trying to stay under our radar. Half-deads can’t disguise themselves as well as vampires can. His bloodlust would force him to keep taking more victims, but he wouldn’t want thirty slaves wandering around, doing nothing but drawing attention to themselves.”
“Closer on a hundred, if you count the ones inside.” It was the local cop. He still looked green but he had their identification in his hands. He returned it to them and let them head inside.
Caxton almost wished he’d refused them when she saw the kitchen. The scene inside made no sense and her brain refused to accept it. The smell kept screwing with her head. It was bad, extremely bad, but more than that it was wrong. The reptilian part of her brain knew that smell meant death. It knew enough to want to get away. She could feel it squirming at the base of her skull, trying to crawl away down her spine.
She focused on the details, trying not to see the big picture. That was tough.
There were cops everywhere in different uniforms, milling around, bagging evidence, doing their jobs. She could barely see them for the bones. It was like a crypt in there, not like a house at all. Bones were stacked like cordwood along the wall, on top of the white enamel stove, shoved into closets. Someone had sorted them into skulls, pelvises, ribs, limbs. “Obsessive compulsive disorder,” Caxton breathed.
“Now that may be something real,” Arkeley told her. “In Eastern Europe they used to sprinkle mustard seeds around a vampire’s coffin. They thought he would have to count them all before he could move on and if they left enough he would still be counting when dawn came. We don’t know much about what vampires and half-deads do when they’re not actively hunting. We know they don’t watch television—it confuses them. They don’t understand our culture and it doesn’t interest them. Maybe they have their own entertainment. Maybe they sit around sorting their bones.”
Caxton moved into the main room, mostly just wanting to get away from all the bones. What she found in the living room was worse. She crossed her arms across her stomach and held on tight. A couch and three comfortable-looking chairs stood in a semi-circle around a big fireplace. Human bodies in various states of decomposition sat as if posed, some with their arms around others, some leaning forward on their elbows. Baling wire had been used to keep them upright and in comfortable-looking postures. “Jesus.” It was too much. It made no sense. “I don’t get it. The vampire ate all these people. He kept their bodies around. Then he killed Farrel Morton and his kids and he felt like he needed to hide their corpses. Why the sudden change? What was different about Morton?”
“Somebody might miss him.” It was a photographer from the sheriff’s office. She was an Asian woman with long bangs draped cross her forehead. Caxton had seen her before somewhere. Some crime scene or other. “As far as we can tell the victims here are all Latino and Hispanic males, between fifteen and forty years of age.”
Arkeley, strangely enough, squinted in confusion. “And what does that suggest?”
he asked.
It was Caxton’s turn to shine, finally. Her nausea was swept away by her need to impress Arkeley. “It suggests they were migrant workers. Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians—they come up here every year to work in the mushroom sheds or picking fruit in the orchards. They move from town to town according to the growing season and they pay cash for whatever they buy so they don’t leave a paper trail.”
“Illegal immigrants,” Arkeley said, nodding. “That makes sense.”
“It’s smart,” the photographer said. She looked angry, pissed off even. Caxton knew some cops turned their fear and disgust into rage. It helped them do their job.
The photographer lifted her camera and snapped off three quick shots of a defleshed pelvis sitting on the coffee table. Someone had used it as an ashtray. “Real fucking smart. Nobody keeps track of migrants. Even if somebody back home misses them, what are they going to do? Come up here and ask the American police for help? Not a chance. They’d just get deported.”
“So the vampire was living here for months, feeding on invisible people,” Caxton said. “Then the owner showed up with his kids. Damn,” she said, thinking it through.
“They weren’t taking the bodies off to make half-deads out of them. They were going to dump them some place else, to draw attention away from here.”
“Yeah,” the photographer spat. “Don’t want to shit where you eat.” She snapped another picture, this time of an umbrella stand half full of umbrellas and half full of femurs.
“Alright, Clara.” A burly sheriff’s deputy grabbed the photographer’s arm.
“Alright, we have enough pictures.” He looked up at Arkeley and Caxton. “Have you two seen the basement yet?”
Caxton’s mind reeled. The basement. The camp had a basement. What kind of vault of horrors awaited them? They passed through a mud room and down a flight of stairs, Caxton holding one hand against the smooth drywall, the other gripping the banister. They headed down through shelves of preserves, thick and cloying in their Mason jars. They climbed over stacks of scattered sports equipment and roofing supplies. At the far end of the narrow cellar a group of state troopers wearing latex gloves stood in a semi-circle. What were they guarding? They stepped aside when they saw Arkeley and his star.
Caxton moved forward. She felt like she floated rather than walked. She felt like a ghost in the haunted camp. She pushed through the standing troopers. Beyond them in a shadowy alcove stood three identical coffins, all of them open, all of them empty.
Three coffins. “No,” she blurted. “No.” It wasn’t over. There were more of them, more vampires out there.
Arkeley kicked one of the coffins shut with a hollow sound.
15.
Outside Caxton sat down on the grass and put her head between her knees. It wasn’t over. She had thought they were safe again. She had looked at all the dead human bodies in the camp and she had thought that yes, they were horrible, but it was okay, okay in some sad way, because the vampire was dead. Because nobody else was going to get torn apart, nobody else’s blood was going to drained from a still-twitching carcass.
“She said ‘brood’. She said her brood would devour me,” Arkeley said. He stared out at a distant line of blue hills above the water. Mist rose from between the trees over there and it looked like ghosts to Caxton, like wandering ghosts coming out to plead, to beg to have their life back.
Ghosts. Ghosts could scare you but they couldn’t hurt you, not really. They couldn’t pull you to pieces and suck your life out. They didn’t use your bones as furniture.
“I was fooled. I thought she was being poetic.” Arkeley kicked at a spill of stones and they went clattering into the stream. “I thought Lares was pretty smart. He could pass as human he was such a good actor. Malvern has real cunning, though. She knew I would be watching her. She knew that one vampire, just one, would be bad, would create all kinds of havoc. But it wouldn’t be enough. What does it cost her to birth one of these monstrosities? And to do it while she’s being monitored night and day. For twenty years I thought we were safe. Clearly she was just taking her time, gathering her strength.”
Caxton’s chest heaved. She wasn’t sure if it was a sob or the precursor to vomiting. It was convulsive and spontaneous. It happened again, her ribs flexing as if something inside were pushing to get out.
“Let’s go,” Arkeley said. “We have to start chasing down our leads. All we have to go on is the list of people who worked at Arabella Furnace. Who knows. Who the fuck knows? We might get lucky.”
“Hold on,” she said. The thing in her midriff squirmed in annoyance. She wasn’t supposed to talk. A cough exploded out of her lungs.
“We’re wasting daylight,” he told her. “Get up.”
She shook her head. That was a bad idea. She hiccoughed and a ribbon of bile shot out from between her lips. Her breakfast came up in one great rush, a brown spray she couldn’t hold in. She rolled over on her side, her body shivering uncontrollably. “I don’t expect you to care about my feelings,” she whimpered. “But I can’t do this anymore.”
He squatted next to her. He jammed two fingers into her throat, feeling for her pulse. He took his hand away and she looked up at him, her cheek against the cool grass, her eye following his face. Then he slapped her.
The impact made her cry out and her body shook. She rolled up to a sitting posture and then forced herself to stand, pushing her back against the side of the camp, pushing herself up to a standing position. She stared at him,
