Eventually the reinforcements came, their lights strobing through the trees, their sirens drowning out the cackling noises from below. Caxton sat up and nearly rolled off the roof. Arkeley grabbed her but wouldn't look at her as she scrabbled for handholds.

There was a lot of shooting, none of which she could see. She remembered being down in the pit when they took down the vampire. "Jesus, I thought I was going to die."

"When it's time for you to die I'll let you know." There was a sneer in Arkeley's voice. "Damn." He pointed and she saw a crowd of half-deads running into the trees. "They're going to get away. I wanted to capture at least one so we could torture some information out of it."

"I don't know if I could watch you torture something. Not even one of those freaks," she said.

"Then I'll just have to do it while you're not looking."

When the sheriff and the state troopers below had finished securing the hunting camp they put a ladder up against the roof so Caxton and Arkeley could climb down. An ambulance waited for her while the Sheriff himself wanted to talk to the Fed.

"Take your shirt off and sit down here," an EMT in plastic gloves said. She did as she was told, sitting on the edge of the open back of the ambulance. It was freezing out and she didn't like sitting there in just her bra but another EMT wrapped a silver anti-shock blanket around her and that helped. The first medic, a middle-aged woman cleaned out her wound with antiseptic that turned her skin orange and made her cut look like spicy taco meat. "This isn't so bad," she said.

"I've seen a lot worse."

So had Caxton, of course. She'd just never been injured herself before, not even so unseriously. "Do I need to go to the hospital?" she asked.

"I'm going to recommend you get a tetanus shot and you'll need to see a doctor to change your bandage every so often. But you can go home tonight and sleep-that's the most important thing."

Sleep. It would be nice. Over the last few nights she'd gotten maybe six hours sleep total. She closed her eyes right there, but the ambulance's spinning lights pulsed blue on her eyelids and she came to again. The medic wrapped her shoulder with an Ace bandage and sent her on her way. Her shoulder ached pretty badly but she could move her arm just fine. She went looking for Arkeley and found him on the porch of the camp, studying a big state map. The sheriff stood rigidly next to him, holding a flashlight at just the right angle so the Fed could run his finger along the various routes and back roads. "Here, right?" Arkeley asked.

"Yeah, it's called Bitumen Hollow. Tiny little place."

Caxton bent down next to Arkeley. The Fed turned to stare at her as if she was in his light. She wasn't. "What?" she demanded.

He replied as if she'd asked what was happening. Which would have been her second question. "The vampires struck tonight. This," he said, waving his arm at the woods where they'd been ambushed by the half-deads, "wasn't a trap. It was a diversion from what was happening here." He poked at the map with his finger.

"You said the vampires struck tonight. Vampires, as in plural," she said. Arkeley bared his teeth at her and stared down at the map like he wanted to burn a hole right through it. "They worked together. The reports we have are pretty much useless in terms of piecing together a flow of events. We have a couple panicked 911 calls, a few cell phone recordings the sheriff was kind enough to share with me. No real details but they all agreed on one fact: there were two of them, two males, and they were hungry. They took down an entire village. We're going there right now to see what kind of evidence they might have left behind."

She nodded and reached for her car keys. They were in her jacket, which happened to still be up on the camp's roof. Arkeley stalked away in disgust when she told him as much. The sheriff turned off his light and folded up his map. "Not the most friendly sumbitch, is he?" the man asked. He had a handlebar mustache and a scar across his forehead that cut his eyebrow in half.

"I've been thinking I might have more fun working for the vampires," she said, and he chuckled. She glanced at the map to memorize where they were headed. A sergeant from Troop J climbed up and fetched her jacket. He tossed it down to her and she snatched it as it fluttered through the air.

Back in the car he wouldn't even talk to her. She started up the cruiser and got it back on the highway. They were only half an hour from the village. About halfway there she realized she couldn't handle his silence for the duration of the trip. "Listen, I don't know what I did to piss you off, but I'm sorry."

For once he was in a mood to talk. "If I had known you weren't really hurt, I wouldn't have retreated so hastily," he said, as if he were writing out a report. "I was counting on capturing at least one of them. Why else did you think I walked right into that trap? Maybe this night wouldn't have been such a fiasco. Maybe we would have been in time to reach Bitumen Hollow while there was still a chance to help."

"Now you're blaming me before we even know what's happened." But of course she knew what they would find, just as he did. She didn't want to see the village, or what was left of it. She didn't want to do any of this. "If I'm not tough enough for you-"

"You will be. You're going to toughen up in a hurry," he told her.

"Or what?"

"There is no 'or what'. You're going to toughen up and that's it. I don't have time to find a new partner. I don't have time to teach anyone else just how dangerous this game can be. Don't let me down again."

It was all he had to say. She had learned one thing, at least-she had learned when he was through talking and there was no point in asking more questions. She let him ride in brooding silence until they arrived.

Bitumen Hollow was just across the Turnpike, near French Creek State Park. It turned out to be a little depot town straddling the railroad line. A century earlier it might have served as a railhead for the local coal mines, judging by the giant rusting bins behind the town's single real street. Now it served merely as a place for the local farmers to buy feed and fertilizer. Or rather it had served that purpose until a few hours previous. There was a little coffeeshop, a Christian bookstore, a discount shoe store and a post office. Lights burned in all four places of business, but nobody was home.

A ribbon of yellow police tape stretched across the road at either end of the street. Inside that cordon there were no living people at all. There were plenty of human bodies.

Arkeley wasn't speaking to her. That was okay. She didn't need any more guilt. She ducked under the fluttering tape and walked the length of the street. She counted fourteen corpses. She kept meeting their eyes, which were open, and wide. There was a teenaged girl left hanging over a bench, her mid-section crushed by some unspeakable blow. The sleeve of her puffy coat had been torn open and the arm underneath was little more than torn meat. Caxton couldn't look away from the girl's face. Strands of thin blonde hair draped across her forehead, her nose. They stuck to the drying saliva at the corner of her mouth. In the darkness it was hard to tell what color her eyes were but they were very pretty.

In the Christian bookstore three bodies had been shoved behind the counter, all of their throats torn out. Whether they had run back there to hide or whether the vampires had stashed them back there for their own reasons, she didn't know. There was a man who looked a little like Deanna's big brother Elvin. He was wearing a hunting cap with red plaid flaps.

At the end of the street a late model car, a Prius, had collided with a lamp post. The driver was spread across the front seats. Caxton couldn't tell if it had been a man or a woman. The face was removed completely and the bloodless tissue underneath didn't look like a human head at all.

An explosion of light stunned Caxton. She blinked away the after-image and looked up to see maybe twenty sheriff's deputies standing on the other side of the police tape. They waited respectfully like people lined up to watch a parade. Clara, the photographer, had taken a picture-that had been the source of the flash. She'd been photographing the crashed car's license plate. "Hi," she said, and Caxton nodded back in greeting.

"Whenever you're ready, Trooper," the sheriff said. "Take your time." She realized they were waiting for her and Arkeley to finish their investigation. They had been given the right to the first look at the crime scene. The sheriff's department would take over as soon as they were done.

"Arkeley," she said, "are you finding anything useful?"

The Fed was bent over the teenaged girl. "Nothing I haven't seen before. Alright, let them in." He walked past her and lifted up the police tape. "Maybe they'll see something I've missed. I'm extremely tired, young lady, and I think I want to go home."

She blinked at him, then stepped aside to let the sheriff's deputies pass under the tape. "Alright," she said, more than a little surprised. "Let me bring the car around."

"Actually," he told her, "if you don't mind I'd like to be by myself. I'm sure the Sheriff can give you a ride home."

Very strange, she thought. Arkeley had to be up to something. He was going to do something he didn't want her to see. "Okay," she said. She was pretty sure she didn't want to see it, either. She handed over the keys to the patrol car. "Come pick me up tomorrow whenever," she told him, but he was already walking away.

"What's eating him?" Clara asked her, but Caxton could only shake her head.

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***