She stood her ground, waited for Vicente to start shouting. She didn’t have to wait for long. While he told her just what he thought of her idea she waited patiently for the verbal storm to blow over. She barely even registered what he was saying.
“We’ll search this town from top to bottom for those coffins,” she said. “I will do everything in my power to find them before nightfall. But if the search fails—”
“—You have a recommendation for when that happens, too?”
Caxton stared into his eyes. Directly into his eyes—like a vampire hypnotizing a victim. She lacked the magical powers, but she hoped her sincerity and her fear would have a similar effect. “If we can’t find the coffins before nightfall, we need to be ready. Ready for an army of vampires. Because that’s what we’re talking about. They’ll wake up hungry and they will kill everyone they see. Chief, I need you to authorize me to start planning for tonight.”
“Tonight? Tonight, when you’re going to single-handedly take on a hundred vampires with your sidearm?”
“No. I need you to help me gather my own army. I need officers, I need guns, and I need you to stay out of my way. I need you to stop thinking in terms of jurisdictions. I need you to stop thinking of this as an investigation and start thinking about this as a war.”
64.
—THE PAPERS OFWILLIAMPITTENGER
65.
So much to be done. Caxton’s weary body felt it piling up on her as if she were being buried alive.
Local police had to be rounded up, given cars, given maps that broke down their search areas. Radios had to be synchronized. The dispatcher, with an exasperated sigh, routed dozens of messages an hour to the unit in Caxton’s car. Houses, museums, inns, tourist centers had to be searched. Schools, the hospital, every building of Gettysburg College (especially there, no stone could be left unturned there).
The fire station, the old houses that were headquarters for ghost tours or guided tours of the battlefield.
Restaurants, gift shops. The 7-Eleven. There were plenty of buildings that were too small to hold all the coffins, but they might have basements.
There were phone calls to be made. Always there were more phone calls.
Caxton called the state police barracks just outside of town, and the one in Arendtsville. She needed more eyes, more cops, more people to come and help look for coffins. She waited on hold for long minutes, far too many of them, just to talk to the Commissioner up in Harrisburg. She called the National Guard armory, only to be told that they couldn’t mobilize without a direct order from the governor.
The governor wasn’t available to take her call.
She oversaw roadblocks being thrown up across the major roads. Local cops from Harrisburg, Arendtsville, and Hanover could man those. She oversaw hospital staff, doctors, nurses, orderlies, and maintenance men as they packed up necessary equipment, spoke in low tones with administrators about moving patients out of their rooms, out to the available beds in nearby towns. Always someone wanted to argue, someone wanted to claim that a given patient couldn’t be moved, that their condition was too delicate. The vampires wouldn’t care, she tried to explain. They didn’t care if somebody was dying of leukemia or brain cancer or pernicious infections. Blood was blood, and if the donor couldn’t get up and run away, all the better.
She scared a lot of people. She saw their faces go white, saw their hands tremble as they failed to meet her gaze. Laura Beth Caxton’s heart went out to them. Arkeley would have been pleased—if they were scared they would move faster. It would inspire them to get away. She needed to be more like Arkeley.
When their voices broke, when they begged her to understand, she hardened herself and told them what was coming.
More calls. She called in school buses, talked to principals and superintendents, called the local Greyhound station. Called the National Guard again and asked if they could send troop transports. A lot of people had already left Gettysburg, including most of the tourists. A lot of the townies had stayed put.
She needed to get more than five thousand people out of harm’s way and she needed to do it before six o’clock, her absolute, positive deadline for the evacuation. The National Guard had a fleet of vehicles fueled up and ready to go, but they couldn’t dispatch them without the approval of the governor, or, if he was completely unreachable, the lieutenant governor.
The lieutenant governor was away from his office at the moment. Did she want to leave a message? His personal assistant wasn’t really sure how to get hold of him, even if it was an emergency.
Operations like this didn’t just happen. They had to be obsessively planned. Everyone wanted oversight and everyone wanted to cover their respective asses. People couldn’t be pulled away from necessary jobs, life-and- death-type jobs. There were authorizations she needed just to use the right kind of weapons—much less to requisition them. A police operation this size normally took months to organize, to get all the necessary people and equipment in place at the right time. She had just a few hours.
Not every piece of news was cataclysmic. The Harrisburg Police Department had a long-standing agreement with the borough of Gettysburg, a convenient blurring of jurisdictions that had never been legally questioned. They were happy to send some men down. Would ten suffice? Caxton wanted a hundred, but she took what she was offered.
“What about helicopters?” she asked. The coffins could be hidden somewhere out in the woods around the battlefield. They could be sitting on a rooftop somewhere, someplace her searchers couldn’t easily get to. Aerial support would help the searchers coordinate their efforts, too. Harrisburg had two helicopters, though one was in for scheduled maintenance. It could be prepped and fueled and in the air within a couple of hours. They’d send them down as soon as possible.
The local Harrisburg PD had a special arrangement with the state police as well. They knew she was serious, and they wanted to help any way they could. She couldn’t thank them enough.
Glauer called her several times. “Nothing,” he always said. “Nothing. A couple people wouldn’t let us search their houses, but these are good people, people I’ve known all my life.”
“Make sure they get evacuated in the first wave,” Caxton said. “Then search their houses after they’re gone. This is an emergency.”
They put an announcement on the radio, on TV and over the Internet. All citizens of the borough of Gettysburg should report to the closest school or government building and await transport out of town.
Under no circumstances should they try to leave town in their own vehicles. Caxton had seen how bad the traffic could get on a normal day—the streets of Gettysburg would have been hopelessly snarled, the evacuation hopelessly gridlocked in honking horns and flashing lights and road rage and minor accidents and maybe major accidents too. The rain would make it worse.
Some of them tried. She got calls from all over town and had to send units to untangle the mess, to calm
