No time to curse her luck, she thought. She glanced over the gallery railing into the darkness below, looking for any sign of movement. The only light came from the flashers on the cruisers inside, which occasionally stabbed a blue or red beam through the first-?floor windows. Anything could have been down there and she wouldn’t have seen them, even if they were moving around; the strobelike effect of the flashers ruined her dark-?adapted vision every time they cycled through. Moving as silently as she could, she pushed onward to the next door down. Neither the light of the flashers nor the softer light from Astarte’s room reached up that far. She had her Mag-?Lite still, but she didn’t dare use it. In the deep gloom she ran a hand over the door’s polished surface, then found a brass plate with a keyhole in it. She lifted her hand a few inches and found a cracked porcelain knob that turned with a barely audible squeal. Slowly she opened the door, an inch or two at a time, ready to stop the instant the hinges creaked. Just a little more. Once she had it open wide enough she would slip in and close it just as carefully behind her.
A high-?pitched scream tore through her consciousness and a once-?human body slammed into her, knocking her down. She could only register that its breath was horrible as he pushed her down to the carpet. She saw a long weapon glint as it was raised high—a meat fork, it looked like, a foot long and with four wicked barbed tines—and then it was all she could do to throw her head to one side as the fork came down right where her left eye had been. The half-?dead on top of her screamed again and she saw the tattered skin of its face jiggle, felt spittle fleck her cheeks and upper lip. It tried raising its fork for another attack but couldn’t. The tines had gotten stuck in the wooden floor. Caxton had been trained in some very basic martial arts, so she knew what to do next. She got one knee between her attacker’s legs and pushed up with all her strength. Whether half-?deads had sensitive testicles or not was a moot point; the maneuver was intended to roll the thing off of her body, and it worked. She could have followed up by rolling on top of it and pinning its arms down, but she didn’t bother taking the move that far. Instead she yanked her Beretta out of its holster and shoved the barrel up under the half-?dead’s chin. Its eyes went wide just before she squeezed the trigger, but afterward what was left of its face went slack.
She took a second to study the dead thing, trying to figure out who it had been and what it was doing in the house. One look at its clothes told her the whole story.
It was dressed in the gray shirt and navy blue pants of a Pennsylvania state trooper. One of her own. Jameson must have been waiting in the house when the troopers broke in. He would have made short work of them. Though she had tried to warn them what dangers awaited inside, she had known when she sent the troopers in that they weren’t prepared or trained in how to fight a bloodthirsty monster. Once he killed them they had become his to play with, and he must have raised them from the dead even before Caxton arrived on the scene. That was why there had been no bodies in the cars out front—because the bodies had already been inside the house.
There could be as many as six more half-?deads inside the house, then. She didn’t have time to feel guilty. As fast as she could, she rolled over and jumped to her feet. She peered through the door her attacker had come through and saw the room beyond, a kind of butler’s pantry lined with cupboards. The room also contained a simple table, a few chairs, and at the far end a very narrow staircase leading down. She figured it had to go down to the kitchen. She could already hear more half-?deads clattering up those steps.
She thought fast. A brass key stood in the keyhole on the inside of the door. She yanked it out, slammed the door shut, and locked it from the outside. When the mechanism clicked she hit the key with the butt of her weapon, breaking it off inside the lock.
Her next move was easy to figure out. There was no more point in subterfuge. “Glauer!” she shouted, as loud as she could, just in case he hadn’t heard the gunshot. “Glauer! Now!”
Vampire Zero
Chapter 21.