13 Bullets

frightened rats.

She really hoped so.

One of them had a pair of kitchen shears. He worked them nervously, the blades glinting in the few stray beams of moonlight. Another one wore a dark blue Penn State sweatshirt with the hood up around his ruined face. He was carrying a ball peen hammer. He could break her arm in a second if he got too close.

She took a step backward. The half-deads took a step forward. It wasn’t going to work. They would stop being scared in a second or two and they would rush her.

There was no way she could survive if they all attacked her at once. If she didn’t shoot one of them soon they would call her bluff and it would be over.

She picked one. The one with the pitchfork. He didn’t look as scared as the others.

Taking her time, lining up her shot, she aimed right at his heart and fired, thinking even as she squeezed the trigger, “four.”

The half-dead’s chest burst open and a stench of rotten meat rolled across her.

For a second the others drew back.

Then they started moving toward her again. Their weapons brandished in their pale hands they advanced on her as if they knew exactly what she was thinking. As if they’d been counting her shots too and they knew she didn’t have a chance.

She fired again, wildly, cursing herself even as she snapped off an unaimed shot.

If it hit anything she didn’t stick around to see. She ran back along the corridor, back the way she’d come. She could feel them behind her, chasing her. She could hear their feet slapping on the linoleum in the dark. Could they see better in the gloom than she could? She didn’t know. She didn’t know at all. She flicked on her light, more interested in seeing where she was going than in not giving away her position.

She pushed open a door and skidded around a corner, nearly collided with a filing cabinet somebody had left right in the middle of the hall. She pushed it over, adrenaline giving her the strength, and its clattering fall echoed all around her. Maybe one or two of the half-deads would trip over it.

Her breath froze her throat as it rushed in and out of her, and she ran, the light of her flashlight jumping up and down on the walls and floors ahead of her.

56.

Caxton rushed around a corner into a narrow hallway with no windows. She crouched down in the dark and tried to control her heartbeat and her breathing. Her blood was beating so loudly in her ears she thought anyone nearby must be able to hear it.

Blood. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She was full of blood. The half-deads wanted to spill it, maybe in revenge for what she’d done to them and their masters.

Maybe because when you were undead all you had in your heart was jealousy directed at the living. They wanted her blood. Then there was the vampire, the unknown vampire haunting the sanatorium, also searching for her, also wanting her blood. But for a different reason.

She heard a half-dead moving nearby. Its feet made less sound on the linoleum than a cat might make padding through a garden, but she heard it. Nothing like fear to concentrate the senses.

She had three bullets left. She knew better than to think they would be any use to her. She could put one of them in her own heart—that way she would at least not come back as a vampire.

Alternatively she could put one in her head. Then she would come back.

Would that be so very terrible? It would be a betrayal of Arkeley, true. But then he had never liked her. If she made herself a vampire at least her life wouldn’t end. It would change in many ways. But it wouldn’t end.

“Yes,” Reyes said, inside of her head. He’d been quiet all night. Either he was losing his grip on her, fading away, or he was just biding his time.

“Yes,” someone else agreed. “In the head.” Someone else.

A full-body shiver made her twitch in the shadows. She heard the prowling half-dead stop not ten feet away. She held her breath until he walked past her hiding place. When he was gone from earshot she let herself exhale a little.

Somebody else had spoken to her from inside her head. It hadn’t sounded like Reyes at all. Somebody else was in there.

“All of you can just shut the hell up,” she told them. A splintered chuckling sounded in the back of her throat as if she’d been laughing to herself. Not nice, she thought, but she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of a response.

She got up and made her way to end of the dark hallway, using little bursts of light from her mini-Maglite to find her way. The corridor opened out at its end to a wider hallway full of flats of building supplies—stacks of shingles and neat bundles of replacement floor tiles, pallets of lumber, row after row of sealed white plastic buckets full of plastering compound. Moonlight streamed in through a hole in the ceiling and painted everything a ghostly silver, but even in that eerie light Caxton could see the supplies must have been left there untouched for years, bought for some project that never really got started. Maybe they’d planned on fixing the hole in the roof. The wood was worm-eaten and slimy to the touch while some of the buckets had corroded away and spilled white powder in long sinuous drifts across the floor. She approached carefully, knowing that anything could be hiding in the shadows just outside the patch of moonlight. She glanced down at the powder spread across the floor. The wind coming down from the ceiling listlessly stirred the plaster. Slowly it worked at filling in a line of footprints. Laura was no tracker but she could see the feet were no bigger than her own. The tracks were fresh, too, sharply defined. A barefoot woman had come that way recently.

“Laura,” someone said in a room nearby. Or had they? Caxton’s mind wasn’t just playing tricks on her, she had a whole Vegas-quality magic show going on in there. She couldn’t be sure of anything. What she had heard sounded like a cough more than a word. And it sounded more like the building settling than like a cough. If she hadn’t know better she could have convinced herself it was just her imagination.

The footprints lead her eye to a wide set of double doors across the hallway.

Black paint on the doors said INVALID WARD. Someone was sending her a message— she was supposed to go through those doors. It was a trap. Arkeley had taught her about traps. Shaking more than she would have liked, Caxton stepped up to the doors and pushed one of them open. It slid away from her easily, its hinges creaking just a little.

The room beyond was cavernous and extremely dark. Her light showed her that it had been stripped bare of anything that could be moved. All that remained in the room were cast iron bedframes painted with flaking white enamel. There were dozens of them, maybe a hundred. Some had been pushed into a corner and some effort had been made to stack them on top of each other. The majority remained exactly where they’d been when the sanatorium was abandoned, standing in neat rows that ran away from her into impenetrable darkness.

How many people, how many generations of people had died in that room? How many men had lain in those beds coughing away their lives until someone came to cart their lifeless bodies away? How many ghosts did they leave behind? Caxton’s father had died like that, one little hitching cough at a time. He had died in a bed like—

Feather-light and soft something tapped her shoulder.

A fear leapt on her then, not an emotion but a living, breathing thing that crawled around her shoulders and neck as if looking for some place to hide. Caxton wanted to run. She wanted to scream. She tried to turn around and found that her body was completely paralyzed by fear.

Caxton stopped in her tracks and flicked off the light. Slowly she tried to breathe again. It pretty much worked.

“Laura.” Wind in some trees, maybe, making branches rub together. Yeah, sure.

Trees. Maybe the first time she could have believed that. Through sheer dint of repetition she knew what it had to be. It was a vampire and the vampire was playing with her like a cat playing with a wounded starling. The skin on her arms erupted in goose pimples.

It might be Malvern. The bath of blood might have given the moribund vampire enough strength to call out like that from the other side of the sanatorium. Or it could be the other vampire, the complete unknown.

A cold breeze brushed across Caxton’s face, ruffling her hair. There had been no wind in the passage before