Vampire Zero
Laura Caxton Book 3
David Wellington
For my parents
Chapter 1.
A crystalline sweep of snow flashed across the road as her headlights gouged white tracks through the darkness. It wasn’t far to Mechanicsburg, to the address the special subjects unit dispatcher had given her. In the middle of the night there was no traffic, just white lines in the road to follow. She arrived still partially asleep, but that changed the instant she popped the door and stepped out into the freezing winter air.
It was just past Thanksgiving. Arkeley had been underground for two months and she’d been chasing him night and day, but maybe this was where that trail ended. Where her guilt, and her duty, ended.
Maybe.
“Support’s on the way, ETA ten. In thirty we can have this place buttoned up,” Glauer debriefed her, not even bothering with hello. He was a big guy, a head taller than her and far broader, and the epitome of a Pennsylvania police officer—bad haircut, thick but not bushy mustache, pasty white except where the sun got his ears and his neck. He wore the uniform of a Pennsylvania state trooper—the same as Caxton.
Once he’d been just a local cop, one who’d never even visited a murder scene. He’d seen a lot of terrible things since he met Laura Caxton, but now at least he’d reached a higher pay grade. After the massacre in Gettysburg—his hometown—she had him assigned directly to her SSU. He was a good man, and a great cop, but he still had visible fear lines etched into the crinkles around his eyes. “I figured maybe we could wait this one out.”
“That’s not how it works,” she told him. She followed him as he strung up caution tape around the entrance to the self-storage facility. He had a patrol rifle on a strap over his shoulder. “He taught me that.”
“He taught you to go running into an obvious trap?”
She tried to peer in through the glass doors of the storage center’s lobby, but she couldn’t see anything from the street. Glauer had already checked the place out and reported two bodies—dead, of course, very dead—but she needed to see for herself. She needed to see how far down Arkeley had fallen.
“Yes,” she said.
The lobby was a glaring space of white light in the night, all plaster and scuffed drywall. She could see a counter inside where the night watchman should have been sitting, a white countertop marred with dripping red splotches.
“I’m going to have to go in there,” she said. “How many exits does this building have?”
Glauer cleared his throat noisily. “Two. This one in front and a fire exit in the back. The one in the back has an alarm, but I haven’t heard any bells ringing so far.”
“Of course not. He’s waiting for me inside. He won’t wait forever, though. If we sit tight until the reinforcements arrive, he’ll come out that door so fast you’ll never get a bead on him.” She tried to give him an ingratiating smile, but he wasn’t buying it. Instead he turned away and spat on the frozen pavement.
She understood his reluctance. This was a bad situation, a real death trap. Not that she had any choice in the matter. She slumped a little inside her heavy coat. “Glauer, this is the best lead we’ve had. I can’t let it go.”
“Sure.” He finished up with the caution tape, then jogged around the side of the building without waiting for further orders. He knew exactly what to do. Stand by the fire exit and keep his eyes open. Blast anything that came through.
His concern—and the careful way he let it show—meant something to her. It really did. But not enough to stop her. She pushed through the glass doors and walked into the lobby, her Beretta already in her hand but with the safety still on, one more thing Arkeley had taught her. She approached the desk as if she wanted to rent a storage locker, then leaned over it to look at the floor behind the counter.
The carpet there was slick with coagulating blood. There were two bodies behind the counter, as advertised. One wore a uniform shirt and sat slumped forward over a security monitor, his neck torn open in a wide red gash. The other wore a janitor’s coveralls and his open eyes stared up at the acoustic ceiling tiles. His right arm was missing.
She backed up a step, then turned to look at the elevator bank at the left side of the lobby. One of the elevators stood partially open, the door kept from closing by something wedged in the jamb. She bent down and saw exactly what she expected. It was the janitor’s missing arm that held the door, the fingers pointed inward like a sign telling her where to go next.
That kind of thing passed for a joke among vampires. She’d learned not to let their sick humor get to her.
She picked up the arm—she had no worries about ruining fingerprints, since vampires lacked them—and placed it as reverently as she could to one side. Then she stepped into the elevator and let the door close behind her.
Someone had already pushed the button for the third floor.
Exactly twenty-seven minutes earlier, according to Caxton’s watch, someone had placed a call to the SSU’s tip line. That wasn’t so uncommon. Ever since the massacre at Gettysburg people were seeing vampires in their back gardens and going through their Dumpsters and loitering outside of shopping malls all the time. Caxton and Glauer had run down every one of those leads and found nothing worthy of note.
This call had been different, however. She’d heard a recording of the call and it had made her skin creep.
The caller’s voice had been inhuman, a rough growl, the words slurred as they were drooled out through a mouth full of vicious teeth. The caller hadn’t wasted any time, instead just reeling off a street address in Mechanicsburg and announcing, “Tell Laura Caxton I’m waiting for her there. I’ll wait until she comes.”
A trap, an obvious trap. Arkeley had loved it when the vampires would set traps—because then you actually knew where they were. The vampires loved traps because they were predators, and often lazy, and they loved it when their victims came to them. Now Arkeley was one of them, but she had somehow expected more of him.
The arm in the elevator door wasn’t his style either. But that didn’t mean anything. It had been two months since he’d changed, since he’d accepted the curse. He’d done it for all the right reasons, of course. He’d believed it was the only way to save Caxton’s life. He’d probably been right about that, as he was with most things.
There had been only one flaw in his reasoning. When a human being dies and returns as a vampire, he loses some of his humanity. With every night that passes he loses a little more. Arkeley had been a passionate crusader once, a killer of monsters. Now every time he crawled into his coffin a little less of him crawled out. In the end every vampire became the same creature. A junkie for blood. A sociopath with a sadistic streak. A pure and ruthless killer.
A bell chimed inside the elevator door and then the door slid open.
She stepped out onto the third floor with her handgun at the level of her shoulders, clutched in both hands. She kept her ears and her eyes open and she tried to be ready for anything. She tried to be ready to see him, to see Arkeley, and to be ready to shoot on sight.
Arkeley had never thought of himself as her mentor. She’d been useful to him in a very limited way and so he’d requisitioned her as a partner. Sometimes he’d used her to do his legwork, the way she used Glauer now. More often Arkeley had used her as bait. She’d had to learn not to take that personally—he hadn’t meant it to be personal. He was driven, obsessed, and he had found her useful. By letting him use her she had learned so much. Everything she knew about vampires had come from him, either from grudging answers to her incessant questions or by way of his example. She had worried often enough when he was alive—and far more often since he’d died and come back—that there were things he’d never bothered to tell her. Secrets he’d kept for himself.