stalks. Whether she’d hit the half-dead who had been taunting her or not she couldn’t say.
The stench of cordite filled her nostrils and she wanted to retch, to stop breathing the fumes altogether, but her body knew better than her brain. It sucked deeply from the fresh oxygen coming in through the bullet hole.
For a long time nothing happened. The casket didn’t move. She could hear her heart beating but it sounded strange, deeper and slower than she’d expected. Then she heard a sound at last, a faint, twittering sound, a bird calling somewhere out in the corn. Her eardrums were intact. It was the best thing that had happened since she fell into the casket and she wanted to cry sweet tears of relief.
Then the casket started moving again, bouncing and jumping over the rough ground, if anything faster than before. She held on as best she could, shoving her weapon in its holster and grabbing at handfuls of upholstery to keep from being thrown around so much. The slick silk kept slipping through her hands and soon they ached from the constant exertion of just holding on.
Minutes passed, long minutes she could only measure by counting slowly to herself,
The half-deads picked her up and carried her after a while. They moved slower than they had while dragging the casket through the corn field but Caxton didn’t mind. The ride got a lot less bumpy.
Darkness closed over the bullet hole in the lid. She thought they might have covered the opening with a cloth or something. She stuck her pinky finger through the hole, careful not to extend it too far, to not give the half-deads an excuse to grab it and do something horrible with it. She felt nothing out there but cool air. She tried again and again felt nothing.
The casket suddenly tilted forward at a very steep angle and she slid up into the top half, her head jammed painfully to one side. She struggled to push her arms up past her shoulders, to push against the top of the casket with her hands to take the pressure off of her neck.
The coffin lifted and fell. Again, it lifted and fell. Again, a moment’s respite and then it lifted—to fall again. She realized what was happening. The bullet hole had gone dark because they were inside of a building. The lift and fall came from the motion of the casket as the half-deads carried it down a flight of stairs.
She tried to count the risers but she lost track every time the casket lurched and she was thrown back and forth. It was a long way down and she had lost track of how much time had passed. She felt as if she were floating unbound in space and then grasped tightly by enormous fingers, her body shaken violently by a giant spectral hand with each step down.
She didn’t notice at first when the downward motion stopped. The half-deads set her down without any fanfare, the casket creaking a little on a stone or concrete floor. Then she heard their footfalls, and the echoes of their footfalls, getting softer as they walked away from her.
Then there was no sound at all.
She slapped the lid of the coffin again and again, but got no reply.
“Hello?” she said, willing to hear their squeaking voices if that was the reply she got. “Hello?” she shouted, wanting someone, anyone, to speak to her. Sure, she had shot at them, but wouldn’t that make them want to taunt her even more? “Hey you fuckers!” she screamed. “Hey, calling all faceless geeks out there, somebody say something!”
She heard her own echoes but nothing more.
“You can’t just leave me here!” she screamed, getting a little hysterical. She knew they could do, and had done, just that.
36.
Caxton slept.
Somehow her body had given out, somehow whole hours of panic had ebbed away, all force spent, and little bits of sleep had rushed in, dark breakers on the shores of a planet with no sun. Inside the casket her breathing had come more shallow, her eyes had rolled back in her head. She had slept.
If there were dreams in that dark slumber she could remember little of them afterward. She had a sense of rolling over in blackness, of tumbling, of falling free through infinite lightless space. There was no fear in the dream, though when it ended she screamed, her body thundering around her, her pulse beating very hard.
Her eyes fluttered open and she was awake, awake and lying silently on the upholstery of the casket. She cleared her throat and blinked her eyes and tried to reconcile where she was with waking life. It wasn’t easy.
A tiny finger of light slipped in through the bullet hole in the casket lid. It was so pale and faint that she thought it might be a hallucination but it grew stronger as she watched it. It danced and shifted from side to side and soon a sound came to join it, a repetitive slapping sound, a rasping two part sound, slip slap, slip slap.
Bare feet walking on stone. And the light—it possessed the guttering motion and the warm yellow light of a candle flame.
“Hello,” she breathed, but her throat was dry, painfully dry so it felt like it was stuck shut. She tried to clear her esophagus but nothing would come loose. She coughed and coughed and the footfalls stopped and she held her breath, wanting them to come back, terrified they would leave her alone inside the casket, even though she knew that whatever made that sound, whatever horror was approaching her, would not be a friend, or a rescuer, but a monstrosity.
The feet came closer and the light brightened. It moved to one side and then stayed put, as if the owner of the feet had set the candle down beside the casket.
Caxton tried to breathe as calmly as she could.
The casket rocked back and forth as the unseen monster tore at the lid. It made no sound, no grunt or gasp. The nails in the wood shrieked and tore. The wooden lid cracked down the middle, splinters brushing Caxton’s lips and then it came away altogether, air rushing into the casket, her eyes narrowing in even the miniscule light of the candle. She saw the ceiling above her, perhaps fifteen feet away, a vaulted mass of bricks held up by stout square columns. On either side she saw the walls of the cellar room lined with shelves, the shelves heavy with jars and cardboard boxes and rolled-up blankets. She had no idea where she was.
A pale face slid into view. She’d been hoping for a half-dead but her hopes were dashed. She saw the round, hairless head, the triangular ears, the face of Efrain Reyes looking down at her. His eyes were dark slits, vaguely reddish in the flickering light. His mouth was heavy with all those teeth. She sensed that he had just woken himself, that he was still half asleep, as she was. Had night just fallen? Had she been in the casket for an entire day, alone with her dreams?
Reyes wore nothing but a pair of drawstring pants. His skin was a snowy white but with just a tinge of pink that made him look feverish instead of healthy. He leaned down closer until his face was eighteen inches from hers. She felt the same absence of humanity or warmth she remembered from when she’d stood next to Justinia Malvern. It didn’t surprise her this time.
He stared down into her eyes and she tried to look away but he grabbed her chin and held her, as sure and steady as if her face was bolted to his hand. She would never have the strength to break that grip.
His eyes went wider and she saw red tears wash across his pupils, as if blood had replaced every fluid in his body. She saw his pupils grow larger and larger until they filled up half her vision. She had been hypnotized by a vampire before but this was nothing like the paralysis she had felt then. That had been a general deadening, an anesthetic effect. This time she was quite conscious, to an almost painful degree, of what was being done to her. Something passed between them, from his mind, into hers. It moved silently, invisibly, but it was something very real. It was all in her mind, certainly, but it carried with it a physical sensation, a very real, very unpleasant feeling of being invaded.
Caxton had never been raped. There had been a boy in high school who didn’t understand what she meant when she said she wanted to wait, to save it. She hadn’t understood herself, really, and hadn’t known how to stop him when he would shove his hands inside her clothing and grab her, physically grab handfuls of her flesh in a painful grip. One day after school when they’d gone back to her house to theoretically study he had taken out his penis once and rubbed it up and down on the back of her hand, begging her to turn her hand over, to grasp him the way he was always grasping her. The boy’s need, his absolute desperation, had sickened her and she had pulled away. He had stood up next to the bed and loomed over her then and she had been very much aware of the fact
