But thinking like that was going to get Caxton exactly no where. She had to believe that Clara would be alive for almost a full day longer. That Caxton would have a chance to rescue her.
And kill Malvern, as soon as she was sure Clara was safe.
That was essential. She’d been fighting Malvern for years, and while she’d always saved the day, and kept people from being killed—most people, anyway—Malvern had always gotten away at the last second. She couldn’t let that happen again.
Malvern was clearly planning something big this time. She must be drinking gallons of blood to look so healthy and strong. Caxton could guess where it was coming from. She must be draining the prison population, using them as a captive food source. The administrators of the prison must be dead or collaborating to allow that to happen. Someone in the administration—the warden, she remembered—had been IMing with someone who used the same convoluted, archaic English that Malvern was famous for. She hadn’t quite put it together at the time, but it was obvious now. So this had been an inside job.
But turning the prison into her own private blood bank seemed to lack Malvern’s usual elegance. Malvern always thought several moves ahead, and she must know that her time at the prison was limited. Eventually someone on the outside was going to wonder why none of the COs had come off duty and gone home to their wives or husbands. Or maybe some prison bus would show up at the front gate, loaded with new inmates, and there would be nobody to let it in. One way or another the authorities would come in force, and then Malvern would be forced to fight her way out of the prison. No matter how tough vampires were, they could still be taken down by enough cops with assault rifles. She couldn’t be looking forward to that confrontation.
Malvern was on borrowed time. And yet she seemed in no rush. She was giving Caxton almost a full day to think over her offer. A nearly full day, half of which she would spend inside her coffin, unable to direct her minions, unable to fight for herself.
Of course, she hadn’t made it too easy for Caxton. The prison was still full of half-deads, and presumably at least one living human, who would keep Caxton from getting into too much trouble. Especially since they could watch her every move, keep track of everywhere she went, through the hundreds of video cameras that monitored every corner of the prison.
Caxton jumped up and grabbed at the camera mounted to the ceiling of the guard post. It held firm, even when she put all her weight on it. Grunting in frustration, finally she grabbed the pepper spray canister out of her bra and gave the lens a good coating. It would at least ruin the camera’s focus, even if it made the close air in the guard post stink of spicy food, and that made Caxton’s stomach rumble.
Those cameras. She couldn’t spray every single one of them.
But maybe there was something she could do about them.
27.
After Malvern left the command center the half-deads went back to their tasks, some watching monitors, some trying to make the warden more comfortable. Her breathing was heavy and her face went very pale. She sat down heavily in a chair and put her head between her knees. For a very long time she just sat like that, not moving or speaking, while the half-deads tried to adjust her clothing or mop her forehead with wet towels. Clara stood by, watching it all, unable to do a thing to help anyone.
Then the warden sat up very suddenly and stared around the room with a wild eye. “I’m fucking fine! Don’t you dare touch me,” she shouted, one hand lashing out to smack the face of the approaching half-dead. The creature squeaked in pain and spat teeth onto the ground. It had only been trying to change the bandage on her eye. “It’s not going to have time to get infected,” the warden insisted, “and that antibacterial shit stings like hell.”
She started to get up out of the chair, but clearly losing an eye had taken its toll on her. She nearly collapsed and had to let a half-dead ease her back down to her seat. She looked up at Clara and just breathed for a while, which seemed to be about all she was capable of. Then, with an effort of will that made sweat pop out in beads on her skin, she pushed herself up out of the chair and headed for the door. “Hsu, you stick with me,” she said, grabbing the door frame and holding herself up with both hands. “I don’t trust these bastards. One of them might try something when I’m not looking.” Clara walked over to the door and tried to take the warden’s arm, but the older woman pushed her away. “You’ve got no reason to be nice to me,” she said.
“You’re a living, breathing human being. The only one in this room other than me,” Clara suggested.
The warden snorted in derision. “Living,” she spat out. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Not when it makes you feel like this. Come on.”
The warden was wobbling a little on her feet, but her voice hadn’t lost any of its steel. She stumbled through the corridors of the prison, Clara hobbling along behind her, careful not to take too long a stride. The warden stopped at several doorways to bark orders in at groups of half-deads who were gathered around radiators or television sets. “Get breakfast going! I’ve got more than a thousand assholes to feed. And you—I want a detail to check every dorm, every hour. Half these women hate the other half. We’ve got members of the Aryan Brotherhood crammed in the same cells as Latin Kings. If you don’t watch them at all times they cut each other to ribbons, because it’s what they think their boyfriends would want them to do. You see a shank, you take it away. You see them fist-fighting, you separate them. It isn’t rocket science. What? No, I don’t give a shit if they fuck each other. That’s what women in prison do, to pass the time. It’s not like they’re real dykes, they’re just bored.”
Clara’s shoulders tensed in anger, but then she saw the glazed look in the warden’s remaining eye, and the way her hands trembled. The older woman stopped suddenly in midstride and pressed one hand against her forehead. She looked like hell. It was hard not to feel a little sympathy for her—whether she deserved it or not.
“Are you feeling alright?” Clara asked. “Maybe a little feverish?”
Bellows snarled at Clara’s concern. Then, slowly she recovered her demeanor and answered the question. “Cold, actually,” the warden admitted. “I’m shivering. And there’s a ringing in my ears. I think I might be going into shock.” She set her jaw and shook off Clara’s hands. “But shock is something you can gut through, if you’re tough enough. I’ll be fine. I have work to do. For one thing, I have to kill your girlfriend.”
Clara’s heart shriveled in her chest. “What? No—no, that’s not how it’s supposed to happen. Malvern gave her twenty-three hours. Malvern wanted her to join her, to become—”
“Malvern’s not in charge right now. I don’t know why she’s wasting time on Caxton, honestly. I mean, I get the joke. It’s really funny, make the deadly vampire hunter into a vampire herself, ha ha. But that’s like asking a dog if he wants to guard your Thanksgiving dinner. He’s still a dog. He still wants to jump up there and get his snout in the gravy. No,” she said, “turning Caxton is a lousy idea. So I’m going to knock her off before sunset, so we don’t have to worry about her ever again.” She squinted at Clara. “You think Malvern will really be that upset? Caxton’s been a thorn in her side for so long, she’s not going to cry if she wakes up and finds her dead.”
“You can’t do that. You can’t!” Clara said.
The warden grinned through her pain. “Watch me,” she said.
At the next door they came to, the warden reached in and physically pulled a half-dead away from the television set it had been watching. Clara glanced at the screen and saw that it showed one of the prison’s shower rooms, currently empty. She was too frightened for Laura to worry much about what the half-dead had seen there.
“You. Get as many others together as you can and go down to the loading dock behind the cafeteria,” the warden ordered. “Kill Caxton.”
“No! You can’t do this!” Clara howled, but no one was listening.
The half-dead’s ruined face scrunched up in t
hought. “But, um, Miss Malvern wanted—” it managed to stammer out.
The warden grabbed the half-dead by its shoulders. “Miss Malvern is currently a puddle of goo in a coffin. Whereas I am very much awake and ready to pull your arms out of their sockets. Do this quietly, do it quickly, and don’t give her a chance to fight back. Do we understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the half-dead murmured, and then headed off down the hallway at a run.
28.
Gert,” Caxton said, softly.
Her celly woke up instantly, her eyelids snapping open and her hand reaching for the knife she’d kept tucked under her arm while she slept. “Everything cool?” she asked.
Caxton nodded. “For the moment. I’ve been busy, and—”
“What time is it?”
Caxton shrugged. “I don’t have a watch. If I had to guess I’d say it’s around nine.” It had felt like about three hours since Malvern had made her dawn ultimatum. Twenty more to go.
“You think there’s any coffee?” Gert asked. “Maybe in one of these crates?”
“We wouldn’t have any way to brew it,” Caxton suggested.
“Oh, I’ll find a way. You know how long it’s been since I had caffeine? Way too fucking long, that’s how long. If I have to snort lines of freeze-dried instant, I will do it. You got me operating on three hours’ sleep, I’ll mainline the shit. What the fuck are those?”
She was looking at Caxton’s big project. The things that had taken her three hours to construct. The things she wasn’t sure would work, even so.
As she’d said, she’d been busy. She’d had to improvise and put them together from items she could find in the loading dock. She’d started with tin cans. She had as many of those as she could possibly want. In her search for supplies she’d found a small toolkit in one of the trucks. It had included a flathead screwdriver she’d used as a can opener. Very carefully she had emptied out five big cans that had contained creamed corn. She’d scraped them out and then let them dry. Then she had broken open a couple dozen crates and pried all the nails out of their boards. She had driven nails through the walls of the cans, all around, as many as she could without buckling the cans entirely. She’d made that mistake more than once.
The final step had left her gagging and sick, but it was necessary. There had been a garden hose on the dock, presumably used to wash the trucks. With a pair of bolt-cutters she had clipped off a four foot section of hose, which she had used to siphon gasoline out of the tanks of the three trucks. There had been a lot of spillage—the loading dock still reeked of gas—but she had managed to fill all five cans to the brim and seal them back up.
Sealing the cans took some work. There’d been a big economy-size pack of chewing gum in the glove compartment of one of the trucks. She chewed and chewed until her jaw was sore and used the wet gum to hold the lids on the cans and make seals around the nails to make the cans more or less watertight.
“Homemade fragmentation grenades,” Caxton explained.
“You light one of these on fire and it’ll blow up, throwing burning gas all over the place. Even better, when they go off the nails will shoot out in every direction as shrapnel. They should make a pretty good mess.”
“Well, shit,” Gert said, laughing. “I never took you for a pyro. You’re gonna blow down the main gate, huh? And then we just waltz right out of here. Or no—we can drive out, in one of the trucks. Jeez, Caxton, you’re pretty smart, huh?”
“I hope so. I hope I can make them work without killing both of us in the process.” She chose not to share what she really had in mind for her big unwieldy grenades. Gert might not understand what she truly hoped to achieve.
Caxton started loading the cans inside the cab of one of the big trucks. She was careful not to slosh them around too much— not because they might explode (it would take more than rough handling for that), but because she didn’t want to disturb the chewing-gum seals. They were the weak spot in her design. She thought there was a good chance that when the cans were set on fire, the burning gasoline would erupt upward and pop the lids right off the cans, rather than exploding outward and launching the nails. She would just have to hope for the best.
“Have you ever driven a truck?” Caxton asked Gert.
“Sure, no problem. Half my family had trucks,” her celly told her.
“That’s good. That’s a very good thing.” Caxton nodded and rubbed her hands on her jumpsuit. “Here’s what I want to do. You get in this one and get it ready to go. I’ll run up to the guard post and hit the control for the outer gate, then come and join you. We’re going to have to move fast. Once they figure out what we’re doing the half-deads will be all over us, regardless of what Malvern might want from me. You ready?”
Gert pulled herself up into the truck’s driver’s seat and cranked the engine until it was rumbling along well. Caxton threw her shotgun and her stun gun in through the passenger’s-side window, then jogged back to the guard post. She glanced up and saw that Malvern’s ultimatum was still running over and over on the monitor. She slapped the red button on the control panel and checked through the post’s window to make sure the gate was opening smoothly. When she saw it was, she reached for the post’s door.
Before her hand even found the knob the door burst inward. A half-dead barreled through it, its knife high and swinging downward to cut into her heart. Caxton shouted for Gert and half-jumped, half-fell backwards, colliding with the guard post’s chair. She stumbled and fell hard on her hip, one arm tucked uselessly beneath her.
It was a lousy defensive position. It was a great way to get killed, falling over herself like that.
The half-dead took a step closer to her, the knife held straight out in front of its body. Its torn face split in a wicked grin so wide that the muscles around its mouth bunched and split.
Caxton grabbed for the can of pepper spray in her bra. It felt suspiciously light in her hand and she realized she’d used it too many times. She couldn’t be guaranteed there’d be even one good spray left inside.
She rolled to her left as the knife came down at her, and sprayed anyway. The can sputtered out a thin mist of capsicum and then died on her. The half-dead didn’t even look annoyed.
Crap, she thought—she had put her best weapons in the truck, thinking she was safe from attack inside the loading bay. This half-dead must have been waiting just outside the outer gate, waiting for its big chance. She should have been smart enough to check outside the gate before she’d hit the red button. She should have done a lot of things smarter, she thought, as she rolled away from another blow.
She still had her baton. She yanked it free of the belt she was using as a bandolier and brought it up fast, just fast enough to parry the half-dead’s next strike. The blade dug a bright furrow through the black paint on the baton. Caxton grabbed it in both hands and pushed, struggling to get back up to her feet as the half-dead tried to keep her down on the ground by pushing down with its knife.
Caxton was stronger than any half-dead—their muscles and bones were rotten and got weaker with every second their unnatural existence continued. She got one foot under her and shoved the half-dead back, sending it sprawling backward out the door of the guard post. She followed through and came down hard on it, smashing the pommel of her baton into its forehead with a grotesque crunch.
Breathing hard, adrenaline making her skin feel prickly and tight, she jumped back up to her feet and started running toward the truck.
Five more half-deads were climbing up onto its cab.
29.
Gert,” Caxton yelled, “get it moving! Put it in gear!” The truck didn’t move.
Caxton ran forward and grabbed at the half-dead nearest to her. It was wearing a stab-proof vest, so she grabbed the straps and hauled it bodily off of the truck. Spinning it around, she slammed her baton across the back of its head and reached for another. One of them was crawling up onto the truck’s hood, using the top of the tire as a foothold. Caxton grabbed
it around the neck and twisted, hard. She heard a series of pops from inside its collar as its cervical vertebrae snapped, one after the other. She knocked it to the ground and then grabbed the top of the passenger’s-side window. She brought her bare feet up and slid inside the truck, landing with a bounce in the passenger’s seat.
Gert was staring at her as if she’d just won the gold medal for gymnastics.
“Don’t look at me! Look at them. And get this thing moving—we can shake them off,” Caxton said. A half-dead was climbing up on top of the cab while another was reaching toward Gert’s window.
Gert nodded, grabbed the truck’s gearshift, and pushed it forward.
The truck’s engine roared for a second, then sputtered and stalled. The smell of burning gears filled the cab.
“I thought you said you could drive this thing,” Caxton insisted.
“I said I could drive a truck. Like a pickup truck. I never even sat in one of these before,” Gert told her.
Gert’s window exploded inward, showering them both with tiny cubes of safety glass. The half-dead there had a hammer that he swung into the cab. Gert managed to pull back far enough that it hit the steering wheel instead of her jawbone.
Caxton cursed, then lunged across Gert’s lap to grab at the hammer and the hand that gripped it. She pulled hard and the half-dead came screaming into the cab with them. Caxton punched its face and twisted the hammer out of its hand, then smashed its head forward against the dashboard. It stopped struggling then, so she pushed it out the window and moved on to the next task.
“Switch places,” Caxton said, and Gert slid toward her across the seats. Caxton grabbed her shotgun and climbed over Gert to get into the driver’s seat.
Something hit the top of the cab hard enough to make a dent in the ceiling. Caxton pointed her shotgun at the dent and started to depress the trigger—then realized the mistake in that and stopped herself. The plastic bullet in the shotgun was designed not to penetrate human flesh. It certainly wouldn’t pass through sheet metal. If she fired at the ceiling the bullet would bounce off, at dangerously high speed, and probably hit her or Gert.
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