23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

55.

Laura—I’ve got her. Malvern’s in C Dorm, along with a couple of half-deads. They’re taking donations.” Clara’s voice wasn’t as loud as Caxton had expected it to be. “I’ve figured out how to use individual intercoms without turning on the entire system at once—so they didn’t just hear me say that.”

“That’s a plus,” Caxton said. She stopped for a second and looked up at the camera in the stairwell’s ceiling. “Did you just hear me?”

Clara didn’t respond. So the intercoms didn’t work both ways. She would be able to hear Clara but not talk to her. It was still better than going it alone.

“No sign of the other two vampires,” Clara said. “I don’t think they know we’re free yet, but I’m thinking that someone will go and check on us eventually. I don’t know how much time you’ll have.”

She was halfway down the stairs to the Hub when she heard a clattering behind her and saw Gert coming down the steps.

“Go back,” Caxton said. “Go back and guard Clara.”

Gert shook her head. “I came this far with you. I’m not backing off now. Are you really going to tell me you don’t want an extra pair of hands right now, when you only got one that works?”

“Fine. Just don’t get yourself killed.” Caxton reached the door to the Hub and glanced up at the nearest camera.

“All clear,” Clara told her. “Nothing moving in there, anyway.”

Caxton pushed open the door and stepped inside the circular room at the heart of the prison. She scooped her shotgun off the floor—no one had bothered to remove it—and went straight to the armory and found a box of shotgun shells. They were loaded with plastic bullets, of course, and therefore absolutely useless against vampires. But maybe she could do something about that.

“Here,” she told Gert, handing her a box of .22-caliber bullets. “Pry six of these out of their casings.” There was a pretty good set of machine tools in the armory, useful for adjusting and refitting the now ruined guns. With a pair of pliers she pulled the plastic bullet free of its casing and threw it away. It wasn’t easy doing it with one good arm, but she gritted her teeth and got through the pain. As Gert handed her the bullets she loaded them into the shell casing as if they were buckshot. They weren’t perfect. They weren’t spherical, so they would tumble when the shell’s gunpowder went off, making them even less accurate that normal shot. They were too big, as well, and the shell had half the load of powder a normal shotgun shell used—the plastic bullet didn’t need to travel as fast as a lethal round. But if she got up close, very close, and fired point blank into Malvern’s chest—maybe. Maybe the makeshift shot would punch a hole right through the vampire’s chest cavity. Maybe it would be enough to destroy her only vulnerable spot, her heart.

She would be well fed, which meant she would be able to resist an awful lot of damage. Caxton would never get in more than one shot, not even if she took Malvern completely by surprise. But it was better than the alternative, which was to try to shiv the vampire with a sharpened spoon. She knew that would never work.

When she’d finished loading her hand-built shell, she checked the shotgun a couple of times to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with. She shoved it into the armpit of her good right arm. Then she nodded to Gert and stepped out of the armory.

Now. Which way?

There were exits leading out of the Hub in every direction, some of them darker than others, some of them behind heavy barred gates, some wide open. “Third exit on your right,” Clara said. C Dorm was behind a locked gate, but as Caxton approached a buzzer sounded and the gate clanked open on its hinges automatically. “I can open any door in the prison from here,” Clara said.

Caxton looked up at a camera and mimed turning a key.

“You’re asking—oh, you’re asking if I can lock them, too? No, unfortunately. The controls up here are just for emergency use, if there’s a fire or something. They have to be locked by hand with an actual key.”

“At least we can go wherever we want,” Gert said.

Caxton didn’t bother replying. She headed through the open gate and into a long hallway that led straight to the dorm.

It was lined on either side with checkpoints and defensive kiosks, but Caxton ignored those.

Except—there was a weird smell in the air. Caxton had learned a long time ago that when weird things happened around vampires it didn’t pay to ignore them. She sniffed around and found the smell was coming from one of the kiosks. It was a smell almost like roasted pork, though more sickly sweet. Like someone had been burning the hair off of a pig, perhaps.

“Smells like my daddy’s barbecue,” Gert whispered when Caxton asked if she smelled it too. “He had a half an oil drum full of coals, big enough to roast a horse if he wanted to, he always said. He used to do a whole suckling pig for Fourth of July.”

Caxton hadn’t eaten in a long time. She was pretty sure that what she found in the kiosk would not be a pig roast.

Except—in a way, it was. In a very sick, very darkly humorous way.

“I think that’s the warden,” Caxton said, when she popped open the door of the kiosk. Inside, lying on the floor, was a charred human corpse. “The clothes look right.”

Clara’s voice came very softly over the intercom. “That’s the warden!” she said.

“Yeah.” They had known already that Malvern had killed the warden. Now they knew how. The vampires must have doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. “I don’t get it. That’s not Malvern’s style. Sometimes vampires like to torture their victims— they get off on it—but she was never that kind. I think this is a message, except I don’t know how to read it, you know?”

Gert’s open face suggested she didn’t know. “You been after Malvern a long time, huh?”

“You could say that.” It had only been a couple of years, really. But in that time Malvern had cost Caxton a girlfriend, a mentor, half the police force of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and, least of all, her career.

“You really want her dead.”

“Oh, yes.” Caxton wanted nothing more in the entire world. She would let Fetlock take the other two. She didn’t know them, had no history with them. But Malvern had to die now. Once it was done, Caxton would be finished with vampires. She could go back to being a model prisoner, do her bit, and then restart her life.

Or she could die in the next thirty seconds.

She was pretty much okay with either scenario, as long as she got one shot in.

There was nothing they could do for the warden, even if they wanted to. They left her body where it lay and moved to the far end of the corridor, where another barred gate was all that stood between them and C Dorm. “The plan’s pretty simple. We rush in there. You distract the half-deads, however you can. I get as close as possible to Malvern and I shoot.”

“And then what?”

“Then we play it by ear. You ready?”

Gert nodded. Caxton looked up at the video camera in the ceiling.

“She’s close to the far end of the dorm,” Clara whispered. “There are three half-deads between you and her. It’s just a straight run and she doesn’t look like she has any idea that something is up.” The intercom crackled for a second—Clara had left it turned on, though she wasn’t saying anything. Finally she came back and said, “Laura. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Caxton said, even if Clara couldn’t hear her. Then she pointed at the gate and held up three fingers. Two fingers. One.

The gate popped open with an electronic buzz.

They stepped through. Every light in the dorm was on, and Caxton had no trouble seeing the rows of cells, the medical carts in the walkway, the half-deads drawing blood from the arms that prisoners shoved through the bars. Dead ahead, not fifty yards away Malvern had her back turned. She was wearing her decrepit mauve nightgown, and the skin on her head and bare shoulders was perfect, creamy, unblemished.

Caxton’s vision narrowed down to a spot just left of Malvern’s spine, just below the wing shape of her shoulder blade. Right where her heart would be. She was running so fast, she didn’t even feel her feet moving beneath her.

You didn’t aim a shotgun, she told herself. You pointed it. You didn’t squeeze the trigger. You yanked it. You could do all that with just one hand.

Caxton had closed half the distance, Gert right by her side, when the intercom blared again. Clara wasn’t whispering this time.

“Laura, look out! They were hiding on the upper level the whole time!”

Caxton stumbled to a stop. Malvern turned around to look at her with a wicked grin full of nasty teeth. Caxton turned around and looked up at the galleries above her, to the second tier of cells. From either side, a female vampire dropped down, landing effortlessly like a pair of cats.

As if they had all the time in the world, they started walking toward her, their red eyes locked on her face.