23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “This feels bad,” Caxton said, out loud, when she looked at the empty corridor that lay beyond. It was lined with doors, normal doors with doorknobs and everything. No one was guarding that hallway. There weren’t any guard posts watching the place where the hall turned a corner. “There is one door that’s open, and it’s completely unguarded. It feels like a trap.”

  “Don’t be such a pussy,” Gert said, pushing past Caxton to head down the darkened hallway. “I thought you were the big tough vampire killer, who never waited for backup, who went into vampire lairs with guns blazing—”

  “That’s when I had decent guns,” Caxton explained. “You know, assault rifles with cross-point bullets. One stupid move right now and both of us are dead. And you might have just made a stupid move.”

  Gert looked down at her feet as if expecting to find the floor littered with bear traps. “Nope, don’t look like it.” She marched over to the nearest door and, before Caxton could stop her, turned the knob and stepped through.

  “Wait, just—” Caxton called.

  “This one’s clear,” Gert said. “Just a bunch of boxes and shit.”

  Caxton stepped over to the door and brought up her shotgun. She stepped inside and swung the weapon from side to side, daring any half-dead to come jumping out of its hiding place. When that didn’t happen she went over to the pile of boxes and tore one open. It was full of cans of peaches in heavy syrup.

  “This must be a storage area,” Caxton said. She went to the next door down the hall and repeated her drill of sweeping the room with her shotgun before approaching the boxes inside. She broke open several of them and studied the contents. Powdered milk. Sliced beets. Sweet peas. The next room down was full of plastic-wrapped pallets of the plastic trays the cafeteria used.

  “We must be close to the kitchens—you store food near where you’re going to prepare it,” Caxton announced.

  Gert used her hunting knife to cut open a can of pineapple. She slurped a couple slices into her mouth and chewed noisily. “This is good stuff. How do they take good stuff like this and turn it into that shit they serve us at mealtimes?” Gert asked.

  “Maybe—maybe this is a positive thing,” Caxton went on, ignoring her celly “If this is a storage area, then there has to be a way for people to bring boxes in and out. They must off-load delivery trucks close to here—there might be a loading dock right here. Maybe that’s a way out.”

  Gert shrugged. “Kinda. The trucks come in through the main gate, then drive around the side of E Dorm. They gotta go through two gates on the way, and there’s a place where the hogs can blow out their tires if there’s a problem.”

  Caxton stared at her cell mate.

  “What?” Gert asked. “I been here a couple years. You think me and my old celly never talked about how we would break out? People see things, yeah, and they talk about them. Everybody wants to know how this place works. And how to get out.”

  Caxton laughed. She hadn’t considered that at all. “Okay,” she said. “So how would you do it?”

  Gert shrugged. “Well, first you have to fuck a guard. Some of ’em will do that, you know. They’ll come in the cell saying they’re gonna do a shank search, and then you just take your clothes off if you want to do it. You do that often enough, they start bringing you little things.”

  Caxton’s eyebrows went up. “Like what? Chocolate? Lipsticks?”

  Gert rolled her eyes. She threw her can of pineapples into a corner, then headed for the next door down the hall and threw it open. “No, dummy,” she called, stepping inside. “Like rock. Crystal. You know, drugs. That’s how a lot of girls in here get high. But if they really like you, you can ask them for things. It can’t be anything too obvious. But there’s one kind of toothbrush you can snap off the head and it makes a real nasty shank. Or a good hairbrush, the kind that’s metal inside, you can do a lot with a piece of metal if you’ve got time to work it. Make lock picks, say. So either you take a screw hostage, which shouldn’t be too hard if his pants are around his ankles and his dick is hanging out—or you pick a couple locks outside the infirmary and that gets you as far as the wall. Then you just have to get over the wall. We never did figure that part out.”

  Caxton frowned and followed Gert into a room full of chairs. Hundreds of them had been stacked up inside, and in the dark the stacks made weird, spiky shadows. “I can see a couple of problems with us implementing that plan. For one thing, half-deads aren’t interested in sex.”

  “Yeah, well—hey. You know, it’s seriously dark back here,” Gert said. “Like, deep end of a coal mine dark.”

  “Not quite that dark,” Caxton said. She’d been in a few coal mines in her time.

  Gert tripped on something and caught herself against a stack of chairs. They rattled and squeaked loud enough to wake the dead. Caxton tensed herself, just by reflex, and grabbed the stun gun off her belt.

  When she felt a knife pass through the air inches from her face, she knew there was a reason she had grown so paranoid. She could just see the blade glittering in the low light. She estimated where the blow had come from and jabbed at it with the stun gun, then squeezed the trigger.

  There was a loud snapping sound of arcing electricity, and a high-pitched scream. Then the half-dead hit her hard with a fist to the stomach and knocked her down going past. She saw it silhouetted briefly against the doorway, and then it was gone.

  “Shit,” Caxton said. “I was hoping the stun gun would work on them like it does on living people, but no dice. Now we’re screwed.”

  Gert clucked her tongue. “No we’re not. It ran away, girl.” Caxton sighed in frustration. “You don’t know about these things. They’re weak, and cowardly, and they can’t shoot the side of a barn. But the problem is, they never work alone. That one wasn’t running away. It was running for help.”

  23.

  Caxton sped out of the storeroom and slid to a stop in the hall. If she could catch the half-dead before it reached others of its kind she could save herself a lot of trouble. She wasted a half-second peering through the gloom back the way she’d come before she heard running footfalls and realized that the half-dead was running farther down the corridor, past the storerooms and into the deep shadows at the far end. Cursing, she chased after the retreating sound—knowing that what she was doing was stupid. She couldn’t see a thing. She could trip over something on the floor and break an ankle. She could miss a turn in the corridor and run smack into a wall and break her nose or worse.

  She didn’t have much choice. She’d been very lucky back in the SHU. The package of sticky foam had provided her with a few extra hours of life, but there’d only been one of them, and she didn’t have any more tricks to play.

  Gasping for breath, she tore down the hallway anyway, spurred on by the same reckless instincts that had kept her alive for the last few years, kept her alive when so many vampires couldn’t say the same. She held her hands out in front of her, which would give her a split second’s warning if she was about to run into anything. Not enough time to stop herself, but maybe enough to prevent giving herself a concussion. She almost cried out in triumph as her fingertips brushed cloth and she realized that she was about to catch the half-dead. It collided hard with something in front of it, something softer than a brick wall anyway, and she threw herself onto it, grabbing for anything she could get a handle on, an article of clothing, a stray limb, hair.

  The half-dead had run into a door. It turned the knob just as she hit it from behind, and together they went sprawling through, into light so bright it dazzled Caxton’s eyes and momentarily blinded her.

  The half-dead went down, its face hitting a cement floor with an ugly crunch. Caxton’s fall was softened by its body, but still she felt the impact like a punch in the gut. She sucked air into her lungs and looked up, blinking away the glare in her eyes.

  She was in the kitchen, the same kitchen where she’d met Guilty Jen and her set. Back then it had been staffed by human prisoners cook
ing up meals for the other inmates for a few pennies an hour.

  Now it was full of half-deads.

  They were standing at counters chopping up vegetables or stirring huge pots on industrial stoves or carrying trays of food. One of them, who stood in the middle of the room with its hands on its hips, was wearing a white chef’s toque.

  Every single one of them was staring at her. They were as surprised to see her as she was to see them, and they had frozen in place, unsure of what to do next.

  That wouldn’t last.

  Caxton had no idea what Malvern had ordered her slaves to do if they found her lying facedown on the floor, all but defenseless. She could guess, however, that it involved a lot of knives and a very brief but furious attempt to hurt her as much as possible without actually killing her.

  She didn’t have to think very hard about what she needed to do. She grabbed the shotgun from under her shoulder and fired her plastic bullet into the neck of the one in the chef’s hat. The first rule of fighting dirty was that your first target was whoever appeared to be in charge.

  Fighting dirty was her only option. She watched as the chef’s head flopped backward on a nearly severed neck and then rolled to the side, behind a stainless-steel table covered in chopped carrots. She could hear the half-deads screaming in their obscene falsetto voices, asking each other what to do, shouting that they needed to call for backup, or just howling for her blood.

  Caxton broke open the shotgun and started loading another slug. Before she could even get it out of her makeshift bandolier, carrot peelings showered down on her head and she looked up to see a half-dead diving over the table to get at her. It had a steel mortar in its hand, the kind used to crush herbs in a pestle, and it was holding it like a club, ready to dash in her brains.

  She yanked the pepper spray out of her bra and squirted the thing in its bloodshot eyes. It screamed and rolled to the side, tearing and gouging at its own eyeballs. Half-deads might not feel pain the same way living humans did, but nobody enjoyed getting a full load of capsaicin right in the mucous membranes.

  She finished loading the shotgun just as a pair of half-deads came around the side of the table toward her. They were both armed with kitchen knives, wicked and sharp and glowing in the brilliant light of the kitchen. She had time to notice that one of the knives was still flecked with bits of chopped parsley.

  She fired a plastic bullet into the chest of one half-dead, then flipped the shotgun around and caved in the other one’s face with the weapon’s stock.

  The two of them went down. Whether they were fully dead or just wounded enough not to bother her didn’t matter. The point was that they had to stay down. She was much more concerned, anyway, with the six half-deads right behind them, who were all coming straight for her.

  She grabbed her baton. It wasn’t much of a weapon, just a hollow length of aluminum weighted at one end and with a rubberized grip at the other. Back when she’d been a cop, though, she had trained in how to use it.

  The course she’d taken had focused on how to avoid breaking bones with the baton, and how to make sure you never, ever killed anyone with it. Like everyone else in the class, she had made a note of all the things she wasn’t supposed to do in case she needed to do them one day.

  A half-dead armed with nothing but a steel ladle reached her first. It tried to duck under her arm, probably intending on grabbing her around the waist and knocking her over. She brought the baton around, grip end first, and jammed it in the soft spot just behind where its jaw attached to its skull. The half-dead screamed and dropped to the floor, where she stomped on it with both bare feet.

  She really needed to find some heavy boots. Preferably with steel-reinforced toes.

  The next half-dead had a cleaver that it brought whistling around to nearly cut open her throat. Maybe it hadn’t gotten the message that she was supposed to be brought in alive. Caxton grabbed its arm at the elbow and pulled it into its own swing, overbalancing it and sending it sprawling.

  A third one came at her from the side while she was recovering from that move. It hit her hard in the side with a tenderizing mallet. If it had connected with her kidney, that might have been enough to drop her, but it only grazed the bottom of her rib cage. The pain was still intense and it almost kept her from focusing clearly enough to bring the baton down on the back of her assailant’s neck. It curled away from the blow, which wasn’t quite hard enough to paralyze it.

  “Caxton, over here!” Gert shouted at that particular moment.

  Caxton had all but forgotten her celly’s existence until then—hadn’t, in fact, given her a thought since she’d started running down the dark hallway. She looked around wildly and saw Gert standing next to an open door on one side of the kitchen. It wasn’t the door Caxton had intended to use when exiting the area. She had planned, or half-planned, to escape into the cafeteria, a wide-open space that would be easy to brawl in. The door Gert had chosen had two things to recommend it, however. It wasn’t locked, and there were no half-deads near it.

  A kitchen knife flashed in the air and it was all Caxton could do to swivel away from where it was coming down. Instead of puncturing her chest, it flashed in front of her and sank deep into the back of another half-dead.

  Caxton took the opportunity to get away from her enemies, rolling under a prep table and then launching herself out the other side, knocking over a pile of dirty pots and pans as she hurried through the door where Gert was waiting, dancing in anticipation. Beyond the door was a darkened area full of wooden crates, stacked high in towers reaching toward a ceiling lost in the gloom. Caxton saw a forklift ahead of her, its bright yellow paint just visible in the darkness. Beyond that were— trucks. Big eighteen-wheelers, white and ghostly and huge.

  “This is the loading dock you were looking for,” Gert said. “Remember?”

  Behind Caxton the door started rattling in its jamb. Gert must have had the presence of mind to close and lock it after Caxton came rushing through.

  “Who’s got your fucking back, huh?” Gert asked.

  Caxton didn’t bother to answer. The door wouldn’t hold long. Half-deads were weak individually, but in groups they could bust down any barrier you put in their way. She needed a way to slow them down.

  “Help me over here,” Caxton said, and hurried toward one of the tall stacks of crates. Together they kicked and pushed at the crate at the bottom of the stack. The ones above their heads started to totter.

  “You’re supposed to say thank you now,” Gert insisted.

  Caxton gave the bottom box a last kick. One side of it collapsed, spilling thousands of white plastic sporks in individualized wrappers all over her feet. The boxes above it fell with a great dusty crash, collapsing and shattering against the door, burying it in shattered wood and dented cans of baked beans and fingerling potatoes. That might hold the half-deads a minute or two longer.

  Caxton sighed and looked around herself, trying to anticipate the next threat. When she saw Gert’s crazy eyes glowing in the dark, she remembered herself and managed to say, “Thank you.”

  24.

  Caxton had bought a little time. She needed more. She jumped on the forklift and started moving crates up against the door, a painfully slow process but the best way to make a strong barricade. The half-deads in the kitchen kept pushing and beating at the door, but they were making little headway. With half a ton of canned goods behind the door, there wasn’t much they could do. After a little while they stopped trying.

  Caxton frowned. “They gave up,” she said.

  Gert laughed. “That’s a good thing! What’s with you, huh? Every good thing that happens to us, you look like someone put cayenne pepper in your tampon.”

  “That’s because I’m a realist,” Caxton said. “Half-deads don’t just stop trying to kill you. It’s possible they’re just going around another way. Check these doors,” she said, pointing at a pair of large rolling doors leading into the kitchen. They were big enough to drive the forkli
ft through. Gert checked them both, bending low to look at their locks, then shook her head.

  “Both locked up tight.”

  Caxton rubbed her cheek absentmindedly It was possible the half-deads were going the long way around, and were going to come at them through the wide-open loading bay doors. Maybe there was something she could do about that.

  The loading dock had its own guard post. The door was locked, but Caxton was still riding out the adrenaline rush she’d gotten from fighting the half-deads in the kitchen. She slammed into the door with her shoulder, careful to hit it just above the lock. It held, but she heard something small and metallic fly out of the door and bounce away. She got a running start and kicked the door just below the lock, careful to keep her foot flat against the wood. The lock disintegrated and the door swung open, vibrating wildly on its hinges.

  Inside was a rolling chair sitting in front of a control panel. A pair of monitor televisions hung from the ceiling, angled downward so whoever was sitting in the chair could easily keep an eye on them. She studied the control panel, expecting to find a big red button, and was not disappointed. When designing the prison’s control systems the architects had at least known that there might come a time when someone needed to secure the loading dock without wasting time looking for the right controls. She slapped the red button with her hand and an alarm sounded as a chain-link gate rolled sideways across the open mouth of the loading bay. Weird shadows flickered across Gert’s face as the gate carved up the light. Caxton bent under the control board and found the cable that would let central command override the door controls. She pulled it, half expecting the door to roll open again because she’d pulled the wrong wire.

  It didn’t.

  “Now we’re safe, right?” Gert asked.

  “There’s not a lot of difference between being safe and being trapped, at the moment. But we have time to think. That’s the main thing I was after.”