23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

30.

Caxton blinked away the last of the tear gas and blew her nose hard into her sleeve. She could see the low brick shape of the powerhouse ahead of her through the shattered windshield. There was a signpost fifteen yards away and she downshifted and braked carefully to miss hitting it, but she’d never driven a big rig before and she could just make out half of what it said before the truck plowed right into the sign and bent it over backward.

It had read WARNING: THIS AREA PROTECTED BY and then something else, something she hadn’t caught before it was too late. Protected by what? Guard dogs? Land mines?

Cursing, she put the truck in reverse and gave it a little gas. What resulted was one of the ugliest noises she’d ever heard— metal grinding on metal, and wheels spinning without getting anywhere. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Can’t anything ever be easy around here?” The sign must have gotten stuck in the truck’s front axle. She tried gunning the engine, tried driving forward, tried hauling the wheel all the way over to one side, then back the other way, but nothing worked.

She switched off the engine and rested her head on the steering wheel.

The truck settled around her, its vibrations and its rumbles shutting down one by one. Eventually all she could hear was the engine pinging as it cooled down.

“I guess we walk from here,” she said.

Gert looked over at her with wide eyes. She was hugging herself and shivering.

“You alright?” Caxton asked.

“Uh-huh,” Gert said, and licked her lips. “Just a little scared, I guess.”

“That was kind of a wild ride,” Caxton admitted. “And I suppose you didn’t see those half-deads until they were all over us?”

“Yeah, except, um, no,” Gert said. “That stuff doesn’t scare me. I’ve seen shit like that in the movies. It’s you I’m scared of right now.”

“Me? I thought I was your road bitch.”

“Me too. Except, we had a great chance to escape back there and you didn’t take it. That’s not how a road bitch is supposed to act.”

“I told you, Gert, it was too well defended, and the main gate—”

Gert shook her head. “Nope.”

Caxton frowned. “Nope what?”

“Nope, I ain’t buying that bullshit. You think I’m stupid? After all we’ve been through, you still think I’m some kind of down-home trailer-trash fool? I know what’s going on. I know what you’re doing.”

“Oh,” Caxton said. She’d hoped to put off this confrontation for a while.

“You’re going to try to rescue your girlfriend. Which, you know, hoo-fucking-ray for you, big hero butch dyke, but it’s not what I signed on for. She’s cute and all, but she’s not my type. Mostly because she’s got tits and no dick.”

Caxton closed her eyes. She didn’t have time for this. According to the clock on the dashboard it was nearly ten— which meant she had only nineteen hours left. For what she had planned that wasn’t a lot of time. “You want to split up, then? You go your way, I’ll go mine?” Caxton asked. “The only thing between you and the outside world is the wall over there.” Which was twenty-five feet high, topped by barbed wire, and in full sight of the machine-gun nests on two different guard towers, of course. If Gert wanted to try it, Caxton wouldn’t stop her.

Or—maybe she would, she reconsidered. Gert was a killer. She was in the prison for a very real reason. Caxton might not be a cop anymore, but it was her duty as a citizen if nothing else to keep Gert from escaping.

It was her duty as a celly to keep the girl alive.

Gert stared out her window, rubbing her arms as if to keep warm.

“I think, though, it’s still in your best interest to stick with me,” Caxton said. “I think that’s your best chance of getting through this without dying.”

“Yeah. Even a NASCAR-watching, sweatpants-wearing coupon queen’s white-trash daughter like me can figure that one out. Let’s just fucking go,” Gert said, and popped open her door. A flood of broken safety glass and pieces of chain-link fence sloughed out and spilled across the ground.

Gert put one foot down, careful not to slip in the mess, and started to climb down from the cab. Then Caxton heard a noise like a six-pack of soda cans being opened one after another, pff-pff-pff-pff-pff-pff. An instant later Gert started screaming. Caxton grabbed for her celly’s hands and pulled her roughly back into the cab.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Gert howled, “it stings—it stings so much—I think I got shot, oh motherfucker!”

Caxton pulled Gert closer and grabbed the leg of her jumpsuit. Something had indeed hit her very hard and left a white powdery residue that flaked away when Caxton scratched at it. She lifted her finger to her nose and nearly screamed herself.

Her eyes had barely recovered from the tear gas. Tears burst out from under her eyelids at the same time as she started sneezing and coughing uncontrollably. There was a distinct smell to the powder as well, one she knew all too well.

It was PAVA, sometimes also called Capsaicin II. It was made of superrefined capsaicin, the chemical in chili peppers that made them burn your mouth and made you want to die, except this chemical was two thousand times hotter than the same weight of jalapeño peppers. It was the same chemical used in pepper spray, but much more concentrated. A direct hit from that stuff on the face or chest would be enough to incapacitate anyone for hours.

Caxton squinted through the windshield and saw what was defending the powerhouse. There was a camera mounted on the front of the building, just above its door, a camera in a complicated housing that allowed it to swivel and point in any direction. Mounted just beneath the camera was a long, thin pipe painted black. It looked exactly like a rifle barrel, because that was exactly what it was.

Caxton had heard about such devices before. They’d been developed for use in understaffed prisons to deny access to sensitive areas. There was no one on the other side of that camera. The rifle was under the control of a robotic system that simply watched its surroundings twenty-four hours a day, looking for signs of intrusion on its programmed territory—and then attacked anything that moved.

It looked like the truck’s cab was just inside that territory. To get to the powerhouse, Caxton was going to have to find a way around that gun.

“Gert, Gert, calm down,” Caxton said, when she realized her celly was hyperventilating. “Just calm down. You aren’t really hurt.”

“It hurts like fucking hell!” Gert assured her.

“It didn’t puncture the skin. That thing’s firing pepperballs. They look like gum balls but they’re just pepper spray in a casing that’s designed to break open on impact. It’s like it’s shooting water balloons at you.”

“Yeah, water balloons full of fucking pain!”

Caxton shrugged. “That’s what it feels like to get hit with a paintball. It stings, yeah, but you’ll be okay. And I need you to be okay right now.”

“What? Why? What do you want me to do now, flash my tits at the next half-dead that runs by to distract it? Maybe cut off my head so you can throw it at somebody.”

“Um, no,” Caxton said, explaining as carefully as she could. “I need you to run out there, as fast as you can, waving your arms. To get that thing’s attention and make it shoot at you. For about thirty seconds.”