A far better plan would be to signal Glauer and have him come rushing in with a shotgun blast to scare the hell out of the intruders. Jameson had always maintained that half-deads were cowards at heart. If Glauer surprised them enough they might just scatter, allowing her to escape without actually having to fight them at all.
Caxton reached into her pocket for her cell phone, so she could call Glauer and set up a surprise attack.
Her hand found the bottom of her pocket but didn’t find the phone. She cursed silently when she realized she’d left it back in the car. She could still signal him by shouting for his help (screaming seemed undignified, even if that was the signal they’d agreed upon). Doing so would of course alert every half-dead in the area to her presence and give them a bead on her location. They could be on her like a plague of locusts before Glauer could get through the door.
If the room she was in had possessed a window she could have opened it and looked down at the back of the house. From there she could have signaled Glauer somehow. The room did not possess a window.
But maybe one of the other rooms on the second floor did.
It was worth a try, she decided. Moving slowly, keeping very low, she crept around the bed and past Astarte’s dangling arm. She crouch-walked through the pool of blood on the floor—it made her a little queasy to think that she was walking through someone’s spilt-out life, but she’d been through worse before—and out through the door.
She could hear the half-deads moving about below her on the ground floor. She heard drawers yanked open and what sounded like someone rummaging through a pile of cutlery. The half-deads were arming themselves, she thought, divvying up the steak knives in the kitchen. Their beady little eyes were probably shining with glee. Half-deads never used guns, because their decaying bodies lacked the coordination necessary for aiming a firearm. They loved knives, though. Passionately.
Keeping her back against the wall, Caxton slid to her right, toward the nearest door on the gallery. She passed across its width, then reached back to turn the cut-glass knob. The door opened with the barest of creaking noises, but she stopped and stood perfectly still, listening. The half-deads were still about their business in the kitchen—they must not have heard her. She pulled the door open further and peered inside.
Neat stacks of folded white blankets and tablecloths sat on shelves inside, smelling of old, clean cotton.
She had found the linen closet.
No time to curse her luck, she thought. She glanced over the gallery railing into the darkness below, looking for any sign of movement. The only light came from the flashers on the cruisers inside, which occasionally stabbed a blue or red beam through the first-floor windows. Anything could have been down there and she wouldn’t have seen them, even if they were moving around; the strobelike effect of the flashers ruined her dark-adapted vision every time they cycled through.
Moving as silently as she could, she pushed onward to the next door down. Neither the light of the flashers nor the softer light from Astarte’s room reached up that far. She had her Mag-Lite still, but she didn’t dare use it. In the deep gloom she ran a hand over the door’s polished surface, then found a brass plate with a keyhole in it. She lifted her hand a few inches and found a cracked porcelain knob that turned with a barely audible squeal. Slowly she opened the door, an inch or two at a time, ready to stop the instant the hinges creaked. Just a little more. Once she had it open wide enough she would slip in and close it just as carefully behind her.
A high-pitched scream tore through her consciousness and a once-human body slammed into her, knocking her down. She could only register that its breath was horrible as he pushed her down to the carpet. She saw a long weapon glint as it was raised high—a meat fork, it looked like, a foot long and with four wicked barbed tines—and then it was all she could do to throw her head to one side as the fork came down right where her left eye had been. The half-dead on top of her screamed again and she saw the tattered skin of its face jiggle, felt spittle fleck her cheeks and upper lip. It tried raising its fork for another attack but couldn’t. The tines had gotten stuck in the wooden floor.
Caxton had been trained in some very basic martial arts, so she knew what to do next. She got one knee between her attacker’s legs and pushed up with all her strength. Whether half-deads had sensitive testicles or not was a moot point; the maneuver was intended to roll the thing off of her body, and it worked. She could have followed up by rolling on top of it and pinning its arms down, but she didn’t bother taking the move that far. Instead she yanked her Beretta out of its holster and shoved the barrel up under the half-dead’s chin. Its eyes went wide just before she squeezed the trigger, but afterward what was left of its face went slack.
She took a second to study the dead thing, trying to figure out who it had been and what it was doing in the house. One look at its clothes told her the whole story.
It was dressed in the gray shirt and navy blue pants of a Pennsylvania state trooper. One of her own.
Jameson must have been waiting in the house when the troopers broke in. He would have made short work of them. Though she had tried to warn them what dangers awaited inside, she had known when she sent the troopers in that they weren’t prepared or trained in how to fight a bloodthirsty monster. Once he killed them they had become his to play with, and he must have raised them from the dead even before Caxton arrived on the scene. That was why there had been no bodies in the cars out front—because the bodies had already been inside the house.
There could be as many as six more half-deads inside the house, then. She didn’t have time to feel guilty.
As fast as she could, she rolled over and jumped to her feet. She peered through the door her attacker had come through and saw the room beyond, a kind of butler’s pantry lined with cupboards. The room also contained a simple table, a few chairs, and at the far end a very narrow staircase leading down. She figured it had to go down to the kitchen. She could already hear more half-deads clattering up those steps.
She thought fast. A brass key stood in the keyhole on the inside of the door. She yanked it out, slammed the door shut, and locked it from the outside. When the mechanism clicked she hit the key with the butt of her weapon, breaking it off inside the lock.
Her next move was easy to figure out. There was no more point in subterfuge. “Glauer!” she shouted, as loud as she could, just in case he hadn’t heard the gunshot. “Glauer! Now!”
Chapter 21.
The half-deads inside the butler’s pantry hammered on the door and it shook wildly in its frame. It was constructed of thick oak, though, and Caxton thought it would hold awhile.
She rushed to the head of the stairs, still shouting for Glauer. She hoped he could hear her, through the walls of the house. If he couldn’t she was in real trouble. She could hear more half-deads moving around on the ground floor, but she couldn’t see anything. Sweeping her Mag-Lite around the base of the steps revealed nothing but faded carpet and motes of dust that twirled in the light’s beam.
She was going to have to run down there and hope for the best. She had her Beretta, and plenty of ammunition, but she knew better than to think she could shoot accurately in the dark house. Holding her light high and her handgun low, she started down the stairs. She took them carefully, one at a time.
She was halfway down when a knife sailed past her cheek to clatter against the steps behind her. It passed so close to her skin that she could see the brass rivets in its wooden handle and the serrations on the blade—close enough that it made her weave over to one side and lose her balance. She stumbled down three stairs, her left hand lashing out for the banister. She caught it, but in the process her flashlight tumbled free and bounced down the steps. Its jumping, falling light caught the torn face of a half-dead for just a moment, showing the gray, twitching muscles beneath the raveled skin. The creature was smiling broadly—but then the light bounced away again and rolled to the bottom of the stairs, where a pale hand grabbed it up and switched it off.