"Then why would you say things like that to somebody? G.o.dd.a.m.nit, Arkeley!"
He cleared his throat. "I took the time to play this little game with you because I need to train you out of the habit of bulls.h.i.tting me, Trooper. You may talk about being a soldier of the law all you like. You may say you want to help me. It"s completely immaterial. You"re in this car for only one reason."
A metallic blue Honda shot past them going at least ninety and stopped him from finishing his sentence. The unmarked patrol car rocked on its shocks with the near collision and Caxton slapped her horn. The Honda slowed down just enough to pull right in front of them, dangerously close.
"What the h.e.l.l?" she demanded, and hit the horn again. She took her foot off the gas completely and went for the brake. Another car, a Chevrolet Cavalier that desperately needed a car wash, came up on her left. It matched her speed. As she tried to slow down, the Chevy"s driver copied her. In the rear-view mirror she saw a third car coming up from behind. They were boxing her in. She glanced across at the driver of the Chevy just as he looked at her. His face was torn to ribbons.
"They"re following me-they were at my house and now they"re following me," Caxton said. In the rear-view she saw her undead pursuer drift ever closer toward the b.u.mper of her patrol car.
"I doubt it," Arkeley told her. "Hold on." The car behind them-a Hummer2-smashed into them and the patrol car shrieked as metal tore into metal. The half-dead back there wasn"t trying to make them crash. Caxton had enough experience with police pursuits to understand. The driver behind her was showing her the limits of the box. She sped up a little, keeping just inches away from the car boxing them in from the front, and whirled around in her seat to keep all three a.s.sailants in sight.
"They"re not here for me?" she asked.
"No, I don"t think so." Arkeley took his weapon from its holster. "When I took down Lares he was feeding his ancestors. He brought them blood. I did some more research and I found others who"d seen similar behavior. Vampires
l.u.s.t for blood, but they worship the creatures who gave them the curse. When I threatened Malvern back in the hospital I brought this on us. Roll down your window and lean back."
She did as he asked only a moment before he lurched across her body and fired two shots into the Chevy on her left. The half-dead driver threw his hands across his face but they exploded in clouds of bone fragments and withered flesh. His head cracked and pulled apart and the car spun off the road and smacked into a tree. Caxton watched in her rear-view as its headlights swiveled out crazily, pointing in different directions, a moment before they went dark.
From behind the Hummer-2 rammed them again. The half-deads were not pleased. Caxton grabbed the steering wheel so hard she felt it in her shoulders. "Okay, my turn," she said. She spun the wheel and stamped on the gas. The patrol car shot forward and smacked into the rear right wheel of the Honda in front of them. The tire slipped on the pavement and the car spun out to the left, letting Caxton surge forward and around the out-of-control vehicle. She"d had three days training in pursuit evasion tactics-everyone in Highway Patrol had to take it. As she sped into the darkness ahead, finally free of the box, she turned to grin at Arkeley, truly pleased with herself. "Do you know how to use the car radio?" she asked him, gesturing at the dashboard set with her chin. "Go ahead and call Troop H dispatch. We need every available unit."
Arkeley stared at her. "You little idiot," he breathed. She didn"t look at him, just focused on keeping control of the car. She was doing better than ninety on a road rated for sixty at the most. "If we had let them, they would have taken us right to their master."
"To the vampire," she said.
"Yes."
"But you shot that guy!" she protested.
"I had to make it look like we weren"t just playing along."
Caxton gritted her teeth and glanced in her mirrors. The Hummer was still back there, laboring to keep pace with her. She eased off the gas a hair-not enough to make him think she was letting him catch up. The Honda was still trying to get turned around after its sudden stop. A green traffic sign flashed by. "The exit for New Holland is coming up. Do I take it or not?"
"We"ll have to try to guess from their behavior which way they want us to go." Arkeley bit off the words and spat them out. He was holding on to the door handle with one hand while the other held his weapon up, barrel pointed up. If the bouncing, jostling car made him fire by accident the bullet would exit the car as quickly as possible. "If he starts to weave to the left-"
He didn"t need to finish the sentence. Two motorcycles came screaming up the on-ramp behind them and rumbled quickly up behind the patrol car. The riders weren"t wearing helmets but then they didn"t have any faces either. One of the half-dead riders pulled up on the right of Caxton, forcing her into the left lane, away from the New Holland exit. At least that answered her question. The other motorcyclist gunned his engine with a sustained explosive noise and pulled up next to her front left wheel.
The motorcycles weren"t much of a threat on their own-she could ram them off the road with one swivel of her wheel. The one on her right, though, had a big rusty hunk of metal in his hand, a cleaver, at least eighteen inches long. He brought it back with his arm straight and then swung it right into the side of the car. There was more noise than damage to the car"s body but her right-hand headlight flickered out in a shower of sparks and she was half blind, hurtling through the Stygian woods at eighty-five miles an hour. Reflexively, even as he was pulling his cleaver free, she swerved to the left to get away from him. The biker on that side swung out wide and narrowly missed getting clipped by her front left wheel. Gla.s.s and bits of metal smacked and skittered and danced across the windshield as the patrol car rocked up and down on its shock absorbers and the wheels slipped away from her.
Caxton struggled to regain control of the car. Her remaining headlight washed the road surface from left to right as the car sagged on its tires but she was good at this, she"d had years of practice driving under hazardous conditions, and she didn"t panic. She straightened the car out and poured on a little more speed. Maybe the Hummer would have trouble keeping up but she figured the bikers knew where they were taking her.
"Are you sure they"re not trying to kill us?" Caxton demanded. "Ninety per cent so," Arkeley replied. "Normally half-deads herd victims to the master. After all if we die out here the vampire can"t drink our blood. Then again, if they think I"m enough of a threat they may not want to take any chances."
"You"re a known vampire killer," Caxton said. "If I were them I"d consider you a pretty serious threat. Please, please, please, can we call for some backup?"
He nodded. He didn"t waste time suggesting that maybe she was right for once and maybe he was wrong. He picked up the radio handset and called it in, just like he should have ten minutes earlier. Dispatch from Troop H started calling in cars.
Then an orange sign flashed by them so fast she could barely see it, its phosph.o.r.escent paint glowing eerily in the near-total darkness. She didn"t have a chance to read it but she knew what the color meant: road work ahead.
She took her foot off the gas. The Hummer behind her grew bigger in her rear-view but she tried not to sweat it. She had no idea what was coming -anything from a lane shift to a complete road closure. She could feel panic rising in her chest.
The biker on her left had a monkey-wrench. He started to draw back his arm, clearly intending to smash in her remaining headlight. There were no streetlamps on this stretch of highway-this was a rural route where people
were expected to bring their own lights. If he smashed her lamp she was going to be blind. With a desperation she"d never felt before she rolled the wheel over and slammed right into him. The bike twisted under the impact, its front wheel flying up. The biker, pinned against the side of the patrol car, shot out his hands and tried to grab on to her door but his skinless fingers scrabbled uselessly on the slick metal and gla.s.s. He disappeared from view, there one second, far behind her in the dark the next. His motorcycle span on the asphalt kicking up sparks.
She stood on the brake and the Hummer swerved to avoid hitting her. The other biker pa.s.sed her by, his broken face turning to watch her go. While he wasn"t watching the road his machine kept going in a perfectly straight line, right into an orange traffic cone. The PVC cone was meant to survive even the worst collisions but his bike wasn"t. It flipped end over end and landed right on top of its operator.
Caxton pumped the brakes. She could read the signs now. There was an emergency detour she couldn"t quite make. There was a complete closure of the road in front of her. Behind her the Hummer stopped short, its brakes howling.
She rolled toward a stop, the car unwilling to slow as quickly as she wanted it to. Sheer willpower wasn"t helping. The road surface was covered in a chalky dust and in places it had been peeled away to reveal a much rougher layer below. The car jumped and bounced and Arkeley shoved his handgun into its holster. Finally, at last, the car ground to a halt, sliding the last few feet. It rocked forward, then back, and threw the two of them around in their seatbelts. Dust drooped from the air, settling again on the road, and silence fell with it.
Directly in front of them stood a roadblock of sawhorses and bright yellow collision barriers. Beyond the road surface had been completely cut up and torn through, leaving a six foot deep pit in the earth. Mud-spattered construction vehicles, abandoned power tools, boxes of rags and supplies and stacks of traffic cones littered the hole. Overhead an ancient and gnarled silver maple arched across the roadway, its twinned propeller-like seeds spinning down through the night air.
High up in the mostly denuded branches something huge and white caught a few rays of light from her headlamp. As she watched, about a quarter of the white thing broke off from the main ma.s.s and fell like a stone. It hit the hood of her patrol car hard enough to make her scream a little. When she"d recovered herself she looked through the windshield and saw a construction worker in an orange vest staring back at her with dead eyes. His throat had been completely torn out, as well as part of his collarbone and shoulder. His skin was pale, and there was no blood on him at all.
Before the car had time to stop trembling from the impact, the vampire leapt down from the tree to land right next to her, separated from her fragile body by only the width of her door. His eyes met hers and she could not look away.
The vampire stood at least six and a half feet tall. He was not as muscular as she had expected-perhaps she had thought every vampire would be as big as Piter Lares. This one had a thin, whip-like quality that made her think of a predatory cat-fast, vicious, over-designed. He was completely naked and completely hairless. His ears stuck up on either side of his head and came to sharp points. Caxton studied him. She had plenty of time-he didn"t seem to be in any kind of hurry, as if he would kill them when he felt like it, when he got around to it. They both knew she wasn"t going anywhere. His eyes were reddish and bright. Seed pods from the maple tree had stuck to his skin here and there-a faint sheen of sweat covered him from head to toe. His skin, which had looked so white before, actually had a slight tinge of pink. He had just sucked the blood of the dead construction worker, after all. The poor dead man must have been the only one around the work site, perhaps a night watchman.
The vampire cleared his throat as if he wanted her to look at him some more. Was he vain? Did he want her to think him beautiful? She actually wondered. Did she find him beautiful? Like Malvern in the hospital he radiated no humanity at all. It was strange, she would never have said that Arkeley was particular human-seeming. Yet the Fed gave off some kind of aura, a human warmth or perhaps it was just a smell. The vampire had none of this. The only comparison she could make, and it really jumped out at her, was that the vampire was like a marble statue of a person. Its lines and contours could be perfectly carved, immaculately replicated, but you would never mistake him for something alive. He was like Michelangelo"s statue of David. Perfect but hard and cold. His p.e.n.i.s drooped flaccidly against his thighs and she wondered if he had any use for it. Did he find humans attractive? Did vampires have s.e.x with their own kind?
He padded closer to the car and placed one hand on the frame of the open window. He bent down to look inside, his lower jaw falling open to show his frightening number of teeth. From behind her Caxton was aware of a certain sound, an irritating buzz like the droning wings of a mosquito. As the vampire"s face came closer to her she heard the noise double in volume. It really was quite annoying. It was Arkeley, she realized. He was saying something but she couldn"t make out the words. Well, he"d never said anything she particularly wanted to hear before, so she saw no reason to start paying attention to him now.
The vampire"s hands came down around her, his powerful fingers clutching at her uniform shirt and her belt. She moved through s.p.a.ce, dragged inexorably along by his power, in one slightly sickening, perfectly fluid motion she was outside of the car and dangling from his hands. She was floating, weightless, and she felt like a little girl again, she felt as she had when her father used to pick her up and carry her around. How wonderful it had been to surrender everything to that embrace. How much joy she had taken in being a doll in her father"s arms.
She looked for the vampire"s eyes again but his face was turned away from her. She frowned, wanting very much for him to look at her once more. A hole appeared in his forehead, a gaping, fluttering black hole that spat dark fluids and fragments of bone. A second hole appeared in his cheek and she saw the back of his head burst open and suddenly, quite suddenly, she was falling.
Bang-she hit the ground. And pain flashed like lightning in her arm. The pain smashed her lungs open. Breath gasped out of her. She hadn"t realized she had been holding it in before. She could hear again-she hadn"t know she was deaf a moment earlier. She looked down at her hands then up at the vampire. There was no marble statue up there. There was a beast, a thing of sharp teeth and b.l.o.o.d.y eyes and it was going to kill her. In fact it-he-had been in the process of killing her when Arkeley shot him twice in the face.
"Jesus," she shrieked, "Jesus," the vampire had been shot twice in the head and all he did was drop her. He was. .h.i.t, hit bad, but she knew it wouldn"t be enough. She raced away from him, scuttled away on hands and feet and panic erupted in her throat and she nearly threw up.
The f.u.c.ker had hypnotized her. She grabbed for her gun and turned to shoot him in the heart, as many times as possible. Before she could do more than free vampire"s hand closed on her neck. As fast as she had moved away from him, he had come at her even faster. He picked her up and threw her away, even as two more gunshots made the night air jump and shiver. She was flying and this time she knew she was going to hit hard, knew it was going to hurt. She collided with a sawhorse painted orange and white. It caught her right her navel, right at the top of her thighs and she kept going, twisting over it, agony jarring through her femurs as they flexed and twisted and nearly shattered. She slumped forward and her momentum carried her over the barrier and into the exposed pit beyond, the place where the road had been peeled away.
Caxton fell for six feet that felt like six miles, her hands clawing at naked air, her legs pinwheeling. She landed with a splash in a puddle of freezing cold mud that got in her eyes, her mouth, her nose, threatening to choke her, to drown her. She sputtered and clawed at her face and sucked in one painful breath that made her ribs ache.
She was still alive. Up above, beyond the pitch dark wall of the trench, two more gunshots sounded. Then another one. She waited for a fourth shot but it didn"t come. Was Arkeley dead? If he was she was all alone in the bottom of the hole. She sat up her weapon from its holster the and looked around but couldn"t see any way out-no ladder, no ramp, not even a rope she could climb. Given enough time she could probably find a way up to the top. She doubted she would be given enough time.
Even as she thought it the vampire appeared on top of the barricade. He looked down at her and his eyes were red mirrors that caught the starlight and shone it down on her. With a wave of nausea she tore her gaze away from his.
"You." His voice was thick, and low, and it had a raspy, rumbling growl in the back of it. "Are you Arkeley?"
He didn"t know? He"d laid such an elaborate trap to catch the Fed but n.o.body had bothered to tell him if Arkeley was a man or a woman? Caxton didn"t think before she answered. "Yeah, I"m Arkeley." He looked doubtful so she tried to convince him. "I"m the famous vampire killer, bloodmunch. I tore your daddy"s heart out, that"s right."
He stared down at her and she looked at her feet. She could feel his gaze on her like the laser sights of two sniper rifles painting her back. Finally she heard him laugh. It sounded a little like a dog choking on a half-swallowed bone.
"Little liar," the vampire said, still chuckling. "Lares was no kin of mine. You"re the other one, the partner. I"ll be back for you," he sang. And then he disappeared from view.
"d.a.m.n," she whined, not entirely sure why she"d wanted to pretend to be Arkeley. Surely if he"d believed her the vampire would have come down and snuffed out her life on the instant. Yet perhaps that would have given the real Arkeley a chance to get away, or at least to gather reinforcements. That idea was based on the presumption, with no basis in known fact, that the vampire hadn"t already killed the Fed.
She pounded at the walls of the pit with her fists, scattering clods of dirt and pebbles and achieving nothing whatsoever else. "f.u.c.k!" she shouted. As if in echo, she heard another gun shot, this time from a whole new direction.
"Freeze!" someone shouted and she heard a whole volley of shots. "This is the State Police!" came next. It was followed by horrible screams. The pit was full of road grading equipment and supplies. Caxton searched through boxes of tools, looking for anything she could use to help her get up top again. Her reinforcements had arrived-the backup Arkeley had called for, back when the half-deads were chasing them. The troopers had arrived and they were getting slaughtered.