“What do you mean, stop?” he asked when the creature dropped to the floor. He shone his heavy-?duty flashlight in her face.
“I wanted to keep it alive for questioning,” she answered. She pushed the flashlight away. It was hurting her eyes. “What took you so long?”
He shrugged amiably. “There’s about fifty doors in this place and they were all locked.”
It didn’t matter. He was here now. Caxton did a quick calculation in her head. “There were seven of them originally, assuming Jameson raised them all.”
“Seven? There were seven cops called to this scene—”
Apparently he was just figuring out whom he’d been fighting. She raised a hand for silence. “I got one upstairs.” She grabbed the light out of his hands and pointed it at the two on the floor, their bodies twisted around by the shotgun blast and completely lifeless. She pointed it again at the one with the knocked-?in skull. “That’s four.”
“Two more of them tried to get me back in the kitchen,” Glauer said. “Check this out.” He tried to show her a bad cut on his arm. “Went right through my jacket and my shirt. Just a little paring knife, but that guy wanted me bad.”
“Six, then, all dead—and one left,” Caxton counted, too busy to worry about his arm. She spun around with a sudden intuition and pointed the light at the front door. It hung open to the night. “Come on, hurry,” she said, and sprinted out across the porch and down into the street. At first she saw nothing, just the cars piled up in the road. She had expected the last half-?dead to steal one and make a break for it, and had just hoped it wouldn’t be the Mazda the monster chose. All the cars were in their proper places, though.
“There,” Glauer said, and pointed at the road. A thin layer of new powdery snow had coated the street since they’d arrived. A trail of boot prints curved away from the house and off to the west, toward the highway. Glauer started for the passenger side of her car, but she shook her head. “No time for that. We can catch him on foot.”
She raced down the street, her eyes bleary with the light from the streetlamps and the glare off the snow after the darkness in the house. She had no trouble following the trail, however—the footprints were dark against the snowy street and they headed due west, never weaving back and forth, never turning as if the half-?dead had looked over his shoulder to see if he were being pursued. She had a bad feeling she knew what that meant. Half-?deads for all their wicked humor and spite were bound to the whims of vampires. They could no more resist the commands of their masters than they could make themselves alive and whole again. This one wasn’t just escaping a hopeless fight—no, it would have stayed until the bitter end if Jameson had so desired. It was carrying out some other order. She ran as fast as she could, her work shoes slipping constantly in the wet slush. She hadn’t had a chance to put on proper boots. Glauer came chugging along behind her, more sure-?footed but not as quick. Yet it was he who first caught sight of the half-?dead ahead of them.
He shouted and pointed and Caxton followed his finger. There, a block ahead, the half-?dead was moving fast. It was limping badly and one of its pant legs had been torn away. It had a nasty bloodless wound in its calf, where part of the muscle had been blown away. It must, she realized, be the one she had wounded with her wild shots on the stairs. Yet as crippled as it was, it forced itself along, forced itself to keep moving.
She had closed the distance to half a block when she realized they were about to run out of road. The street ahead curved southward to follow the creek, but the half-?dead wasn’t turning with it. It hurried on forward in a straight line.
She tried to sprint after it and nearly fell on her face. “Glauer—grab it, quick,” she called, and the big cop shot past her, puffing mightily. She raced after them both and arrived at the built-?up edge of the creek just in time to watch the half-?dead jump awkwardly over the edge and split the dark water like a falling stone. It disappeared with a gurgling whine and was immediately lost from view. Glauer started to pull off his jacket as if he would jump in after it, but she grabbed his arm and yanked him back. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said, breath surging in and out of her chest. “You’d freeze to death in minutes.”
“But it’s getting away!” Glauer cried back.
“No it isn’t,” Caxton knew. She understood right away what Jameson had demanded of his creature. She didn’t know if the icy water would have hurt it, but she knew half-?deads didn’t breathe. She imagined they weren’t very buoyant. It must have sunk like a stone. Under the water its brain would freeze and that would be the end of its short un-?life. “Back when we were working together—I mean, Jameson and me—it was standard practice to try to capture half-?deads. That was our best source of information. He knew I would want to talk to this one, and he made damned sure I didn’t get the chance.”
Vampire Zero
Chapter 22.