99 Coffins: A Historical Vampire Tale

“Oh my God, how many times have I heard that?” Howell held up his radio, his thumb on the receive button. Only crackling static came through. “Nobody’s going to come save us! We’re the last of your task force, lady. Haven’t you figured that out yet? They took us to pieces!”

“We heard others outside, others who are still alive.”

“Not for long,” Howell replied.

She ground her teeth together and hit him with her best cop glare. “A lot of my people have died, yes,”

she admitted. “But their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. We killed a lot of vampires. But there are more of them —”

“No fucking shit!” Howell shouted.

She began to reply, but Glauer grabbed her arm. He lifted his free index finger to his lips. “Has it even occurred to either of you that the monsters who did that,” he whispered, pointing at the dead LEOs,

“might still be here?”

Howell shut up instantly. He looked away, down the dark corridors leading into the building, and lifted his weapon to a firing position. Caxton could see the flash hider on the end of his rifle shaking in the air.

She drew her own weapon, pointed it. She half expected a horde of vampires to come running out of the darkness that second. When nothing happened after a long, tense interval, she raised her rifle to point at the ceiling.

Howell spun around, his face white and his eyes wide. He had nothing clever to say this time.

Caxton wanted to mock him—but she caught herself. He was just scared. She understood that perfectly. He knew Glauer might be right, just as she did. She needed to get control of herself. Needed to keep it together, just as much as Howell did.

“Good thinking,” she told Glauer, her voice barely audible to herself.

“What do you want us to do, Trooper?” one of the other guardsmen asked, quietly. His name tag read SADLER . Slowly, careful not to make too much noise, he climbed to his feet and the others followed.

There were two corridors, one for guided tours and the other for the electric map. There was no reason to choose one over the other. Whichever one she chose, though, could be the wrong one. If she took her people to the guided tour office, a vampire could sneak up behind them and kill them before they even knew he was there. Assuming there even was a single vampire still in the visitor center. They might have devoured the LEOs and then left.

She needed to think.

“We need to secure this place. We’ll split up, just for a little while. Howell, you take your people down the hall on the left. Glauer and I will take the one on the right. If you make contact don’t wait for us to catch up, just engage.” She looked at her partner. He was pale and breathing hard, but he was still mobile, and his right arm—his shooting arm—was okay. He saw her sizing him up and gave her a reassuring nod.

“Okay,” Howell said. He looked at his own troops. “Guys, get your asses up.”

With Glauer at her back she headed down the dimly lit corridor toward the electric map. The way turned around a number of corners, almost instantly hiding the guardsmen from view. It led them past glass display cases full of artifacts from the battlefield—cannon, racks of antique rifles, a whole wall of white-corroded bullets and black tarnished uniformed buttons. She turned another corner and brought her weapon around, her breath catching in her throat. Before she fired, though, she saw what had scared her so badly—a posed group of mannequins wearing replica uniforms both blue and gray. The mannequins’ faces were as white as plaster.

“Jesus,” Glauer said from behind her. “Don’t scare me like that.”

“I’ll do my best,” she promised.

A few moments later, the corridor opened into a waiting area. There were turnstiles and a ticket taker’s podium and several broad double doors leading into an auditorium beyond. As they watched one set of doors slowly creaked inward, just an inch or two.

Caxton’s blood froze. She dropped to a firing crouch and held out an arm to keep Glauer back. She waited for the doors to crash open, for dozens of vampires to come bursting out, but nothing of the sort happened.

The doors just stood there, slightly open. It could have been nothing. The building’s furnace might have switched on and a sudden puff of hot air could have pushed the doors open.

Not likely, she thought.

“Cover me,” Glauer said, moving in. She stayed in her crouch, her weapon ready. He pushed his back up against the wall just to one side of the slightly open doors and peered through the crack. “I don’t see anything,” he told her. He held out his rifle and used it like a stick to push one door open all the way.

Caxton could see something of the room beyond—a big open space lined with rows of seats. The doors opened on the top level of a square amphitheater. Anything at all could be waiting below, hidden from view.

Duck-walking forward, she moved closer to the doors. Glauer stepped through them, his rifle moving from left to right as he covered the room. “Clear,” he said, and she got up to her full height again and moved in, her own rifle still at the ready in case he’d missed something.

She scanned the blue seats and the flights of steps that ran between them, made a note of all the fire exits from the room, then looked down. The electric map lay at the bottom of the amphitheater, an enormous topographically correct rendering of the town of Gettysburg and the battlefield to the south. An operator could switch on and off a series of lights to indicate where various regiments and battalions had stood on each day of the battle. It was hard for Caxton to see much of the map, however, because it was obscured by coffins.

Lots of coffins. Some were broken open but most remained intact. They lay without any real organization on top of the map or on the floor around it. A lot of them had been laid across rows of seats or stood propped up against the steps. She didn’t need to count them to know there must be ninety-nine in total.

She had finally found the coffins. Too late to do any good.

84.

While I was off to war, much transpired behind me, at my previous lodgings. I was only to learn much later of how sorely I’d underestimated my new friend. I was able to reconstruct most of what happened. The following I took from the official record of the special court martial of Private Jack Beecham, transcribed from his own words:

“It was right after midnight, right after her night’s feeding, that it happened.

“I really have no explanation for it, sir, other than it seemed right. The man who came had a bad wound on his face and he looked sickly, but we just thought he was some poor casualty bastard put to use by the quartermaster ’cause he wasn’t fit to fight anymore. Some of the men working as cooks here have worse injuries and ailments, as I’m sure you know. This fellow said his name was Bill something. He was a yank soldier and he used Colonel Pittenger’s name, said he had orders to pick up a coffin and take it away for burial, that’s all I know. No, sir, he hadn’t any papers, but that’s not so rare in wartime, when things aren’t often done to a nicety. He had a wagon with black bunting, you know, a funeral hearse, and a team. Oh, how those horses got themselves up when we brought out the coffin, as if they’d been at by a whole nest of hornets. We was all glad to see him go, as you might imagine, for it meant getting rid of those maddened beasts.

“It seemed alright, honest. I didn’t know Miss Malvern was inside that coffin, or I’d have put up a real fight. He said he was going to take her home and bury her proper, but where he actually got to, I have no notion.

“I’ll take my punishment now, if that’s alright.”

Private Beecham was made to ride a donkey backward around the whole of the camp at morning rolls, with a dunce cap over his eyes. Then he was flogged, given six stripes, and had his week’s pay taken away. It was lucky for him I was so far away; my punishment would have been far graver. Perhaps I’d have introduced him to my new acquaintances.

—THE PAPERS OFWILLIAMPITTENGER

85.

Glauer headed down the steps toward the map. She circled around the top of the amphitheater, scanning the exit doors. She tried one, found it locked. Moved to the next one. That was a dangerous