75.
Glauer got Caxton on her feet, but she was already moving. There was no time to talk, no time to thank him for saving her life. They moved fast, crouching low, heading for a big round building she could just see in the dark. Behind them the vampires were feasting on the dead and the dying and they didn’t bother pursuing them. She cast the occasional glance over her shoulder and saw bodies strewn across the field.
Some were pale in the starlight, their heads hairless and their eyes dark. Many, many more of those bodies belonged to her troops.
She would feel guilty in the morning, if she lived that long. She kept running.
When they had gotten far enough away that she dared to make a sound she said, “I thought you’d never shot anybody before.”
“On-the-job training works wonders.” Glauer favored her with a short-lived grin that transformed into a rictus of pain. Was he hurt? She couldn’t see. It didn’t slow him down if he was. How many vampires had he killed? She had no idea.
As tight as her plan had been, as disciplined as she’d made herself, she’d seen very little of what had happened on the field. She’d been fighting herself, too focused to keep an eye on anyone else. She had no idea how many of her troops were still alive.
Up ahead the dark curved mass of the Cyclorama building blocked out the stars. She needed to get there, as fast as she could. Holding on to the sleeve of Glauer’s jacket, she pumped her legs to add more speed. A vampire could be right behind her, or directly in her path. They could move fast enough to get around her, to get in her way—
If that were the case, of course, she was already dead. Nothing she could do about it. She poured on more speed. Her feet hit concrete and she gasped in relief as she dashed up the handicapped ramp of the Cyclorama.
The front doors opened and a pair of guardsmen stepped out, weapons up and aimed at her. She lifted her own patrol rifle and they stood down. “You,” she said, pointing at one of the guardsmen. He had his night-vision goggles dangling in front of his face, a pair of shiny lenses staring back at her. “What do you see? Is anyone behind us?”
“Negative,” he told her.
“Okay. Get this door shut once we’re in.”
As badly as the first stage of the battle had gone, regardless of how many people had died, her plan was still operational. She led Glauer inside, into a building with electric lights and warmth.
The Cyclorama Center was one of the big tourist attractions of the military park—or at least it had been.
It had been closed to the public for renovation for over a year. The police had been kind enough to open it up for her so she could use it as her preliminary fallback position. It was a round building with no windows, so no vampires could come crashing in from the sides. Inside was mostly open space so that people could see the cyclorama itself, an oil painting twenty-seven feet high and hundreds of feet around, a 360-degree vision of the battlefield during Pickett’s infamous charge. The painting was badly faded, but restoration work had already begun and the smoke and cannon and hordes of struggling men were depicted with eerie realism. The subject matter was too close to what Caxton had just fled for comfort.
Some of Caxton’s troops—mostly guardsmen in camouflage-pattern uniforms—had gathered inside, keeping close together. They had their rifles in their hands, ready to fight again at a moment’s notice.
None of them spoke, none of them smoked or even gave her a second look. They knew what was still out there in the dark. Falling back had bought them a few moments’ respite, but nobody would call it peace.
In the middle of the floor a table had been set up on sawhorses. A big man-portable radio rig took up half the tabletop, and the rest was covered in small-scale maps of the park and the town. A guardswoman with chevrons on her uniform was holding court down there, craning over the radio and shouting heated questions into her mouthpiece.
“Lieutenant Peters,” Caxton said, rushing up to the woman. “You made it.”
“By the skin of my ass, Trooper,” the guardswoman said. She was one of only three female volunteers in Caxton’s slapdash army, but she was also the highest-ranking of the National Guard contingent. She was a little older than Caxton, maybe thirty, but she already had streaks of iron in her dark hair. She’d been to Iraq and come back from that alive. Caxton wondered briefly if she would live through the night. If any of them stood a chance, she supposed it had to be the lieutenant.
“Any word from the visitor center?”
Peters frowned and looked at her radio. “There are some men there. They don’t sound well organized.
The mass of the opposition went after them.”
“As long as they’re holding their ground,” Caxton said. She drew one of the big maps toward her. The visitor center was just across the Taneytown Road, only a few hundred yards away and slightly farther north than the Cyclorama. Caxton’s forces had split in groups to occupy the closest buildings, just as she’d planned. Every group had orders to abandon their positions as soon as things got too hot and move to tertiary locations farther up the road. The plan was to draw the vampires farther and farther north, into the town, where it would be easier to box them in. If they headed south instead, into the open ground of the park, they might get away. She had a contingency in place if that happened—the helicopters would try to herd them back toward town with powerful searchlights. She didn’t know if that would actually work.
“If I were them I’d cut my losses and run,” Peters said, as if she’d read Caxton’s thoughts. The lieutenant pointed at three places on the map. “The roadblocks we set up couldn’t hold these assholes for more than a minute or two. If they made contact here—”
“They won’t,” Caxton said, suddenly sure of it. “They’ll come for us first.”
“For God’s sake, why? We hurt them. They hurt us worse, but they took some hits.”
Caxton nodded. “I should hope so. No, they’ll come toward us. They want our blood. They’ve been starving for so long in darkness, waiting, dreaming about blood. They’ll go for the nearest supply. And that’s us.” She looked up at the front door of the building. “Are your people ready? They’ll be here in minutes.”
“I saw how fast they moved. My people are ready,” Peters said, fixing Caxton with her eyes. Caxton started to look away—but the lieutenant didn’t. She just stood there studying Caxton, not blinking.
“Something wrong?” Caxton asked.
“We didn’t expect this kind of resistance. Over in the desert,” she said, shifting her weight slightly, leaning against the table, “our SOP when we found ourselves this badly in shit was to withdraw. Live to fight another day. That’s what we know.”
And that’s why I couldn’t just turn this job over to you, Caxton thought. She would have loved to let the soldiers take charge of Gettysburg. She could have gone somewhere and gotten some sleep. She knew better, though—Arkeley had taught her better. Soldiers didn’t just stand around waiting to get butchered. They moved strategically and only held positions they knew they could adequately defend.
They worked that way because they knew their enemies were following the same model.
Vampires didn’t fight that way. They were too arrogant—they never backed down. “Lieutenant, if we just bugged out now, the vampires could do as they pleased. Like you say, the roadblocks couldn’t hold them. You saw what they did to heavily armed soldiers. Do you want that kind of threat getting out into the civilian population?”
Peters scowled but shook her head. Good enough. Arkeley had never asked anyone to approve of his orders. Just to follow them.
76.