"They're following me-they were at my house and now they're following me,"
Caxton said. In the rear-view she saw her undead pursuer drift ever closer toward the bumper of her patrol car.
"I doubt it," Arkeley told her. "Hold on." The car behind them-a Hummer-2-smashed into them and the patrol car shrieked as metal tore into metal. The half-dead back there wasn't trying to make them crash. Caxton had enough experience with police pursuits to understand. The driver behind her was showing her the limits of the box. She sped up a little, keeping just inches away from the car boxing them in from the front, and whirled around in her seat to keep all three assailants in sight.
"They're not here for me?" she asked.
"No, I don't think so." Arkeley took his weapon from its holster. "When I took down Lares he was feeding his ancestors. He brought them blood. I did some more research and I found others who'd seen similar behavior. Vampires lust for blood, but they worship the creatures who gave them the curse. When I threatened Malvern back in the hospital I brought this on us. Roll down your window and lean back."
She did as he asked only a moment before he lurched across her body and fired two shots into the Chevy on her left. The half-dead driver threw his hands across his face but they exploded in clouds of bone fragments and withered flesh. His head cracked and pulled apart and the car spun off the road and smacked into a tree. Caxton watched in her rear-view as its headlights swiveled out crazily, pointing in different directions, a moment before they went dark.
From behind the Hummer-2 rammed them again. The half-deads were not pleased. Caxton grabbed the steering wheel so hard she felt it in her shoulders.
"Okay, my turn," she said. She spun the wheel and stamped on the gas. The patrol car shot forward and smacked into the rear right wheel of the Honda in front of them. The tire slipped on the pavement and the car spun out to the left, letting Caxton surge forward and around the out-of-control vehicle. She'd had three days training in pursuit evasion tactics-everyone in Highway Patrol had to take it. As she sped into the darkness ahead, finally free of the box, she turned to grin at Arkeley, truly pleased with herself. "Do you know how to use the car radio?" she asked him, gesturing at the dashboard set with her chin. "Go ahead and call Troop H dispatch. We need every available unit."
Arkeley stared at her. "You little idiot," he breathed. She didn't look at him, just focused on keeping control of the car. She was doing better than ninety on a road rated for sixty at the most. "If we had let them, they would have taken us right to their master."
"To the vampire," she said.
"Yes."
"But you shot that guy!" she protested.
"I had to make it look like we weren't just playing along."
Caxton gritted her teeth and glanced in her mirrors. The Hummer was still back there, laboring to keep pace with her. She eased off the gas a hair-not enough to make him think she was letting him catch up. The Honda was still trying to get turned around after its sudden stop. A green traffic sign flashed by. "The exit for New Holland is coming up. Do I take it or not?"
"We'll have to try to guess from their behavior which way they want us to go."
Arkeley bit off the words and spat them out. He was holding on to the door handle with one hand while the other held his weapon up, barrel pointed up. If the bouncing, jostling car made him fire by accident the bullet would exit the car as quickly as possible. "If he starts to weave to the left-"
He didn't need to finish the sentence. Two motorcycles came screaming up the on-ramp behind them and rumbled quickly up behind the patrol car. The riders weren't wearing helmets but then they didn't have any faces either. One of the half-dead riders pulled up on the right of Caxton, forcing her into the left lane, away from the New Holland exit. At least that answered her question. The other motorcyclist gunned his engine with a sustained explosive noise and pulled up next to her front left wheel.
The motorcycles weren't much of a threat on their own-she could ram them off the road with one swivel of her wheel. The one on her right, though, had a big rusty hunk of metal in his hand, a cleaver, at least eighteen inches long. He brought it back with his arm straight and then swung it right into the side of the car. There was more noise than damage to the car's body but her right-hand headlight flickered out in a shower of sparks and she was half blind, hurtling through the Stygian woods at eighty-five miles an hour. Reflexively, even as he was pulling his cleaver free, she swerved to the left to get away from him. The biker on that side swung out wide and narrowly missed getting clipped by her front left wheel. Glass and bits of metal smacked and skittered and danced across the windshield as the patrol car rocked up and down on its shock absorbers and the wheels slipped away from her. Caxton struggled to regain control of the car. Her remaining headlight washed the road surface from left to right as the car sagged on its tires but she was good at this, she'd had years of practice driving under hazardous conditions, and she didn't panic. She straightened the car out and poured on a little more speed. Maybe the Hummer would have trouble keeping up but she figured the bikers knew where they were taking her.
"Are you sure they're not trying to kill us?" Caxton demanded.
"Ninety per cent so," Arkeley replied. "Normally half-deads herd victims to the master. After all if we die out here the vampire can't drink our blood. Then again, if they think I'm enough of a threat they may not want to take any chances."
"You're a known vampire killer," Caxton said. "If I were them I'd consider you a pretty serious threat. Please, please, please, can we call for some backup?"
He nodded. He didn't waste time suggesting that maybe she was right for once and maybe he was wrong. He picked up the radio handset and called it in, just like he should have ten minutes earlier. Dispatch from Troop H started calling in cars. Then an orange sign flashed by them so fast she could barely see it, its phosphorescent paint glowing eerily in the near-total darkness. She didn't have a chance to read it but she knew what the color meant: road work ahead. She took her foot off the gas. The Hummer behind her grew bigger in her rear-view but she tried not to sweat it. She had no idea what was coming-anything from a lane shift to a complete road closure. She could feel panic rising in her chest. The biker on her left had a monkey-wrench. He started to draw back his arm, clearly intending to smash in her remaining headlight. There were no streetlamps on this stretch of highway-this was a rural route where people were expected to bring their own lights. If he smashed her lamp she was going to be blind. With a desperation she'd never felt before she rolled the wheel over and slammed right into him. The bike twisted under the impact, its front wheel flying up. The biker, pinned against the side of the patrol car, shot out his hands and tried to grab on to her door but his skinless fingers scrabbled uselessly on the slick metal and glass. He disappeared from view, there one second, far behind her in the dark the next. His motorcycle span on the asphalt kicking up sparks.
She stood on the brake and the Hummer swerved to avoid hitting her. The other biker passed her by, his broken face turning to watch her go. While he wasn't watching the road his machine kept going in a perfectly straight line, right into an orange traffic cone. The PVC cone was meant to survive even the worst collisions but his bike wasn't. It flipped end over end and landed right on top of its operator. Caxton pumped the brakes. She could read the signs now. There was an emergency detour she couldn't quite make. There was a complete closure of the road in front of her. Behind her the Hummer stopped short, its brakes howling. She rolled toward a stop, the car unwilling to slow as quickly as she wanted it to. Sheer willpower wasn't helping. The road surface was covered in a chalky dust and in places it had been peeled away to reveal a much rougher layer below. The car jumped and bounced and Arkeley shoved his handgun into its holster. Finally, at last, the car ground to a halt, sliding the last few feet. It rocked forward, then back, and threw the two of them around in their seatbelts. Dust drooped from the air, settling again on the road, and silence fell with it.
Directly in front of them stood a roadblock of sawhorses and bright yellow collision barriers. Beyond the road surface had been completely cut up and torn through, leaving a six foot deep pit in the earth. Mud-spattered construction vehicles, abandoned power tools, boxes of rags and supplies and stacks of traffic cones littered the hole. Overhead an ancient and gnarled silver maple arched across the roadway, its twinned propeller-like seeds spinning down through the night air. High up in the mostly denuded branches something huge and white caught a few rays of light from her headlamp. As she watched, about a quarter of the white thing broke off from the main mass and fell like a stone. It hit the hood of her patrol car hard enough to make her scream a little. When she'd recovered herself she looked through the windshield and saw a construction worker in an orange vest staring back at her with dead eyes. His throat had been completely torn out, as well as part of his collarbone and shoulder. His skin was pale, and there was no blood on him at all. Before the car had time to stop trembling from the impact, the vampire leapt down from the tree to land right next to her, separated from her fragile body by only the width of her door. His eyes met hers and she could not look away.