78.
I thought we would have time to train, and devise special tactics for the use of vampires in wartime. We did not.
No one expected Gettysburg to happen. Neither side was prepared. Once it began, however, like a fire in a fallow field, it could not be stopped.
I was near Hagerstown with my rail car at the time the news came. I was on my way toward Pipe Creek, to join up with Meade’s army; a trap had been laid there, to draw Lee south again. Clearly Lee had failed to take the bait. My orders changed in a moment and I linked up with a troop train to take us across the border. I was not ready. My men, such as they were, were not ready.
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. I moved about the troop train once we were under way and saw men praying, some wailing to the skies. They believed the End of Days had come. The soldiers knew this battle would be a “good ’un,” a last desperate fight to try to stop Lee before he could capture Philadelphia and force a peace. The men sang songs, “John Brown’s Body,” which I hadn’t heard since the great muster when all Washington was an armed camp, or the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” By God, it was stirring.
As we approached the little market town of Gettysburg the singing stopped abruptly. There was another sound, an abominable sound, an unbearable sound that rocked the train car beneath me, shifted the coffins back and forth in their racks. I had never heard real artillery fire before. I had not heard guns ring like bells and the earth roar as it was torn open. From twenty miles away the noise was loud enough to tear the breath out of my mouth. They say those guns were heard as far away as Pittsburgh.
—THE PAPERS OFWILLIAMPITTENGER
79.
“Go, now,” Caxton said, grabbing a guardsman’s arm and shoving him toward the exit. He went. The door flapped open and closed on its spring-loaded hinges as one after another of her troops pressed through. Caxton searched the Cyclorama for any more survivors, but all she saw were torn and bloodied corpses—and vampires.
Twenty or so of them had pushed inside the vast round space. They stood in the middle of the floor, looking up at her. Their tattered uniforms—one even wore the moldering remains of a forage cap—echoed the look of the painted soldiers on the walls. They were old, these vampires. So old—and so hungry. She could only imagine how hungry they must be, after lying asleep in the ground for a hundred and forty years.
Caxton cursed herself. Arkeley would never have given that thought time to form. They weren’t people, these vampires. Not anymore. They were killers, wild animals that needed to be put down.
One of them stepped forward, toward her, arms up. Beseeching, begging her for her blood. Behind him others started moving.
She lined up her shot perfectly. The vampire took another step. He had fed—she could see a slight tinge of pink in his cheeks, could see his chest where his ribs weren’t quite as prominent as they were on the others. Her first shot only ripped open his skin and splintered a few bones. Her second shot spun him around until she could see only his arm and his side. She waited for him to turn back, to face her again, before she fired a third shot that sent fragments of his dark heart spinning out through a hole in his back.
The others were still moving, still coming closer. Some of them tried to fix her with their gaze, but she was able to avoid eye contact. She could feel her skin rippling, her body curling in revulsion.
Adrenaline—pure, liquefied fear—coursed through her body. Every fiber of her being just wanted to turn and run, to escape. Somehow she held her ground.
Caxton couldn’t take them all on. That would be suicide. She could buy a few moments for her troops, though. They were out there in the dark, running for the visitor center. The longer she kept the vampires inside the Cyclorama the better chance the guardsmen and Glauer had to make it. She wanted Glauer to make it. She owed him this chance.
“Who’s next?” she asked, raising her rifle to a firing posture.
The vampires seethed forward, all of them at once. Like vaporous white mist they rushed toward her, so fast they seemed a single mass of death hurled at her. Caxton had expected as much. They were too smart to try for her one at a time.
She dropped the rifle, letting it fall back on its sling, and shoved her hand in her pocket to pull out her second and last flashbang. She’d already peeled off the plastic wrapper, so it took only a fraction of a second to rip out the pin and let it tumble out of her pocket. She didn’t have even enough time to throw it—
She hurled herself backward, her eyes screwed shut. Her back hit the push bar of the fire door even as the flashbang went off and the vampires howled in pain. She hadn’t had time to pull on her ear protectors, and the noise of the explosion ripped through her eardrums, deafening her, filling up her head with a high-pitched whine so loud it made her teeth hurt, made her guts vibrate.
She couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Her body was wracked by the noise, her senses completely scrambled. She was just marginally aware that she was falling, falling backward, then she felt a new wave of pain as she hit the grass hard, her arms flying up reflexively to protect her head. She opened her eyes, but all she saw was darkness. She’d passed from the well-lit Cyclorama into the near-total darkness of the overcast night, and her eyes were still adjusting.
Someone grabbed her arm. She lashed out, terrified that a vampire would tear her apart while she was still deaf and blind, but the hand just held on to her and eventually she realized it was a warm hand, a human hand holding her. She blinked her eyes rapidly, trying to force her pupils to dilate. Eventually she saw a gray shape looming out of the darkness above her, a gray shape bisected by a darker bar. A face—a face with a thick mustache. It was Glauer.
“—hear me? The…through…door…bolt…how…”
His voice was a distant rumbling, a bass-heavy noise trying to fight through the ringing in her ears. She could hear only a fraction of what he was saying. Frustration surged up inside of her and she sat up, then climbed to her feet. She could see Glauer a little better then and she noticed that he was jabbing his index finger at something behind her.
She spun around and saw the fire door she’d just crashed through. It had closed on its hinges, but now it was rattling in its frame. As if the vampires inside were trying to get it open but didn’t know how to work the push bar. Well, maybe that was even true—they’d probably never seen one before. It would take only seconds before they figured it out, however, if only by trial and error.
Glauer had been asking her if there was any way to bolt the door. She’d lost precious time while she recovered her senses. Urgently she cast around her, looking for a lock, looking for something to push up against the door. The door had no knob on this side—it was meant to be opened only in emergencies, and to keep out trespassers who might try to break in. There was a small lock plate with a narrow keyhole, presumably to be used to seal the door shut. They didn’t have the key, though. Glauer ran his fingers across the plate, wincing back every time the door jumped in its frame. If a vampire so much as leaned on the door, if his hip caught the push bar, it could fly open at any moment. They had no more time. Caxton grabbed his sleeve, tried to pull him away, but he was intent on the lock plate.