Kissing Corpses (13 page)

“So he's good, then?” I asked. “If he's evaded you for fifteen years, but you're used to killing vampires on what... a monthly basis?”

“If there were that many vampires in America, I'd be a little more concerned. Yearly, I'd say.” Gilchrist stopped working and looked up at me. “If you're worried that he's going to get away again... I won't lie, that's not out of the realm of possibility, but I'll tell you that this is the closest I've been in a long, long time, and I have a plan.”

“What makes this plan better than all of the others?”

“The bait is in my camp.”

“The bait?” He meant me. I wanted to shake my head and tell him no, but I knew it was the best possible plan. I couldn't sleep under a UV lamp for the rest of my life (though melanoma still seemed preferable to an eternity of damnation with Rawdon).

“The bait,” he repeated. “No arguments? Good.”

“Was that the part I may not like?”

“Nope,” he said. He picked up a mint tin off of the desk. I hadn't noticed it sitting among the crossbow bolts and hand tools. Gilchrist opened the tin and, from it, held up a large, royal blue pill. “This is.”

We traveled to a list of locations to leave out packages and notes for Rawdon. Gilchrist had neatly hand-written the stack of notes while I had been sleeping that morning. Gilchrist made me stay in the car for every location after the first. He insisted that Rawdon would suspect his plan if he could smell me anywhere in between.

“See,” Gilchrist explained as we parked at the second stop. “He can run faster than an automobile. When he gets the call and rushes to your side to find you missing, he's going to know he can beat me, a human being, to the next stop. When he arrives, if you're there waiting, he'll realize it was a setup. But, if he thinks that I've set up a scavenger hunt to stall him and only I know the end location...”

“He won't suspect I'm in on it and not really kidnapped. But if we only make one more stop and we miraculously beat him there--”

“Despite his superhuman speed--”

“Then he'll know we're in league, and we'll lose the advantage.”

“You're not as stupid as I thought.”

After six stops to leave notes for the vampire, we finally made our way to the final destination, the museum. I took one last look at the map before going to the front and paying admission.

I spent fifteen minutes pretending to take notes on the exhibits. Once I was comfortable that the security guards thought I was a college student, I texted Gilchrist that I was coming and headed off towards the museum construction.

It was five o'clock. The museum was still open, but the contractors doing the renovations had packed it up. I checked my watch. The sun was setting. Rawdon was waking up.

Adrenaline poured into my system as I ducked under a strip of caution tape and walked to the back door. I pushed my hands on the door, careful not to touch the fire exit bar with my body. It opened without setting off the alarm. Gilchrist was right; the workers would chance leaving it that way for easy access to a smoke break.

He stepped in, carrying a duffel bag, and looked around the area. Not a soul in sight. Warm light shined in from the outside as the sun sank below the cloudless horizon. “Red sky at night, sailors delight. Red sky in the morning, vampires take warning.” Gilchrist laughed at his own joke. I got the feeling that he had been telling it for years.

“Let's hurry,” I said. “He'll be awake.”

We hurried into the closed-off area of the museum. Gilchrist spotted the door straight away. It was an old door made from three planks of wood. It was painted with white interior paint and stenciled with a big red “Keep Out.”

Gilchrist set his bag down. He unzipped it. On top of a stack of crossbows, ropes, straps, and the scimitar, was a battery powered screwdriver. He wasn't going to bother with lockpicks in the dark. Gilchrist took the lock and the deadbolt straight off and set them on the floor. The door opened to reveal a dark, musty stairway straight down into a pitch black tunnel.

“Hurry up before security hears us,” he whispered.

We slipped in through the door and closed it behind us. Gilchrist turned on a flashlight and pointed down the stairs. “Wait until I reach the bottom. I'll point the light at your feet.”

There were barricades put up to warn us to stay out of the tunnel, but Gilchrist just moved them aside. It was narrow and dark. The walls were made of brick and stone and it was hard to breathe A series of large pipes ran along the left-hand wall. Spider webs had formed between the pipes and the bricks. I remembered reading about these tunnels years ago. The pipes were used to transport steam for heating systems but were closed down. They were seen unfit for exploration.

I coughed for a while before getting used to the poor air quality. The icy air stung my stung my throat with every breath. Gilchrist waited until I was safely standing at the bottom of the ladder and then trudged on ahead, not worrying about me keeping up. He knew I wasn't going to let myself get left in the dark without a flashlight.

We stopped when we came to a fork in the tunnel. Gilchrist set his bag down and shined the light at all of the walls.

“Take your medicine,” he said.

I pulled the large blue pill out of my coat pocket and popped it in my mouth. The pill stuck to the side of my throat going down. I didn't know how long it took to kick in. I was secretly grateful that this night would be a blur in retrospect.

“Where does this go?” I asked, looking around the tunnel. I grunted to try and clear the sticky feeling from my throat.

“Back to our hotel, Crown bar, a bunch of other places. I wonder how long it's been since anyone has been down here.” His flashlight illuminated a crack in the wall. It was crawling with small insects.

“Probably a very long time. Should we have gas masks?”

“Probably. I think I can handle a little crappy air to survive a vampire. Don't you?”

“I suppose.”

He crouched down and unzipped his bag, handing me things and barking orders. He wrapped four chains around the metal bracket of a pipe and fastened them with padlocks. A set of real metal handcuffs were attached at the ends of all four chains.

Gilchrist buckled me in by my ankles and my left hand, leaving the right one free. The chain and coordinating cuff lay on the slimy floor. I looked down at his coarse hands as he worked, locking me in. He had a gold wedding band on his left hand. I hadn't noticed before.

“You're married?” I asked.

“Seventeen years.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Making the world a better place for my kids.” Gilchrist crouched down to lock my ankles. “She knew about my calling when she married me. She knew she was marrying the job.”

“How exactly do you get paid doing this? The church?”

“Not the church. We've had our own organization for hundreds of years. We take donations from private benefactors. I'm on salary.”

“Oh. How old are your kids? Do they know you do this?”

“My nine-year-old thinks I'm the coolest Dad in the world and my four year-old doesn't know.” He dropped a crossbow on the ground in front of me. “And I've got to be back by Christmas because there's another one on the way.”

“And what happens to your family if you die doing this?”

“He'll be thirsty,” Gilchrist said, sidestepping my question completely. “The morning news says he killed two and fled after being shot. As far as internet news sites go, there have been no other reports of other attacks in Cheyenne. He's laying low. He'll need to feed, and we took out his backup supply in that fire.” Gilchrist took my phone from my pocket, “Don't be alarmed if he needs a snack. That's what I'm betting on. Make the call.”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I ran over what I had to say in my mind. We had rehearsed all afternoon so that I wouldn't forget any of it, no matter what state I was in.

He hit send and handed me the phone. I didn't have the benefit of those theater classes like Geneva had taken in college, but I think the actual panic of seeing Rawdon again lent a sincere quaver to my voice.

“Kendall?” he asked quietly as he picked up the phone.

“Rawdon,” I said. “Rawdon, he's after me.”

“No he's not,” he said. “He's right here.”

I froze.

“I'm looking into his scared eyes.”

“Who? Who is right there?”

“Cody Hunt. Your valiant hero. Say hi, Cody.”

“Kendall, run!” Cody screamed. “Get the hell out of Cheyenne.” There was a crack and a whimper. Rawdon put the phone back to his own ear. “Would you like to listen while I kill him?”

“Rawdon, I'm not talking about Cody,” I said in a hurry. If I could distract him, maybe I could save Cody. “Gilchrist is after me. I got away from him this morning and he's chasing me. I want to be with you. I'm so sorry.”

It was quiet. I sincerely hoped that the silence meant he couldn't be killing Cody. I decided to go on.

“I got scared. I like living. I like sunshine and cheesecake, and I got scared. But I love you,” I lied. “I need you. Please come get me.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm at the library,” I said. “In the back issues of periodicals. I think I saw him outs--” Gilchrist clamped his hand over my mouth. I screamed through it. Gilchrist took the phone ended the call.

“Great job, kid,” he said, tossing the iPhone to the ground, out of reach. He stepped back and drew a knife from a strap around his leg. He had armed himself with crossbows at his hips and a scimitar on his back. He left the rest of the bag to lay abandoned.

“We have about fifteen minutes before he catches up with the trail,” Gilchrist noted before slicing his left hand and allowing the blood to spill on the floor. I winced and looked away. After everything I had been through, I still looked away.

He dropped a lit flashlight on the ground before turning and running up the tunnel, clutching his bloodied palm.

Fifteen minutes sure seemed like a lot of time. I was waiting for the most dangerous encounter of my life. Waiting, alone in the dark, time crept by. My mind wandered. What if Rawdon wasn't coming? What if he was beyond obsession and just angry. Was Cody going to live? What if he decided to kill Cody and then come save me? Could I live with myself if I had gotten Cody killed?

I nodded off for a moment, leaning back against the row of cold pipes, and awoke at the sensation of falling. I stumbled and caught my balance. Had the pill kicked in? How long had it been since I had taken it? We had taken our time setting up. I supposed it could have been forty minutes. I always was a dope on painkillers. When my wisdom teeth had come out, that week had been a blur. I needed to focus.

Rawdon was standing in front of me. A small ring of dried, black blood starched the left shoulder of his white shirt, where a bullet had gone through the night before, during his escape from the morgue. The shoulder itself hung at an odd angle and his back looked crooked. What I saw first, however, were the scarlet splashes of blood, fresh from his visit with Cody. I reasoned that if he had killed Cody, he would have drank and he would be better healed by now.

The dizziness I had been feeling was pushed back by a surge of adrenaline at seeing his face. He stared at me, fangs bared, and cocked his head.

“I smell blood.”

I had rehearsed this line all afternoon and it tumbled out of me. “I got his crossbow and shot him. He ran away.”

Rawdon crouched and picked up the crossbow off of the ground. He looked around for the bolt. “It must still be in him.”

“Rawdon,” I said, “He'll be hunting me now.”

“Not if I kill him,” he said, as casually as if he had just suggested chicken for dinner. “Have you been hurt?”

“My head hurts. I think I have a concussion. He hit me and I woke up here. You're hurt. Rawdon, you're hurt.” That was the last scripted line. I just needed to keep my focus for a few more minutes and improvise.

“I haven't fed,” he hissed. “I can't heal without feeding.”

“You need your strength,” I said. “You need it to fight him. You need blood.”

Rawdon slipped his fingers between the handcuff and my left wrist. He pulled and the lock broke, springing open with ease. I rubbed my wrist as he tore off the bonds on my ankles.

“You can feed on me,” I said, “If you promise not to go too far. When he's dead, you can turn me.”