I didn’t answer her. The face shield was next, with its little strap that went around the back of the head. That was government ordered, but I actually agreed with it; again, cleaning blood out of your eyelashes loses its charm after a while. The face shield sent my breath back to me, so that I could feel how warm it was. I had a moment to be claustrophobic, but fought it off. If I did it right, I didn’t really need it, but every once in a while the undead bodies acted weird, and they’d squirt at you when you weren’t expecting it. I really didn’t want this guy’s blood on my face.
I got out the thin gloves, and then put the longer rubber gloves over that. They went up past my elbows, which I’d need because of the way I took the heart out of the body. A lot of executioners just destroyed the heart with a stake, a knife, or a gun, but left the remnants of it in place. If I could see daylight through the chest, so that I knew the heart was utterly destroyed, I’d do that, but when I couldn’t see into the chest cavity, I didn’t trust the heart to be destroyed enough. New vampires like this one, the gunshot wounds I’d put in his chest were probably enough to ensure he wouldn’t heal and rise unexpectedly, but I’d never gotten in trouble being overly cautious when it came to making certain a vampire was really, truly, completely, dead.
Of course, it was a little hard to see the extent of the gunshots through the clothes, which was why I had the paramedic’s scissors. They’d cut through anything but metal, and even cheap metal would yield to them, but harder things like handcuffs were proof against them-but clothes, no sweat.
I knelt beside the body, tucking the scissors in between the buttons just above the waist of the jeans, cutting to one side so I could parallel the fastened buttons.
“Just unbutton it,” she said.
“This is faster,” I said, keeping my gaze and my attention on what I was doing.
“But the buttons are right there,” she said. It’s funny what will bother someone most; you never know what it will be. Things that you would never dream would frighten someone, or creep them out, scare the hell out of them or make their skin crawl. For whatever reason, it seemed to really bother her that I was cutting beside the line of neatly fastened buttons, but not using the buttons.
I usually cut a quick, clean line through a shirt, but now I slowed down, took my time, let her watch, let her think, let whatever it was about it have time to bother her more.
“Just do it,” she said, her voice holding an edge of franticness. “Just cut through it, if you’re going to, or unbutton it. Why do it like that? Why cut it off like you’re enjoying it?”
Ah, I thought, she thought what I was doing looked sensual, like I was enjoying it. I wasn’t; it didn’t move me one way or the other. The days when it would have creeped me out to cut through the clothes were long past. Cutting clothes off a willing lover who enjoyed that sort of thing was fun, exciting, sexy. Cutting clothes off a corpse wasn’t any of those things. It was just cutting the cloth away so I could see the chest and judge how much damage the bullets had done to the heart, so I’d know if I needed to take out the heart, or if the bullets had done the job for me. Baring the pale, cool skin was more like unwrapping a piece of butchered meat, inert, not alive, nothing but meat that you might have to cut up. That was the only way to think of it; the only way to do it, and stay sane.
“Just finish cutting it!” She half-yelled it.
The door opened behind me; I caught the movement out of my peripheral vision, so I was able to see Zerbrowski come smiling through the door without actually turning away from the body in front of me.
“What’s all the fuss?” he said cheerfully.
The vampire tried to get up off her knees, where the uniforms had put her. The rattle of the chains made me look at her and see one of the officers put a hand on her thin shoulder, automatically pushing her back to her knees.
“Make her stop,” the vampire said.
“Marshal Blake isn’t under my command. She doesn’t answer to me.”
The vampire gave me wide frightened eyes. I looked into her eyes and smiled a slow, tight spread of lips. She actually tried to move backward, as if ten feet were suddenly too close to me. I smiled a little more, and she made a small sound in her throat, as if she were trying not to whimper, or scream.
“Please,” she said, and held her hand up to the officer who was keeping her on her knees. “Please, please, I don’t want to see her cut Justin up. Please don’t make me watch!”
“Tell us where the vampires are that killed the officers and you don’t have to watch,” Zerbrowski said.
I had cut through the shirt, just the collar being upright and the way it fitted through the shoulders keeping it closed over the chest-well, that and the blood. The cloth was sticking to that. I laid the scissors down and began to peel the cloth off the wounds, slowly, letting the sound of it sucking away from the skin fill the silence. I knew the sound would be so much louder to the vampire than to the rest of us. I made it last, made it peel and hiss as I pried the cloth out of the drying blood and the cooling flesh. Some of the cloth was actually sucked into the wounds in the chest, riding along on the force of the bullets, so that I used my fingertips to pick the cloth from the wounds. I didn’t have to; I usually just pulled the cloth away in one big movement like tearing a Band-Aid off a cut, but I was pretty sure it would bother Shelby the vampire to do it this way. I was right.
“Please, please, don’t make me watch this.” She held her hands out to Zerbrowski.
“Tell us where they are, honey,” he said, “and the nice officers will take you out of here.”
“They’ll kill me if they know I told,” she said.
“We discussed this; they can’t kill you if we kill them first,” I said, forcing myself to look at the wounds I’d put in the body, rather than at her. I was hoping she’d think I was gazing longingly at the dead chest, and since I wasn’t sure my acting was up to looking sexy, since I totally didn’t feel that way, I kept my expression down where she couldn’t see it.
“You can’t kill them all,” she said.
“Watch me,” I said, and I did look at her then; I let her see my expression, because I knew it was cold, and empty, and yet a smile started across my lips. I knew the smile; I’d seen it in mirrors. It was most unpleasant. It was the smile that I had when I killed, or felt justified in it. It was a smile that left my eyes cold and dead. I wasn’t sure why I smiled sometimes when death was on the line, but I did, and it was involuntary, and it was creepy, even to me, so I let the vampire see it. I let her make everything there was to make of it.
She screamed a short, choked sound. Her breath came in a choked sob. “All right, all right, just get me out of here before she… get me out of here! I don’t want to watch. Please, don’t make me watch.” She started to cry, her thin shoulders shaking with the force of it.
“Tell us where they are,” I said, “and then the nice officers will take you away from the big, bad executioner.” I made my voice low, and deep, with a sort of purr underneath it. I’d used the voice before. It worked both for real sex and for threats. Funny, how some things worked for both.
Shelby gave up her friends. She told us three different daytime retreats. She told us where all the coffins were, all the places where they hid from the sunlight, and where we could find them once the sun rose and they lay helpless.
I asked her one last question. “Are they all as newly dead as the vampires here tonight?”
She nodded, and then wiped pink-stained tears against her jacket with a swipe of her cheek, as if she’d been chained before and knew how to wipe tears away without using her hands. It made me wonder just how horrible her undead life had been up to this point.
“Except for Benjamin, he’s older. He’s been dead a long time.”