13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1) Page 7

"Down here, take the next right," Arkeley said, stabbing one finger at the windshield. He settled back in the passenger seat, looking more comfortable there than he had on the chair in the Commissioner's office. Maybe he spent more time in cars than offices, she thought. Yeah, that was probably right. Caxton wheeled their unmarked patrol car around a stand of ailanthus saplings that bounced and shimmered over the hood. Twilight was about to be over: the night was just starting. According to the map they were right in the middle of the township of Arabella Furnace, named after a cold blast pig iron furnace that would once have employed the whole population of the town. There was nothing left of the furnace itself except a square foundation of ancient bricks, most of them crumbled down to dust. There was a visitor's center there and Caxton had learned all about the history of cold blast furnaces while Arkeley took a pit stop.

Other than barking out directions he had very little to say. She had tried talking to him about the skinless face in her window the night before. She had not presented it as something that scared her. Though it still did, especially as the daylight dwindled in her rear-view mirror. She presented it as part of the case. He grunted affirmatively at her suggestion that he should know what had happened. But then he failed to add so much as a comment.

"What do you think it was about?" she asked. "Why was it there?"

"It sounds," he said, "as if the half-dead wanted to scare you. If it had wanted to hurt or kill you it probably could have." Any attempt on her part to get anything further out of him resulted in shrugs or, worse, complete apathy.

"Jesus," she shouted, finally, and stopped the car short so they both hit their seatbelts. "A freak with a torn-up face follows me home and all you can say is that it probably just wanted to scare me? Does this happen so often in your life that you can be so jaded about it?"

"It used to," he said.

"But not anymore? What did you do? How did you stop it?"

"I killed a bunch of vampires. Can we continue, please? We haven't got a lot of time before the bodies start showing up in heaps."

She studied him the whole length of the drive. She wanted to get the drop on him at least once, to prove that she wasn't a complete child. So far she'd failed. "You're from West Virginia," she had suggested. It was the best she had. "There's a hint of a drawl in your voice." Plus she had read that his investigation in the Lares case had begun in Wheeling, but she left out that detail.

"North Carolina, originally," he had replied. "Make a left."

Fuming a little she crept forward onto the road he'd indicated. It looked more like a nature trail. In the headlights she could see it had been paved once with cobble stones but time had turned them into jagged rocks that could pop a tire if she drove too quickly. The drive wound between two copses of whispering trees, mixed maple and ash. Leaves had fallen in great sweeps across the way, suggesting that this road lead nowhere but the ancient past. Yet perhaps not-the way was never actually blocked. Someone might have tried to make the place look forbidding but they had stopped short of actually cutting off access.

"There's no parking lot, there hasn't been for fifty years. You can just drive up onto the main lawn and stop somewhere unobtrusive," Arkeley told her. Main lawn? All she could see was increasingly dense forest, the thick dark woods that had given Pennsylvania its name centuries earlier. The trees rose sixty feet high in places, in places even higher. She switched on her headlights-and then she saw the lawn.

It was not the manicured stretch of bluegrass she had expected. More like a fallow field aggressively reclaimed by weeds. Yet she could make out low stone walls and even, in the distance, a dry fountain streaked green and black by algae. She stopped the car and they got out. Darkness closed around them like a fog once the car's lights flicked off. Arkeley started at once toward the fountain and she followed him, and then she saw their destination looming up in the starlight. A great Victorian pile, a gabled brick mound with wings stretching away from its central mass. On one side stood a greenhouse with almost no glass left in it at all, leaving just a skeletal iron frame festooned with vines. A wing on the far side had completely collapsed and partially burned, perhaps having been struck by lightning. A concrete bas relief above the main entrance named the place:

ARABELLA FURNACE

STATE HOSPITAL

"Let me guess," Caxton said. "You've brought me to an abandoned lunatic asylum."

"You couldn't be less correct," he told her. The smile on his face was different this time. It almost looked wistful, as if he wished it was an asylum. They approached the fountain and he laid a hand on the broken stone. Together they looked up at the statue of a woman pouring out a great urn that rested on her hip. The urn had gone dry years before. Caxton could see rust inside its mouth where the waterworks must have been. The statue's free arm, maybe twice the size of a human appendage, stretched toward them in benediction or perhaps just welcome. Her face, whatever expression it may once have offered to visitors, was completely eroded. Acid rain, time, maybe vandalism had effaced it until the front of her head was just a rough mask of featureless stone.

"This wasn't an asylum, it was a sanatorium. They used to bring tuberculosis patients here for a rest cure," Arkeley explained.

"Did it work?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Three out of every four patients died in the first year. The rest just lingered on and on. Mostly the health authorities just wanted them out of the way so they wouldn't infect anyone else. The cure amounted to fresh air and simple manual labor to pay for their keep. Still, the patients received three meals a day and all the cigarettes they could smoke."

"You're kidding. Cigarettes for people with a respiratory disease?"

"The cigarette companies built this place, and all the other sanatoria like it all over the country. They probably suspected a link between smoking and tuberculosis-smoking made you cough, after all, and so did consumption. Who knows? Maybe they just felt sorry for the infected."

Caxton stared at him. "I wasn't expecting a history lesson tonight," she said. He didn't reply. "You said that I couldn't be more wrong. How else was I wrong?"

"It isn't abandoned. There are still patients here. Well, one patient."

She was left, as usual, without further information. She had to imagine what kind of hospital would be kept open for a single patient.

They entered through the front door where a single watchman in a navy blue uniform waited, an M4 rifle slung over the back of his chair. He wore the patches of a Bureau of Prisons corrections officer. He looked bored. He definitely recognized Arkeley, though he made no attempt at greeting the Marshal.

"What is this place? I've never heard of it," she said,

"They don't advertise," Arkeley told her.

They passed through a main hall with narrow spiral staircases at each corner, leading both up and down. Large square vaulted chambers stood at every compass point. Arches here and there were sealed off with bricks, then pierced with narrow doorways with elaborate locks. Power lines and Ethernet cables hung in thick bundles against the walls or stretched away across open space, held up by metal hooks secured in the ceiling.

Caxton touched the dark stone of a wall and felt the massive coolness, the strength of it. Someone had scratched their initials in the wall right next to where her hand lay, a complicated acronym from a time of rigidly defined names: G.F.X.McC., A.D. 1912.

Arkeley didn't stop to let her absorb the atmosphere of the place. He strode forward briskly, his squeaking footfalls rolling around the ceiling as echoes that followed her close behind as she rushed to keep up. They passed through a steel doorway and she saw where the paint had been rubbed away from the jamb by countless hands over time. They moved through a white corridor with plaster walls, studded by a dozen more doorways, all of them wreathed with cobwebs. At the far end a sheet of plastic hung down over an empty doorway. Arkeley lifted the plastic aside for her, a strangely comforting gesture, and Caxton stepped inside. The ward beyond was bathed in a deep blue glow that came from a massive lighting fixture in the ceiling. The bulbs up there had been painted so that everything red in the room appeared to be black. The contents of the room were varied, and somewhat startling. There were rows and racks of obsolete medical equipment, enameled steel cabinets with bakelite knobs that might have been part of the Hospital's official equipment. There were laptop computers and what looked like a miniature MRI scanner. In the middle of the room was a tapered wooden coffin with brass handles and a deeply upholstered interior. Cameras, microphones and other sensors Caxton couldn't identify hung down over the coffin on thick curled cables so the coffin's contents could be constantly and exhaustively monitored. An electrical junction box with a single button mounted on its face stood next to the doorway. Arkeley pushed the button and a buzzer sounded deep inside the sanatorium. "You read my report. You know I set fire to all the vampires on that boat in Pittsburgh."

Caxton nodded. She could guess what came next.

"You'll also remember Lares only had enough blood to revivify three of his ancestors. There was a fourth one who went without nourishment. Strangely enough, the ones with skin and flesh burned just fine. The one without was merely charred. She survived the blaze."

"But vampires were supposed to be extinct in America," she protested.

"Extinct in the wild," Arkeley corrected her.

A plastic barrier at the far side of the room lifted and a wheelchair was steered into the coffin chamber. The man who pushed it wore a white lab coat with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was a little skinny-otherwise he had no distinguishing features at all. Then again he was likely to appear nondescript in comparison to his charge. The woman in the wheelchair wore a tattered mauve dress, moth-eaten and sheer with use. She was little more than bones wrapped in translucent white skin as thin as tissue paper.

There was no hair on her head, none at all except for a few spindly eyelashes. The skin had broken and parted from the bones of her skull, in places having worn away altogether, leaving shiny patches of bone visible. She had one plump eyeball, the iris colorless in the blue light. Her ears were long and sharply triangular and riddled with sores. Her mouth looked broken, somehow, or at least wrong. It was full of shards, translucent jagged bits of bone. Caxton slowly made out that these were teeth. The woman had hundreds of them and they weren't broken, either, when she looked closer. They were just sharp. This was what she had read about in Arkeley's report. This was one of the creatures he'd set on fire in the belly of the boat-a vampire, an old, blood-starved vampire. She'd never seen anything more horrible, not even the near-faceless half-dead who had peered in through her window the night before.

"Hello, Deputy. You're on schedule-it's just about feeding time at the zoo." It was the man in the lab coat who spoke. He pushed the wheelchair closer to them than Caxton would have liked. She felt nothing from the vampire, no sense of humanity, just coldness. It was like standing next to the freezer cabinet in a grocery store on a hot summer day. The chill was palpable, and real, and wholly unnatural.

"Special Deputy," Arkeley corrected.

"Feeding time?" Caxton asked, appalled.

The vampire's eye brightened noticeably.