99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

22.

He proved as good an oracle of future events as he was a crack shot. Within moments of my concealing myself I began to hear hoofbeats approach. Within the space of a minute a horde of Secesh cavalry reined in before the house. Their leader, an officer of some distinction by the look of his insignia, wore leather gauntlets & a dusty slouch hat & good gray cotton tailored to his frame. Many of his men were in butternut though, which is to say, uniforms made at home & undyed. We’d seen plenty like them at Chancellorsville, where some men fought with no shoes on their feet, & some without even rifles of their own.

We were defeated at Chancellorsville, as we have been defeated every time we strove against Robbie Lee. I took this fact to heart & tried not to breathe too loudly. “Marse Obediah,” the cavalry commander shouted, as if he were hallooing an old friend. “Can you hear me in there?

I’ve come from Richmond thirty miles. Can you hear me? The Cause requires your services once more. The Yanks are all over this part of creation & we must drive them back. General Lee commands it!”

The officer wheeled his horse as if expecting an attack to come from any direction.

An answer came at last, however, in a voice that chilled my blood. There was very little human in that voice though the words were good English. It sounded more like a violin had been scraped with the neck of a broken bottle, & words had somehow come out.

“You have been heard,” the voice announced.

—THE STATEMENT OFALVAGRIEST

23.

Caxton got out of the bed feeling like she’d been beaten up the night before. Her joints ached and there was a truly foul taste in her mouth. It couldn’t be helped. Clara had brought her a change of clothes, which she got into painfully. It felt good to have a crisp new shirt on her back, though. She slipped on her coat and shoved her notebook and her cell phone in the pockets. The local police had been kind enough to return the latter after she dropped it in the street outside the mortuary.

“You’re on the case,” Arkeley said. It wasn’t a question.

It had been, the day before, and the answer had been no. Now everything had changed. She had watched a fellow cop die because of a moment’s hesitation. She had gone chasing after a vampire she had no chance of killing. It had all been so crystal clear. It had all made sense—the way nothing much had since the last time. Since the last vampire she’d fought.

“Yes,” she said. Clara turned to look up at her, but Caxton didn’t even meet her lover’s eyes. What choice did she have? Arkeley couldn’t fight active vampires anymore. Not when he couldn’t tie his own tie. There were plenty of other cops in the world, but none of them had her experience. In fact, none of them had any experience with vampires. If she left this job to other cops, they would almost certainly get themselves killed.

Of course there was no guarantee Caxton would survive, either. But that was part of who she was. Her father had been the only cop in a coal mining patch up north. His father had been a Pinkerton. What would her father say now, she wondered, if he were still alive? She knew exactly what he would say. He would tell her it was about damn time.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes already,” she said, and Arkeley just nodded. He’d never been big on reassurance. Still, the fact that he’d come to her for help—that he thought of her as the one best to find and destroy the vampire—meant something. She just hoped she could convince her superiors in Harrisburg. “We should start doing things right, then. We should start now.”

He nodded again.

“That starts with getting some idea of what we’re fighting. Vampires don’t age well—that’s been a constant so far. The older they get the more blood they need just to maintain, and after fifty or sixty years they can’t even climb out of their coffins. This guy’s different. I wish we knew how that was even possible. I saw him last night. He looked like he’d been starved of blood for a very long time. He looked terrible. Still, he almost outran a car.”

“There’s a lot we don’t know about this one,” Arkeley concurred. “I might be able to do something about that.”

Caxton grunted in encouragement.

“It might be nothing. But I have a lead of sorts. I have a contact at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia —”

Clara laughed. “You mean at the Mutter Museum? Why am I not surprised an old fossil like you has an in with that place?”

Caxton frowned. She knew about the Mutter Museum, of course. She’d been there on a class trip when she was a kid. It was the world’s largest collection of medical anomalies. Two-headed babies in jars, the skeleton of the world’s tallest man. Lots of skeletons, actually. She thought about the bones in the cave.

The vampires that hadn’t made it to the twenty-first century. “Hold on, Clara. Arkeley, what do they have there that would interest us?”

He shrugged, looking a little miffed at being interrupted. “As I was saying, my contact there got in touch with me recently. He’d turned up something in a storage room he knew I would want to see. They have the bones of a vampire in their collection. Bones which are dated to 1863.”

Caxton’s eyes went wide. “You think there’s a connection.”

“You don’t?” he asked. “I should go and take a look, anyway. It might tell us something about who we’re fighting.”

Caxton nodded eagerly. She was less concerned by who the vampire might be than by what he might do next, however. “Okay. Find out what you can. The most important thing for me right now is to catch the active one. I’ll head up to HQ and see what I can do about getting some people down here so we can start searching for this vampire’s lair.”

He left without another word. Caxton checked her pocket and found her car keys. Turning to Clara, she said, “You drove down here, right? You can take me back to where I left the Mazda and then—”

“Yeah,” Clara said, standing up. She threw her arms around Caxton, pressed her face into the crook of Caxton’s neck. “Anything I can do to help,” she said. “Just promise me you won’t get killed.”

Caxton hugged her back, hard, and promised. When she let go she saw the red bruises on Clara’s neck, however, and made a promise to herself.

The last time she fought vampires people had been hurt—people she cared about. That wasn’t going to happen again.

They went out into the hospital’s parking lot, where a stiff wind was whirling up great spirals of fallen orange leaves. Clara drove her back to the Mazda and left her there with one deep, meaningful kiss. She promised she would take care of the dogs.

“Don’t expect me home tonight.” Caxton didn’t plan on coming home until the vampire was destroyed.

“Keep me informed,” Clara insisted. Then she drove away.

Caxton watched the patrol cruiser go, watched the sweep of leaves it kicked up in its wake. Then she unlocked the Mazda and reached inside for the Beretta and its magazine, checked the action, and put the weapon in her coat pocket. Just having her familiar sidearm on her person made her feel better.

She wanted to get started right away, wanted to start liaising with the local cops and start an investigation folder. It wasn’t that easy, though. First she had to drive back to Harrisburg and beg her superiors at the Bureau of Criminal Investigation to allow her to be reassigned and to give her some kind of jurisdiction for Gettysburg.

A thick layer of clouds lay over Route 15 as she hurried northward. She listened to the radio and tried not to think about much until she saw the aqueduct bridges of the state capital appear before her between two ridges. The dome of the capitol looked greenish under the overcast sky, but she was glad to see it. A few miles farther on, she pulled into the parking lot of the state police headquarters, a brick building with a big flag out front. She parked the Mazda and rushed inside to the lobby.

She had planned on speaking with her captain, but when she arrived she was told to go straight up to the Commissioner’s office. At his door she introduced herself to his assistant. She expected to be kept waiting while her