23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

18.

Oh God, no,” Caxton said, and put a hand over her mouth. Gert had—had killed Harelip. She stepped outside of the cell and saw the CO’s body shoved up against one wall. A pool of blood glistened around her, staining her blue uniform and slicking across her throat and lower face.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” she moaned. “This was the last thing you should have done!”

Gert came up behind Caxton and grabbed her shoulders. She started to knead them until Caxton jumped away from her.

“She was jamming you up,” Gert said. “Even after you saved her ass. Don’t tell me you ain’t grateful. I could have let you rot in that cell, girl! I could have kept my head down, played nice. Instead I gave you a chance to survive, right?”

It was true, in its way. Like most crazy people, Gert operated on a logical basis. It was just a basis built on a very shaky foundation.

Caxton breathed through her mouth and tried to think. Harelip could have been a valuable ally. Caxton’s plan up until that point had been to find a group of COs somewhere else in the prison and explain to them what was going on, then get them to help her fight her way out. If she’d been able to convince even one of their number, it would have gone a long way toward enlisting their aid. Now she was going to have to approach them as an escaping prisoner, a situation in which they would be likely to shoot first and ask questions later. Furthermore, Harelip had done well against the half-deads. She had kept her cool and thought things through. She would have made a good partner for the fighting to come.

Now Caxton was all alone. She was trapped inside the walls of a maximum-security prison where no one, neither CO nor fellow prisoner, would be likely to offer her any help.

At least, no one except Gert.

“Who are you?” Caxton snapped. “I mean—what did you do to get put in a place like this? You’re no gangbanger.”

Gert sucked on her lower lip. “I killed some… people.”

Caxton shook her head.

“It wasn’t my fault! When you’re high, you don’t always know what you’re doing. You can’t be held accountable, you know?”

Caxton had never used drugs in her life. She had met lots of people who had, and rarely had she found one of them trustworthy. Never had she found one whom she would want watching her back.

She was going to have to go it alone. Which meant she needed to start planning.

Whether she was locked in the cell or free to move around the SHU, she was still trapped in a prison that was overrun by a vampire and full of half-deads. Malvern wanted her alive, but she really didn’t want to find out why. She was going to have to protect herself.

Calling for backup was her first instinct. She’d been trained, as a cop, to never be out of touch if she could help it. She headed inside the guard post and studied the control board. There was a telephone handset mounted on one side to allow the CO manning the post to communicate with the rest of the prison. There was no keypad—instead individual telephones around the prison could be selected from a series of buttons that dialed directly. She picked it up and then started punching buttons at random, calling the infirmary, the commissary, the staff lounge, the main gate. Anywhere but central command, which she knew had been compromised.

She was not surprised when she didn’t even get a dial tone. Malvern might be hundreds of years old, but she was conversant with modern communications. Cutting the phone lines had probably been one of her first moves.

Well, if Caxton couldn’t call for help, she would have to help herself. That meant finding some weapons.

She only had to look around herself to find a miniature armory. A row of stun guns sat in chargers on one side of the control board. They would be useless against half-deads, who experienced pain in a far different way than human beings did, but she grabbed one anyway, in case she had to deal with any more COs who thought it was more important to contain the situation than it was to save lives. Underneath the board was a twelve-gauge shotgun, held in a pair of metal clips. She noticed for the first time that the stock was marked with a band of yellow paint, which meant it was to be loaded only with nonstandard ammunition. She pulled it free and broke it open, checking to make sure there was no round loaded already. In a bin beneath the board she found plenty of beanbag rounds but ignored those in favor of a box of rubber bullets. The name was doubly misleading: they were neither rubber nor, strictly, bullets. Instead they were shotgun slugs about four inches long made of polyvinyl chloride. They were designed not to penetrate the skin but to hurt someone enough to make them want to vacate an area. Against half-deads they would be even more effective than the beanbag round Harelip had used.

There were other weapons to be had, but they were all what used to be called less-lethal weaponry (the most recent term was “compliance weapons”)—useful for controlling prisoners you didn’t want to actually kill. There was a can of pepper spray, a hollow aluminum baton, and a squishy bag of some compound Caxton couldn’t readily identify. She took all of it except the bag, though two concerns limited her arming herself.

For one thing, none of it—nothing in the SHU—would be of any use against a vampire, even one as decrepit and weak as Malvern. The hunting knife could carve out her heart, assuming she would stand still long enough, but Caxton knew better than to fight a vampire without proper firearms. It was just asking for a quick and painful death.

The other big concern was that she had no way to carry it all. There was no belt on her jumpsuit, nor were there any belt loops. The jumpsuit had been designed to be bright enough to see in the dark and easy to wash. Fashion hadn’t been much of a concern, and it was baggy and shapeless. It didn’t even have any pockets.

At least there was something she could do about that, though it was a grisly task to contemplate. Caxton went over to Harelip’s body and removed her belt. It fit over Caxton’s shoulder like a very thin bandolier, and she was able to clip the stun gun to it and slide the shotgun and the baton underneath it if she pulled it tight. The pepper spray she slipped inside her bra. That left just the knife.

“Gert, you have to give that to me,” she said, and held out her hand.

Caxton’s celly looked her up and down. “You got the utility belt. I’m keeping the knife.”

Caxton sighed. “I need it more than you do. In fact, you’re not going to need it at all.”

“What do you mean?” Gert asked.

Caxton stood up straight. “You’re going back in the cell now.”

Gert laughed. “You shitting me? I saw what happened to those fools in the cells when that thing came through. I ain’t getting locked up again!”

Caxton was about to reply when a loud bang startled her. She whirled around and saw a woman staring at her through the glass window in her cell door. “I’m with her,” the woman shouted, her voice just audible through the door. “Let me out! I don’t want to die in here!”

Over across the SHU there came a rapid hammering on another door. “What about me, bitch?” another prisoner demanded.

Soon half the cell doors were rattling in their jambs. Caxton whirled around, looking at the cells, wondering what she was supposed to do about the women inside. Then she ran back to the guard post and turned on the intercom that would broadcast to the speakers inside the cells.

“Listen,” she said, speaking into a microphone on the control board. “We are in a very bad situation here, but I’m in charge now and I have things under control, at least for the moment. I need all of you to stay calm.”

The cells erupted with shouts and obscenities and manic pounding on doors and windows.

Caxton gritted her teeth and looked around at the cell doors. Almost every window had a face plastered against it. An angry, demanding face.

“There are more of those things outside the SHU,” Caxton announced. “They’ve come for me. Just for me—I plan on leaving here soon, and when I do, I think they’ll leave you alone. For now, though, you have to trust me! The safest place for you is inside your cells.”

She stared at Gert as she finished.

Gert stared back with a look of utter scorn on her face. “If you was one of us,” she asked, raising her voice over the chorus of shouts and catcalls, “would you buy any of that shit?”

They don’t have a choice, Caxton thought. They were murderers and gangbangers and women who were a danger to them-selves. Three of them were on death row. She couldn’t trust them. She might have all the weapons, but they could easily mob her and overpower her and take away even that advantage.

It was just like Harelip had said. You had to contain the situation. You couldn’t leave your back unguarded for a second. And yet Gert had a point. Who was Caxton to deny these women a chance to defend themselves? Maybe they could even help her. If they would just pipe down, that would help a lot. It would let her think—

A booming, echoing thud came from the main door of the SHU, and suddenly there was silence. The shouting stopped, though the women stayed glued to the windows, every eye looking toward the door.

The thump came again. Then a high, cackling voice said, “Keep it down in there, ladies! We’re trying to sleep!”

The prisoners started in again with the noise instantly, but this time it was different. Before it had been howls of outrage and anger. Now they were screaming in fear.