The one she’d shot slumped to the ground. His eyes stopped glowing, stared upward, into the sky. Here and there in the front rank others fell. Two—no, three of them down. The rest stared down at their bodies, at the holes that riddled their chests and bellies and their faces, looked from side to side, to one another.
The three who were down stayed down. The others grimaced as their flesh filled in around the bullet holes, as their bodies healed. It couldn’t have taken more than a second or two.
“Keep firing!” Caxton called. The rifles jumped and spoke. Another vampire fell, and then one on the end of the line spun around and grabbed at the vampire next to him. The rifles roared and vampires jumped, stepped backward, moved aside to let the ones behind pass.
They were moving again. Coming closer. So fast.
“Hold your positions,” Caxton shouted as the men behind her wove back and forth, looking for shots, some of them walking backward, trying to keep their distance. “Hold on,” she shouted, over the noise of the rifles. Vampires collapsed in the front line, but others moved forward, more of them. There were so many and they were so close, moving so fast. “Hold on!” she shouted again. She fired again and corroded brass buttons flew off a dark tunic. There was no blood; they had no blood in them to leak from the wounds. No way to tell if any given shot went true or wild. Some of the vampires who had fallen to the grass, their limbs wild and askew, started to get back up.
They moved fast. They were closer than she wanted them. She grabbed a pair of ear protectors from around her neck and pulled them on over her head, checked to make sure the others had theirs. Then she pulled a grenade out of her pocket and tore open its plastic wrapper.
It felt weird in her hand, like a can of soda more than a miniature bomb. It was painted a matte black, cylindrical and heavy, with circular holes punched down its length. She’d never seen one like it before, but she knew what it could do.
“Eyes,” she shouted, and pulled the pin. She threw it like a softball and it bounced harmlessly off a vampire’s shoulder. The vampire turned to watch it drop to the grass.
Even as she pulled her rifle back around to a firing position, Caxton squeezed her eyes shut. When the grenade went off she still saw stars.
Normal fragmentation grenades would be useless against vampires. The burst of shrapnel might slow them down for a moment or two, but the shards of metal would never reach a vampire’s well-protected heart. When the National Guard had asked her what kind of armament might be more useful she’d had a real inspiration, for once. She remembered the way Harold the night watchman’s flashlight had bothered her vampire and she had asked for flashbangs—stun grenades, in other words. The guard called them XM84s.
The grenade she threw held only about four and a half grams of magnesium and ammonium perchlorate.
That was more than enough. When it detonated it pumped out more light than a million burning candles and a noise nearly one hundred and eighty decibels, loud enough to leave an unprotected human being staggering and dazed. To Caxton, even with her ear guards on, it sounded like a bomb had gone off right next to her face.
When the flash and noise were over she cautiously opened her eyes again, praying the grenade had been effective. What she saw almost made her smile.
Vampires were nocturnal creatures, unable to stand any bright light. They were also predators with exceptionally acute hearing. They were also well over a hundred years old and could not have imagined what she was throwing into their midst. Many of them must have turned to look right at the grenade. All of them had heard the noise. Their advance had halted and the majority of them were down, rolling on the grass, clutching their triangular ears. The glow in their eyes had brightened considerably until the red embers looked like they were sizzling away painfully in their sockets. One, she saw, was reaching up toward the stars as if to fend off some unseen blow. One had dropped to his knees and was clawing his own eyes out with talonlike fingers.
They were no more than ten yards away. If she had hesitated for another second they would have been on her, all over her, devouring her troops. “Get around them,” she shouted, looking back to see her men tearing off their ear protectors. She reached up and took off her own. “Circle them, now, this is the best chance we’ll get!” She had another flashbang in her pocket, but she knew better than to underestimate vampires. They would know what to expect if she tried that trick again.
Her feet slipped as she ran through the long grass, but she didn’t fall. She came around behind the mass of vampires and lifted her weapon. It hardly seemed sporting, but she was beyond caring about that. One shot, then the next she lined up, executing the monsters, blowing out their hearts. They writhed and moaned beneath her, their white bodies luminous in the dark. An absurd deadly chant rang through her head, syncopated with the reports of her weapon. One vampire two vampires three vampires four.
She did not stop or slow down until Glauer grabbed her arm.
“What?” she demanded. “What now?”
He pointed and she saw one of the dazed vampires blinking his eyes rapidly. He was sitting up, slowly regaining his composure.
“Shit,” she said.
She had known they would recover from the flash. She had really, really hoped it would take longer than it had.
72.
I thought it would be hard to find volunteers. Yet again I was wrong. It was a shock to me, as it must be to any man who had not seen this war at first hand, to learn just how many dying soldiers there were in Maryland, wounded in battle, victims of dread pestilence, or simply broken in spirit and in mind. How many who had so little left to live for, who would gladly welcome one last chance for glory before they must go on to meet their rest.
I was not stopped by dint of volunteers. In fact, I had to turn many away, men who still possessed some spark of life, and healthy frames, whose only infirmity was despair. Though I could not give particulars to any, though the word “vampire” never passed my lips, still, there were so many.
Far, far too many.
Procuring the supplies I needed was easy enough as well. A few demijohns of prussic acid were requisitioned and readily available, for the troops used it to poison rats in their camps. Coffins were easily obtained, of a necessary quality and stoutness. This government has assured there will never be a shortage of coffins. A railroad car, fitted up for transporting dead soldiers home, was waiting for me in Hagerstown. And the most necessary item, Miss Justinia Malvern, I had accessed already. She was most tractable, and accommodating, as long as each night she received her ration of blood. More than once I provided this from my own veins.
—THE PAPERS OFWILLIAMPITTENGER
73.
“Damn it. Get back, get back,” Caxton called.
Some of the men around her obeyed at once, falling back, some running. Others stood their ground and kept shooting vampires, their weapons pointed down, the muzzle flashes going off in stuttering bursts.
More of the vampires started getting up, getting to their feet. The ones still rolling around on the ground were getting picked off, but there were still so many of them.
“Get back!” The only advantage the humans had was range—if the vampires recovered too quickly they would make short work of the troopers and LEOs and guardsmen. “Get back!” she screamed again.
More of her troops peeled away and ran off into the dark. More than a few, however, didn’t seem to hear her at all. Maybe their ear protectors hadn’t protected them from the bang. Maybe they were deafened—or maybe they were just so scared that they didn’t understand what she was telling them.