“Calm down, lady,” he said. “Look, we don’t do hospitals. We do prisons.”
She managed not to yell at him somehow. He said he would pass on her message but that wasn’t good enough. Hanging up the phone she stormed into the bedroom.
“Dee?” she yelled. “Dee? I need to borrow your car.”
Deanna was in the living room, lying on the couch watching television, the remote clutched in one arm that spilled down onto the floor and lay half-buried in the shag carpet. “I had one of my dreams about you last night,” she said when Caxton came storming in. “You were tied to a post and Roman soldiers were whipping your naked back. Blood was trickling down your hips in long, red tracks that looked kind of like chocolate syrup. I don’t think you should go anywhere today.”
Caxton made a fist and shoved it into her pocket. She didn’t have time for this. “I really, really need to borrow your car.”
“Why?” she asked. “Maybe I have things to do today.”
“Were you?” Caxton asked. It wasn’t the day Deanna did the shopping. Most days her car sat unused in the driveway. “Look, this is super important. Seriously, or I wouldn’t even ask.”
Deanna shrugged and looked at the TV. “Alright, if you want me to be a prisoner in my own home.”
Caxton was holding her breath, she realized. She blew it out slowly and then inhaled, just as slowly. Deanna’s keys were hanging on a hook in the kitchen, right next to the closet where she kept her pistol. She fetched them both. Outside the air was a little more than crisp. She pulled her uniform jacket around her chest and jumped into Deanna’s little red Mazda. She took off her hat and went to put it on the passenger seat but the remains of a take-out lunch from McDonald’s, including half a hamburger, were spread across the already-stained fabric. The narrow backseat was full of cans of paint and unopened packages of brushes and rollers, even though Deanna hadn’t painted anything in six months. She’d been restricting herself to the untitled project in the shed.
Caxton balanced her hat on top of an open can of paint that had dried to the consistency of hard plastic and hoped for the best. Backing out of the driveway she adjusted the mirrors and in minutes she was on the highway, headed for Arabella Furnace.
On the way she played with the car’s radio, looking for a news report. There was another IED explosion in Iraq and some kind of golf scandal—Caxton didn’t really follow sports and didn’t understand what they were saying. There were no reports of vampire attacks on abandoned tuberculosis rest homes, no bugles playing Taps for a Fed who had died in the course of his duty, but the lack of news failed to reassure her.
By the time she arrived it was well past noon and sprinkling rain. The sun was blinking on the wet leaves that dotted the road and the narrow track that lead to the hospital had gone to mud. The little Mazda nearly got stuck but Caxton had years of training in getting cars through bad patches of road. She pulled up on the lawn below the faceless statue of Health or Hygiene or whatever and was a little bit relieved, but just a little, to see her own patrol car parked on the same stretch of grass. Arkeley had at least come to Arabella Furnace the night before. When he’d indicated he wanted to be alone he must have gone to see Malvern.
It occurred to her that maybe he had taken one look at Bitumen Hollow and known the vampires were gorging themselves, and therefore known they would attack that night. But then why would he have gone alone, and left her behind?
Because he didn’t trust her, of course. Because she’d acted like a wimp when she got stabbed with a shovel. Because she’s said she couldn’t watch him torture a half-dead. He must have decided she was a liability.
The corrections officer at the front desk recognized her but he still made her sign in. When she saw him she knew her worst fears hadn’t come true. The vampires hadn’t successfully freed Malvern.
“What happened here last night?” she asked, laying down the pen on his sign-in sheet.
“Something happened, something big,” he told her, his eyes wide.
“Something? What kind of something?” she demanded.
He shrugged. “I just work days. This place, at night? You’d have to nail my feet to the floor to keep me from running away.”
She wanted to ask him a million more questions but she figured there might be better informants. From memory she tried to find Malvern’s ward, only to get lost and have to circle back. Finally she retraced her steps, took a left instead of a right, and saw the plastic curtain that sealed off the ward. The hospital was immense and most of it was dark—she could easily have gotten lost for hours if she hadn’t been shown the way before.
She pushed through the plastic and into the blue light and there, of course, was Arkeley, sitting patiently in a chair. He looked healthy enough, though his hair was greasy. Presumably he hadn’t showered since she’d seen him last.
Malvern was nowhere to be seen but the lid of her coffin was closed tightly shut.
Caxton went straight to Arkeley. “Are you alright?” she demanded.
“Of course I am, trooper. I’ve been having a lovely chat with my old friend.” He knocked on the lid of the coffin. There was no answer but Caxton assumed Malvern was safely inside. “Why don’t you sit down?”
Caxton nodded. She looked around but didn’t see Hazlitt. Maybe he slept during the day, she decided. “I though—I know it sounds crazy but I had this idea. The vampires that slaughtered everyone in Bitumen Hollow last night were gorging on blood. I thought maybe they were going to attack this place, that they were gathering blood for her. I guess I jumped to a dumb conclusion.”
“Hardly,” he told her. “They did exactly as you suggest. Or at least they tried.”
25.
The previous night, when she was being kissed by a pretty girl in a bar, Arkeley had been fighting for his life. He laid out the story for her quite calmly and without a lot of recrimination. He never once said he wished she’d been there to help.
Arkeley had taken one look at the corpses in Bitumen Hollow and knew that trouble was brewing. He had seen the number of bodies and he knew how many vampires were responsible. He did the math in his head. Remembering the way Lares had fed his ancestors—“Not that I’d ever forgotten it,” he said, with a shudder of distaste—he had realized the vampires were through waiting. The two of them couldn’t hold enough blood to fully revivify her but they could at least get her up and walking under her own power. They would strike that very night —he was certain of it. So he had taken the patrol car and proceeded immediately to Arabella Furnace.
“Without me,” she said, in a partial huff.
“Shall I finish my story, or should we argue?” he asked.
He arrived at the hospital at approximately nine o’clock. He warned the corrections officers on duty about what was coming and then he went into Malvern’s private ward. He found her there significantly decayed from when he’d last seen her, when he cut off her blood supply. She was unable to sit up and was reclining in her coffin. Most of the skin on her skull had worn away and her single eye was dry and irritated. One arm was crossed over her chest. The other hung limply out of the coffin, its talon-like fingers draped across the keyboard of a laptop computer. Arkeley had thought she had simply flung it out in despair but while he watched her index finger trembled and then stabbed down at the “E” key, then fell back as if that slight effort had completely exhausted her.
Hazlitt appeared, his manner suggesting he was unhappy about something. He explained that Malvern was averaging four keystrokes a minute. The doctor allowed Arkeley to view what she had written so far:
“You’re killing her, Arkeley,” the doctor told the Fed. “I don’t care if she’s already dead. I don’t care if this can go on forever. To me it’s death, or worse.”
“If she wants to live so badly she should stop typing to conserve her energy,”
Arkeley told him. “Maybe you should take that computer away from her.”
Hazlitt looked as if he’d been struck. “It’s the only connection she has to the outside world,” he insisted.
Arkeley dismissed the argument with a shrug. He sent the doctor home at ten o’clock PM, although Hazlitt had indicated he wished to stay with his patient.
