen?"

"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. The next night 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 that when they came back to life tomorrow they would be able to claw their way out and rise to serve their new master. We need to cremate the corpses before sunset tomorrow."

"The families might not like that. Especially since we can't even contact them yet, 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 Leatherman multi-tool 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!"

He heard her. He didn't face her or do anything really but she could tell he'd heard her and that he was tired of playing games. His body stopped moving and sagged in place as if he'd been switched off. The words that came out of him next were like wind escaping from a dying set of bagpipes. "Nobody ever knows what it's like," he said. She had no idea what he meant until he continued. "They think they do. They've seen all those movies, all those idiotic movies. They think vampires are something you can reason with. Something you can explain away. They don't understand. They don't understand that we're fighting animals. Wild beasts."

"At least tell me what you plan on doing with the evidence." She couldn't bring herself to call it an arm.

He nodded and started up again. His power source replaced. "There's a hospital near Arabella Furnace with the facilities I need. You can call there tomorrow and talk to them about getting it back, if you really want it. My advice is to burn it but apparently we haven't reached the point yet where you're comfortable taking my advice."

"What's the number of this hospital?" she asked.

"I'll tell you tomorrow. I'm going to be in Harrisburg, at the State Police Headquarters. I want you to report there so you can repeat everything you told me to the Commissioner."

Caxton must have looked shocked. Honestly she didn't know why the Commissioner would want to hear her report in person. But she knew better than to ignore a direct order from a Fed.

"Go home now. Get some sleep and I'll see you tomorrow," he told her. Then he walked away, into the night.

The Sergeant grabbed her shoulder when she came back to the roadblock. She must have looked like she was going to pass out. "I'm okay, I'm okay," she told him, and he backed off. He didn't say a word when she announced she was going home.

The drive back to Wyomissing flickered in and out of her consciousness. She couldn't remember falling asleep at the wheel but whole mile markers would go by without her noticing them, despite her training. It was like she'd been drugged and she started to worry that maybe she would drive right into a ditch or a utility pole. She stopped at the first diner she found and drank two big cups of coffee. It helped a little. She kept her speed down on the back-country roads she used for the last third of the journey, lightless, often unpaved stretches of track where the trees pressed in close on either side, their curving arms flashing at her in the headlights, the grey weeds that sprouted up out of the ground before her waving like seaweed. She couldn't escape the feeling that the whole world had changed. That something horrible and new had come to life in the darkness outside, the chilly blackness that filled up the sky. Something big and dangerous and toothy, still made shapeless by her ignorance. It infected everything, it had gotten inside her head. Her teeth felt encrusted. She could sense the dirt under her fingernails. It was just exhaustion and low-grade fear, she knew, but it still made her itch inside her own skin. Everything had turned bad. The old familiar roads she'd driven a thousand times, ten thousand times, seemed more bendy, less friendly. Usually the car seemed to know the way to go but tonight every turn and jog of the path took more strength out of her arms. She rode the brake down every hill and felt the car labor beneath her as she crested another rise.

Eventually, finally, she pulled her patrol car carefully into the wide driveway next to the Mazda and switched everything off. She sat there in the driver's seat for a moment listening to the car ping, listening to the thinned-out rise and fall of the last of the year's cicadas. Then she popped open the door and slipped in through the garage. The ranch house she shared with her partner was perfectly quiet inside and mostly dark. She didn't want to disturb the stillness, didn't want to track any horror into her own home, so she left the lights off. She unstrapped her holster and hung it in the closet as she passed through the kitchen with its humming refrigerator, passed through the hall unbuttoning her uniform shirt and pulled it down over her arms. She wadded it up inside her hat and put them both on the chair next to the bedroom door. Inside Deanna lay sleeping in their queen-sized bed, only a tuft of spiky red hair sticking up above the covers at the top, and, at the other end, three perfect little toes that had sneaked out from underneath. Caxton smiled. It was going to feel so good to climb into that bed, to feel Deanna's bony back, her sharp little shoulders. She would try as hard as she could not to wake her up. Caxton unzipped her uniform pants and pulled off her boots one at a time. Suppressing the groan of pleasure it gave her to have her feet finally free she stood there for a moment in just her bra and panties and stretched her arms above her head.

Behind her something tapped on the window. She pulled the curtain aside and shrieked like an infant. Someone stood out there, a man, his face torn into strips of hanging skin. She screamed again. He slapped a white hand against the window, the fingers wide. His face beckoned at her. She screamed again. Then he broke away and ran. As Deanna stirred behind her and freed herself from the duvet, Caxton couldn't look away from the dark silhouette that loped across the garden behind the house. She watched until he slipped between the dog kennels and Deanna's shed and disappeared from view.

"Pumpkin, what is it, what is it?" Deanna shouted again and again, grabbing Caxton from behind.

"He only had one arm," the trooper gasped.