13 Bullets

Chapter 8

"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 nobody 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 nobody 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. Nobody 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 of it has been rewarding."
"Yeah? What have you learned?" Caxton asked.
The vampire's face curled up. Her nose lifted in the air and rippled obscenely. She had smelled the blood.
"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."
"We don't need a vaccine if they're extinct," Arkeley said. The two of them exchanged a hot stare for a moment of pure, easy hatred.
"Excuse me, I really do need to feed her." Hazlitt knelt before the wheelchair-bound vampire and held up the beaker to show her the ounce or two of black blood at the bottom.
"Jesus, how long have you been studying her?" Caxton asked. "You said you've been doing this for seven years. But she must have been here for two decades. Who worked here before you?"
"Dr. Gerald Armonk."
"The late Dr. Armonk," Arkeley said.
Hazlitt shrugged. "There was an unfortunate accident. Dr. Armonk and Justinia had a very special relationship. He used to feed her directly, cutting open the pad of his thumb and allowing her to suck out his blood. She had a bad spell of depression in the nineties, you see, and even attempted suicide a few times. Perhaps it wasn't the wisest thing to do, to feed her that way, but it seemed to cheer her immensely."
"Armonk had a Doctorate. From Harvard, if you can believe it," Arkeley said.
"For the first few days that I worked here, she was flush with life and really, actually, quite beautiful," Hazlitt said. "Then she began to fade like a wilting rose. What little blood I had for her just wasn't enough." He raised the beaker as if to press it to her bony lips. Arkeley grabbed it out of his hands, sloshing the thick liquid.
"Maybe not quite yet," he said.
The vampire lifted a shaking hand. Anger flared in her eye.
For a lingering moment no one said anything. Hazlitt opened his mouth only to shut it again quickly. Caxton realized he must be terrified of Arkeley. He had recognized the Marshal when he arrived, had even spoken to him with a certain familiarity. How many times in the previous twenty years had Arkeley come to this little room, Caxton wondered? How many times had he grabbed the beaker?
But no. This was a familiar scene for everyone but herself. Yet she understood, from the relative postures of the two men, that Arkeley had never interrupted the ritual before this night.
It was Arkeley who broke the silence. Clutching the beaker in both hands he looked right into the vampire's eye. "We've had reports of half-dead activity," he said, quietly. Softly, even. "Faceless. The woman over there saw one. I burned its arm this morning. There's only one way to make a half-dead, and it takes a young, active vampire. A new vampire. Have you been naughty, Miss Malvern? Have you done something foolish?"
The vampire's head rolled to the left and then the right on the thin column of her neck.
"I have a hard time believing you," Arkeley said. "Who else can make a vampire but you? Give me a name. Give me a last known address and I'll leave you alone."
The vampire didn't reply at all, except to let her one eye roll downward until it was focused on the blood in the beaker.
"Don't be a bastard," Hazlitt hissed. "At least not more than usual. You know how much she needs that blood. And look. It's already clotting."
"Alright." Arkeley lifted the beaker and pressed it into the vampire's out-stretched hand. She clutched it in a shaky death-grip that turned her knuckles even whiter.
"Enjoy it while you still can."
"What is your problem tonight?" Hazlitt nearly shrieked.
Arkeley straightened up and tapped his jacket pocket again. It made a tiny snare sound-there was a piece of paper in there. "I said we couldn't cut off her blood supply unless we had a court order. Well, this new vampire activity lit some fires under some very important posteriors." He drew out a long piece of paper embossed with a notary's seal. "You are hereby ordered to cease and desist feeding this vampire as of right now." Arkelely smiled broadly. "Sometimes it helps to be the guy who guards courthouses."
The vampire stopped with the beaker halfway to her mouth. Her eye swiveled upward to squint at Arkeley.
"If you were human you would try to make it last," the Fed told her. Caxton had never seen him enjoy anything so much. "You'd know it was your last taste, ever, and you'd try to savor it. But you're not human, and you can't resist, can you?"
The vampire's mouth drew back in a kind of sneer. Then a long gray tongue snaked out between all those teeth and started lapping hungrily at the blood in the beaker, licking long black streaks up the side. It was gone in a moment.