23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  Regardless, the last thing she wanted was to see Malvern just then. Not until she had some serious firepower to back her up.

  “I don’t have a lot to say to her at the moment,” Caxton told the half-dead. “But if you come out of there right now, I’ll talk to you.”

  The half-dead cackled.

  “I’ll take it that’s a no,” Caxton said.

  It might have planned on replying, but before it could speak again she was inside the cell. She kept low but moved fast, rushing forward to try to knock it down, her eyes darting from side to side, looking for where the knife might be.

  Instead she just saw the cell’s two inmates. They weren’t begging for mercy anymore, because both of them were dead, locked in a final embrace and covered in each other’s blood.

  The half-dead was crouching up on the top bunk, waiting for her.

  This one was proving way too smart. It leapt down on top of her, one arm back, holding the knife high, pointed downward toward her. Its orders might be to bring her in alive, but clearly it was willing to wound her if that’s what it took.

  One of its boots clipped Caxton’s ear as she tried to roll out of the way. Her head rang and her ear instantly felt hot. She brought her knees up to protect her body and felt them dig into the half-dead’s groin, a blow that would have left a living man gasping in agony. The half-dead didn’t gasp. It didn’t even need to breathe, and what it had between its legs wasn’t that sensitive anymore.

  Still, the impact left the half-dead off its balance and rolling off of her to one side. Caxton grabbed at the toilet/sink unit and started dragging herself upright, fighting the fuzziness that was spreading through her head. The half-dead jumped on her back and its knife came around to swing at her face.

  Caxton couldn’t stop the blow—she was moving too slowly. But she was still stronger than the half-dead. She bucked wildly, like a horse, and it flew backward and off of her, the knife sliding through the shoulder of her jumpsuit but not even connecting with her skin. She spun around to find it standing in the doorway, the knife low, holding it out toward her, ready to lunge.

  She kicked it in the wrist as hard as she could.

  Had she been wearing shoes, or been just a hair faster, that would have disarmed the half-dead and left her with the advantage. Instead the half-dead managed to yank its arm back just as her kick connected. Her toes curled back painfully as they collided with the half-dead’s arm. All she accomplished with the kick was to make her opponent step backward, out of the cell. That left her trapped inside the small cell. The half-dead could simply slam the door shut behind her and engage its latch, locking her inside. Then it could call for reinforcements and just wait until they arrived. That’s what she would have done, and this one had proven to be no fool so far.

  She screamed in rage as it smiled at her and reached for the edge of the door.

  It didn’t get a chance to push the door closed, however. Harelip appeared behind it and leveled her shotgun at the back of its head. Somehow she must have gotten out of the guard post.

  “Freeze, asshole,” the female CO said.

  The half-dead started to turn around. It didn’t drop the knife.

  Caxton dropped to the floor and covered her head as Harelip pulled the trigger. The shotgun roared and fire burst from its muzzle. It didn’t contain any buckshot, Caxton knew, or any weight of slug—the shotguns the COs used fired beanbag rounds, soft nylon bags full of ceramic balls that expanded in flight to spread the energy of the impact. For a normal human being, getting hit by a beanbag round was incredibly painful, even incapacitating, but it rarely resulted in permanent damage.

  Normal human skulls, however, had a lot more structural integrity than a half-dead’s. The head of the thing that had once been named Murphy exploded like an overripe pumpkin hit by a sledgehammer, spattering the interior of the cell—and Caxton—with pulpy brains and shards of bone and plenty of unidentifiable goo. The beanbag itself, which looked like a sweat sock full of marbles, bounced off her back and landed with a squelch on the floor.

  “Shit,” Harelip said.

  Caxton started breathing again.

  “That wasn’t Murphy,” the CO told her. She was crouched next to the body.

  “You’re right. It might be Murphy’s body, but—”

  “Murphy had a tattoo on the back of his hand. This asshole doesn’t.”

  Caxton glanced at the hand and saw this was correct.

  “So what the hell is this thing doing, wearing Murphy’s uniform?”

  13.

  An hour earlier Clara Hsu had just been taken prisoner. They walked for quite a while through narrow corridors, passing through a number of doors that had to be opened electronically, and a few gates where COs in glassed-in booths buzzed them through. The prison was a big place, and Clara doubted she could find her way back alone if she had to, much less figure out a way through all those locked gates. Eventually they emerged from an underground tunnel into a building that felt more like office space than jail cells. The ceiling was made of acoustic tile that supported fluorescent light tubes, and the walls were normal plaster instead of cinder block or brick. Clara decided this had to be the administrative center of the prison, a place prisoners would rarely ever see. It made her feel a little more comfortable, anyway, to be away from the echoing cell blocks and the brutal architecture of restraint and control. Not that she thought that she was free, or that she would be unsupervised for even a second.

  At the end of a long corridor lined with normal hollow-core doors they came to a reception lobby and then an oak door labeled WARDEN in chipped gold lettering. The CO with the stun gun indicated that Clara should open the door herself. She stared at the scratch on his cheek. The skin was starting to peel away at the edges. She was very afraid she knew what that meant.

  She knocked gently on the door—her arms had gone weak—and then turned the knob. Inside the office her eyes were dazzled by orange and pink light. There was a massive picture window at the far end of the room, and the sun was just setting beyond it, a bar of red light on the horizon. The window looked out over a courtyard ringed with watchtowers and a twenty-five-foot-high curtain wall.

  “Miss Hsu,” someone said.

  Clara shielded her eyes to try to see who was talking to her. “It’s Special Deputy Hsu, please,” she said. There were at least three people in the room, not counting the CO who had come in behind her and had his stun gun leveled at her back. She blinked rapidly as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. There was a desk there, and a long rectangular coffee table running through the middle of the room, and two people in orange sitting on a sofa along one wall—

  “I suppose there’s no need to pretend this is a routine interview,” said a woman standing next to the window. She was wearing a stab-proof vest over a conservative business suit. She had something in her hand that Clara thought at first must be another stun gun, but a moment later she saw it was a Black-Berry handheld.

  Outside the window the sun winked out, done with the day.

  In a few seconds it would be night. The timing wasn’t lost on Clara. “Maybe so, but I should point out that detaining a federal agent without an arrest warrant is a pretty serious crime,” Clara said. “If you let me go now, we can both save a lot of really annoying paperwork.”

  “I would advise you not to move, or flinch,” the woman said. She had to be the warden of the prison, Clara decided, though she hadn’t bothered to introduce herself.

  The coffee table stirred, and Clara nearly did jump back. She hadn’t been expecting that. She stared at the piece of furniture and saw that her sun-dazzled eyes had mistaken it for something it was not. It was a wooden box, six feet long, with a long, tapered, hexagonal shape.

  “Oh, Christ,” Clara sighed, as its lid started to slide back.

  Someone whimpered to her left. Clara looked over and saw the two people sitting on the sofa there. Now that the sun’s glare was less dazzling, she could see that they were both prisoner
s dressed in identical orange jumpsuits. Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were gagged. One of them, a blond girl who looked like she couldn’t be more than nineteen, stared at Clara with imploring eyes.

  Laura Caxton wouldn’t just wait and watch this happen, Clara thought, because she was pretty sure what was going to come next. Laura would fight.

  But she wasn’t Laura. She had never been as brave as her girlfriend, could never be as tough as the famous vampire hunter. She was a glorified police photographer, and there was a big man—or something worse—at her back, ready to beat her into submission if she made the slightest move. So she stood there, still as a statue, and watched.

  The lid of the coffin slid a little further, then overbalanced and fell to the floor with a crash. Clara felt as if a puff of cold air blew out of the coffin, but she knew it wasn’t that. Vampires were unnatural creatures. Their very existence felt wrong—it made the hair on the back of your arms stand up. It made your skin prickle.

  Taking her time, moving stiffly Justinia Malvern sat up and looked around the room.

  She’d been born in 1695 in England, and had lived through every year of American history there was. Vampires lived forever if no one managed to kill them, but they didn’t age gracefully. Malvern’s skin was pale, paper-thin leather stretched tight over protruding bones. In some places it had worn away where it had rubbed night after night against the stained silk lining of her coffin. A patch on her forehead had eroded down to dull yellow bone. She wore nothing but a thin, almost transparent mauve nightdress that was nearly as tattered as her skin, but modesty hardly applied to something that had spent more time in a coffin than it had standing upright.

  Her head was completely hairless. She didn’t even have eyelashes. She had long triangular ears, one of which looked like it had been chewed on by animals. She had one eye that was yellow and cloudy with cataracts. The other eye socket was empty except for a wisp of cobweb, a dark hole in her head surrounded by rotten skin.

  Her mouth was full of broken fangs. Not just two sharp canines—Clara had been raised on that image of vampires, of suave counts with a pair of protruding but tiny fangs. Vampires in reality had teeth like sharks, their mouths packed full of row on row of wicked translucent blades. There were gaps in Malvern’s smile, a lot of them, but she still had plenty of teeth to chew with.

  Her bony arms were folded across her chest. She opened them slowly, carefully, and placed a skeletal hand on either side of the coffin. With obvious pain but just as obvious determination, she levered herself up until she was standing on her own two feet. She swayed slightly, but she didn’t fall.

  Clara gasped a little. She didn’t mean to. She’d read Laura’s notes, though. The first time Laura Caxton had seen Malvern, she’d been confined to a wheelchair, barely able to lift her arms to hold a beaker full of donated blood. Later on, when Malvern had assisted Caxton with her investigations at Gettysburg, the vampire had been too feeble to even raise her head. She’d been trapped in her own coffin, barely able to lick at blood dripped across her mouth. Clearly the blood she’d drunk at the Tupper-ware party, and at the roadhouse, had gone some way toward reviving her.

  She had never spoken more than a few words, as long as Clara had been alive.

  “I trust,” she said now, in a voice that was creaky and thick, but clear enough to be understood, “that my dinner is prepared.”

  It was all Clara could do to be still as the warden went to the sofa and grabbed the blond prisoner. She was dragged up to her feet and pushed forward. The warden tripped the girl until she was kneeling next to the coffin, her head bowed. Her hair fell forward, exposing the nape of her neck from the hairline down to the loose collar of her jumpsuit.

  Malvern struck like a snake. She might be slow and stiff, but where there was blood involved, there was always a way. Her broken fangs sank effortlessly through the flesh at the back of the prisoner’s neck, grating on the thick bones of her spinal column. The prisoner screamed and shook, tried to break free, tried to buck the vampire off her back, but Malvern’s fangs had a death grip on her, like a wolf’s jaws squeezing shut around the throat of a caribou. Malvern wrapped one spindly arm around the prisoner’s waist and pulled her close. That arm should have snapped like a twig, but instead it seemed to possess the strength of an iron bar. It stopped the prisoner’s convulsions and stilled her screaming as Malvern crushed her lungs and squeezed all the air out of her.

  In a minute it was done. Malvern dropped the corpse to the floor, having no more use for it. Then she climbed out of the coffin and walked over to the warden. “’Tis a treat, to meet ye at last, my dear,” she said, and leaned in to kiss the warden on the cheek. The warden closed her eyes and sighed as if she were being greeted by a lover after a long separation. “And for you, Miss Hsu, my feelings are none but the warmest.” She came gliding over toward Clara as if she would kiss her as well. Her face loomed toward Clara out of the gloom of the office like a scarred moon. There was a narrow stripe of blood on her chin.

  Clara did flinch then. The CO behind her grabbed her into a choke hold, then pinned her hands behind her back with his free hand, immobilizing her.

  “Ah, I understand. Ye’ll not find this face a pretty sight, not yet. Well, we’ll change that anon. For now,” Malvern said, standing up a little straighter, “there is my second course to consider.”

  The second prisoner on the sofa started to scream, even through her gag.

  14.

  Thank God,” Caxton said, stepping forward, out of the cell. “I thought he was going to kill me. You saved my life.”

  Harelip prodded the half-dead’s headless body with the end of her shotgun. She knelt down next to the corpse and touched its back. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said. She sounded like she was a long way away. “I thought it was Murphy I was shooting. I wouldn’t have used lethal force on Murphy, no matter what. I’ve worked with him for seven years.”

  “That thing was a vampire’s servant,” Caxton said, trying to explain. “When a vampire kills someone, they can—”

  “Murphy was no fucking vampire!” Harelip shouted.

  “That’s not what I was trying to say,” Caxton tried, in as soothing a voice as she could.

  Harelip turned and looked at the dead bodies on the floor of the SHU, and at the bodies in the cell behind Caxton. Her eyes stopped focusing for a second. Caxton had seen this before: most people, even hardened law-enforcement types, lost their reason for a moment the first time they saw the kind of violence that vampires or even just half-deads could create. Maybe Harelip had seen murder victims before. Maybe she’d seen people stabbed with shanks more times than she could count. But the kind of chaos the half-dead had created was still new for her, and it would take her a while to process it. Caxton just didn’t have the time to let her work through it on her own.

  “There will be more of them. They’ll send ten of those things next time. Or the vampire will come herself. You can’t stop a vampire with a beanbag round. We need to get the door closed. We need to lock down this unit. Right now.”

  “You giving me orders now?” Harelip demanded.

  “No. No, of course not. This is your show.”

  Harelip spun around and focused on Caxton. “You lie down on the floor, hands behind your head. We’re going to do this by the book.”

  “Listen,” Caxton said. “Your name is Worth, right?”

  “My name is fuck you, bitch,” Harelip said, breaking open her shotgun and taking a fresh beanbag round from a pouch at her belt. “I said get down on the floor, on your goddamned belly.”

  Caxton raised both hands to where the female CO could see them and dropped to one knee. “There are vampires in the prison. All that screaming—I know that sound. You must know who I am. I’m Laura Caxton. I’m the vampire hunter. I know all about vampires. I know how to keep us all alive, but you have to listen to me.”

  “And I damned well know you know who I am. I am your boss!” H
arelip screamed, jabbing her shotgun at Caxton like a spear. “I don’t know shit about vampires, maybe, but I know exactly what to do when I got a prisoner out of her cell and acting violent. You’re going back in your cell, and you ain’t coming out until this emergency is over. We’ve got a protocol for this.”

  Caxton knew that if Harelip put her back in her cell, she would be a sitting duck for the next vampire—or half-dead—to come into the SHU. She was absolutely certain that someone would come looking for her again. She had to do something, anything, to keep that from happening. “Your protocol must include calling for backup, right? You’re not supposed to do this on your own.”

  “I already tried calling central. Nobody’s responding. It sounds like there’s riots breaking out all over the facility.” Harelip shook her head. “You going to do what you’re told, or are we going to have a problem?”

  Caxton knelt down in front of the CO, her hands still up and visible. “We just need to think about this, okay? What’s the next step of your protocol? It’s got to be to lock down the unit. To close that door.”

  She looked over at the heavy reinforced door that was the only way in or out of the SHU. Harelip followed her gaze.

  “Shit,” the female CO said. She was breathing heavily. “Down. Now.”

  Caxton nodded and dropped to her belly, weaving the fingers of her hands together behind her head. She could just crane her head far enough up to watch Harelip run back inside her guard post and slam the palm of her hand against a big red button on her control panel. A buzzer sounded and the reinforced door started to slide along its tracks.