13 Bullets

Caxton slept.



Somehow her body had given out, somehow whole hours of panic had ebbed away, all force spent, and little bits of sleep had rushed in, dark breakers on the shores of a planet with no sun. Inside the casket her breathing had come more shallow, her eyes had rolled back in her head. She had slept.



If there were dreams in that dark slumber she could remember little of them afterward. She had a sense of rolling over in blackness, of tumbling, of falling free through infinite lightless space. There was no fear in the dream, though when it ended she screamed, her body thundering around her, her pulse beating very hard. Her eyes fluttered open and she was awake, awake and lying silently on the upholstery of the casket. She cleared her throat and blinked her eyes and tried to reconcile where she was with waking life. It wasn't easy.



A tiny finger of light slipped in through the bullet hole in the casket lid. It was so pale and faint that she thought it might be a hallucination but it grew stronger as she watched it. It danced and shifted from side to side and soon a sound came to join it, a repetitive slapping sound, a rasping two part sound, slip slap, slip slap. Bare feet walking on stone. And the light-it possessed the guttering motion and the warm yellow light of a candle flame.



"Hello," she breathed, but her throat was dry, painfully dry so it felt like it was stuck shut. She tried to clear her esophagus but nothing would come loose. She coughed and coughed and the footfalls stopped and she held her breath, wanting them to come back, terrified they would leave her alone inside the casket, even though she knew that whatever made that sound, whatever horror was approaching her, would not be a friend, or a rescuer, but a monstrosity.



The feet came closer and the light brightened. It moved to one side and then stayed put, as if the owner of the feet had set the candle down beside the casket. Caxton tried to breathe as calmly as she could.



The casket rocked back and forth as the unseen monster tore at the lid. It made no sound, no grunt or gasp. The nails in the wood shrieked and tore. The wooden lid cracked down the middle, splinters brushing Caxton's lips and then it came away altogether, air rushing into the casket, her eyes narrowing in even the miniscule light of the candle. She saw the ceiling above her, perhaps fifteen feet away, a vaulted mass of bricks held up by stout square columns. On either side she saw the walls of the cellar room lined with shelves, the shelves heavy with jars and cardboard boxes and rolled-up blankets. She had no idea where she was.



A pale face slid into view. She'd been hoping for a half-dead but her hopes were dashed. She saw the round, hairless head, the triangular ears, the face of Efrain Reyes looking down at her. His eyes were dark slits, vaguely reddish in the flickering light. His mouth was heavy with all those teeth. She sensed that he had just woken himself, that he was still half asleep, as she was. Had night just fallen? Had she been in the casket for an entire day, alone with her dreams?



Reyes wore nothing but a pair of drawstring pants. His skin was a snowy white but with just a tinge of pink that made him look feverish instead of healthy. He leaned down closer until his face was eighteen inches from hers. She felt the same absence of humanity or warmth she remembered from when she'd stood next to Justinia Malvern. It didn't surprise her this time.



He stared down into her eyes and she tried to look away but he grabbed her chin and held her, as sure and steady as if her face was bolted to his hand. She would never have the strength to break that grip.



His eyes went wider and she saw red tears wash across his pupils, as if blood had replaced every fluid in his body. She saw his pupils grow larger and larger until they filled up half her vision. She had been hypnotized by a vampire before but this was nothing like the paralysis she had felt then. That had been a general deadening, an anesthetic effect. This time she was quite conscious, to an almost painful degree, of what was being done to her. Something passed between them, from his mind, into hers. It moved silently, invisibly, but it was something very real. It was all in her mind, certainly, but it carried with it a physical sensation, a very real, very unpleasant feeling of being invaded.



Caxton had never been raped. There had been a boy in high school who didn't understand what she meant when she said she wanted to wait, to save it. She hadn't understood herself, really, and hadn't known how to stop him when he would shove his hands inside her clothing and grab her, physically grab handfuls of her flesh in a painful grip. One day after school when they'd gone back to her house to theoretically study he had taken out his penis once and rubbed it up and down on the back of her hand, begging her to turn her hand over, to grasp him the way he was always grasping her. The boy's need, his absolute desperation, had sickened her and she had pulled away. He had stood up next to the bed and loomed over her then and she had been very much aware of the fact that they were alone together, that her father wouldn't get home until after six. "Suck it," he had said, his appendage dangling in front of her. "Suck it," and his voice had been something broken, and sharp, and potentially dangerous.



She had resorted to tears, big sobbing tears of panic, and the boy had been so shamed he went away and never spoke to her again. It was the closest she'd ever come to being sexually violated.



What Reyes was doing to her, though, was far worse than any teenaged fumbling could ever be. He was forcing himself on her innermost thoughts, her secrets, the deepest, darkest parts of her. He read her like a book, picking at her memories. He found the memory of the boy and the tears and she could feel he was amused. She could feel him just as if he lay on top of her, the cold waxiness of his skin, the faint heat of blood, the smell of blood all over him. She was under his control, completely. She lacked even the will to fight him, or even to struggle, even to try to get away.



After a while the vampire closed his eyes but he didn't move away. The violation stopped instantly but she could still feel him, some remnant of his intrusion inside of her skull. It made her brain itch. Vesta Polder's amulet hadn't done a damned thing to help her. The vampire reached down into the casket, presumably to lift her up. She wasn't going to get a better chance. She lifted the Beretta to the level of his heart and fired and fired and fired again, the noise splitting the silence wide open, the muzzle flashes so much brighter than the candle it was as if the sun had entered the room. Spent gas wreathed around Caxton's face like smoke and the stink was oppressive. Her already battered ears rang and the vampire snarled like a wild animal. When she stopped firing he grabbed the smoking hot barrel of the gun in one of his hands and threw it into the corner of the room. Her shots hadn't even scratched his hairless white skin. She remembered what Arkeley had said: with so much blood in him a bazooka probably couldn't scratch his skin. She had succeeded in one thing, though. The part of him inside her head lit up with rage. She knew she'd pissed him off, she could feel his anger burning inside of her. He reached down with both hands and picked her up and threw her against the nearest wall. Her back collided with wooden shelves, dry and dusty, and they broke under her momentum. Glass jars bounced over her shoulders and head and shattered on the floor. The pain woke her up and bent her double at the same time, made her want to pass out even as it brought her fully to consciousness.



He was going to kill her, she thought. He would tear off her head and drink from the stump. Or maybe he would just punch her face in. There were so many ways he could destroy her body. Tears squirted from her eyes and she could do nothing but be afraid, she couldn't even call out Deanna's name, she didn't even have time to worry what Arkeley would think about the mess she'd made. She had no mental energy to spend on anything but fear.



He strode toward her on his muscular legs, his eyes wide with hatred. Then he stopped, right in the middle of the cellar room, and stared at her. She had no idea what he was doing but she could sense how much it hurt. His body shook for a moment, a single, awful heave, and then his mouth opened and a thick scurf of clotted blood slid out of his mouth and dripped down his jaw.



Reyes dropped to his knees, the impact with the stone floor sounding like a thunderclap in the vaulted chamber. He coughed and choked and spat old blood out on the flagstones. He clutched at his chest and tore at the skin there with his vicious fingernails, leaving long pink trails across his pectoral muscles. He shook violently until he collapsed totally on the floor and lay there in his own sick. Caxton could do no more than take a few breaths while she watched him curl around himself in pain. In her head the relic of him howled and she clapped her hands over her ears but the sound was inside of her. There was no shutting it out. Eventually he recovered from his fit. She hadn't moved an inch. He got to his feet and grabbed her around the waist and threw her over his shoulder and started climbing up the stairs.