69.

No more mistakes. She’d thought it so many times, it was written on the inside of her skull. No more mistakes. Slinging her patrol rifle over her shoulder, she pressed the spiral pendant into her palm and tied it there with its broken ribbon.

The last trace of yellow faded from the sky. A few stars peeked through the clouds that wheeled from east to west while she watched. She could hear the helicopters quartering the town, searchers with infrared and night optical cameras looking for any sign of the enemy.

Now, she thought, her nerves thrumming. The call will come now.

It didn’t. Her radio crackled a bit, but nothing came through but the occasional check-in as the helicopter pilots kept track of each other. Caxton tried to breathe.

The vampires, she thought, could split up and—

She shook her head to clear away that thought, but the sudden motion made her neck hurt. She was so tired, hadn’t slept in far too long. Occasionally during the day she had started to nod off but had managed not to lose any precious time. Now she was just waiting, waiting to hear something.

They could split up, go across the open ground. Avoid the roadblocks on the highways and just melt into the darkness.

No. No, that wouldn’t happen, because it couldn’t. If it did, she would have to spend the rest of her life tracking them down. Every night would be a bloodbath, every day a frantic search, and never any time for sleep. It couldn’t happen.

She stared around at the men under her charge, watching them for signs that they were losing their edge. They were tough guys, most of them. Volunteers all. The LEOs tended to look the roughest. Liquor enforcement officers had to go into bad places all the time, had to deal with sketchy individuals who tended to own a lot of guns. The troopers were much the same, veterans of endless drug raids and meth lab assaults. They looked a little scared. That was how she could tell they were tough, because they looked scared. She remembered how terrified she’d been herself the first time she’d fought a vampire, and now when she looked around she saw fear in every face. Because they knew, they knew they could get hurt every time they clocked in to their jobs. They knew they could get killed.

The guardsmen, the soldiers, were a little harder to read. Some, the newbies, sat silently in groups of four or six, their rifles between their knees. They looked up every time someone laughed or the radio spat white noise. The veterans from Iraq looked a lot more casual. More Pennsylvanian guardsmen had been called up for duty in Iraq than from any other state in the union, and their casualties had been commensurately high. These men knew more than she could tell them about keeping themselves alive. They stood leaning against the trucks, not moving much. She saw them keeping their eyes on the four roads that lead out of the square, not alert so much as just aware, constantly aware of their surroundings.

Now, she thought, staring at her radio. Nothing.

Glauer came up beside her with a giant thermos of hot coffee and a sleeve of Styrofoam cups still in their plastic wrap. He tore it open and handed her one, poured it for her.

“How are your guys doing?” she asked.

He puffed air into his cheeks, let it out. “We’re good, we’re good,” he said. He looked back over his shoulder. Of the twenty officers of the Gettysburg Police Department, eighteen were scattered around the square, waiting on her orders. All twenty had volunteered. This was their town—they wanted to be here, wanted to defend their home. She had sent two of them home. One was the only means of support for an autistic brother who couldn’t care for himself. The other one was sick.

Chief Vicente had been moved to a safe location.

Glauer scratched at his mustache. “Listen, Trooper,” he said, but then it was as if he’d forgotten what he’d meant to say. He smiled awkwardly, put his hand down.

“They’ll do fine,” she said, because she thought it was what Arkeley would have said. “They’ve had firearms training. They’ll do just fine.”

He nodded briefly but didn’t look convinced. “Yeah. On the firing range. Some of them are hunters, too. I always preferred fishing. If I’d known what was coming, what was going to happen here, I would have done one of those counterterrorism courses the FBI offered. They would have paid my hotel bill and everything. I always figured, you know, that Gettysburg wouldn’t need that. I mean, none of us went. We thought it was silly.”

“They’ll do just fine.”

“Okay,” he said, and chewed on his lip. “I, um. I’ve never fired a gun at a living thing. Not in my whole life.”

“You won’t tonight, either,” she said. “The vampires are already dead.”

He laughed, not the friendly chuckle she’d expected but a loud, embarrassing snort that made even a few guardsmen look up in surprise. He nodded again and moved on, handing out coffee to anyone who wanted it.

These men would succeed, she insisted to herself. She would lead them to the vampires and then it was all about the shooting. The vampires would stick together, they wouldn’t split up. She wouldn’t have to go chasing them. She would finish this, tonight, and whether she lived or died it would be over and then—

“Contact,” the radio coughed. It sounded almost apologetic. “Can you confirm?” the helicopter pilot asked. Not speaking to her. “Affirmative. Contact.” The pilot rattled off a string of map coordinates. Caxton went to her own map, laid out on the hood of a truck, and suddenly seventy-five men were crowding around her, pushing close, perhaps trying to see. The contact had been made just south of town, at the top of the battlefield. That fit her plan just fine.

“Okay,” she said. Her heart was jumping in her chest, but she didn’t let it show. “Let’s not make any mistakes,” she said. “I’m going to move fast so they don’t have a chance to split up. Everybody keep up.”

She ducked through the throng of men, headed south. The old buildings of Gettysburg, red brick with white trim, yellow brick with black trim, streamed past her. The noise of all the men moving together was a vast rustling like sails caught by the wind. Vampires had excellent hearing. They would hear her coming. They would see the men’s blood, sparkling in the night.

She checked her rifle as she moved, checked the magazine, checked the action. Behind her she heard seventy-five safeties being flicked off.

The town’s cemetery opened up on her left, darkness flooding in where the streetlights stopped. On her right the buildings grew farther apart. Their windows were dark. Up ahead the street rose to crest a low hill. She saw old painted cannon, memorials to the various battalions and regiments that had fought at Gettysburg. Open stretches of grass, stands of trees, and then she was atop the hill looking down into the valley, the open ground between the two tree-crowded ridges that flanked the battlefield. Seminary Ridge, to the west, and Cemetery Ridge to the east. In between was open grassland, studded with memorials and crisscrossed by roads and footpaths.

They called it the Valley of Death in all the tourist literature. In the brochures and pamphlets and the guidebooks. A hundred thousand men had fought down there for three days, and many of them had died. She craned her head forward, strained her eyes trying to see anything. A flicker of motion, anything. There was no moon to light the field and only a few stars shone down through gaps in the clouds. Nothing, she couldn’t see anything—

—and then she did. Something white, paler than the dark field. Moving, almost writhing. Like a mass of maggots squirming on the grass. Coming her way, very slowly. Slowly getting bigger, resolving into separate forms.

She lifted her rifle to her shoulder, squinted down the sights.

Okay, she thought. Now.