23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

31.

You’re out of your mind.”

Caxton shook her head. “Listen, it’s just a robot. It has lousy depth perception and it can never really lead a target, especially if you run in a zigzag pattern. If you keep moving fast enough, it won’t be able to hit you at all.”

“Oh, boy,” Gert said. “And I’m going to do this… why? To entertain you?”

Caxton picked up one of her homemade grenades. “It can only track one target at a time—most likely the fastest-moving target it sees. I’ll come out a second after you do, and make my way inside there with these. Once I’m inside you can run around the side of the building and you’ll be safe. Okay?”

Gert said nothing.

“I need you for this,” Caxton said. “I know I haven’t been straight with you. I know you don’t care about Clara, and whether she lives or dies. But I really need you. I need you to be useful to me, right now. I need to count on you. Because we’re cellies. And cellies watch each other’s backs.”

Gert stared at her for a long time, her nostrils flaring. Her lips compressed as if she was trying to keep herself from saying something. Then, without a word, she pushed her door open and jumped out.

Immediately the robot started shooting at her, pff-pff-pff. Gert screamed and spun and ran with her arms up in the air. Caxton wasn’t sure if she’d been hit or if she was just following instructions.

It didn’t much matter, as long as Gert kept moving. Caxton pushed her door open and jumped down to the ground, the five cans sloshing in her arms as she bent over and duckwalked toward the powerhouse. The robot’s gun started to swing toward her, but she just stopped in her tracks and it went back to shooting at Gert.

Moving as fast as she dared, Caxton made her way to the door of the powerhouse. It was locked, of course, but she hit it a couple of times with her shoulder and it gave way. She stepped into a dimly lit room full of machinery that gave off a crackling hum.

The prison was attached to the local power grid, but it consumed so much electricity every day that it needed its own substation, as well as backup generators in case of a power outage. The powerhouse supplied the entire facility. If she could take it down she would shut off every piece of electrical equipment inside. There would be backups on the backup systems, she knew, and eventually the half-deads would restore some kind of power, but it would give her some time to enact the next stage of her plan, time she desperately needed.

The big turbine generators and the step-down power conditioners were all locked away in cages with thick bars, and anyway she didn’t think her grenades would do them much harm. Instead she found a main power coupling, where all that electricity was shunted through one thick bundle of cables that ran down into the floor. The cables would spread out underground and form a network of wires throughout the facility as tangled and complex as the roots of an ancient oak tree, but inside the powerhouse every line was gathered up in one single bundle of insulated cabling. She placed her grenades carefully around the bundle, where they could do the most damage.

The hard part about the plan was setting them off. She didn’t have the equipment or the expertise to build any kind of timed detonator. Instead she had to rely on a very crude, very simple source of ignition: a Molotov cocktail.

She had found an old soda bottle in the trash can on the loading dock. She had filled it with six ounces of gasoline, then shoved an oil-stained rag into the neck of the bottle to seal it.

A Molotov cocktail on its own would do very little damage to anything in the powerhouse. The concept behind the weapon was simple: you lit the rag and threw the bottle at your target. The bottle was supposed to smash on impact, and the gasoline inside would be dispersed as a fine mist which would then catch fire from the still-burning rag. This would create a cloud of burning fuel that would last for only a few seconds before it died out. Effective, perhaps, against riot-control cops or anyone who could be psychologically damaged by the threat of being set on fire. However, a little flame inside the powerhouse would do nothing more dramatic than—maybe—melt some of the insulation on the cables.

It would, however, raise the temperature of her makeshift grenades by several hundred degrees for a split second. Which would be enough to make the gasoline inside them expand and hopefully ignite, bursting open the cans and sending the nails flying in every direction at very high speeds. That might just be enough to destroy the cable bundle and cut power to the prison.

It was an awful lot of mights and maybes and hopefullys she was looking at, but Caxton needed to take out the powerhouse if she had any hope of getting Clara out of the prison alive. She was just going to have to trust her luck.

She moved to the doorway of the powerhouse. The robot above her head was still spitting out pepperballs at high speed. There was nothing she could do about that—it was designed in such a way that it couldn’t be disabled without special tools. She sent Gert all the positive thoughts she could muster; it was all she could afford. She adjusted her stance so that as much of her body as possible was outside of the door, then gripped the Molotov cocktail in one hand and her stun gun in the other.

Please let this work, she thought. Please. It wasn’t a prayer, really, so much as a voice of desperation. She was asking herself not to make any mistakes.

She pressed the stun gun to the dangling end of the rag and triggered its test mode. A bright arc of electricity jumped across the shiny terminals at the business end of the gun. She wished, and not for the first time, that the prison didn’t have a strict no-smoking policy. A butane lighter or even just a pack of matches would have made this much easier.

The rag refused to light the first time she hit it with the stun gun, and the second time. The third time a tiny ember of orange appeared on the end of the rag. It curled and bent and refused to grow, refused to start consuming the oily rag. Caxton shoved the stun gun into her jumpsuit and blew on the ember, fanned it with her free hand, willed it to enlarge, to expand.

A thin flame leapt up and then the rag caught all at once. Fire dripped from it and evaporated before it could touch the ground. Caxton threw the bottle at her grenades, at the exact same time as she threw herself sideways, out of the powerhouse doorway.

There was a noise like a barbecue grill starting up, then a second where all she heard was metal expanding under heat with tiny noises like pins dropping. Then a wall of noise and pressure hit the side of her head and rolled her over on her side. Black smoke boiled out of the powerhouse door and the orange light of flames lit up its windows.

Above her the robotic gun drooped suddenly, its camera lowering to point at the ground. Caxton got up slowly, unsure if she’d managed to cut the power. When the gun didn’t follow her movements, she allowed herself a small yelp of triumph.

Then she looked over at Gert, who was lying on the ground five yards away. She wasn’t moving. White powder covered most of her orange jumpsuit and all of her face. It had turned into a thick paste where it had mixed with tears and snot around her nose and her eyes.