“You’re offering me a way out? Henry… I don’t think you understand—”
“Shut up!” he yelled. “No more games. Either you surrender yourself right now and help us… or you die.”
We looked at each other for a second or two. I think of those seconds sometimes. So much going on behind her eyes: hatred, pity, regret, love. And the truth, sinking in… The truth that one of us was never going to leave that room.
“Think,” said Henry. “They know your face. Your associates. They know you orchestrated the death of a president. Even if you kill us, even if you fight your way out of here tonight, they’ll never stop hunting you. They’ll find you, and when they do they’ll take their time killing you.”
“And if they do,” said Virginia, “there will be others to take my place. Others who won’t rest until this country crumbles.”
“Why?” asked Henry. “Where does this hatred come from? You would slaughter innocents in the name of what—fascism? Communism? Because one form of tyranny suits you better than another?”
“Slaughtering innocents is all men have been doing since they landed on these shores. Burning witches at the stake, driving people from their lands, persecuting and purifying and segregating. How many innocents have died in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’? You, Henry… how many innocents have you slaughtered in your time?”
Henry gave no answer.
“America’s time is over,” she said.
“And yet we remain.”
Abe’s voice had come softly from the darkness, echoing through the room.
“For all of our imperfections,” he continued, “all of our sins and hypocrisies—and they are many, I grant you—through war and disagreement and tragedy… we remain.”
He took a small step forward, twirling his ax. “We may yet destroy ourselves,” he said. “I can’t say I’d be all that surprised if we did. But I promise you… this country will never be destroyed from the outside. Not by any ideology or foreign power… and certainly not by you.”
Virginia looked at both of them. She smiled.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “You’re Americans… You’ve always been Americans.”
Virginia’s fangs punched through her gums and her eyes went black. She broke her stare with Henry and lunged toward the collection of sharp instruments laid out beside the nearest autopsy table. Abe took off running across the tile floor, intent on stopping Virginia before she reached them, as Henry sprang from his seated position and gave chase from behind. All of these things in the same instant, almost imperceptible to human eyes.
Abe beat Virginia to the table by an arm’s length, knocking the instruments out of her reach, spilling all manner of scissors and scalpels across the floor. He swung his ax at her neck, but she moved from its path and swung her clawed hand at him in return, tearing the front of his T-shirt and drawing blood. Henry was there a fraction of a second later, the three vampires colliding in a blur of gnashing teeth and swinging claws. They fought the length of the room—Virginia kicking and punching; Abe swinging his ax from the front, only to have it blocked; Henry with his claws out, thrusting them like daggers at Virginia’s back but doing little more than landing scratches.
Even with the two of us [fighting her] together, we were barely holding our own. There’s no overstating how talented she was. How fast, how strong. She seemed to anticipate our every move, have a counter for our every attack.
Abe brought the blade of his ax down on Virginia’s head, only to have her grab the handle in midflight and use it as a brace, lifting herself off the floor and landing a kick to Henry’s neck behind her—the sharp heel of her shoe punching a small hole in his throat. Henry brought his hands upward, just as Kennedy had done when the assassin’s bullet tore through his vocal cords.
Without missing a beat, she flew at Abe like this [drags fingers across his face] with her claws and opened four deep gashes across his face, from here [his left temple] to here [his right cheek].
With both Abe and Henry stunned, Virginia grabbed the front of Henry’s shirt, lifted him off the tile, and drove him into the wall of metal storage lockers. He slid to the floor, dazed. The lockers teetered, then collapsed on top of him. He tried to roll out of the way, but he couldn’t muster the speed. His left arm was pinned beneath the cold metal.
She left me trapped there, still bleeding from my throat, my arm crushed beneath a ton of metal.
Virginia turned back to Abe. Now with only one opponent, she attacked with twice the fury, avoiding his ax by contorting her body out of its path, and countering with sharp-clawed punches and high-heeled kicks—one of which knocked the ax out of Abe’s hand.
It slid across the floor, and Virginia went for it. She was faster, but Abe’s body was longer—he dove after her and wrapped his arms around her legs, tackling her before she could get to it.
Abe held on to Virginia’s legs as tightly as he could. With the same strength that had once made him a feared wrestler in Illinois, he stood up and swung her body off the floor and into the air—throwing her down onto one of the empty autopsy tables, hard enough to leave a dent in its stainless-steel top. He held her there on her back, his left hand pressing on her chest, and reached for a nearby electric bone saw.
He got his hand on it and powered it up. The round blade started to whir, a terrible, high-pitched shrill sound. [Abe] brought it toward her neck, stretching the electric cord to the limit and getting within a foot of taking her head clean off.
But Virginia got her heels up and kicked Abe in the chest, knocking him backward and onto the ground. His head cracked against the floor, shattering several of its soft-blue tiles. Virginia was up in an instant, grabbing the bone saw and starting it up. Abe tried to lift his head, but Virginia stepped on his throat, pinning his neck against the floor with her heel. Henry tried to pull his arm free to no avail. He was trapped.
If it had been a movie, Virginia would’ve brought the blade [of the bone saw] down slowly, so that [Abe] could see it coming and have a few seconds to scream or beg for mercy. In reality, she just revved it once and jammed it into his skull.
Imagine the piercing whine of a dentist’s drill as it excavates a particularly stubborn tooth. That’s what it sounded like as the saw bit into Abe’s forehead. A flower of blood blossomed in the air above him, followed by the smell of burning hair. It was Abe’s skull. I was smelling Abe’s skull as the bone saw’s carbide blade chipped greedily away at it.
Still on his back, Abe brought his long legs up and kicked Virginia off, sending her flying halfway across the morgue. The bone saw ground to a halt, its blade still embedded in his forehead. He wrenched it free and pawed at his face as a sudden sheet of blood obscured his vision. Virginia saw her chance and took it.
She went for the ax again… This time she got it.
Abe ran at her and dove, thinking that he could tackle her again before she started swinging. Better to grapple with her on the ground than face a blade out in the open. But Virginia was a step too quick, moving out of his path and swinging the ax downward as he flew past her.
The blade found purchase in Abe’s lower back.
Henry cried out.
[Abe’s] whole body tensed up, all at once. He hit the floor hard—didn’t put his hands out in front of him to soften the landing, didn’t try to roll over or get back on his feet. And I knew. I knew, in that instant, she’d paralyzed him.
Abe was facedown on the floor, helpless to move his limbs. Blood ran freely down his face. Virginia dislodged the ax and swung again, hard enough to split a tree stump. She broke Abe’s spine clean in two and cut through his organs. Only the tile under his belly kept her from cutting any deeper. With the blade still buried inside him, Virginia pulled on the handle and put her heel against Abe’s hip. With a grunt of effort, she ripped the two halves of his body apart. His legs and torso slid off in different directions, like two like poles of a magnet repelling each other. The wet sounds of blood and org
ans spilling onto the floor.
Henry gritted his teeth and yanked on his left arm. With a sound that belonged in a butcher’s shop, muscle, fat, and sinew tore. There was a stomach-churning jolt and the shoulder joint separated—then suddenly his arm was free.
I was desperate to get to Abe and help him. But I couldn’t do that until I finished her. I felt wild, savage.
With one arm hanging useless, but feeling no pain, Henry ran at Virginia, no plan other than charge. No weapon other than rage. Virginia drew the ax back and swung for his head. But Henry dropped to his knees, sliding across the floor, freshly wet with Abe’s blood. As the blade passed over him, he dug his claws into Virginia’s upper thigh and dragged them down toward her knee, tearing the ligaments apart and making her leg buckle. She fell to the floor beside him.
Henry hit her with a closed fist, breaking four of the knuckles on his right hand and shattering Virginia’s jaw. She was stunned just long enough for Henry to hit her again—square in the face this time, breaking her nose and eye socket. Blood seeping from her tear ducts and nostrils.
Henry knelt on top of her and grabbed a scalpel off the floor—one of the instruments Abe had knocked off the table. He squeezed her throat with his left hand, his muscles shaking with effort, grunting, pushing the blade ever closer to her face as Virginia grabbed his wrist and pushed back, both of them fighting for every inch. She dragged her claws along his wrist, slicing away bands of flesh, but Henry hung on. Even as the bones of his wrist were exposed and his blood began to pour over his hand and onto Virginia’s porcelain throat.
He pushed… the scalpel’s blade pressed against Virginia’s closed eyelid, droplets of blood beading around it. Harder… until the blade cut through the closed lid and into the cornea beneath it. Harder… through the cornea and pupil, into the lens, slicing through to the retina.
She screamed. I kept pushing—burying the blade deeper into her eye, until half of the handle had disappeared into her face. I yanked [the scalpel] out, taking some of her eyeball with it, and plunged it into the other eye.
Virginia screamed, a sound more shrill and terrible than the whir of the bone saw. He’d blinded her. With the scalpel handle still sticking out of her eye, Henry let go, drew his arms up, and clapped his palms against the sides of her skull as hard as he could—hard enough to burst her eardrums. She brought her hands up to her ears as blood began to pour from them, and cried out again. Blind and deaf. Henry grabbed the handle of the scalpel and yanked it out, a useless, gelatinous mess where those pretty blue eyes had been moments before. He tried to pry her mouth open with his free hand, determined to cut out her tongue.
Whatever parts of me that were human had been sent away. This was the vampire, acting of his own accord. Merciless and unbound.
Perhaps sensing his intent, Virginia clamped her jaw shut. Undeterred, Henry pressed the scalpel against her chin and dragged it down her throat, severing the digastric muscle. As she thrashed, trying to free herself, he pried the incision open with his fingers and pulled her tongue out through her throat. He severed it with the scalpel and threw it across the floor.
Henry got to his feet and tugged on the bottom of his T-shirt, straightening it—an unconscious habit. He watched Virginia drag herself across the floor, blind, deaf, and mute. Feeling her way around as blood seeped from the exposed muscle of her throat and the remnants of her severed tongue. He walked to her, grabbed her by her wavy red hair, and dragged her across the tile. The same beautiful hair of the infant he’d cradled in his arms, of the little girl he’d watched grow into a young woman, the young woman he’d fallen in love with. But all of those people were long dead. What had been left in their wake was something completely devoid of humanity. What Powhatan would have called a “bad devil.”
And it was time to send the devil back to her maker.
Henry dragged her to the cremation furnace as she moaned through the blood pooling in her mouth. He gripped the bloody scalpel in his right hand and lifted Virginia up by her hair with his left, pressing the blade to her forehead.
He took her scalp.
She tried to scream, but all she could manage was a kind of wet, pathetic moan.
Henry opened the furnace’s metal door, its stone innards barely bigger than a coffin. He threw the scalp inside, then lifted the rest of Virginia up and tried to force her in, feet first. She was weak, and she’d been robbed of two senses, but she was still aware enough to fight back. She grabbed the sides of the furnace with her fingertips and held on, scraping the walls with her claws as Henry forced her deeper inside. His patience depleted, his sympathy nonexistent, Henry swung the furnace’s heavy metal door on its hinge and slammed it shut, crushing the tips of her fingers. He opened it again as she moaned loudly, a fresh wave of hot pain. She retracted her hands, and Henry shut and latched the furnace door for good.
He planted the palm of his one good hand on the red button beside the door and pressed down. There was a loud whoosh of gas, following by the click-click-click of an electric igniter. The flames came with jet-engine intensity, screaming from nozzles that ran the length of the furnace, top and bottom. The stone coffin was full of fire.
Henry wasn’t sure if Virginia was moaning inside; he couldn’t hear over the roaring flames. But he could hear her bony fingertips scraping against the other side of the iron door. Desperate to free herself from the agony. Blind, deaf, and burning alive. The blood running from her face, sizzling as it hit the stone floor of the furnace.
There would be no improbable escapes this time. No survival. She would burn.
But Abe…
The reality came flooding back all at once. Henry turned away from the flames and rushed to his friend’s side. He’d been cut clean in half at the waist. His long legs were on the other side of the morgue floor. Henry knelt down and turned him over… his face ghostly white except for the vivid red wound on his forehead, his brown eyes tired, their lids half-closed.
“You’ll be all right,” said Henry. “We’ll get you put back together. Your body will heal its—”
“Henry,” said Abe through the sputters of blood in his throat.
Abe looked up at his old friend. The time had come to conduct the last of his earthly business. And it was so clear to him now, so clear what his last word on this earth must be. So clear why time had delivered him to this place, this moment. Abe found just enough breath to whisper to Henry the same word his mother had said to him as she lay dying in a cold Kentucky cabin, 150 years earlier:
“Live…”
And with that, Abraham Lincoln died.
“Abe?”
There was nothing behind his open eyes.
“Abe!”
But Abe was elsewhere, his mind cycling through its shutdown sequence. Firing off its last few electrons before it was hauled off to the Great Scrapyard in the Sky. The picture book flipped past, pausing on random (and not so random) pages: the room above Speed’s store, summer in full, near-poverty bloom. His sons, all four of them, waiting for him on a train platform. Waiting to become one with his consciousness, their atoms rejoining his, completing their cycle. His mother, with whom this adventure had begun a century and a half before. All of them together again, closer than any physical embrace could bring them. All of them melting into one another’s love and becoming one with the universe, where consciousness was merely a matter of mathematics and all possible outcomes coexisted in eternal harmony.
I’d watched many men die… human and vampire alike. I could tell the precise moment death touched them with the tip of a skeletal finger and they became nothing but an empty vessel.
I saw that moment come for my friend.
Henry lowered Abe’s head to the tile floor. He cried awhile, alone.
Abe’s ax lay on the tile floor nearby… the same one he’d had since his earliest vampire-hunting days, when he was barely more than a teenager. The one he’d carried with him to the White House as president and swung at Henry in anger during the Civil Wa
r. The ax that Henry had kept after Abe’s assassination—a keepsake of their friendship.
Henry picked it up off the bloody tile and held it a moment, feeling the weight of its blade, of its history. He walked to the cremation furnace and opened the heavy door again, the flames still raging inside, hot air rushing past him into the cooler morgue, making the follicles on Henry’s head dance. Virginia’s body was blackened and still, skin giving way to charred muscle and sizzling yellow fat. Henry half expected her to lunge toward him, a half-melted monster, intent on grabbing him and pulling him into the flames with her. But nothing of the sort happened. She was dead.
Henry threw the ax in with her.
He watched its wooden handle start to blacken, then catch fire, burning away the worn grooves where Abe had placed his hands a million or more times; watched its reflective blade darken as carbon blackened its surface.
The two people he’d loved most in his long life had died in the same room, on the same day. And before the day was done, he would burn both of them to ash.
The men with guns came. The covering up began. The scrubbing of surfaces and destruction of evidence. Dawn was breaking over Dallas, bringing unwanted sunshine—that best of all disinfectants. They had to hurry. There were witnesses to discredit. Cameras to confiscate. Busy, busy, the cover-uppers.
Henry was ushered out of the Medical Examiner’s Office building and into the early morning sun, toward a black government car—Abe’s and Virginia’s blood still on his torn clothes.
Men with radios everywhere yelling, hurrying this way, that way. Chaos. A younger man ran up to me before I got in the car. Judging by his suit and buttoned-down demeanor, he was an FBI agent. Judging by his youth, he hadn’t been one for very long.