13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale by David Wellington

Author:David Wellington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307393609
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

31.

A stretcher rolled past Caxton’s face, barely three inches away. It was being pushed at high speed up the main ramp to the emergency room entrance, but to her it seemed to float, unattended, through boundless space, taking its time. The body on the stretcher was just a pile of bloodstained rags. She couldn’t even see a face. But then the body reached out a hand to her. The skin was scorched and falling away in places. Thick clotted blood was smeared across the fingers. She couldn’t even tell if it was a male or female hand.

Still. She reached out, touched it. The fingers curled around hers, but then the hand was ripped away from her, the stretcher flying up the ramp. Somebody shouted for plasma and she squinted and tried to clear her head.

She’d been sitting in the hallway for hours and hours with no stimulation except the constant parade of mutilated bodies that flew by. She shouldn’t have been in the hallway at all—there was a waiting room for people like her, complete with six TV sets and a couple hundred pounds of straight women’s magazines—but being a cop had its privileges. Most of the EMTs and nurses who passed by didn’t even give her a second glance; they assumed she was just guarding the entrance. In fact it just let her be a couple hundred feet closer to Deanna. They wouldn’t let her into the operating room or the recovery room. The hallway was as close as she was going to get.

That hand. It had been like something out of a dream, but she knew it was real. It had touched her. She looked down and saw real blood on her fingers. Her hand smelled like gasoline and shit, a smell she knew all too well. The smell of a really bad car accident. The hand had been real and warm and alive.

Unlike the half-dead she had tortured and executed on her bedroom floor. Unlike the vampires who were coming to destroy her life.

Caxton sighed and crossed her arms and waited. She had tried reading a magazine, but she was too distracted. Images and words jumped into her head unbidden. Not even things related to the investigation, not even memories of Deanna, just weird little scraps of thought. She kept wondering if the milk sitting out on the kitchen counter was going to go bad. The kitchen had to be as cold as the outside air, since the window was completely gone. Pretty much anybody could climb in through the hole where the window had been—should she call someone, have them check the house, have them put cardboard, at least, over the window? If she did that, should she ask them to go inside and put the milk back in the fridge?

She couldn’t shut her mind down. It didn’t work that way. Only sleep could turn off the brain, and she was a long way from sleep. The banal thoughts, the endless, cycling inanities had their purpose, as excruciating as they were.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.