13 Bullets

Outside Caxton sat down on the grass and put her head between her knees. It wasn't over. She had thought they were safe again. She had looked at all the dead human bodies in the camp and she had thought that yes, they were horrible, but it was okay, okay in some sad way, because the vampire was dead. Because nobody else was going to get torn apart, nobody else's blood was going to drained from a still-twitching carcass.



"She said 'brood'. She said her brood would devour me," Arkeley said. He stared out at a distant line of blue hills above the water. Mist rose from between the trees over there and it looked like ghosts to Caxton, like wandering ghosts coming out to plead, to beg to have their life back.



Ghosts. Ghosts could scare you but they couldn't hurt you, not really. They couldn't pull you to pieces and suck your life out. They didn't use your bones as furniture.



"I was fooled. I thought she was being poetic." Arkeley kicked at a spill of stones and they went clattering into the stream. "I thought Lares was pretty smart. He could pass as human he was such a good actor. Malvern has real cunning, though. She knew I would be watching her. She knew that one vampire, just one, would be bad, would create all kinds of havoc. But it wouldn't be enough. What does it cost her to birth one of these monstrosities? And to do it while she's being monitored night and day. For twenty years I thought we were safe. Clearly she was just taking her time, gathering her strength."



Caxton's chest heaved. She wasn't sure if it was a sob or the precursor to vomiting. It was convulsive and spontaneous. It happened again, her ribs flexing as if something inside were pushing to get out.



"Let's go," Arkeley said. "We have to start chasing down our leads. All we have to go on is the list of people who worked at Arabella Furnace. Who knows. Who the fuck knows? We might get lucky."



"Hold on," she said. The thing in her midriff squirmed in annoyance. She wasn't supposed to talk. A cough exploded out of her lungs.



"We're wasting daylight," he told her. "Get up."



She shook her head. That was a bad idea. She hiccoughed and a ribbon of bile shot out from between her lips. Her breakfast came up in one great rush, a brown spray she couldn't hold in. She rolled over on her side, her body shivering uncontrollably. "I don't expect you to care about my feelings," she whimpered. "But I can't do this anymore."



He squatted next to her. He jammed two fingers into her throat, feeling for her pulse. He took his hand away and she looked up at him, her cheek against the cool grass, her eye following his face. Then he slapped her.



The impact made her cry out and her body shook. She rolled up to a sitting posture and then forced herself to stand, pushing her back against the side of the camp, pushing herself up to a standing position. She stared at him, hot, pure hate coming out of her. He stood there and took it.



"There are dead people in that house," he told her. "There will be more dead people tonight. And every night. Until we bag the other two."



Five minutes later they were in the car. He drove this time. He kept his speed low, kept his eyes on the road. She sat in the passenger seat with the window rolled down. It was freezing but the icy air on her face seemed to help. She spent most of the ride on her cell phone, coordinating with the Area Response Team, trying to eliminate some of the seventy-nine suspects on Arkeley's list. It was tough even talking, much less trying to keep straight in her head the various units she was assigning to various missions. The Bureau of Forensic Services had to be connected with the Records and Identification unit so they could work up a profile of what a vampire killing looked like, which was then sent on to the Bureau of Investigation so they could detach units from the troop-level Criminal Investigations Units. Meanwhile the media were yammering for details and interviews with the infamous vampire killers. She was under orders from the Commissioner to send a prepared statement to his office for release to the press. She kept it as brief and non-sensational as possible. By the time she finished and signed off they were nearing Centre County.



When she hung up the phone she felt like her soul was going ninety miles an hour in a school zone. "I'm not cut out for this," she suggested.



"What, working the bureaucracy? I've seen worse."



"No," she said. "I'm not cut out for vampire hunting." She closed her eyes but she just saw bones, human bones. "Last night the vampire hypnotized me."



"I remember," he told her. "I was there."



"No, I mean, there was nothing I could do. I couldn't fight it. What if the next one hypnotizes me, but you can't shoot it in time?"



"Then you'll die," he told her. He didn't look at her. He just said it.



"I'm not a weak person," she insisted.



"That has nothing to do with it. Susceptibility to hypnotism is like hair color or how tall you are. It's genetic and it means very little, most of the time."



"But I'm susceptible, that's what you're saying. I'm not strong enough, mentally, to fight vampires. Seriously. I'm not cut out for this. I can't do it." Fear ate her like a wolf swallowing a gobbet of flesh. She shivered and her teeth chattered and her skin stood up. Proud flesh her mother used to call it. Her father called it goosebumps. Just sitting there, knowing she would have to face another vampire, was scaring the hell out of her.



"When I slapped you, you were ready to bring me up on charges. And you would have been in the right. But you didn't. Instead you came with me. That means you're in the right place," he told her.



She shook her head. She needed to stop talking and start doing something. It might help, anyway. "What's our next step?"



Arkeley surprised her by pulling off to get some lunch.



"You're hungry? I feel like I got kicked in the belly," she said. He shrugged. "Try not throwing up next time." He rolled into the parking lot of Yoder's Diner, right next to a shiny black Amish buggy. The horse gave Caxton a look as she stepped out of the car. It swished its tail and she made clucking noises to calm it down. Arkeley headed inside without waiting to see if she would follow. Caxton looked up at the ridgeline opposite the restaurant and sighed. In the deep, dark heart of her state the earth was wrinkled into high limbs of rock that blocked cell phones and radio waves and left the fertile valleys secluded from most of human society. It was why the Amish thrived there. Caxton had never liked this stretch of Pennsylvania too much, though. It was a place where her kind weren't exactly welcomed, a power center for the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-nazis. Elsewhere in the state you saw billboards for Penn's Cave or the outlet malls clogging up every roadside but here they disappeared. In their place you saw smaller, less colorful signs sponsored by the local churches with messages like: "WORSHIP Your LORD



In Fear" and "How did you SIN today?" This was the zone of central Pennsylvania called "Pennsyltucky" by outsiders, and they didn't mean it as a compliment. She stepped inside. The restaurant was familiar to her, at least-it was neutral territory where all the valley's inhabitants could come together in peace. Yoder's catered to farmers who needed to fuel up for a day of hard manual labor and also people who liked huge portions who weren't watching their cholesterol. Arkeley went through the buffet and heaped up a plate of fried chicken, German potato salad and sweetened baked beans swimming with bits of gristly bacon. Caxton slid into an artificial wood-grain booth and ordered a small diet soda. She looked across the aisle at an Amish family, a grey-bearded patriarch with a mole on his cheek, his wife whose face had the texture of a dried apple, and their two cherubic sons who wore bright blue shirts and wide straw hats. Their eyes were closed, their hands folded. They were saying grace. The table between them was laden with plates of pork chops and bowls overflowing with mashed potatoes with brown bits of skin half-submerged under the starchy surface.



Arkeley folded himself painfully into the booth and dug into his food. The thought of all that oily greasy chicken being shredded between Arkeley's teeth made Caxton look away. She studied a woman in an enormous sweatshirt with a howling wolf painted on the front. She was shoveling red Jell-O into her mouth. Caxton just closed her eyes and tried to breathe normally.



"They drink blood, just like we eat food," she said. Talking helped her ignore all the food being consumed. "You talked before about how they need more and more the older they get. Like those things in Lares' boat."



He nodded. "Malvern would need to bathe in blood to restore herself. It would take half a dozen kills to make her whole again, and she would need that much blood again the next night. And every night after that."



"Christ," Caxton said. The Amish man across the aisle shot her a nasty look for taking his Lord's name in vain. She resisted the urge to show him her middle finger.



"They always need more? It has to level out after a while, right? Otherwise there wouldn't be enough blood in the world after a while."



"You've never seen evil before, have you?" Arkeley asked. He held up a spoon laden with ambrosia salad that vibrated with his breath. "Not true evil."



She thought about it for a while. The horrors of the hunting camp were still with her. She only had to close her eyes and she saw them again. Still. She had seen killers before, human killers, and they had failed to terrorize her like this. They had been sick, sad little people who lacked the imagination to solve their problems in any nonviolent way. That didn't make them evil-it made them damaged, but certainly not evil. "I'm not sure evil exists, not like you mean." She put both hands on the tabletop and pushed against the edge, stretching her arms. "I mean, there's a moral component to our lives, sure, and if you know you're doing something wrong-"



"Evil," Arkeley interrupted, "is never satisfied. Evil has no ending, no bottom."



He swallowed noisily. "If it isn't stopped it will swallow the world. Vampires are unnatural. They are dead things that get up and enact a mockery of living and it costs them, badly, to do it. The universe abhors them even more than it abhors a vacuum."



She nodded, not really understanding. But she could feel how much of it he believed. How much he needed to destroy the remaining vampires. She could feel, also, the beginning of something inside of herself that matched his need. She wanted to close the remaining coffins. She wanted to destroy the vampires and she was standing on the edge of that desire and she wasn't sure, if she stepped off the edge, if there would ever be a bottom to her wanting. Which, she realized, was exactly what had happened to him. He wanted to kill vampires the same way vampires wanted his blood.



"It's dangerous, isn't it, to learn too much about them?" she asked. "You start becoming something unnatural yourself." She looked around at the normal, healthy, happy people all just eating lunch. They weren't monstrous. They weren't disgusting. They weren't good or evil. They were natural. "Why did you bring me here?" she asked. "None of the suspects lived this far west."



"I want you to meet somebody," he said, and reached for the check.