13 Bullets Part 3

"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 pa.s.sed through a main hall with narrow spiral staircases at each corner, leading both up and down. Large square vaulted chambers stood at every compa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce, held up by metal hooks secured in the ceiling.

Caxton touched the dark stone of a wall and felt the ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.sive 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 k.n.o.bs 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 bra.s.s 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 b.u.t.ton mounted on its face stood next to the doorway. Arkeley pushed the b.u.t.ton 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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.

"This blue light we're standing in," Caxton said. "It must be some, I don't know, some wavelength vampires can't see, right? So she can't see us?"

"Actually she can see you just fine. She would see you in perfect darkness. She's told me," the man in the lab coat said. "She can see your life glowing like a lamp. This light is less damaging to her skin than even soft white fluorescents." He held out a hand. "I'm Doctor Hazlitt. I don't think we've met."

Caxton tore her gaze away from the vampire's single, rolling eyeball to look at the man. She began to reach for his hand, to shake it. Then she stopped. His sleeve was rolled up to his bicep and she saw a plastic tube embedded in the soft flesh inside his elbow. A trickle of dried-up blood, perfectly black in the blue light, stained the end of the tube.

"It's a shunt," he told her. "It's easier than using a syringe every time."

Arkeley squatted down to look at the vampire eye to eye. Her fleshless hands moved compulsively in her lap as if she were trying to get away, as if he terrified her. Caxton supposed she had every right-the Fed had once set her on fire and left her for dead. "Hazlitt here feeds her his own blood, out of the goodness of his heart," Arkeley announced. "So to speak."

"I know it seems grisly," the doctor told her. "We tried a number of alternatives-fractionated plasma and platelets from a blood bank, animal blood, a chemical the Army is trying out as a blood surrogate. None of it worked. It has to be human, it has to be warm and it has to be fresh. I don't mind sharing a little." He stepped over to a workbench a few yards away from the wheelchair and took a Pyrex beaker out of a cabinet. A length of rubber tubing went into the shunt, its free end draped over the lip of the beaker. Caxton looked away.

"Why?" she asked Arkeley. "Why feed it at all?" Her first instinct as a cop-to ask questions until she understood exactly what was going on-demanded answers.

"She's not an 'it'! Her name," Hazlitt said, and stopped for a moment to grunt in moderate-sounding pain, "is Malvern, Justinia Malvern, and she was a human being once. That might have been three hundred years ago but please, show some respect."

Caxton shook her head in frustration. "I don't understand. You nearly got killed trying to destroy her. Now you're protecting her, here, and even giving her blood?"

"It wasn't my decision." Arkeley patted his coat pocket as if that should mean something to her. It didn't. He sighed deeply and kept staring at the vampire as he explained.

"When we found her at the bottom of the Allegheny, still in her coffin, we didn't know what to do. I was still in the hospital and n.o.body much listened to me anyway. My bosses turned her body over to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian said they would love to have her remains but while she was still alive they couldn't take her. They asked us to euthanize her so they could put her on display. Then somebody made a mistake and asked a lawyer what to do. Since as far as we know she's never killed an American citizen-she's been moribund like this since before the American Revolution-the Justice department decided we didn't have a right to execute her. Funny, huh? Lares was up and moving and showing signs of intelligence but n.o.body filed any charges when I put him down. Malvern here was half rotted away in her coffin but if I put a stake through her heart they were willing to call it murder. Well, that's how it goes. She had no family or friends, for obvious reasons, so they made her a ward of the court. Technically I'm responsible for her welfare. I have to clothe her, shelter her, and yes, feed her. n.o.body knows whether cutting off her blood supply will kill her but without a federal court order we're not allowed to stop."

"She's earned her keep a dozen times over," Hazlitt said. He was dismantling the siphon that had drawn blood out of his arm. "I've been studying her for seven years now and every single day and night rewarding."

"Yeah? What have you learned?" Caxton asked. The vampire's face curled up. Her nose lifted in the obscenely. She had smelled the blood.

of it has been

air and rippled "We've learned that blue light is best for her. We've learned how much blood she needs to maintain partial mobility. We've learned what level of humidity she likes and what extremes of temperature affect her."

Caxton shook her head. "All of which helps keep her alive. How does it benefit us?"

For the very first time Arkeley looked at her with a light of approval in his eyes.

"We're going to find a cure, here." Hazlitt came around a bank of equipment, his face sharp. "Here, in this room. I'll cure her. And then we'll have a vaccine and that will benefit society."