23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

51.

Marty was the first to die. Malvern moved forward faster than he could push himself away in the chair and snapped his neck, turning his head almost all the way around. Before she could scream, Maricón was grabbed by one of the others, a female vampire in an orange jumpsuit with the sleeves torn off. The vampire started to lean in to savage Maricón’s neck, but Malvern flashed across the room and slapped the vampire away from the Latina gangbanger.

“None of you shall drink here,” she said. “Ye can’t yet handle the madness the blood brings.” Then she choked Maricón until her face turned purple and her tongue stuck out of her mouth.

“Stay the fuck back,” Featherwood said, brandishing a shank. Another of the new vampires—this one naked—ran up to the burned woman and laughed as the shank sank into her chest again and again. As it came out each time, the wounds were already healing.

“You didn’t say it would feel this good,” the vampire growled. Then she spun around and slammed her forearm up against Featherwood’s throat, crushing her trachea. The burned gangbanger dropped to her knees and stared up at Clara as she struggled for a breath she couldn’t take.

Another of the vampires, this one wearing panties and a stab-proof vest, was behind Clara before she could even turn to run. The vampire’s hands settled on Clara’s shoulders. It felt like she was being pressed down by heavy stones. “Kneel,” the vampire said.

Clara knelt.

“She lives, for now,” Malvern announced. The vampire holding Clara nodded but didn’t let her go.

The five of them came and stood around her, looking down at her. They were beautiful, in a way. They were hairless and their skin was perfect, creamy smooth and perfectly white. Their bodies were tight and lithe, even Malvern’s. All the blood she’d drunk the night before agreed with her—she didn’t even look wrinkled anymore. The only reason Clara even knew it was Malvern was that one of her eyes was missing, leaving just an empty socket in her head. That, and that she was wearing her old mauve nightdress, which didn’t look like an empty sack on her anymore. Now it clung to the filled-in curves of her body.

Otherwise they were all identical. Their ears were long and came to sharp tips. Their eyes glowed a dull red. And their mouths were filled with rows of wicked, translucent teeth.

There was a clattering sound from the stairwell—from the stairs that led down to the Hub. It had to be Guilty Jen, coming up to announce that Laura was dead. Clara’s head dropped forward, her body unable to support its weight anymore.

For a moment the five vampires just stood looking at the door. It didn’t open. One of the vampires moved to the door, eventually, and stared at it as if she could see right through it. Then she tore it open, reached through, and pulled Guilty Jen into the room so fast the gangbanger barely had time to scream. The vampire holding her grabbed Jen around the waist and around the mouth, effortlessly holding her motionless. But then Guilty Jen did something Clara would have thought impossible. Writhing like a snake, she slid right through the vampire’s arms and ducked between her legs, rolling out the other side. Immediately she sprang upward into a combat stance, one hand held out in front of her like a blade.

The vampire turned on her heel, her face lit up with excitement. Even Clara could see the deep cut in Guilty Jen’s palm. And the drop of blood rolling down her forearm.

Malvern growled, no words at all, just a pure animal noise. The vampire facing Guilty Jen didn’t seem to notice. She was watching the hand, watching the blood. Malvern started to move, but the vampire got there first. Grabbing Jen again, she pulled the gangbanger’s hand into her mouth and bit down hard. There was a noise like someone trying to suck up the last bit of frozen strawberry from the bottom of a milk shake, and then Guilty Jen lost all her color.

The gangbanger tried one last roundhouse kick. She got halfway through her arc before collapsing to the floor. She wasn’t breathing.

The newly fed vampire dropped to her knees. Her chest shook and her hands grabbed at the floor, her fingernails digging deep channels through the linoleum tile. When she looked up her cheeks were slightly pink, as if she’d applied a layer of blush, and her eyes were on fire.

Malvern hadn’t stopped moving. She collided with the blood-drunk vampire, hard enough to knock her over on her back. Then she raised one arm and brought it down like a pile driver, her fingers sinking into the vampire’s flesh as if through so much milk. There was a horrible sucking noise and an elastic snap and then Malvern pulled the vampire’s heart out right through her shattered rib cage.

The fire went out of the dead vampire’s eyes.

“Ye shall not defy me,” Malvern rasped, getting to her feet again. “Ye may be strong, but I am stronger.”

Every single red glowing eye in the room was fixed on the heart in Malvern’s hand. It was dark, almost black in color, and it was still beating, though without any kind of human rhythm. It slowed down as they watched, and eventually stopped.

Clara didn’t think about what she did while they were distracted. It wasn’t as if she had any kind of plan. Her hands crept across the control board behind her, the one that monitored and administered the prison’s communication systems. She turned a knob here, flipped a switch there. And leaned toward a microphone that stuck out from the top of the board on a flexible wand.

They weren’t going to kill her. Not right away. She could get away with this, and still they wouldn’t kill her. She just hoped they didn’t know spinal anatomy the way Guilty Jen did, or some even more horrible way of letting her live but making her wish she was dead.

“Fetlock,” she shouted at the microphone, “if you’re waiting for the right time to attack—this is it!”

Every intercom speaker in the prison picked up the message and relayed it at ear-shattering volume. Clara could hear her words echoing around the prison yard and bouncing upward into the darkening night sky.

The vampires looked around the room as if they expected federal agents to come storming out of closets and crawl spaces, machine guns blazing.

That didn’t happen.

Clara begged, silently, for some sign. Some signal, of any kind, that meant Fetlock had heard her. That he was out there, ready to save her. Maybe he could have shot a flare over the prison. Maybe he could have called in on the prison’s multiband radio system.

But he didn’t.

Malvern took a step toward Clara, and suddenly she was right there, so close that every hair on Clara’s body stood up at once. Then Malvern hit her, and—