She also knew the warden was a tough bitch and that it would be a close thing.
She couldn’t just run away, though. The band was still on her arm and she was pretty sure it had enough juice for more than one shock. If she ran now she would just get zapped again. She bent down over the warden—slowly—and went through her pockets. She found the special key that locked the band onto her biceps and removed it easily. She dropped it on the floor and then hurriedly went back to the warden’s pockets and took out the woman’s BlackBerry—and her pistol, a SIG Sauer P228.
Clara stared at the pistol for a while. She even pointed it at the warden’s face. Surely if anyone deserved to be shot while they were down it was this woman. She had betrayed her trust and put over a thousand women at risk. She had fed some of her prisoners to Malvern. She had ordered half-deads to kill Laura.
Clara couldn’t do it. She put the pistol in her pocket.
It wasn’t that she didn’t think the warden deserved to die, though. It was because Laura wouldn’t have done it. Laura had no compunctions about killing monsters, but she’d never kill a human being, no matter how much they deserved it. Clara couldn’t imagine doing such a thing, either.
So instead, she wrapped the electroshock band around the warden’s arm and locked it tight. There was a heating vent in one wall of the room. She slipped the key through the vents and listened to it clunk and ding its way down into the bowels of the prison’s ventilation system.
Then she went to the room’s door, checked to see no one was looking, and slipped out into the hall, a free woman.
34.
The hallway was almost pitch dark. There were no windows anywhere along its length, and the only light came from an open door down at the far end. A fan of murky light spread outward from the doorway, striped or occluded now and then as a half-dead passed in front of it. Clara could hear them talking down there in their grotesque high-pitched voices. They sounded confused and frightened.
Clara was glad she wasn’t the only one. She headed in the other direction, feeling her way along the wall. She wanted to run. Her body wanted to move, to get out of there as fast as it possibly could. She couldn’t afford to make any noise, though. If she were discovered now the warden would probably have her killed just for revenge.
Her fingertips brushed the molding around a door. She stopped and leaned close to the door and listened, held her breath and waited to hear anything from the other side. When she was sure that no one was behind the door, she searched for its knob and then turned it slowly. The door’s hinges didn’t creak as it opened. That was a small blessing, and she was thankful for it.
The room behind the door was almost as dark as the hallway. There was a single narrow window high in one wall that illuminated some uninteresting furniture—a desk, a few chairs. A computer sat on top of the desk, as well as a multiline telephone, but she knew they wouldn’t work, so she didn’t bother with them. Laura had cut all power to the prison, it seemed. Clara wondered how the prisoners in the dorms would be reacting. They must be going crazy wondering what was going on.
She couldn’t help them. Or rather, she could. She was going to help everybody, but not directly. Clara climbed under the desk and took the warden’s BlackBerry out of her pocket. It was a high-end model with a full keyboard and a built-in camera. The screen lit up when she touched the space bar and it displayed a list of email subjects. Clara didn’t have time for those. They would be important evidence later, when the warden was brought to trial, but for now all she needed was a cell phone. It took her a while to figure out how to just dial a phone number, but eventually she got Glauer’s cell number typed in and hit send.
The phone on the other end rang once, twice, three times. Clara bit her lip and nearly switched off the phone when she heard footsteps passing outside the room. This was too important, though. Even if she got caught in midcall, she needed to get the word out to Glauer and Fetlock. On the fifth ring the call went to voice mail.
“This is Glauer. You’ve reached my official phone. If this is personal, call me back on my other number. If you don’t know that number, it can’t be too personal.”
Clara cursed silently and waited for the beep. She had practiced what she was going to say and didn’t have to think about it. “Glauer, it’s Hsu,” she whispered. “I’m at SCI-Marcy Malvern is here and she’s taken over, with the assistance of the warden, um, Augusta Bellows. The whole facility is under their control and they’re recruiting prisoners to become new vampires. Caxton is here, alive, and at large inside the prison walls, but she’s alone and unarmed. I’m currently at large but very much alone and definitely outgunned. Get Fetlock. Get the state police. Get anybody and get up here.”
She hit end and pressed her forehead against the plastic screen. How long would it be before he thought to check his messages? It was a workday and she’d called his work phone. Why hadn’t he answered it? It must be sitting in his car or, worse, maybe he’d forgotten it when he went in to work that morning.
She heard someone out in the hall and froze in panic. Just footsteps, and they kept going past. She wondered how long it would take Franklin or one of the other half-deads to find the warden. When she recovered from her shock, would she scream for help? Clara couldn’t have much more than five minutes.
She couldn’t stay where she was. They would search every door on this hallway for her, and this room would be the first place they looked. She needed to get to a different part of the prison without being detected. She supposed there must be heating ducts in the ceiling. People in the movies crawled through heating ducts all the time.
Then she realized that if people did it in the movies all the time, the person who had designed the prison might have seen it done and therefore known not to make the heating ducts big enough even for a petite woman like Clara to get into. She remembered the heating vent she’d thrown the key into: it had been no more than eleven inches across. So that idea was out. She looked up at the window above her, but it was reinforced with chicken wire and had bars on the outside.
She was going to have to chance the hallway. There was no other way.
Clara went to the door and went through the same routine she’d used when she entered the room. She held her breath and listened, and only when she was sure there was no one outside did she open the door and step outside. She closed the door silently behind her and pressed her back up against a wall.
She couldn’t go down the hall toward the open doorway. She was certain there would be half-deads down there. So she had only one direction she could head. It saved her from having to make a difficult choice. She pressed on, deeper into the darkness, until she couldn’t even see shadows, just uninterrupted blackness.
She very nearly walked right into a wall at the end of the corridor. Her outstretched hand knocked into it and she had to force herself not to keep walking, to stop in midstep so she didn’t collide with the wall face first. When she’d stopped completely she let out a long sighing breath.
“Dupree,” someone said. “Is that you?” The voice was high and hysterical.
Slowly Clara reached toward her pocket where she’d put the warden’s pistol. It would be suicide to try to shoot now, of course—there was no way she could hit anything in the darkness, and the noise of the shot would draw all kinds of unwanted attention.
“Dupree?” the voice asked again. From closer by.
She could try to slip past the half-dead. Clearly it couldn’t see her—it had only heard the sound of her hand hitting the wall, or maybe her exhalation. If she knew where it was she could just step around it and—
“Gah!” she said, a noise of pure revulsion. A hand had come out of the darkness and touched her left breast.
There was no thought process for what she did then. Clara’s hands moved of their own volition, obeying a reflex as old as time. One hand grabbed at the half-dead’s clothes and pulled it close to her. The other hand went over its mouth. Then she brought up her knee, right int
o its crotch.
It struggled and tried to bite her hand. Its own hands grabbed at her lapels, at her hair. In pure animal fear Clara grabbed its head in both hands and twisted, trying to break the thing’s neck. She felt bones grinding against each other inside the rotten envelope of its flesh and felt its hands grab ever more desperately at her, but she had the element of surprise and she kept twisting, clamped her hands tighter around the half-dead’s head and twisted and twisted—
And then the head came off in her hands. It felt like she was holding a squishy bowling ball. She heard the half-dead’s body slump against the wall, but she couldn’t see anything.
The head kept trying to bite her fingers where they covered its mouth. Clara threw the head away from herself and heard it smack the floor and go rolling down the hall.
Time to run, she thought. She’d been as quiet as she could, but surely someone had heard her outburst or the half-dead calling for Dupree. Clara pushed forward again and found another doorway. She pulled it open and ran through. The hallway beyond was better lit, though not much—an emergency light box was shedding a fading yellow glow from somewhere far down its length. She couldn’t see any half-deads moving through the murky light, so she ran forward, her sensible shoes clopping loudly on the floor. Up ahead she saw a sign and as she got closer she could just read it in the gloom:
INFIRMARY
Stab-Protective Vests
Must Be Worn Beyond
This Point!
There was a massive barred gate beyond the sign. She was just going to have to find a way to get it open. She couldn’t go back, couldn’t—
She heard two things then, and both of them made ice cubes chatter in her blood. One was a cough, from somewhere in the shadows. The other was the BlackBerry which chose that moment to start ringing in her pocket.
35.
Get the fuck off of me,” Gert moaned, but her heart wasn’t in it. Caxton opened another bottle of dish detergent and squirted it into her celly’s eyes.
“This is going to feel pretty good in a couple of seconds,” Caxton explained as she rubbed the detergent into Gert’s eyelids and then used a scrunched-up paper towel to scrape at the girl’s cheeks and mouth. Gert kept trying to push her away, but Caxton held on tight. The pepperballs had left a thick pasty residue all over Gert’s face that was burning her skin. It had to come off, one way or another.
When she’d scrubbed her celly’s face enough she let Gert lie back on the cot and sat down herself in a folding chair. She was exhausted. She used to be able to go without sleep for days at a time, but in the SHU her body had gone flabby and her muscles had started to atrophy. Just fifteen hours to go, she thought. At the end of Malvern’s deadline, either she or the vampire would be dead. Either way, she could rest then. In the meantime she had plenty of work to do.
“What the fuck,” Gert said, rolling over on the cot. It had taken Caxton far too long to revive the girl and get the PAVA residue off her face, but it had to be done. “What happened? What did you just do to me? My mouth tastes like ass.” She smacked her lips. “Soapy ass.”
“You were hit in the face with a couple pepperballs from that robot gun,” Caxton explained. “I got you out of there, but you were suffering from respiratory distress. You weren’t breathing very well. So I found the prison’s infirmary and brought you inside. I had a hell of a time getting the door open. Then I had to clean you up to get the pepper out of your system. The soap you’re tasting is dishwashing detergent. You can’t just wash capsaicin off with water—that makes it worse. You need to scrub it off with soap. Milk works, too, but I couldn’t find any. They keep a ton of detergent on hand here, probably because there’s so much pepper spray in the prison that accidents happen all the time. I tried to be gentle.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Gert said. She tried to open her eyes and grunted in pain. She brought her hands up to rub at her eyes, and Caxton grabbed them and pushed them back down to her sides.
“You’ll just grind it in. Trust me—it’s nasty stuff, but I’ve worked with it before.”
“Back when you were a cop.”
Caxton nodded. Then she realized Gert couldn’t see her, so she said, “Yeah. I’ve used pepper spray on people, a couple of times, when I needed to stop them from running away. It’s supposed to be more humane than shooting them in the legs.”
“I think next time I’ll try my luck with a bullet.” Gert managed to open one eye and stare up at the dark ceiling.
Caxton handed her an ice pack. The infirmary’s refrigerator had gone down when the power was cut, of course, but it was well enough insulated that things in the freezer were still frozen when she opened it. “This’ll help, too. It’ll take some of the swelling down.”
Gert’s face was a mess, puffy and bruised. There was no permanent damage, though. That was the point of pepperballs, of course. They belonged in the middle of what police called the continuum of lethality—a rainbow of options for controlling subjects that went from demanding in a firm voice that they stop all the way up to gunning them down with automatic weapons. Pepperballs were closer to the latter, but you could live through a direct hit and eventually be fine. Well, most of the time. Caxton had read about Victoria Snelgrove, a journalism student who had been caught in the middle of a riot in Boston where the cops had used pepperballs to control the crowd. The cop who shot Snelgrove hadn’t even been aiming for her, but he managed to put one through her eye. It had broken through the bone behind her eye socket and caused massive bleeding in her brain. Ambulances couldn’t reach the scene fast enough because the panicked crowd wouldn’t let them through. The cop who fired that pepperball had received a forty-five-day suspension without pay.
Gert had been lucky. One of the pepperballs had hit the ridge of her eyebrow. An inch lower and it could have killed her.
“You didn’t just leave me there,” Gert said, sounding surprised. “You went out of your way to help me out.”
Caxton shrugged. “You were helping me when you got hit. It seems fair.”
Gert shook her head. “No, sure. But you have somebody else to save, somebody you care about a lot more than me. Wasting time on me maybe makes it harder to save your girlfriend, right?”
“I don’t see it that way,” Caxton said. It was just a small lie, she told herself. “What are you getting at, Gert? Anybody would have done the same.”
“You ain’t been inside long, you think that,” Gert snorted. “There’s girls in here wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. And there’s some people who… maybe you shouldn’t help.”
Caxton shrugged. “Who, like Adolph Hitler?”
Gert laughed, but she looked like she had something on her mind. “Yes, and maybe some people who aren’t as bad as that but who did real bad things. Things that can’t be forgiven.”
Caxton shook her head. “I don’t know who I am to judge who’s worth saving or not. Lie down and rest for a while. We’ll move again soon, but you need to take it easy.” She went over to a desk on the far side of the room. She found paper and a pen and started making a map of the prison, sketching out its layout based on what she’d seen of the place from outside and what she knew about prison design, which wasn’t much. SCI-Marcy was surrounded by a squarish wall with watchtowers every hundred feet around its perimeter. The prison itself was made up of eight long buildings: the five dorms, the infirmary wing, an administrative wing, and the cafeteria and kitchens, which also incorporated the SHU. Each building radiated outward from where they were connected at one end to a central tower, like rays coming out of a central sun. At the top of the main tower was the central command center. Outbuildings and covered walkways connected the buildings here and there, making the prison look from above like a half-finished spiderweb.
It was designed to be easy to get around, if you were a guard. If you were a prisoner it quickly became a maze of locked doors and heavily armed checkpoints.
She couldn’t see any way around it. If she could rescue Clara and
save Malvern before nightfall, that was fine. Malvern couldn’t put up a fight during the daylight hours. She would be trapped in her coffin, unable to move, unaware of what was going on, and Caxton could just reach in, pluck out the vampire’s heart, and destroy it as she saw fit. Malvern would never even wake up. But if, as was becoming more and more likely, she needed to fight Malvern during the hours of darkness, she was going to need guns—real guns, loaded with real bullets.
There were machine guns up in the watchtowers, but there was no way for Caxton to get through all that barbed wire without a pair of wire cutters and a lot of free time. There had to be an armory full of rifles and handguns inside the prison as well. She had no concrete proof of where it might be located—it wasn’t the kind of thing the guards were likely to tell a prisoner—but looking at her crude map, she saw that it could only be in one place. A riot could break out in any dorm, at any time. The COs didn’t ordinarily carry lethal firearms on their persons, because it would be too easy for a prisoner to take a gun from an unsuspecting CO and kill him with it. The real guns only came out in emergencies—but that meant they needed to be available at any time. If the warden decided that the less-lethal elements of the continuum of lethality had been tried and found wanting, that deadly force was a reasonable response to prisoner violence, then the guards would need to arm themselves in a hurry and from a central location. The armory had to be on the ground floor of the central tower.
Which was where all the half-deads were, of course. It would be the most heavily defended spot in the prison, she was sure.
It was going to be her next stop.
She put down her pen and got up. Now she just had to figure out how to get there. The central tower was just on the other side of the infirmary, she knew. It was no more than a couple hundred yards away. But Caxton had already made a quick check of the prison’s medical wing. There was the pharmacy, where she and Gert were holed up, and beyond that a single long room full of beds. Empty beds. There must have been patients in some of those beds when the prison was overrun, but they were gone now, probably shoved in cells in one dorm or another where they could be more easily watched. Beyond the room of beds was a barred gate that she would never be able to get through, not without heavy-duty cutting equipment she didn’t have.
23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale Page 17
