13 Bullets

Chapter 12

"Freeze!" someone shouted and she heard a whole volley of shots. "This is the State Police!" came next. It was followed by horrible screams.
The pit was full of road grading equipment and supplies. Caxton searched through boxes of tools, looking for anything she could use to help her get up top again. Her reinforcements had arrived-the backup Arkeley had called for, back when the half-deads were chasing them. The troopers had arrived and they were getting slaughtered.
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 assured 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 scrape 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 mass. 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 mass 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 mass 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 mass 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 passed 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.