“What?”
“It eats people, Sally. It drinks their blood.”
“You’re telling me we’re locked in this place—” Sally couldn’t even comprehend speaking the word, but Terminal Thomas could:
“...with a vampire.”
Williams leaned his wooden broomstick against the bed and stomped it in the middle, breaking it in half. He was left with two 12-inch-long pieces of wood. He gave one to Sally and looked her dead in the eye. “It’s a vampire.” Sally curled her hands around the wooden handle, finding herself believing the look in Williams’s eyes.
Williams looked back to Thomas, who was visibly scared, almost shaking. “Thomas, I have a plan. It’s real simple. We’re going to go to the nearest door that heads out of the pod, and you’re going to kick that door down just like you did here. Then we get out, safe and sound. Got it?”
Thomas nodded.
Williams hooked his keys into his belt, found a way to grip his improvised stake now that it was half its previous length, and nodded to Sally. “Ready?”
Sally gripped her stake and got to her feet.
“Let’s get out of here.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The uneasy alliance of Josh, Santos, and Carlos were still inside the chapel. Santos had ripped the heavy, two-foot tall crucifix from the wall and was holding it like a baseball bat. Carlos had located some smaller crosses for himself and Josh. One was wooden, about five inches from top to bottom, with a gold-coloured plastic Jesus. “The priest likes to wave that one around,” Carlos said to Josh in a reassuring tone. “It’s a good one.” The other cross was white plastic with no Saviour hanging from it, about a foot long, with a flat gold-plastic base so it could stand up on a table. It usually sat behind a row of candles when the inmates got a chance for private prayer. Carlos kept that for himself.
The small room didn’t have any fixed furniture, so that the room could be emptied for religions that knelt rather than sat. Accordingly, there was a long closet in the left wall, in which six long benches and several dozen folding chairs were housed. Santos pulled one of the benches out and flipped it over in the centre of the room.
“Whoa man!” said Josh, “Why not make some more noise? You got any cymbals in there?”
“Hold it,” said Santos.
“What?”
“Hold it to the fucking ground, white boy.” Santos was not in a mood to be talked back to. Josh did what he was told, awkwardly laying his weight on the upside-down pew. Once it was held down, Santos stomped on the side of the pew.
“Can I ask what you’re doing?” Josh asked. He didn’t want to taunt the gang leader, but from Josh’s perspective, Santos was making a hell of a lot of noise for a man convinced that a man-eating monster was stalking them, so he thought a few inquiries were justified. Santos grunted and kicked again. His kicks eventually did their job, snapping the front leg off the pew. Santos picked it up and tossed it spitefully at Josh, who managed to catch the pew leg before it struck him in the face.
It was solid wood. An inch and a half square, almost a foot long, and it came to a nice point at the jagged end where it had been broken off.
“Wooden stake,” said Carlos, who was standing back and observing it all. Josh nodded, and stopped talking.
Santos went about his business while Josh held down the pew. Santos broke off a stake for each of them. When Santos was finished breaking off the third pew leg, Josh climbed to his feet. Santos came over to Josh and poked him hard in the chest with his stake.
“Weapons,” said Santos. “I got us up here where we got crosses, stakes, holy water. That’s my thing, getting ready for a fight. So you damn well better have a plan for getting us out of here. That’s your thing, and if you can’t do that, I don’t need you. And if I don’t need you...”
Josh was put on the spot. He knew that Santos had only kept him alive for an escape plan, but between running from that thing in the office and now equipping themselves with wooden stakes, his mind had gone off-track a little. He stammered and tried to think of something.
“Which of the doors is the least fortified?”
“All the doors are fortified.”
“There had to be one. When you rioted, I assume you were calling the shots, right? You must have boarded up the doors, and there must have been one door that had you worried. One door that made you think the guards were going to walk right through and take the place back.”
“I told you, all the doors were fortified. I’m not incompetent. You see any SWAT guys in here? It’s ‘cause we locked this shit down tight.” Santos was snarling with rage and disdain for Josh. Josh could tell that the moment he became expendable, Santos would do him in without a care. The moment that Josh killed Delman he became Santos’s for life, and Santos’s enemies had short lives.
“The yard door.” Carlos said. “The door by the mess hall that heads outside. It’s big and there was nothing to really tie onto. That’s the one that they would get in through.”
“Then that’s out way out.”
Santos stared at his friend, betrayed and also disheartened. Carlos had doubted Santos’s plan for taking over the pod, and knew the weak points, but he had said nothing. Was that a sign of unwavering loyalty, or patronization? It was a moot point now, but Santos was hurt, and for a moment his gaze shifted from Josh to Carlos, silhouetted in the emergency light.
“This could work,” Josh said, the cogs turning behind his eyes, “since we can’t get past any electric locks anyway, the door outside’s pretty much the only chance we got. How’d you barricade it?”
Santos wasn’t convinced that Josh was the Houdini he claimed to be. “How about we go there and you take a look for yourself?”
“Because down there we’re exposed. We have to minimize our exposure. This thing isn’t some guard on a scheduled watch. He’s unpredictable and he might show up at any time. So we stay here until we hash out a plan.” Josh spoke clearly and directly, trying to sound like he was explaining rather than lecturing. “In here, maybe, the thing can’t get us. I dunno how it works in prison, but maybe this place is consecrated or the all the shit on the walls will keep him out.”
“Then why don’t we stay here?” Santos asked, still hostile.
“I said the room might be consecrated. I didn’t say he can’t throw a Molotov cocktail in here and barbeque us.”
“We leaned stacks of mess hall tables against the door, lined up and tipped over like dominoes. Couple thousand pounds of pressure on that door.” Carlos once again tried to interject before Josh’s mouth got him killed. “Then we tied a lot of them together with cables from the weight room, and did a pretty rough job of hammering some of the cables into the wall with spikes. And the doors and the whole works got a quick and dirty soldering job to seal the doors and hold the tables together more.”
“How hard would it be to take down from the inside?” Josh asked.
“Three guys? I dunno, man. It took a dozen of us to get that stuff in place, and we had tools. And if you did get the first table out of the way, you’d still have the next one falling down on top of you. Then you gotta get the doors open.”
“We don’t have to get the doors open—just get them to the point that they could be opened. If you knock on that door, somebody outside will drive a battering ram through it.” Josh was certain that they could count on the cops to open the door, once the barricade was gone.
“Yeah, I guess.”
Santos nodded a little, noncommittally agreeing with the nebulous plan. “So, we’re gonna run down there, somehow take the tables apart, somehow move them out of the way without attracting the goddamn vampire, then just hope the cops are waiting to help us get out of prison?”
“Pretty much,” agreed Josh.
“You better be the first one the cops see.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m Santos Vega, and you’re white.” Santos actually smiled. “You’re really, really, white.”
Josh
started to lead the way out of the chapel, but Carlos stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, and turned him around to look at Santos. Santos was standing at the holy water. First, he instinctively dipped his finger in it, and drew the sign of the cross on his own forehead. He dipped his finger back into the water, and this time rubbed the water up the side of his neck. Santos raised his eyes to look at his allies, passed his wooden stake to Carlos, and dunked his whole hand into the water. He rubbed the wet hand all over his neck and throat, rubbing it into his skin like suntan lotion.
Without saying a word, Santos stepped aside and Josh approached the water. He re-enacted Santos’ actions, and stepped aside for Carlos. Carlos did much of the same, but when he finished applying his holy bug spray, he reached to pull off a shoe and a sock.
“What are you--?” Santos tried to ask. Carlos shushed him with a finger and dunked the sock into the remaining holy water.
“What possible reason could you have?” Santos asked him.
“Easy,” Carlos said, tucking the wet sock into his waistband. “Vampire tries to bite me, I stuff this into his mouth and let him choke on it.”
“Man, your nasty-ass sock probably just de-holied the holy water.”
“We’ll see.” Carlos picked up his cross and stake, and led them out of the chapel.
They moved like a military unit. Carlos approached the first corner, and waved for Josh to advance around to the next corridor. Josh carried his cross in his left hand and his stake in his right, the pointed end jutting out from the bottom of his fist. He jogged, hunching over, past Carlos and around the corner, ducking low and flattening against the far wall. He checked that the hallway ahead was clear, and waved the others to follow. They moved in this way for several minutes.
There was only one more corner to turn before they reached the stairs heading down to the main floor. They approached it in the usual way, and Josh ran around the corner with his stake raised.
“Holy fuck!” he screamed, completely blowing their cover.
Santos and Carlos came around the corner a moment later, their crosses held out straight, and their stakes poised to strike. There was no movement in the hallway, aside from Josh shaking his cross.
“What?” asked and impatient Santos.
“That!” Josh said, pointing.
The others followed his gaze to the three dead bodies lying on the hallway floor. They were all inmates, laying side-by-side with ugly bites in their necks. They weren’t lying neatly, but rather awkwardly in unnatural poses that might have been how they landed when they died.
“There’s dead people. So what?” Santos asked.
“On my way up there, before I found you, I didn’t see anyone. Nobody living, nobody dead. I came right through here before and these bodies were not here.”
“That was an hour ago. They could have died in the last hour,” said Carlos.
“No. They were left here. Someone killed them and dropped the bodies here,” said Josh. The sight of the bodies was obviously uncomfortable for Josh. For Santos and Carlos, these guys with their neat bite marks looked a lot better than the torn up corpses the creature had left in the mess hall when it first appeared. Santos was getting tired of talking when they should be moving, but Carlos was willing to hear Josh out:
“How’d you figure that?”
“Listen. You could hear a pin drop at any time in the last hour. You think we wouldn’t have heard that thing fighting and killing three guys right down the fucking hall from us?”
Santos nodded. “OK, they were left here. But still, so what? So this thing likes playing with bodies. Let’s just make sure it’s not playing with mine.”
Carlos agreed silently, and they brushed past Josh and around the bodies. Josh didn’t like walking past what he interpreted as either a threat or a warning, but he followed the others. They made their way through the second floor, which, like Josh’s description, contained no sign of people, living or dead. It was a dead zone. Finally, they descended toward the ground floor. From here, it was only a couple seconds to reach the doors heading outside to the yard.
The door to the yard was on one side of a major corridor, probably twenty feet wide. The tables stood on end across the entire corridor, just like Carlos described. For an escape artist like Josh, using this kind of innovation to keep himself inside the prison was the exact opposite of his natural instinct. Still, he admired the resourcefulness.
“Jesus, who’s the engineer?” He asked when they first saw the wall of tables.
“I had a hand in it,” said Carlos, with a little pride. “It cuts off the mess hall from the cells, but you can crawl under if you gotta go from one to the other.”
Josh wandered toward the door and the tables, sizing up an easy way to move them. He went to the door and tried to push over the first table. He found that it was actually bound to the other tables with a steel cable. He could smell residue from a failed explosive breach. The cops might have damaged the door, but not very much.
“Wow, you guys weren’t kidding.” He said, looking over his shoulder. Carlos was still about ten feet away, but he too was looking backward. Down the corridor, Santos was wandering into the cell block.
“What’s he doing in the stacks?” Josh asked.
“Getting himself killed...” said Carlos, before turning to go after his friend and boss. Josh touched his hand flat to the door. Three inches past the palm of his hand, the outside world was waiting. He closed his eyes for a second, and felt the cold of the steel—chilled by the cold air beyond these walls.
“Yeah,” said Josh under his breath, “let’s all walk away from the door that leads out of here.”
But when he caught up to Carlos, he saw what had caught Santos’s attention. In every cell, as far into the darkness as Josh could see, there were dead bodies standing against the bars, facing outward. They were clearly dead- pale, limp, covered in dried blood, but they were vertical. Josh saw then that they weren’t standing—they were hanging. Each of them had a bed sheet around his neck, tied to the top crossbar on the cell, holding up just high enough that their feet still touch the ground.
“I told you, he’s playing with the bodies.” Josh whispered to Carlos.
“He’s playing mind games,” Carlos responded.
In front of them, Santos was criss-crossing the corridor, from cell to cell, looking at the faces of the dead men. He was talking to himself, frantic and unintelligible. After looking at a dozen dead men, he came back to Carlos.
“Fuckin’ gonna kill that thing for this.” he said.
“Santos, I know this is fucked up but we gotta get out of here,” Carlos said, tilting his head toward the exit.
“No, not now, man. Look at them.”
“Santos-“
“LOOK AT THEM! It’s our crew. It’s our boys, each and every one of them strung up like a piñata.”
“He did it to screw with us, to make us stay when we know damn well that we should leave. We have to get out.”
“How would he know? How would he know that these were my boys?” Santos was wild-eyed, flailing his arms with every gesture. He practically frothed with every breath. For a man who values nothing above his friends, this was the worst thing he could have seen.
“We gotta get out of here!” Josh chimed in. Santos stared him down, and took a menacing step in Josh’s direction. Josh, desperate and so very close to escape, slapped Santos hard across the face. Carlos instinctively jumped between them, ready to save Josh from Santos’s wrath, but Santos didn’t lash out. He rubbed his cheek and nodded. He forced his wide eyes to shut, squeezing out water that ran down both cheeks.
“We open the door first. You can leave. Then I’m going in to back kill this thing.”
They walked back past the stairs and into the section of the corridor that became a dead-end thanks to the wall of tables.
“I figure we tip them backward one at a time. That way we only have to move the first table or two away from the door,” Josh said.
“Just tip the dominoes back the other way.”
“What about the welds on the door?” Carlos asked.
“We knock on that door, the cops will knock it down. Maybe they’ve got a battering ram on a truck, or they’ll use a shape charge to blast it in, but they’ll be coming.”
The men approached the back table, and realized that in order to free their hands, they’d have to put their stakes and crosses on the floor.
“I’ll go under and get to the other side,” Josh offered. He got on his knees, set his weapons down, and crawled between two tables, coming up on the other side a few seconds later. Santos and Carlos readied themselves to lift the table, but Josh hesitated.
“Um, you guys think you could pass me my cross and my stake? Just in case he’s, you know, on this side?”
Carlos nodded and handed Josh his weapons. Setting them down between his feet, Josh gripped the higher leg of the upturned table and counted to three. They heaved the table and it tipped backward, slamming against the wall with a bang that sounded and echoed like a shotgun blast. The table stayed against the wall after the men let it go, and a small percentage of the weight on the door was relieved.
Josh was nervous about the sound it made. Every successful escape came down to two things: misdirection and a solid way out. From what Carlos had told him, Josh believed that this door really was the best way out. But there was no misdirection here. They were being stalked by something, but had no means of distracting it, or even of knowing where it was. Josh’s last escape had counted on Jackie snorting coke in front of a roomful of guards. This escape had no Jackie, and this time Josh wasn’t being held in by guards—he was being hunted by the undead. So anything that attracts attention—like banging a steel table into a concrete wall—was too fucking load.
“That was too loud. We gotta go faster,” Santos said, his own intuition almost reading Josh’s mind.
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