99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

“You won’t tonight, either,” she said. “The vampires are already dead.”

He laughed, not the friendly chuckle she’d expected but a loud, embarrassing snort that made even a few guardsmen look up in surprise. He nodded again and moved on, handing out coffee to anyone who wanted it.

These men would succeed, she insisted to herself. She would lead them to the vampires and then it was all about the shooting. The vampires would stick together, they wouldn’t split up. She wouldn’t have to go chasing them. She would finish this, tonight, and whether she lived or died it would be over and then—

“Contact,” the radio coughed. It sounded almost apologetic. “Can you confirm?” the helicopter pilot asked. Not speaking to her. “Affirmative. Contact.” The pilot rattled off a string of map coordinates.

Caxton went to her own map, laid out on the hood of a truck, and suddenly seventy-five men were crowding around her, pushing close, perhaps trying to see. The contact had been made just south of town, at the top of the battlefield. That fit her plan just fine.

“Okay,” she said. Her heart was jumping in her chest, but she didn’t let it show. “Let’s not make any mistakes,” she said. “I’m going to move fast so they don’t have a chance to split up. Everybody keep up.”

She ducked through the throng of men, headed south. The old buildings of Gettysburg, red brick with white trim, yellow brick with black trim, streamed past her. The noise of all the men moving together was a vast rustling like sails caught by the wind. Vampires had excellent hearing. They would hear her coming.

They would see the men’s blood, sparkling in the night.

She checked her rifle as she moved, checked the magazine, checked the action. Behind her she heard seventy-five safeties being flicked off.

The town’s cemetery opened up on her left, darkness flooding in where the streetlights stopped. On her right the buildings grew farther apart. Their windows were dark. Up ahead the street rose to crest a low hill. She saw old painted cannon, memorials to the various battalions and regiments that had fought at Gettysburg. Open stretches of grass, stands of trees, and then she was atop the hill looking down into the valley, the open ground between the two tree-crowded ridges that flanked the battlefield. Seminary Ridge, to the west, and Cemetery Ridge to the east. In between was open grassland, studded with memorials and crisscrossed by roads and footpaths.

They called it the Valley of Death in all the tourist literature. In the brochures and pamphlets and the guidebooks. A hundred thousand men had fought down there for three days, and many of them had died.

She craned her head forward, strained her eyes trying to see anything. A flicker of motion, anything.

There was no moon to light the field and only a few stars shone down through gaps in the clouds.

Nothing, she couldn’t see anything—

—and then she did. Something white, paler than the dark field. Moving, almost writhing. Like a mass of maggots squirming on the grass. Coming her way, very slowly. Slowly getting bigger, resolving into separate forms.

She lifted her rifle to her shoulder, squinted down the sights.

Okay, she thought. Now.

70.

Bill, thou art aveng’d, for Chess, they tell me, is reduced & destroyed. Yet I miss you so. Though justice be done memory is not assuaged.

How many times have I dreamed of us returned to dear old Maine, & feted well by family and friend alike. How many dreams of that homecoming did we share? & now neither of us shall see that blessed day.

I went to sit with HER today, thinking only hatred would fill my heart. You served her like a slave at the end, did you not? I said you had escaped her, but she told me (by writing on a paper) that your body was already dead, & that within seven days your soul would be loosed. Hardness in my chest afflicted me, & I began to signal that I should like to leave. My attendants stepped forward, to take up my litter. Yet before they could remove me I asked them to stop.

She had changed, Bill, to take on your face.

It was the barest of illusions, & easily pierced, yet I knew if I wished it she could speak with your voice, and hold my hands as you once did. Disgust, first, consumed me, but not for long. In time I came to understand she was giving me some gift, some favor, & I admit, it was good to see you again.

Then it was she spoke to me direct, using thought in place of word.

—LETTER OFALVAGRIEST (UNPOSTED)

71.

The vampires came toward them in a square formation, lined up abreast in at least a dozen ranks. They wore nothing but rags, tatters of old uniforms, loose trousers torn at the cuff. A few had tunics on, colorless in the dark. Their skin was easier to see, pale, pale white even in the gloom. Their faces were hairless and gaunt, their cheeks sunken in.

They were big. They were fast and dangerous. They moved in an eerie lockstep, as if they were one being with many bodies. She could see their teeth glinting in the starlight, she could see their enormous, powerful hands.

One vampire could kill her. That was all it would take. One vampire had nearly strangled her. It would have been just as easy for him to tear her into little pieces. Now she was facing an army of them.

I can’t do this, she thought.

I am going to die here, she thought. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. She felt bewitched.

Still they came on. Their feet moved together. Left. Right. Left. Right. An army—not just a gaggle of them, not just a mob. A literal army.

Well, yes. Because that was what they’d been when they were alive. “They’re soldiers,” Caxton said, and it broke the spell. Breath plumed out of her. She drew oxygen into her lungs. “They’re marching.”

Arkeley would not have hesitated. Arkeley would have been braver. She channeled him, forced herself to think the way he would. Vampires were deadly, they were strong, but they were not invulnerable. She lined up her first shot, held it. One of the front rank, to the left of the center of the formation. She looked for her vampire among the ranks but couldn’t find him. She’d expected him to be at the front, leading the charge, but he must have been hidden in among them.

They were thin, painfully, horrifyingly thin. They looked starved and bedraggled.

Their eyes, however, were bright. Glowing like smoldering embers. Even in the dark they seemed to glow. She held her shot.

“Go for the hearts,” she said, loud, so the others would hear her. “Every time.”

Around her troopers and LEOs and guardsmen and local cops lifted their patrol rifles. Some knelt down, elbows on thighs to steady their aim. Others aimed from the shoulder, ready.

The vampires came on so fast, their feet barely brushing the ground. Their arms swung at their sides and their eyes stayed facing front, never looking to the side, never betraying them. If they saw Caxton and her troops they didn’t show any sign of it. They certainly didn’t show any fear.

She had worried they would split up. Worried they would head in a hundred different directions, that she would never catch them all. That wasn’t going to be a problem. The vampires were soldiers, and they’d been drilled in nineteenth-century battle tactics. Which meant staying together and walking right into fire.

That standard operating procedure hadn’t worked so well during the Civil War, when men had marched right into cannon fire.

Closer—always closer. It was so dreamlike, so wrongly surreal that Caxton couldn’t get a sense of how far away they were. She held her shot. Corrected her aim. They were closer, well within range.

“Fire at will,” she shouted, and the night blew apart. Patrol rifles barked and jumped in the men’s hands.

Caxton took her own shot, felt the weapon kick her shoulder. The recoil wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. She kept her eye on her target, watched a dark hole open in his chest. The vampire’s arm flew up and he turned at the waist, his chin hitting his shoulder.

The formation stopped in place. The vampires stood there, still, perfectly still, as if in surprise. Their eyes