99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

Apparently Geistdoerfer had a better memory. Montrose could feel the professor’s body go rigid beside him. “Miss Jackson, I’m going to ask you to leave now,” he said. “This is no longer an appropriate site for undergraduate students. In fact, Mister Montrose, would you be good enough to go up top and send all of the students home?”

“Of course,” Montrose said. He led Jackson back to the ladder and did as the professor had asked.

Some of the students grumbled and some had questions he couldn’t answer. He promised them all he’d explain at the next class meeting. When they were gone he hurried back down the ladder, desperate to get to work.

What he found at the bottom didn’t make any sense to him. The professor was kneeling next to the coffin and had something in his hand, a black object about the size of his fist. He laid it quite gently and carefully inside the skeleton’s rib cage, then leaned back as if in surprise.

Jeff started to ask what was going on, but the professor held up one hand for silence. “I’d appreciate it if you went home too, Jeff. I’d like to be alone with this find for a while.”

“Don’t you need someone to help start cataloging all this?” Montrose asked.

The professor’s eyes were very bright in his flashlight beam. Jeff didn’t need more than one look to know the answer.

“Yeah, sure,” the student said. “I’ll see you later, then.”

Geistdoerfer was already staring down into the coffin again. He made no reply.

2.

I met with General Hancock for the last time in 1886, on Governors Island in the harbor of New York City. He was in ill health then, and much reduced in his duties as Commander of the Atlantic Division, and I waited in the anterooms of his office for several hours in the cold, with only a small stove to warm me. When he came in he walked with much difficulty, and some pain, yet gave me the warm felicitations we two have always shared.

We had some matters of small business to conclude. Last of these was the thin sheaf of documents I had compiled, about my work at Gettysburg in July 1863. “I think they should be burned,” the general told me, without a glance at them. His eyes were fixed on my face instead, and as sharp and clear as I remembered, from the third day of the battle. The pain had not then touched his fierce intellect, nor his spirit. “These papers offer nothing to posterity save moral terror, and would ruin many a fine career should they be published now. What benefits any of us to stir up old memories?”

One does not question a man of Winfield Scott Hancock’s authority. I bowed over the papers and gathered them again into my valise. He turned to reach for a glass of tea, which steamed in the icy room.

“And what of the soldiers?” I asked. “They are veterans, all.”

But his answer was immediate. “They are dead, sir,” he told me, putting his feet up on the stove.

“It is better for them to remain so.” His voice sank lower as he added, “and best for our sacred Conscience, as well.”

A week later he was brought to Pennsylvania, and buried there, having died of a very old wound that never healed.

—THE PAPERS OFCOLONELWILLIAMPITTENGER

3.

The unmarked car sat screened by a row of trees only a hundred yards from the barn. The same barn she’d been looking at for so long—just a big unkempt pile of weather-eaten wood planks, with here and there a broken window. It looked like it ought to be deserted, or even condemned, yet she knew it was full to capacity with the fifteen members of the Godwin family, every single one of whom had a criminal record. As far as she could tell they were all asleep. A gray squirrel ran up the side of a drainpipe and she nearly jumped out of her seat. Getting control of herself, she scribbled some notes on her spiral pad.

Sept. 29, 2004, continuing surveillance outside of Godwin residence near Lairdsville, Pennsylvania. This was it, she thought. The day of the raid had finally come. She looked up. The dashboard clock ticked over to 5:47A.M. and she made a note.

“I count five vehicles out front,” Corporal Painter said. “That’s all of them—the whole family’s in there.

We can get everybody in one sweep.” As the junior officer on the investigation, Caxton had been assigned to shadow one of the more experienced troopers. Painter had been doing this for years. He sipped at an iced coffee and squinted through the windshield. “This is your first taste of real police work, right?”

“I guess you could say that,” she replied. Once upon a time she had worked on a kind of investigation.

She had fought for her life against vampires far more deadly than any bad guy Painter might have tracked down in his career. The vampire case had gotten her promoted, but it didn’t appear anywhere on her permanent record. It had been nearly a full year since she’d moved up from the Bureau of Patrol to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. In that time she’d taken endless classes at the academy in Hershey, qualified on tests both written and oral, passed polygraph and background checks and full psychological, medical, and physical fitness evaluations, including a urinalysis for drug screening, before she was actually permitted to work a real investigation in the field. Then had come the hard part, the actual work. For the last two months she had been pulling twelve-hour shifts in the car, watching the barn that they believed contained one of the biggest meth labs in the Commonwealth. She hadn’t made a single collar yet, nor confiscated any evidence, nor interviewed a person of interest. This raid would prove whether or not she was cut out for criminal investigations, and she wanted to do everything perfectly.

“Here’s a tip, then. You don’t have to write down the time every five minutes if nothing happens.” He smiled and gestured at her notepad with his coffee cup.

She smiled back and shoved the pad into her pocket. She kept her eyes on the barn. She wanted to say something funny, something to make Painter think she was one of the guys. Before she could think of anything, though, the car radio lit up and the voice of Captain Horace, their superior, came through.

“All cars, all cars. The warrant just came through. Hazmat and firefighters in place. All cars are on scene.

Let’s wake ’em up!”

Caxton’s body surged with adrenaline. It was time.

Painter twisted the key in the ignition and threw the car into gear. They lurched forward onto the road, then swung into the broad unpaved driveway in front of the barn, their tires squealing. All around them other cars— hidden until that exact moment—came tearing out of the woods, and armored cops spilled out onto the gravel. Beside her a pair of troopers brought up a breeching device—a length of PVC pipe filled with concrete that could knock down even a steel-core door. Another trooper ran toward the door to knock and announce—to give the legally required warning he had to shout out before they could bust in and serve the warrant. Everyone was armored, and everyone was masked up. She grabbed her own gas mask off her belt and strapped it over her face. Meth labs churned out some pretty nasty chemicals, including phosphine gas that could kill you in seconds. She couldn’t see very well through the faceplate, but she ran forward anyway, drawing her weapon and keeping it down near her hip. Her heart pounded in her chest. Everything was happening so fast.

“Team one to the left, team two with me. Go, go, go!” Captain Horace shouted, coming up from behind her. “Team three”—that was her team—“get some distance. Team three,” he called, “get back, get—heads down!”

A window had opened up in the second story of the barn. A man with a shaved head and sores on his face leaned out and started firing at them with a hunting rifle. Damn it, she thought, they were supposed to have been asleep! She ran forward, seeking shelter on the porch of the barn, a narrow roofed porch that would give her cover.

“You! Get back, get back!” Horace shouted. Gunshots smashed into the gravel and struck the hood of her car as if it had been hit with a hammer. “Caxton, get back!”

In her twenty-seven years of life no one had ever shot at her before. Her brain stopped working and her kidneys hurt as her adrenal glands poured fire into her veins. She tried to think. She had to follow the order. She tried to spin on her heel and run back. The cars were so far away, though. She was out in the open and the porch