83.

“You should have told us,” Howell said. His face was wracked with hatred. “You didn’t tell us it would be this bad.”

Caxton knelt down to touch the arm of one of the dead LEOs. It was cold and the hand at the end was very pale. She rolled him over on his side and got a shock. The man’s head was missing.

Stepping backward, unable to see anything except the raw bloodless stump of his neck, she barely heard Howell complaining.

“We need to pop smoke right now,” he said.

“What?” Glauer asked.

The soldier stared at him wide-eyed. “Pop smoke. Bug out. We need to leave!”

She looked up at him with a sudden measure of anger that surprised her. The LEOs had given their lives to stop the vampires. Now this idiot wanted to just leave, with the job unfinished? It was the kind of reaction Arkeley would have had. Feel free to step outside, the door’s just there, she thought, smoky rage billowing in her chest. See how far you get. She managed not to say it out loud. “We just need to hang on,” she said, instead. “The guard will send more troops.”

“Oh my God, how many times have I heard that?” Howell held up his radio, his thumb on the receive button. Only crackling static came through. “Nobody’s going to come save us! We’re the last of your task force, lady. Haven’t you figured that out yet? They took us to pieces!”

“We heard others outside, others who are still alive.”

“Not for long,” Howell replied.

She ground her teeth together and hit him with her best cop glare. “A lot of my people have died, yes,” she admitted. “But their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. We killed a lot of vampires. But there are more of them—”

“No fucking shit!” Howell shouted.

She began to reply, but Glauer grabbed her arm. He lifted his free index finger to his lips. “Has it even occurred to either of you that the monsters who did that,” he whispered, pointing at the dead LEOs, “might still be here?”

Howell shut up instantly. He looked away, down the dark corridors leading into the building, and lifted his weapon to a firing position. Caxton could see the flash hider on the end of his rifle shaking in the air.

She drew her own weapon, pointed it. She half expected a horde of vampires to come running out of the darkness that second. When nothing happened after a long, tense interval, she raised her rifle to point at the ceiling.

Howell spun around, his face white and his eyes wide. He had nothing clever to say this time.

Caxton wanted to mock him—but she caught herself. He was just scared. She understood that perfectly. He knew Glauer might be right, just as she did. She needed to get control of herself. Needed to keep it together, just as much as Howell did.

“Good thinking,” she told Glauer, her voice barely audible to herself.

“What do you want us to do, Trooper?” one of the other guardsmen asked, quietly. His name tag read SADLER. Slowly, careful not to make too much noise, he climbed to his feet and the others followed.

There were two corridors, one for guided tours and the other for the electric map. There was no reason to choose one over the other. Whichever one she chose, though, could be the wrong one. If she took her people to the guided tour office, a vampire could sneak up behind them and kill them before they even knew he was there. Assuming there even was a single vampire still in the visitor center. They might have devoured the LEOs and then left.

She needed to think.

“We need to secure this place. We’ll split up, just for a little while. Howell, you take your people down the hall on the left. Glauer and I will take the one on the right. If you make contact don’t wait for us to catch up, just engage.” She looked at her partner. He was pale and breathing hard, but he was still mobile, and his right arm—his shooting arm—was okay. He saw her sizing him up and gave her a reassuring nod.

“Okay,” Howell said. He looked at his own troops. “Guys, get your asses up.”

With Glauer at her back she headed down the dimly lit corridor toward the electric map. The way turned around a number of corners, almost instantly hiding the guardsmen from view. It led them past glass display cases full of artifacts from the battlefield—cannon, racks of antique rifles, a whole wall of white-corroded bullets and black tarnished uniformed buttons. She turned another corner and brought her weapon around, her breath catching in her throat. Before she fired, though, she saw what had scared her so badly—a posed group of mannequins wearing replica uniforms both blue and gray. The mannequins’ faces were as white as plaster.

“Jesus,” Glauer said from behind her. “Don’t scare me like that.”

“I’ll do my best,” she promised.

A few moments later, the corridor opened into a waiting area. There were turnstiles and a ticket taker’s podium and several broad double doors leading into an auditorium beyond. As they watched one set of doors slowly creaked inward, just an inch or two.

Caxton’s blood froze. She dropped to a firing crouch and held out an arm to keep Glauer back. She waited for the doors to crash open, for dozens of vampires to come bursting out, but nothing of the sort happened.

The doors just stood there, slightly open. It could have been nothing. The building’s furnace might have switched on and a sudden puff of hot air could have pushed the doors open.

Not likely, she thought.

“Cover me,” Glauer said, moving in. She stayed in her crouch, her weapon ready. He pushed his back up against the wall just to one side of the slightly open doors and peered through the crack. “I don’t see anything,” he told her. He held out his rifle and used it like a stick to push one door open all the way.

Caxton could see something of the room beyond—a big open space lined with rows of seats. The doors opened on the top level of a square amphitheater. Anything at all could be waiting below, hidden from view.

Duck-walking forward, she moved closer to the doors. Glauer stepped through them, his rifle moving from left to right as he covered the room. “Clear,” he said, and she got up to her full height again and moved in, her own rifle still at the ready in case he’d missed something.

She scanned the blue seats and the flights of steps that ran between them, made a note of all the fire exits from the room, then looked down. The electric map lay at the bottom of the amphitheater, an enormous topographically correct rendering of the town of Gettysburg and the battlefield to the south. An operator could switch on and off a series of lights to indicate where various regiments and battalions had stood on each day of the battle. It was hard for Caxton to see much of the map, however, because it was obscured by coffins.

Lots of coffins. Some were broken open but most remained intact. They lay without any real organization on top of the map or on the floor around it. A lot of them had been laid across rows of seats or stood propped up against the steps. She didn’t need to count them to know there must be ninety-nine in total.

She had finally found the coffins. Too late to do any good.