23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

22.

Laura Caxton was completely lost.

It didn’t surprise her. She’d never seen a map of the prison—prisoners weren’t typically allowed that kind of information. Every time she’d moved around the facility the COs had been there to guide her. She knew in a general way that she was on the western side of the prison. She knew that the main gate was on the eastern side.

There had to be other gates, though. Other ways out.

Her big plan, so far, was to escape. To get out of the prison and find someone in authority and tell them what was going on. If they wanted her to go back and hunt down Malvern, with proper weapons and backup, then fine. If they wanted to return her to custody and take care of the problem themselves, she wouldn’t put up a fight.

The trick, of course, would be breaking out of a maximum-security prison. With no good tools, no guards she could bribe. And in the dark. Malvern had shut off most of the prison’s lights. Maybe she just wanted to conserve electricity—or maybe she knew that Caxton was loose, and wanted to make things difficult for her. Here and there an emergency lighting unit was still blazing away, but Caxton knew those would only last an hour or so before their batteries died. And then she would be trapped in complete darkness, without so much as a window to let in starlight.

“I knew I could count on you, Caxton. I just knew when I saw you, we were going to be buds. I’m your road bitch now, right? The one you get together with even when we’re out of here,” Gert said. “I mean, I guess I have to be, because we’re going to break out together, right? You’re going to need me out there. And I’m going to be so useful to you. This is my big chance. If I can get out now, I’ll still be young enough to have more babies of my own. I knew I could count on you.”

Caxton nodded but didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure who was listening. She knew exactly who was watching. There were video cameras everywhere in the prison, watching every corner, every hallway, every reinforced door. She had no doubt they had night-vision capability. She knew she had to move quickly, that if she lingered too long in one place it would be easy for Malvern to get a squad of half-deads together and send them her way.

So far she’d been lucky. Beyond the door of the SHU had been a long, featureless corridor that led to a hub area, a place where three hallways crossed each other. It was the perfect place to put a guard detail, and in fact the prison’s designers had built a defensive post in the middle of the hub, a guard post with narrow windows and gun ports and thick cinder-block walls. It had been empty when Caxton arrived. Maybe, she thought, Malvern just didn’t have enough half-deads to cover the entire prison.

She’d learned a long time ago that hoping for anything like that, anything that would make her life easier, was a trap. You had to expect the absolute worst, and capitalize on what little bits of luck you found, but never depend on them.

Of the three hallways she could explore, two had been sealed off with barred gates. The gates could be opened remotely or with an actual key. Harelip hadn’t possessed such a key, she knew—she’d searched the dead CO’s body—and the remote controls were, she was certain, heavily guarded. She’d tried the third hallway. There was a big fire door at the end of that one, but it opened easily when she pushed on it.

“This feels bad,” Caxton said, out loud, when she looked at the empty corridor that lay beyond. It was lined with doors, normal doors with doorknobs and everything. No one was guarding that hallway. There weren’t any guard posts watching the place where the hall turned a corner. “There is one door that’s open, and it’s completely unguarded. It feels like a trap.”

“Don’t be such a pussy,” Gert said, pushing past Caxton to head down the darkened hallway. “I thought you were the big tough vampire killer, who never waited for backup, who went into vampire lairs with guns blazing—”

“That’s when I had decent guns,” Caxton explained. “You know, assault rifles with cross-point bullets. One stupid move right now and both of us are dead. And you might have just made a stupid move.”

Gert looked down at her feet as if expecting to find the floor littered with bear traps. “Nope, don’t look like it.” She marched over to the nearest door and, before Caxton could stop her, turned the knob and stepped through.

“Wait, just—” Caxton called.

“This one’s clear,” Gert said. “Just a bunch of boxes and shit.”

Caxton stepped over to the door and brought up her shotgun. She stepped inside and swung the weapon from side to side, daring any half-dead to come jumping out of its hiding place. When that didn’t happen she went over to the pile of boxes and tore one open. It was full of cans of peaches in heavy syrup.

“This must be a storage area,” Caxton said. She went to the next door down the hall and repeated her drill of sweeping the room with her shotgun before approaching the boxes inside. She broke open several of them and studied the contents. Powdered milk. Sliced beets. Sweet peas. The next room down was full of plastic-wrapped pallets of the plastic trays the cafeteria used.

“We must be close to the kitchens—you store food near where you’re going to prepare it,” Caxton announced.

Gert used her hunting knife to cut open a can of pineapple. She slurped a couple slices into her mouth and chewed noisily. “This is good stuff. How do they take good stuff like this and turn it into that shit they serve us at mealtimes?” Gert asked.

“Maybe—maybe this is a positive thing,” Caxton went on, ignoring her celly “If this is a storage area, then there has to be a way for people to bring boxes in and out. They must off-load delivery trucks close to here—there might be a loading dock right here. Maybe that’s a way out.”

Gert shrugged. “Kinda. The trucks come in through the main gate, then drive around the side of E Dorm. They gotta go through two gates on the way, and there’s a place where the hogs can blow out their tires if there’s a problem.”

Caxton stared at her cell mate.

“What?” Gert asked. “I been here a couple years. You think me and my old celly never talked about how we would break out? People see things, yeah, and they talk about them. Everybody wants to know how this place works. And how to get out.”

Caxton laughed. She hadn’t considered that at all. “Okay,” she said. “So how would you do it?”

Gert shrugged. “Well, first you have to fuck a guard. Some of ’em will do that, you know. They’ll come in the cell saying they’re gonna do a shank search, and then you just take your clothes off if you want to do it. You do that often enough, they start bringing you little things.”

Caxton’s eyebrows went up. “Like what? Chocolate? Lipsticks?”

Gert rolled her eyes. She threw her can of pineapples into a corner, then headed for the next door down the hall and threw it open. “No, dummy,” she called, stepping inside. “Like rock. Crystal. You know, drugs. That’s how a lot of girls in here get high. But if they really like you, you can ask them for things. It can’t be anything too obvious. But there’s one kind of toothbrush you can snap off the head and it makes a real nasty shank. Or a good hairbrush, the kind that’s metal inside, you can do a lot with a piece of metal if you’ve got time to work it. Make lock picks, say. So either you take a screw hostage, which shouldn’t be too hard if his pants are around his ankles and his dick is hanging out—or you pick a couple locks outside the infirmary and that gets you as far as the wall. Then you just have to get over the wall. We never did figure that part out.”

Caxton frowned and followed Gert into a room full of chairs. Hundreds of them had been stacked up inside, and in the dark the stacks made weird, spiky shadows. “I can see a couple of problems with us implementing that plan. For one thing, half-deads aren’t interested in sex.”

“Yeah, well—hey. You know, it’s seriously dark back here,” Gert said. “Like, deep end of a coal mine dark.”

“Not quite that dark,” Caxton said. She’d been in a few coal mines in her time.

Gert tripped on something and caught herself against a stack of chairs. They rattled and squeaked loud enough to wake the dead. Caxton tensed herself, just by reflex, and grabbed the stun gun off her belt.

When she felt a knife pass through the air inches from her face, she knew there was a reason she had grown so paranoid. She could just see the blade glittering in the low light. She estimated where the blow had come from and jabbed at it with the stun gun, then squeezed the trigger.

There was a loud snapping sound of arcing electricity, and a high-pitched scream. Then the half-dead hit her hard with a fist to the stomach and knocked her down going past. She saw it silhouetted briefly against the doorway, and then it was gone.

“Shit,” Caxton said. “I was hoping the stun gun would work on them like it does on living people, but no dice. Now we’re screwed.”

Gert clucked her tongue. “No we’re not. It ran away, girl.” Caxton sighed in frustration. “You don’t know about these things. They’re weak, and cowardly, and they can’t shoot the side of a barn. But the problem is, they never work alone. That one wasn’t running away. It was running for help.”