23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

56.

Have ye made your choice, then?” Malvern asked. “And were ye three unanimous in the choosing?”

Caxton brought the shotgun up to shoulder level. She swiveled from side to side, pointing the weapon at one of the new vampires, then the other. She thought of how she’d tricked Hauser, but she didn’t have the time or the imagination to come up with something like that again. Anyway, she knew Malvern. Malvern would have stuck the stupidest of her brand-new brood with guard duty. These two would be smarter than Hauser.

They were getting closer. They clearly enjoyed the anticipation, the moment before the kill. One of them, the one in a stab-proof vest and panties, was licking her lips. The other, dressed in a jumpsuit with the sleeves torn off, kept wiggling her fingers in the air as if trying out a new set of claws for the first time. Vampire fingernails looked just like their human counterparts (if paler), but they could tear through sheet metal without breaking. They had no trouble at all taking apart a human body.

“Forbin, please secure Miss Caxton,” Malvern said. As scared as she was, Caxton thought that was odd. Always before Malvern had referred to her by her first name. What game was the old bat playing? “I think we can forgo the niceties now. She’s turned me down, and more’s the pity. We could have made history together, dear.”

Forbin was the one with the torn sleeves. The other one didn’t have to be told to go for Gert. Maybe, Caxton thought, she could give Gert a chance to run away. Not that she could outrun a vampire, but—

Forbin lunged for Caxton, trying to grab her shoulders, but she telegraphed the move and Caxton just ducked under her arms. She spun around on her heel and stuck the muzzle of her shotgun right into the other vampire’s stab-proof vest. Without any hesitation she fired her one and only shell.

It was too bad, then, that Forbin was even faster than Caxton had reckoned. Forbin recovered from her failed lunge and brought her elbow backward, into the small of Caxton’s back, throwing her across the room—and ruining her aim.

The shotgun went off with a roar and the hand-loaded shot tore through the vampire’s body, but well to the left of her heart. The vest caught fire and for a second the vampire’s arm swung free at her shoulder, barely connected to her torso. She looked down at it with a grimace and lifted a finger to touch the edge of the gaping wound.

On the floor Caxton rolled over onto her back, her broken arm flopping painfully at her side. “Gert, get out of here!” she screamed.

Gert didn’t need much encouragement. She was already running for the door behind her. The wounded vampire didn’t try to stop her. She was too fascinated by the wound in her chest. It was healing rapidly, white smoke filling in the hole, new skin flowing over the exposed muscles and bones. When it was done she lifted her arm and made a fist, perhaps checking to see if the arm still worked.

Only then, after all that, did she begin to chase Gert. She got to the door before Caxton’s celly was halfway there. Gert stopped running. Started to back up.

Meanwhile Forbin straddled Caxton’s body, one foot on either side of her stomach. She raised one index finger and curled it repeatedly, gesturing for Caxton to get up. Caxton knew it was useless, but she flipped the shotgun in her hand so she was holding the hot barrel and rammed the stock into Forbin’s stomach as hard as she could.

It was like hitting a boulder with a rubber mallet. It just bounced off.

Forbin took the shotgun out of Caxton’s hand. It would have been incorrect to say she grabbed it away from Caxton, because that would have implied there was some kind of struggle. She lifted one knee and broke the shotgun in half across her thigh, springs and bits of metal flying down to bounce off Caxton’s face and chest. Then she threw the two halves of the weapon behind her. And repeated her come-hither gesture.

The second Caxton got up, she knew, Forbin would repeat the move on her spine. Of course, if she didn’t get up, Forbin might just stomp her to death.

None of the vampires, however, had counted on Clara.

As the half-naked vampire stalked Gert around the dorm, Malvern came closer to watch the free entertainment. She was the first to look up, as if she’d heard something inaudible to Caxton. That didn’t last long. Half a second later the dorm was shaking as an electronic buzzer sounded loud enough to wake the dead. A strobe light near the dorm’s main exit started to flash and then a row of red lights went on, one over each cell all along both tiers.

Then, all at the same time, every door in the dorm slid open on well-greased rails. All the exits. All the cell doors. At the other end of the dorm, the far end from the Hub, a green sign lit up reading EMERGENCY FIRE EXIT.

Caxton looked over into the cell nearest her face. There were eight women inside of various ages and races. Most of them had had their arms sticking through the bars with their jumpsuit sleeves pushed back. They had to jerk their arms backward quickly or have them torn off as the door opened. Suddenly they weren’t behind bars anymore. Suddenly they were just standing there, not ten feet away, watching the vampires, watching Caxton and Gert, or just staring at empty space where a second ago there had been prison bars.

It took only a few seconds before one of them decided to make a break for it. A white woman with glasses who couldn’t be more than twenty raced out of the cell, looking over her shoulder the whole way as she headed for the fire exit. When no one tried to stop her, a middle-aged black woman came running down the stairs from the upper tier. And then suddenly there was a stampede.

Women from every cell were coming out onto the floor of the dorm. With no COs to corral them and with the vampires distracted, it fell to the half-deads to try to stop them. That didn’t work very well. Three women from the same cell on the upper tier picked up a half-dead between them and threw it over the railing. Its skull made an audible pop when it hit. Another half-dead tried to flee but was trampled by the rush for the fire exit. Most of the women were bent on escaping, or at least getting away from the vampires, but some of the younger ones, the gangbanger convicts covered in jailhouse tattoos, were sticking around to play with the half-deads.

Then there were so many of them that Caxton couldn’t see what any of them were doing individually. She could only see them as a faceless crowd in constant motion. She had to roll to the side and dash into an empty cell to avoid being crushed. Forbin started after her, but even a vampire had trouble fighting against the current of two hundred women all moving in the same direction. She tried grabbing them and throwing them out of her way, but that just increased the desperate pace of the crowd and made it harder to slog through. Of the other vampire, the one she’d shot, there was no sign. Caxton saw that Gert had climbed up on one of the medical carts and was trying to keep her balance as it was rocked by colliding bodies. The noise was intense, a surging, oceanic roar of shouts of excitement and also panic, of hundreds of feet pounding on the steel catwalk of the upper gallery, of cursing and pleas for help when the fire exit was jammed with bodies. Some of the women seemed to think they’d have better luck heading toward the Hub, and soon there were two currents flowing through the dorm. Bodies filled up all the available space outside the cells and suddenly Caxton couldn’t even see Forbin anymore.

Her spine went rigid when she realized she couldn’t see Malvern, either.