23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

58.

Laura, the feds are—”

Caxton couldn’t hear the rest of what Clara had to say over the intercom. The women of C Dorm were making so much noise that they drowned her out. She pushed her way through the crowd as best she could without being trampled and finally made her way over to the cart where Gert was crouched, barely keeping her balance.

The crowd was starting to thin out a little. Most of the women had run out the fire exit. Those who remained were mostly in a heap on top of the half-naked vampire. Caxton could only see the occasional flash of milk-white skin underneath the pile.

“Let’s move,” Caxton said, and Gert nodded eagerly.

They made their way slowly back toward the gate that led to the Hub. There was a thick crowd around the warden’s body back there—it seemed more than a few prisoners had enough of a grudge against Augie Bellows to want to defile her corpse. The very thought sickened Caxton, but she knew there was no way she could stop so many of them. She also had more important things to do.

“Did you see Malvern leave?” she asked Gert. “Do you know which way she went?”

Gert shook her head. “I was too busy trying not to get killed.”

Caxton sighed and pointed at the ceiling. “Clara was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear her. Let’s get someplace quieter so she can try again.” The two of them headed deeper into the prison, toward the Hub. Rioting prisoners filled the hallway, but they didn’t seem organized or dangerous. Some of them actually looked like they were having a good time.

Then Caxton saw the flames, and she knew there was going to be trouble. Up in the Hub someone had found a bunch of filing cabinets and dragged them into the center of the room. Caxton had no idea what the cabinets contained, but she knew any facility like SCI-Marcy had to be stuffed full of paperwork. Prisoners were pulling out files and setting them alight, maybe with the intention of burning down the prison—maybe because they just wanted to see them burn. They’d built up a couple of pretty good bonfires already. Craning her head around to peer through the massed bodies there, she saw others filing in and out of the armory. They must have been disappointed to find the guns all destroyed, but they were arming themselves anyway with batons, with pepper spray, and with stun guns. More women were streaming into the Hub all the time, coming from the other dorms, and despite the smoke from the fires the central room was rapidly filling up. It would be next to impossible to get through there.

“Come on,” she told Gert. “We’ll try another way.”

She turned—and then stopped. Because there was a woman, a huge woman with a butch haircut, looking right at her. One of her former cellmates from when she’d been housed with the general population.

“Hey, I know you—you’re that ex-cop,” the woman said. She didn’t sound particularly unfriendly. She and Caxton had never bothered each other much. Caxton nodded, tried to smile pleasantly, and pushed past.

She was not surprised, though, when the crowd noise died around her, or when some of the women in the hallway started moving toward her, very nonchalantly, with no obvious violent intent.

Every woman in the prison had a reason to hate the police. They’d all been arrested, after all, by cops. A sizable fraction of them were willing to do something about that resentment.

“Run,” she shouted to Gert. She started to follow her own advice—and then a pair of thick arms grabbed her from behind. She managed to break free, even with only one good arm, but someone else tripped her and a third convict grabbed her bad arm and twisted it behind her back.

All around her women were moving in, shanks appearing in their hands, or just bare fists drawing back to hit her. She tried to fight her way out, but the pain searing through her arm kept her from making any headway. Already she could smell nothing but unwashed bodies, and the light was growing dim—

Then she heard a hissing sound and a meaty thud and Gert was spinning through the crowd, causing screams. Her pepper spray flicked across half a dozen eyes and her baton crashed down on wrists holding shanks, sending the makeshift knives clattering on the floor. She pushed her way in and got her shoulder under Caxton’s good armpit, then levered her up out of the mass of bodies.

“Get the fuck back or you’ll be looking at a whole thirty-one flavors of this shit,” Gert growled, her voice low and angry. Even Caxton shrank back from that voice.

“Just having a little fun,” one of the women in the crowd said.

Gert sprayed her right in the eyes. She screamed and ran away. The crowd started drawing back, no one wanting to be Gert’s next victim. They must not recognize her, Caxton thought. It was bad enough to be an ex-cop in a prison without supervision—but Gert was the hated baby killer. They’d put her in protective custody from the day she’d arrived.

Except now she wasn’t Gertrude Stimson anymore. Now she was Caxton’s celly Her road bitch. And somehow that transformed her from a pimply speed freak into some kind of Viking warrior goddess. Nobody, not a soul, tried to stop her as she moved Caxton quickly through C Dorm and out of the fire exit.

Outside, in the dark, she set Caxton down on a patch of dry grass.

“Thanks,” Caxton said. “That was pretty good.”

“I got your back, no prob,” Gert said. She watched Caxton’s face for a while, then said, “Listen. One thing I gotta ask.”

Caxton nodded.

“We ain’t escaping, are we? I mean, I know you said so before. But I was still holding out some hope. You’re not going to get me out of here, though.”

Caxton stared at the girl. She supposed, in a way, she owed Gert the truth. She could lie and say she expected to live through the night. She could lie and say she would get Gert out of the prison, somehow. It would make her celly feel better to hear it. More willing to help Caxton with what came next.

But it just wasn’t possible. Gert had killed the CO in the SHU. Worse than that, she had killed her own babies. Maybe prison wasn’t the best place for her. It was a degrading place, a soul-killing place where no one even pretended to want to rehabilitate her. But she couldn’t just be allowed to walk the streets, either.

“I guess… all I can say is, I’ll still be your celly if we survive.”

“And we’ll get along okay? We’ll be useful to each other, right? If I talk too much, you won’t try to make me shut up. That kind of thing.”

Caxton smiled. “It’s a deal.”

That seemed to satisfy Gert. “Cool, I guess. What next?”

Caxton looked up and saw stars overhead in half the sky. The other half was blocked out by the great looming expanse of the prison’s wall. Inside the wall groups of prisoners were storming the prison’s outbuildings and looting them of anything that wasn’t bolted down. She saw a dozen of them outside the back door of the infirmary, where she and Gert had reentered the prison after blowing up the powerhouse. She thought of all the drugs in there. There was going to be one hell of a party in SCI-Marcy tonight, she told herself, and—

She looked up at the wall again. It was twenty-five feet high. Every hundred feet along its length was a watchtower with a searchlight and a machine-gun nest. The towers were all dark at the moment. There was no one up there to man them.

Except maybe a pair of vampires. It was where Caxton would go to get away from the riot. If you could get up on top of the wall, into one of those towers, you could see everything. And once you were up there you could escape anytime you wanted—assuming you were a vampire—by jumping down the far side of the wall.

Caxton looked for the nearest camera and found it in the angle made by C Dorm and the wall of the Hub. She waved at it until a loudspeaker mounted on a pole nearby said, “I see you, but I don’t know where Malvern went. She’s not on any of my screens.”

Caxton shook her head and pointed at the nearest watch-tower. It was a pain in the ass not being able to talk to Clara. She sighed and then pointed at it more emphatically.

“What, up in the towers?” Clara asked. She was silent for a while, but a crackling buzz from the loudspeaker told Caxton the circuit was still open. “Oh, wait—yeah! There! They’re hiding in some shadows, but it looks like Forbin hasn’t mastered it yet. One of her feet is in the light. Listen, let me find a way to get you up there.”

There was a muffled crump from the far side of the yard. Caxton raced around the side of C Dorm and saw tendrils of white mist snaking around the outbuildings. Another crump, closer this time, and a group of prisoners came racing out of a roiling cloud, coughing and rubbing at their eyes.

“Shit!” Caxton said. “Fetlock!”

Gert grabbed her good arm. “What is it?”

“The cops,” Caxton explained. “They’re here. They’re using tear gas. If we get caught in that we’re done.”

“So you just have to explain to them who you are and what you’re doing. Maybe they’ll even give us guns.”

Caxton shook her head. “They won’t ask questions, they’ll just scoop us up and drag us back inside. Come on, Clara! Find something!”

The intercom buzzed back into life. “There’s a way up to the wall,” Clara said, as if she’d heard Caxton. “It’s an underground tunnel. The entrance is at the side of the administrative wing. Go—go left, three hundred yards.” Caxton and Gert hurried to follow Clara’s instructions. As they passed each loudspeaker it came on and Clara gave them a new command. “You can’t just go straight there or you’ll run smack into a SWAT team,” Clara explained, as she sent them all the way around a row of baseball diamonds. When they finally reached the door they wanted it was standing open.

It led to a flight of stairs going down into the earth. At the bottom was a long tunnel with bundles of wiring and dripping pipes overhead. “Go left at the next junction, and you’ll come to a flight of stairs going up. It’ll take you all the way up to one of the towers.” The intercom was buzzing when they reached the tower stairs.

“Listen,” Clara said, and then couldn’t seem to find any more words.

Caxton looked at a camera mounted above a door and gave it her most patient look. She was running out of those.

“You don’t have to do this. Fetlock has the place buttoned up. She can’t get away. I know you think this is your responsibility—”

Caxton nodded emphatically. There was no way to tell Clara what she was really thinking. That Malvern was a sneaky monster, and that no matter how good Fetlock’s perimeter security might be, she would have some plan of escape. If Caxton waited for Fetlock to mop up the prison, there was no chance of catching Malvern. And then it would just go on. The nightmares. The long sleepless nights worrying who was going to be killed next. The blood. Always there would be more blood.

Clara was silent for a while. “Just. Just—I was going to say be careful. But that’s not your plan, is it? Okay. Just do it, then. Do what you do best.”

Caxton wasn’t sure how to reply. Blow a kiss at the camera? Salute? In the end she just patted her heart and then pointed at the lens. Clara would know what she meant.

Then she headed up the stairs, with Gert close behind her.