13 Bullets

Chapter 9

"It will start with palsy. Uncontrollable shaking. Then she'll begin losing tissue mass. The skin will peel back from her hands and then the muscles will rot. They'll become lifeless claws. Her legs will atrophy even more quickly and become nothing but dead stumps. In time her eye will dry up and collapse."
Hazlitt sat on top of an antique electrocardiogram machine, its pens splayed outward, and puffed occasionally on a cigarette that mostly sat ignored between two fingers. "Maybe, eventually, she'll die. We don't know."
"If it keeps her from making more vampires I don't care," Arkeley said. "Is there a real reason why we're bothering with this?" he asked.
In the center of the room, near the coffin, Justinia Malvern sat in her wheelchair, the empty blood beaker clutched in one near-lifeless hand. Her other hand rested on the keyboard of a laptop computer perched on top of the coffin.
"You know she can't speak. Her larynx rotted away years ago. This is the only way she can express herself." Hazlitt rubbed the bridge of his nose with one thumb. He smiled at his charge as she worked up the strength to peck at one of the keys with a talon-like finger. "You should be more patient, Arkeley," the doctor said.
"You might learn something from someone so old and wise." When she had finished she folded her hands in her lap and looked up at them, her face quivering with emotion. Hazlitt turned the laptop around so they could see the screen. In 36-point italic letters Malvern had spelled out:
my Brood shall Devouer ye utterly
Arkeley chuckled. Then he stood up and started walking out of the room. "I'll be back to check on you both," he told Hazlitt. "Frequently." Caxton followed him out. In the white light of the hallway Caxton blinked and rubbed at her eyes. She followed Arkeley's footsteps around to a desk in the hub of the building where a corrections officer with sergeant's bars sat watching a portable television, a sitcom maybe. The reception was so bad that the laugh track was indistinguishable from static.
"What can I do you for, Mr. Marshal?" The CO slowly took his feet down from the desk and picked up the keyboard of his computer.
"Good evening, Tucker. I need some information on the staff here. More specifically I need to know the name and current address of everyone who worked here in say the last two years. I need to know if they still work here and if not, why they left. Can you get me that information?"
"Not a problem." Tucker fiddled with his mouse for a while and hit a key. Down the hall a laser printer rattled out three sheets of paper.
Arkeley smiled, an altogether warmer and more human smile than he'd ever given Caxton. "You have to love this modern world. It used to take days to get a report like that. Listen, Tucker, what's the turnover here?"
The guard shrugged. "Shit, it gets creepy at night here. Some people can't take it. Others, like me, we've got balls enough to stick around. I'd say half of the faces I see come through here don't last a week. Maybe ten guys in the last year. Then there's cleaning, maintenance, construction crews, safety inspectors, whatever. They come through here so fast they never introduce themselves."
Arkeley nodded. "I was afraid of that." He turned to Caxton. "Any of those people could have had contact with Malvern."
"Which means any of them could be our vampire now," Caxton responded. Arkeley nodded. She'd gotten something right. She felt embarrassed and vindicated at the same time. Arkeley grabbed the sheets of paper off the printer and jogged back to where she waited. "Hazlitt is supposed to keep her in isolation but you saw him. He'll do whatever she asks." Arkeley shook his head in disgust.
"Every doctor we bring in here falls in love with her."
"Does she hypnotize them?" Caxton remembered that part of the report.
"She has far more to offer them than just her piercing gaze," Arkeley replied, scanning the sheets.
"So why not drag him out of here right now, have him replaced?" Caxton demanded. "You have some funny ideas about police work."
Arkeley nodded, accepting what she said. "Listen," he told her, "if somebody wants to be your enemy, there's only one thing you can do. You give them exactly what they want. It confuses them and makes them wonder what you're up to. If I fired Hazlitt tonight he would start thinking about ways of breaking Malvern out of here. If I let him keep her company at least I know where to find them both." He shook his papers. "Alright. Now we go home and get some rest. In the morning we'll start running down these names. It's always better to hunt for vampires by daylight."
Caxton could hear the good sense in that. They headed back out to the parking lot where dew had collected on the hood of the car and fogged up the windows. Caxton got the car started and drove back out toward the nearest highway, Route 322, which would take them most of the way back to Harrisburg. She turned up the heater, trying to dispel the chill of the night air. It was hard to get warm after the things she'd seen and been exposed to in the previous two days. The cold seemed to have seeped into her flesh. It made her bones hurt. She wanted to turn on the radio but didn't dare-what if Arkeley disapproved of her taste in music? It wouldn't be worth the fight, or what it did to her self-esteem. She got it, really, she was just a highway patrol trooper, he was some kind of big-time Fed. She was willing to bow to his experience, to treat him with respect. Yet whenever he chastised her she felt as if she were a complete failure. She needed to grow a thicker skin, at least when she was around Arkeley.
She was surprised, so deep in these thoughts as she was, when he was the one to break the silence. She was almost shocked when he commended her. "You asked some excellent questions back there," he said. "With some training you might make an adequate detective some day." She had imagined, in her private thoughts, that when he said such a thing (presumably after he found her standing over a heap of dead vampires) that he would sound a little sheepish, as if he should have seen the potential in her all along but had been blinded by his own arrogance. Instead he sounded like he always had-like an elementary school teacher handing out report cards. But this one had a B+ on it. She would take what she could get.
"I need to learn about these monsters," she said, "if I'm going to be any help to you. And I want to be a help to you."
"You will, one way or another. And I'll help you, too. No matter what happens this is going to be a big case. When I went up against Lares it meant a big step up in my career," he told her. "You will no doubt be promoted if we can stop this thing from killing too many people."
She shook her head. She hadn't really thought about that. "I didn't become a trooper to get sergeant's bars. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind a raise in pay grade. I'm in this car though because I believe in what I do. When we graduate from the academy, they make us say the honor call. They make us say it a lot, until we start believing it. 'I am a Pennsylvania State Trooper. I am a soldier of the law. To me is entrusted the honor of the force.' They used to really mean that bit about being soldiers. Troopers weren't allowed to marry and they lived together in barracks, just like soldiers. They didn't let women join until the Seventies."
Arkeley was quiet for a while. When he spoke again he sounded almost pensive.
"It must not have been easy for you to enter such a conservative organization. I imagine there would be some resistance to women being in your position, even now."
"Wow, you're preaching to the choir," she laughed.
"In fact you've probably faced some direct adversity yourself. A woman doing a man's job-there would have been talk. Idle talk, in the locker room, perhaps."
"Sure. A lot of the guys like to mouth off," she said.
"They would have made you a figure of fun. They would have names for you. Hurtful names, though perhaps accurate."
Caxton started to blush. She wasn't sure where he was going with that line of inquiry. "Yes, they call me names. They call everybody something, so-"
"They probably make a good deal out of your lesbianism."
Her lips pressed together and she heard a roaring in her ears. She watched the other cars passing them in the left lane. She was driving too fast and she made herself ease up on the gas.
"You are a lesbian, aren't you? I made the assumption based simply on your haircut," Arkeley told her. "I could be wrong."
She shifted in her seat and glared at him. "Yes, I'm gay," she shouted. She couldn't seem to control her voice. "Which means what to you? I don't care if you know. I don't care who knows, I'm proud of who I am. But that doesn't give you a right to-to-it should mean nothing. It has nothing to do with this fucking case!"
"Quite true," he agreed, looking completely unruffled.
"Then why would you say things like that to somebody? Goddamnit, Arkeley!"
He cleared his throat. "I took the time to play this little game with you because I need to train you out of the habit of bullshitting me, Trooper. You may talk about being a soldier of the law all you like. You may say you want to help me. It's completely immaterial. You're in this car for only one reason."
A metallic blue Honda shot past them going at least ninety and stopped him from finishing his sentence. The unmarked patrol car rocked on its shocks with the near collision and Caxton slapped her horn. The Honda slowed down just enough to pull right in front of them, dangerously close.
"What the hell?" she demanded, and hit the horn again. She took her foot off the gas completely and went for the brake.
Another car, a Chevrolet Cavalier that desperately needed a car wash, came up on her left. It matched her speed. As she tried to slow down, the Chevy's driver copied her. In the rear-view mirror she saw a third car coming up from behind. They were boxing her in. She glanced across at the driver of the Chevy just as he looked at her. His face was torn to ribbons.