like a vampire’s voice. It was squeaky and infantile and nasty.
Arkeley came up on her left, his weapon pointed at the sky. He didn’t look at her, just at the half-dead.
“I have a message for you, but I’ll only tell if you’re nice,” the half-dead cackled at her. Before she could reply Arkeley shot it in the chest. Its ribs and the stringy flesh holding them together snapped open and shattered. Pieces of bone flew tumbling away from the tree. The half-dead screamed, a sound strangely similar to its laugh.
“Tell me now or I’ll shoot off your feet,” Arkeley said.
“My master awaits you, and you won’t like him so much!” the half-dead crowed.
“He says you’re going to die!”
“Tell us the goddamned message,” Caxton growled.
The half dead shook and rattled, its bones straining against the wire. As if the simple effort cost it enormously it lifted its arm and pointed one bony figure across the stream, deeper into the forest.
“Where is he?” Arkeley demanded. “Tell me where he is. Tell me.”
The half-dead was still shaking though, convulsing, tearing itself to pieces.
Without warning its head slumped forward and crashed to the ground. Clearly they wouldn’t get any more answers out of it.
Its arm remained pointing toward the shadowy woods.
Caxton stared at the out-stretched finger. “This is a trap,” she said.
“Yes,” Arkeley told her. Then he splashed across the creek and into the trees.
She rushed forward to catch up with him and take the lead again. Her boots hit the stream with a splash and freezing water soaked her socks. On the far side she hurried into the dark, her flashlight bobbing through the trees, its light swinging across the trunks, leaping up among the branches, searching among the roots.
When it became clear they weren’t going to die instantly she figured she could afford to ask more questions. “What happened to being cautious?” she asked. “To wearing seat belts and not keeping a round in the chamber?”
He turned to look at her in the near dark. “This way we know we’re in danger. If we headed back to the car they might spring on us without warning. When you know your enemy is trying to trap you the only course of action is to rush forward.
Hopefully you can spring the trap before your enemy is fully prepared.”
Half the time she thought he said things like that just so that he could be right and she could be wrong. She tramped after him into the gloom but she didn’t like it, not at all.
It didn’t take long to find the two state troopers and the local cop. They were wired to the trees just as the half-dead had been. Their bodies were twisted and broken—clearly they had died in terrible pain.
“The vampire,” Caxton breathed.
“No.” Arkeley grabbed the barrel of her shotgun and pushed it to move the flashlight around until it shone on the face of the dead police man. Blood dripped from his lacerated nose, blood still steaming with residual body heat. “No vampire would leave a body like that. They wouldn’t spill out blood on the ground, not if they had time to clean it up.”
“Lares spilled blood all over the place. I read your report.”
“Lares was desperate and in a hurry. This vampire can afford to take his time. We don’t even know his name.” He let go of her weapon. “We’re wasting our time.”
She turned to go.
Arkeley shook his head. “I didn’t say we were done here.”
Caxton spun around and saw it—a patch of dirt between two trees lifted and cracked open. A skeletal hand shot up and clutched at the air. She turned again and saw a half-dead coming at her between the trees, a butcher knife in either hand. She lifted the shotgun and fired.
The half-dead’s body exploded in a fountain of ash and dust, bones splintering into fragments, soft tissues bursting open, tearing, bouncing off the trees. The knives flashed forward and clattered together on the ground.
“Jesus!” she shouted. The thing had just… blown up, its body literally shredded by the tungsten shot.
“They rot pretty quickly. After a week or ten days they can barely hold body and soul together,” Arkeley explained. A half-dead appeared at his elbow and he pistol-whipped its jaw off, then fired one of his cross points right through its left eye.
If the half-deads were easy to destroy they had one advantage, however—superiority of numbers. There were suddenly dozens of them, cackling in the darkness, running between the tree trunks, their weapons shining in the moonlight or glinting in Caxton’s flashlight beam.
Reinforcements were on the way. The sheriff was sending two cars. She wanted to grab her cell phone and find out how soon they would arrive, but that would mean taking one hand off her shotgun. And there was no chance of that.
Something sharp dug into the flesh of her ankle just above her boot. She screamed and kicked at a skinless hand that was reaching up from below to grab at her. Finger bones went flying as her boot connected but the half- dead under her feet kept trying to climb up out of the dirt. She had the urge to shoot straight down but she would probably destroy her own foot in the process. Instead she waited for the half-dead’s scalp to crown up out of the dark earth and then she kicked it in with her boot. “Watch out,” Caxton shouted, “they’re coming up from the ground!”
Arkeley scowled at the darkness. “We don’t have enough bullets,” he said.
Caxton pressed her back up against a tree and pumped the shotgun. Where the hell were the reinforcements?
20.
“Do any of them have guns?” she asked, petrified.
“Not likely,” Arkeley told her. “They’re weak, and their bodies are soft with decay. If one of them tried to fire a gun the recoil would blow its arm off.”
“I think we should head back to the house,” Caxton said, doing her best to keep control of the obvious fear in her voice. She wanted to start screaming for help but that wouldn’t do anyone any good. “Let’s at least get out of these trees.” The half-deads were surrounding them on all sides. They were taking their time about pressing the attack and Caxton could imagine why. The assailants wanted to mob the two of them: one on one they couldn’t even get close, but if a crowd of them attacked all at the same time then Caxton and the Fed would be overrun, unable to shoot fast enough to keep all the knife-wielding monsters at bay.
Arkeley raised his weapon and fired. A half-dead she hadn’t even seen disintegrated in mid-air. “We can’t afford to lose them by going too far. But I agree, we’re in unnecessary risk here.” He turned to face the stream that ran between them and the house. A half-dead stepped out from behind a tree in front of him and he punched it with his free hand hard enough to send it spinning to the leaf-littered ground. Caxton stomped it as she followed close behind.
“Follow my lead,” he hissed at her. “If we don’t scare them off, we might just learn something tonight.”
They made it nearly all the way to the water without opposition. At the stream five of the half-deads waited for them, nearly invisible in the darkness. Caxton saw a hatchet come tumbling through the air toward her head and she turned her body just in time for the weapon to tear through her jacket sleeve. If her reflexes hadn’t taken over at just the right moment the hatchet would have collided with her sternum. She put that out of her mind and lifted the shotgun. Her shot destroyed one of the half-deads completely and took an arm off another. Arkeley fired two shots, one after the other, and a pair of them fell down into the water, no more than heaps of old bones.
That left only one of them standing and unharmed. It charged them even as they were recovering from their shots, a shovel held above its head in both hands. It squealed in rage as it closed the distance then brought the shovel down hard, blade first, right at Caxton’s shoulder.
Her very soul cringed as the shovel bit into her. She felt the impact, first, pain twanging up and down her arm and well into her chest. The blow didn’t stop there, though—she felt the blade of the shovel tear through layer after layer of cloth and finally lodge deep in her skin. Trickles of blood rolled down between her breasts and over the knobs of her spinal column. Her flesh stretched and tore and her muscles screamed in panic as they were wedged open. It felt like she was going to die, that her body was being torn apart.
Arkeley took his time, lined up the perfect shot, and blew off what remained of the half-dead’s face.
“Get up,” he told her.
