13 Bullets Part 6

Two beams of light shot over her head-someone had a car up above and they had turned on the headlights. The vampire must have been right in the path of the beams. She heard him hiss in pain. He appeared at the top of the pit again, this time as a silhouette against the new light, his left forearm pressed tight against his eyes. A severed human head with part of its neck still attached dangled by its hair from the curled fingers of the vampire's left hand. Caxton prayed silently that it wasn't Arkeley's head.

Exit wounds appeared on the vampire's back, dozens of them spraying bloodless translucent tissue. The vampire staggered backwards until it was crouched on top of the barricade, howling in pain. Caxton drew her own weapon and sighted on his back.

He dropped the head. He lowered his forearm. Then he fell backwards like a tree falling in the woods. When his long body hit the ground at the bottom of the pit it cracked the loose pavement there.

Caxton remembered Arkeley's report, had all but memorized it. She knew that unless the vampire's heart was destroyed it would get up again. She had only a few seconds. Bullets were pretty much useless-even if she emptied her clip into his chest she knew she couldn't be a.s.sured of hitting the heart dead on. She looked to her side, to the boxes of tools, and found what she wanted. A pile of palings had been left in the pit, the kind of wooden poles surveyors use to mark out where a new highway will go. She lifted one, a square-cut, mud-stained length of unfinished wood maybe six feet long and an inch and a half thick. It even had a day-glo orange ribbon tied to its flat end like a pennon on a lance. She took it up in both hands, lifted it over her head to stab directly downwards.

With all of her strength she brought it down, sharp end first, right into the vampire's rib cage, right into that white skin like carved marble. It might as well have been stone she attacked. The stake shivered all the way up its length, driving long splinters into the meat of her hand. Its point splayed out, twisted and broken.

She brushed away the debris and found a tiny pink point on the vampire's skin where she'd stabbed him. "That skin is tougher than steel," Arkeley said. She looked up and saw his head and shoulders above the barricade. He had a bad sc.r.a.pe up one side of his face but otherwise he looked unharmed. While she stood there being surprised he lowered himself down into the pit to stand next to her. She didn't think until it was too late to ask him to help her out of the pit.

The vampire didn't move, didn't so much as breathe. He was a dead thing and he looked far more natural that way. Caxton lifted her hand to her mouth and tried to pull out a splinter with her teeth. "What do we do next?" she asked, as a little blood welled up out of the ball of her thumb. In the dark she could barely see it drip, a tiny fleck of it splattering on the vampire's foot.

The effect, however, was sudden and electric. The vampire sat up and his mouth opened wide. It swam toward her out of the sharp shadows at the bottom of the pit, some deep sea fish that could swallow her whole. She started to scream, but she also started to jump out of the way. It wasn't going to matter-the vampire was faster than she was.

Luckily for her Arkeley had been ready all along. He fired one of his cross points right into the vampire's mouth and broke off a dozen of its teeth. It didn't look as if it even hurt the monster but it changed his course, slightly, enough that its leaping attack missed Caxton by a hair's breadth.

"Help me," Arkeley insisted. Caxton slowly got to her feet, badly shaken by the near miss. "I can't hold it for long," he shouted, and she shook herself into action. Arkeley fired two shots into the vampire's center ma.s.s. He must be running out of bullets, she realized.

He had slowed the vampire down, at least. The monster knelt in the mud, his balled fists punching at the ground, his head bowed. He started to get up and Arkeley shot him again. He'd had thirteen bullets to start with-how many did he have left?

Caxton looked at the tools around her but she knew they wouldn't be enough. She ran to the far side of the pit and found what she wanted. It was a compact little vehicle with an exposed driver's seat and a simple three-speed transmission. It was designed to cut very narrow defiles through concrete or asphalt. To this purpose its entire front comprised a single three foot wide wheel rimmed with vicious shiny steel teeth. On its side the manufacturer's name was painted in black letters: DITCH WITCH. Caxton jumped up into the driver's seat and reached for the starter.

Nothing happened. She slapped the control panel in frustration when she saw there was no key in the ignition. The cutter had been immobilized for the night, presumably so teenagers wouldn't steal it and go for joy-rides cutting up the highway.

Arkeley fired again but the vampire was on his feet. He tottered back and forth and then he took a step toward the Fed. It was impossible for someone to take so much damage, to incur so much trauma, and still walk but the vampire was doing it. He was perhaps six feet from Arkeley. He would close that distance in seconds.

Caxton grabbed the gear shift of the Ditch Witch and threw it into neutral, then shot back the hand brake. She jumped off the back and shoved the machine forward. The pit's floor was slightly uneven and the whole compact ma.s.s of the construction machine rolled slowly, inexorably forward. Caxton drew her own weapon and fired at the vampire's head, one shot at another, blasting apart his eyes, his nose, his ears.

The vampire laughed at her, at the futility of her shots. His shattered eyes repaired themselves as she watched, filling in his broken eye sockets. Yet in the second or two it took him to heal he was blind. He couldn't see the Ditch Witch rolling right toward him until it was too late.

The toothed wheel dug deep into his thigh, his groin. He fell backward as the ma.s.s of the machine rumbled on top of him and stopped, pinning him to the ground. He tried to get up, tried to shift the Ditch Witch's ma.s.s but even he wasn't strong enough to lift a half ton vehicle with almost no leverage.

"Hey," someone shouted. Caxton looked up and saw a state trooper on the rim of the pit, his wide-brimmed hat silhouetted against the low light. "Hey, are you alright down there?"

"Get the power on," Arkeley shouted. "There should be a master switch up there, get the power on!" The trooper disappeared from view. A moment later they heard an electric generator sputter to life then settle down to a throbbing growl. Caxton had no idea what Arkeley had in mind. A trooper brought a portable floodlight up to the barricade and blasted the pit with white light that made Caxton look away. The vampire, still trying to free himself, let out a yowl like an injured mountain lion. They didn't like light, she decided. Well, they were nocturnal after all. It made sense.

Arkeley limped over to the tool cases. He found what he wanted and plugged it into a junction box. Caxton could hardly believe it when he came to stand next to the vampire's side, an electric jackhammer in his hands.

He shoved the bit into the vampire's chest, just to the right of his left nipple. The same place Caxton had hit him with her wooden stake. Arkeley switched on the hammer and pressed down hard with all his weight. The vampire's skin resisted for a moment but then it split wide open and watery fluids-no blood, of course-gouted from the wound. As the hammer's bit dug through the vampire's ribs the monster started to squirm and shake but Arkeley didn't move an inch. Strips of skin and then bits of muscle tissue like cooked chicken-all white meat-sputtered out of the wound. The vampire screamed with a noise she could hear just fine over the stuttering racket of the power tool and then... and then it was over. The vampire's head fell back and his mouth fell open and he was dead. Truly dead. Arkeley laid the jackhammer down and reached into the vampire's chest cavity with his bare hands, searching around inside to make sure the heart was truly destroyed. Eventually he pulled his hands free and sat down on the ground. The body just lay there, inert, a thing now as if it had never been a person.

The troopers lifted them both out of the pit and Caxton saw what had happened up top while she was trapped. Two dozen state troopers had shown up to support her. Five of them were dead, their bodies torn to pieces and their blood completely drained. She knew them all by sight, though thankfully they were from a different troop than her, Troop H when she was Troop T. She wouldn't have called them friends. She felt a lightness in her head, in her spirit as she pa.s.sed by the bodies, as if she couldn't quite connect with what had happened.

The vampire was dead. It was like that was the only thing that could happen that night, the only event of even the slightest importance. The vampire was dead.

Caxton was barely aware of her own body when they sat her down in the back of a patrol car and made sure she was okay. An EMT checked her for injuries and the surviving troopers asked endless questions about what had happened, about the car chase, about the naked vampire, about how many times she'd discharged her weapon. She would open her mouth and an answer would come out, surprising her every time. She was in shock, which felt pretty much like being hypnotized by a vampire, she realized.

Eventually they let her go home.

Part III: Reyes.

It is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply, but according to an ascertained and ghostly law.

-Le Fanu, Carmilla.

In the morning, with sunlight coming in through the windows, Caxton got up without disturbing Deanna and pulled on some clothes, anything, really. It was freezing in the little house and there was frost on the garden. She turned on the coffee maker and left it belching and hissing then went out and fed the dogs out in the barn. Their breath plumed out of the kennels. They were happy enough to see her. She let them out to run around for a while on the wet gra.s.s, none of them willing to test the limits of the invisible fence, content, for the moment, to stay in their safe little patch of lawn bordered by winter-quiet trees. She watched them play, snapping at one another, knocking each other over, the same game dogs had been playing for a hundred thousand years and still n.o.body ever won. It made her smile. She felt surprisingly good, maybe a little stiff where she'd fallen on her arms and her ribs the night before, a few bruises here and there from when the vampire had yanked her out of the car. But mostly she felt good, and healthy, and like she'd achieved something.

So she was quite confused when she started crying. Not big noisy sobs, just a little leakage from the eyes, but it didn't seem to want to stop. She wiped it away, blew her nose, and felt her heart jump in her chest.

"Pumpkin?" Deanna asked, standing mostly naked in the back door, just a sleeveless t-shirt on that covered everything the law required. Deanna's red hair stood up in a bed head shock of spikes and she shivered visibly. She'd never looked more beautiful. "Pumpkin, what's wrong?" she asked.

Caxton wanted to go to her, to grab her around the waist, to ravage her. But she couldn't. She couldn't stop crying. "It's nothing. I mean, really, I have no idea why I'm crying. I'm not sad or... or anything, really." She wiped at her eyes with her fingers. It had to be a delayed stress reaction. They'd taught her about those in the academy, and told her she was no tougher than any civilian. Like everyone else in her cla.s.s she had thought, yeah, right, and fallen asleep during the seminar. She was plenty tough. She was a soldier of the law. But she couldn't stop crying.

Deanna rushed out on the gra.s.s, the dew squishing up between her toes, and grabbed Caxton up in a stiff kind of back-patting embrace. "There's some guy at the door who wants to see you. Do you want me to send him away?"

"Let me guess. Old guy, lots of wrinkles, with a silver star on his lapel." Caxton pushed Deanna away, not ungently. She grabbed the flesh of her own upper arm near her armpit through her shirt and gave it a good twist. The pain was sudden and real it stopped the crying instantly.

At the front door Arkeley stood waiting patiently, his mouth a meaningless slot again. When he saw Deanna, though, his face started to glow. She opened the door to let him into the kitchen and asked if he wanted a cup of coffee. Caxton stayed a little away from him, not wanting him to see her irritated eyes.

He smiled even more broadly but shook his head. "I can't drink the stuff. It gives me ulcers. Good morning, trooper."

Caxton nodded at him. "I didn't expect to see you here," she said. "I thought we were done after last night."

He shrugged. "While we were busy having so much fun yesterday some people were out there doing real police work. Fingerprints, dental records from the half-deads, what have you have turned up no identification on the vampire yet, not even a name. But we do have this." He handed her a computer printout. She recognized it immediately as an entry from the nation car license plate registry. It listed the license plate number from the Cadillac CTS that had started the vampire investigation, the car full of bodies that the one-armed half-dead had abandoned. The sheet listed the name and all known addresses of the car's owner.

"This is our vampire?" Caxton asked. Arkeley shook his head. "Our best guess is that it's the victim. The one in the trunk. His fingerprints turned up nothing but his son's did and blood typing suggests everyone who was in that car was related."

"What kid has been fingerprinted?" Deanna asked, her nose wrinkling up. "I thought you only got printed if you got arrested." She poured some cereal in a bowl but didn't bother with milk. Breakfast tended to be an informal affair at their house.

"We've been printing kids as fast as we can for a couple years now," Caxton told her. "It helps identify them if they get kidnapped. At least that's what we tell their parents. It also means the next generation of criminals will almost all have their fingerprints on file when they start committing crimes."

Arkeley sat down unbidden in one of the cheap Ikea chairs around the kitchen table. He had that same uncomfortable posture she'd seen before whenever he sat in a chair. He must have seen the question in her face. "The Lares case nearly killed me," he explained. "I had to have three vertebrae fused together. This one last night was easy."

Caxton frowned and studied the printout. It indicated that the car's owner had been named Farrel Morton and that he owned a hunting camp near Caernarvon. Not too far from where she'd been working a standard Intoxilyzer sweep just two nights earlier. She put the pieces together. "Jesus. He took his kids hunting and the whole family got eaten alive. Then the living dead stole his car."

"There are human remains at his hunting camp. A lot of them," Arkeley told her.

Deanna stamped her bare foot on the floor. "No f.u.c.king shop talk in the kitchen!" she shouted. It was a habitual war cry and Caxton winced.

"Quite right. There'll be time enough for the gory details later." He and Deanna traded a look of complete understanding that made Caxton wince again. He would never have looked at her like that. Maybe she shouldn't have cared, but she did.

"You've got quite the partner here, trooper," Arkeley said, rising painfully to his feet. "Have you two been together for very long?"

"Almost five years," Caxton said. "Should we get going? The crime scene is getting old by now." Not that it was likely to matter much with the perpetrator dead but there were rules in police work.

"How did you meet?" he asked.

Caxton froze. She had to decide, at that moment, whether she was going to let him inside of her real life or not. The cop stuff, the vampire fighting, that was important, sure, but this was her home, her dogs, her Deanna. The side she didn't let anybody see, not even her fellow troopers. Of course she'd never had a partner before. He was her partner at least for the duration of the investigation and you were supposed to have your partner over for dinner and stuff like that. He would be going away soon, now that the vampire was dead. She decided the danger of letting him inside was minimal. "I rescue greyhounds," she said. "From the dog tracks. When one of the animals gets injured or just too old they put them down. I give them a more humane option-I save the dogs and raise them to be pets. It's an expensive hobby-most of the dogs you save are injured or sick and they need a lot of medical help. Deanna used to work as a veterinary technician. She used to sneak out heartworm pills and rabies sticks for me. She got fired for it, actually."

Deanna leaned across the kitchen cupboards, stretching, one leg up in the air. "It was a s.h.i.t job anyway. We were putting down animals all the time because people didn't want to pay to fix them up."

"I can imagine that would get disheartening," Arkeley soothed. Deanna's face grew radiant under the warmth of his sympathy. Jealousy spiked upwards through Caxton's guts. "Now she just does her art." "Aha, I knew it," Arkeley said. "You've got an artist's hands." Deanna waggled them for him and laughed. "Do you want to see the piece I'm working on?" she asked. "Oh, honey, I don't know," Caxton tried. She looked at Arkeley. "It's contemporary. It's not for everybody. Listen, you can see my dogs instead. Everybody likes dogs, right?"

"When they're safely behind a fence, sure," Arkeley told her. "I can't stand the way they lick. But really, trooper, I'd love to see your partner's work."

There was nothing for it but to head out to Deanna's shed. Deanna put on shoes and a padded winter coat and headed across the lawn to work the combination lock. Caxton and Arkeley followed along a little more slowly.

"What the f.u.c.k are you doing?" Caxton asked, once Deanna was out of earshot.

Arkeley didn't play coy. "You always make nice with your partner's wife. It gets you invited to dinner more often," he told her.

They entered the shed with roses on their cheeks-it was going to be a truly cold day, it seemed. Caxton moved to stand up against one wall of the shed, extremely embarra.s.sed. Her cheeks burned but not just because of the cold.

Deanna was as unabashed as ever. She'd shown her work to every person she could find who was even slightly willing to look at it. Most of the time she got polite silence in response. Some people would deem her work "interesting" or "engaging" and go on for a while about theories of body politics or post-feminism until they ran out of steam. The people who actually appreciated her work scared Caxton. They didn't seem all there-and worse, they made her wonder if maybe Deanna wasn't altogether normal herself.

Arkeley moved around the shed carefully, taking it all in. Three white sheets -queen-sized-hung from the shed's rafters with a few feet of empty air between them. They moved softly in the cold empty air of the shed, lit only by the early morning sun coming through the door. Each sheet was spotted with hundreds of nearly identical marks, roughly rectangular, all of them the same reddish brown. There was no smell on such a cold day but even in the height of summer the marks gave off only the faintest tang of iron.

"Blood," Arkeley announced when he'd walked around all three sheets. "Menstrual blood," Deanna corrected him.

Here it comes, Caxton thought, the moment when Arkeley got skeeved out

and called Deanna a freak. It had happened before. A lot. But it didn't come. He nodded and kept studying the sheets, his head tilted back to take it all in. When he didn't say anything more for a full minute Caxton started to feel nervous. Deanna looked confused.

"It's about taking something hidden," Caxton blurted out and they both looked at her. "Something that is normally hidden away, disposed of in secrecy, and putting it up on display."

The pride in Deanna's face made Caxton want to melt on the spot. But she had to juggle her two partners. She couldn't let Arkeley see any sign of weakness, especially not here in this deepest sanctum.

Arkeley breathed deeply. "This is powerful," he said. He didn't bother trying to interpret it, which was good. He didn't try to explain it away.

Deanna bowed for him. "It's taken me years to get it this far and it's not nearly done. There's a guy in Arizona who is doing something similar-I saw him at Burning Man a while ago-but he's using any kind of blood and he lets anybody contribute. This is all me. Well, Laura has helped a few times."