was in the switch house.
Arkeley went to the door and pushed it open. Whatever might have been inside the sun hadn’t touched it yet. He unholstered his weapon and took a flashlight from the pocket of his overcoat. “I’m going in, if anyone cares to join me,” Arkeley said over the radio.
“That’s not how we planned this,” Captain Suzie said into her own radio. “That’s not what the Commissioner wanted. It could be dangerous.”
“The sun’s up. We’re safe. Right? We’re safe,” Reynolds said. “The sun’s up.
Vampires can’t come out at day.”
“That’s right,” Caxton told him.
“I don’t care. We stay in the vehicle,” Captain Suzie said. She stared forward at Arkeley as if she could meet his gaze from the back seat of the armored vehicle.
The Fed stepped into the darkness. None of the ART moved.
“Deputy,” Captain Suzie called. “Deputy? Come in, Deputy. Give me a status report, give me something. Anything.”
“Special Deputy,” Arkeley’s voice corrected her. He remained out of sight. “I don’t have a lot a lot to report just now. I’ve found a large quantity of cobwebs and rusty equipment. Hold on. I just found a trapdoor. It looks like there’s a lower level.
I’m headed down.”
Caxton pushed open her door and jumped down to the ground before she knew she was really going to do it. Captain Suzie grabbed for her but Caxton slipped through her hands. She moved toward the switch house as the radio on her collar started yelling orders at her.
She was almost at the switch house’s open door when something moved in the corner of her eye. She turned, her rifle in firing position, and saw it again. Outside of the fence something was definitely moving around. She looked left and right and saw that someone had cut a hole through the fence, big enough for a grown man to duck through. She ran over and twined her fingers through the chainlink. “Arkeley,” she called, “I’ve found a back exit to the substation. There’s somebody out there.”
“Caxton,” he said. “Get back in that fucking truck. I’ve told you already—”
She stopped listening to him. Something was definitely moving, creeping through the corn field. It wasn’t an animal, either. It was a person, or maybe even several persons or… or several half-deads. She ducked under the fence and immediately heard rustling, a layered slithering sound as numerous bodies pushed through the dead stalks. She spun around, one eye down near the scope of her rifle, and then she saw them, six or maybe seven half-deads wearing hooded sweatshirts. They were dragging something through the corn, something big made of dark wood with brass hardware.
It was a coffin.
34.
She lifted her rifle to her shoulder and fired a quick burst of three shots but the half-deads were obscured behind dozens of rows of cornstalks, and moving—she didn’t hit anything, nor did she expect to. With the power of the weapon in her hands she could mow down half of the corn field but she’d been trained better than that. A rifle bullet could travel half a mile before gravity brought it down. Unless she could guarantee there were no innocent bystanders within a half-mile radius she couldn’t fire blind like that.
She could only watch, then, as the half-deads dragged their coffin through the corn. “Arkeley,” she said into her radio, “Arkeley, please come in, I have sighted a group of half-deads carrying a coffin, please advise. Arkeley, what do I do?”
“...bones, human bodies in... no sign of recent... a lot of dust,” he said. She figured he must be talking about the basement of the switch house and what he had found there. He must not have been able to hear her—she could barely make out a fraction of what he was saying. Presumably the signal was being partially blocked by the layer of dirt between them. That was immaterial, though. The half-deads were getting away. She looked back through the fence and saw the armored vehicle just sitting there. One member of the ART leaned out of an open door, staring at her open-mouthed.
“Captain Suzie,” Caxton said, “I need backup over here. They’re getting away!”
“My orders are to stay with the vehicle, no matter what. Our safety is more important than catching your vampire. Those are your orders, too, trooper.”
“Reyes will escape if we don’t get him now,” Caxton said. “If we get him now, by daylight, we can destroy his heart with no danger to us at all.”
“No danger? You said there were maybe seven of those creatures. There’s only three of us. You come back here right now, Caxton. If you won’t take an order from the Commissioner, maybe you’ll take one from me. Come back right now.”
Caxton looked from the armored vehicle back to the corn field. She could still hear the stalks rustling but the sound was growing faint. She didn’t know what to do.
She knew what Arkeley would do, however, in her situation. She knew exactly what he would do.
She pushed through the papery stalks and ran after the half-deads, her boots sliding in dark mud.
The fibrous leaves of the stalks slithered across her helmet and lashed at her exposed wrists. The thick stems of the stalks resisted her and she was certain that if she didn’t catch the half-deads soon she would trip and twist an ankle, maybe even break it. How stupid would that be, she thought, to cripple herself because she was so intent on revenge? After the third time she fell and caught herself on her hands in the clinging dirt she forced herself to slow down. The half-deads couldn’t be moving as fast as she did, could they? Weighted down by the coffin their frail bodies just couldn’t make that much speed. She pushed through a line of stalks with her rifle and it snagged, just for a moment, but enough to make her sway.
Weariness rose in her like a ghost filling out her body, seeping into the her nooks and crannies. She had to accept the fact that she was working on no sleep, that she couldn’t trust her body. Gasping a little for breath she tore her rifle off the cornstalk and slung it over her shoulder. It was a liability in that close space.
Standing still she looked around herself, trying to get her wind back, trying to get her bearings. She was well on her way to getting lost in the tall corn. Already she wondered if she could find her way back—there were no landmarks, no way to tell one patch of plants from another.
That kind of thinking didn’t help her, though. Shaking her head she sucked breath into her body and refused to give up, not when she was so close.
She raced down one row of cornstalks and quickly found what she was looking for, a swath of vegetation that had been crushed by the passing coffin. She moved alongside the track, keeping to a crouch, sure she was getting close. Soon she could hear the coffin dragging on the papery corn trash that littered the ground. A moment later she heard the half-deads whispering, not more than twenty feet from where she stood. She couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. When the sound of the moving coffin suddenly stopped she stopped, too.
“Do you see her, is there sign of her?” one of the half-deads hissed. There was no reply.
Slowly, careful not to make a sound, she brought her rifle around to a firing position. She grasped the shotgun attachment slung under the barrel with one gloved hand and moved forward slowly, steadily, her boots making very little noise in the soft mud. Ahead, through the close-planted stalks, she could make out shadowy figures. She took a step closer and parted the corn with the barrel of her weapon.
Through the narrow gap she made she could see open space, an aisle cut through the field as a firebreak. The clearing was full of half-deads. They were standing around the coffin, their heads low. One of them stood atop the casket, probably trying to get a better view of where she was.
She pointed the shotgun attachment and yanked the trigger. The half-dead on the coffin flew apart in filthy rags and shards of broken bone. The others started howling and running around in terror. One ran right past her, close enough to reach out and grab. She let it get away—she had more important business at hand. She stepped into the firebreak and spun slowly around, looking to see if any of the half-deads had been brave enough to stick around. She didn’t see any. She forced herself to ignore the coffin until she was sure she was alone. Then she bent to take a closer look.
It was a casket, as opposed to a coffin—unlike the hexagonal pine boxes the other vampires used, Reyes had switched up to a deluxe model, rectangular and surrounded by turned moldings. It had been, once, a handsome assemblage of polished cherry wood. The brass handles had probably been bright and metallic before the casket
