23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  She stretched and rubbed at the bridge of her nose, trying to wake herself up. Maybe she could go around to one of the dorms, and make her way through to—

  Suddenly she stopped in place.

  “What’s going on?” Gert asked, grabbing her hunting knife from where Caxton had placed it under the cot.

  “Shh,” Caxton hissed. She’d heard something. Someone screaming. It sounded like it came from the far side of the barred gate. It hadn’t sounded like a half-dead. It sounded like a human being, in real trouble.

  Whoever they were, there was nothing she could do for them, she told herself. But she kept listening all the same.

  36.

  The BlackBerry rang again. Clara pressed her hands over her pocket to try to muffle the sound, but she knew there was no point.

  In the darkness she could feel people moving around her. Human people. Half-deads, like vampires, were unnatural creatures. You could tell when they were nearby because the hair on your arms stood up. Your skin prickled with gooseflesh, your body reacting to the sheer wrongness of the undead. The people gathering around her were human. She could only sense them by the small sounds they made. The noise of slippers dragging along the cement floor. Their breathing.

  They said that when your sense of vision was impaired—say when you were in a perfectly dark room—your other senses grew stronger. It helped a lot if you were terrified that you were about to die, Clara discovered.

  The handheld rang a third time. It felt like time was slowing down. Coming to a stop. Clara expected her life to flash before her eyes.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” someone said, in the shadows. It was not a pleasant voice, even if it had the normal human timbre. Someone else laughed and it was definitely not a nice laugh.

  Clara reached into her pocket and took out the BlackBerry. Its screen lit up the darkness for a few feet around her, but not enough to reveal what was lurking in the shadows. Just enough to hurt her eyes. She fumbled with the handheld, looking for the button that would answer the call.

  “Put it on speaker so we can all hear it,” the voice from the shadows instructed.

  They could see her. She was sure of that. They could see her face in the light of the BlackBerry’s screen. She nodded carefully. Then she looked at the glowing keyboard and pressed the appropriate buttons.

  “Hsu? Hsu, are you there?” the BlackBerry demanded.

  Clara bit her lip. It was Fetlock on the other end. “Uh. Hi. Deputy Marshal, this isn’t a good time—”

  “So I gather,” he said. “Glauer wasn’t here to get your message. I sent him to fetch our lunch while we planned what to do about your absence. Lucky for you I monitor all of your calls, both incoming and outgoing. It sounds like you’re in real trouble. I’ve called the local authorities for Tioga county. They’re waiting for me to take the lead on any assault on the prison. As soon as Glauer gets back we’ll head up there—it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. Can you hang on that long?”

  Clara gritted her teeth. “I’m not alone right now,” she said, hoping Fetlock would take the hint. “I can’t really talk.”

  “I need information, Hsu, if I’m going to put together an appropriate response strategy,” Fetlock insisted. He was not the type to take no for an answer. “Tell me about Caxton. You said you went up there to visit her, well, that’s very commendable of you, I’m sure. You get a gold star for being a good girlfriend. It turned out to be lousy timing, though. You said Caxton was at large. Has she killed any vampires yet?”

  “No,” Clara said. “She—”

  A hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed the Black-Berry away from Clara. “She’s going to have to call you back, pig. Right now she’s too busy begging for her life.” Before Fetlock could say anything more the shadowy hand pressed a button to end the call. The BlackBerry’s screen went dark.

  A moment later it started ringing again. That would be Fetlock calling back, Clara knew. Wanting more information, even when it wasn’t exactly convenient. The handheld was switched off and then disappeared from view.

  “I’m warning you,” Clara said, drawing her pistol. “I’m a federal agent. Assaulting me could get you in real trouble, you could—”

  “What?” someone asked. She thought it was the one who had laughed before. “We might go to jail?” A face loomed out of the darkness. It was grinning from ear to ear. At first Clara thought it belonged to a half-dead after all; the skin on the face was raw and irritated. Then she realized it was just burn scarring. The woman wore a pair of earrings in the shape of swastikas—no, Clara saw, those weren’t earrings. They were tattoos. Gaping in horror, Clara raised the pistol and pointed it directly at the woman’s burnt face. “I will use lethal force if you don’t—”

  A bare foot came in from the left, fast and hard enough to break boards. It hit Clara’s gun hand and she screamed in pain. The pistol clattered to the floor.

  “I didn’t break any bones,” the owner of the foot said. She stepped into the light and just smiled at Clara. It was the kind of smile you might see on the face of a shark as it circles a drowning sailor. Clara was disoriented by the pain in her hand, but not enough to miss the fact that this new assailant had her feet slight apart, in a martial arts fighting stance, and one fist balled at her waist, ready to punch at the slightest provocation.

  There were tattoos on this one’s face, dark blue prison tattoos that looked as if her eye makeup had melted and run down her cheeks. Clara looked closer and saw that they were in the shape of teardrops.

  “I’m Guilty Jen,” the woman said, and gave Clara a slight bow.

  Clara had taken four free lessons in Tae Kwon Do before deciding she didn’t have the discipline to keep going. She’d thought they would at least teach her how to punch somebody, but instead they had just made her stand in various postures and move her feet back and forth, over and over, for hours at a time. She had, though, learned one valuable lesson about unarmed combat. If someone bows to you like that, whatever you do, don’t bow back. That just means you want to fight them.

  Judging by the precision and the force in the kick that had disarmed her, Clara very, very much did not want to fight this woman.

  “Special Deputy Hsu,” Clara said, keeping her posture perfectly straight.

  Guilty Jen’s smile broadened. She relaxed her fighting stance a little. “So you’re Caxton’s famous girlfriend. Well, well, well. How lucky for you that we found you just now.”

  37.

  She looked younger. And skinnier,” someone said. Someone still back in the shadows. These people were smart enough not to all reveal themselves at once.

  “What are you talking about, Queenie?”

  “You know, in that movie. There was a whole scene of them making out. My man must have watched that scene a hundred times.”

  Clara managed to blush, even though it felt like all the blood had drained out of her head and into her feet. She’d never been thrilled with the television movie they’d made of Laura’s exploits. It was called Teeth: The Pennsylvania Vampire Killings and the actress they’d gotten to play Clara had been Japanese and underage. She’d been beautiful, frankly, where Clara always thought of herself as cute. “They took a lot of liberties in the movie,” she said. “It wasn’t really like that at—”

  “But you are Laura Caxton’s significant other?” Guilty Jen asked. “Think carefully before you answer. If you lie to me I’ll break a bone in your foot. Not so you can’t walk, mind. Just enough to make it hurt like fuck.”

  Clara swallowed convulsively. “I’m her partner,” she admitted.

  “Caxton and I have bad history,” Guilty Jen said. “She messed up my set pretty bad. Before I could fuck her back the hogs came in and ruined everybody’s fun. Fucking hogs.”

  “Hogs?” Clara asked.

  “The guards here, man, you know.” Queenie supplied.

  Guilty Jen nodded. “So now I have a respect deficit with her, which is no good when I�
��m trying to organize things and do business in this place. If she was here right now I would just break her face and we’d be even, maybe. But she isn’t. You are. Now, I can get my respect back by putting my mark on you. I have my girls train you—you know what that is, a train?”

  “No,” Clara said.

  “That’s when they take turns fucking you. The nastiest way they can think of.”

  “Oh.”

  Guilty Jen’s face clouded with thought for a moment. “You might like that, though. ’Cause you’re a lesbo. So maybe I just kill you, that’s a pretty clear sign that Caxton can’t protect her own. That she’s my bitch. This is a very tempting proposition.”

  Clara squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think logically. “But—but—but you wouldn’t even be telling me this,” she said, “if you didn’t have something else in mind.”

  “Yeah, good point,” Jen said, as if she hadn’t considered it before. “See, things have gotten weird in here lately. Did you notice? All these vampires and shit?”

  Women on three sides of Clara laughed at that.

  “Bleeding everybody dry, killing some. Making lots of new rules.” Guilty Jen raised her hands as if to say, what can you do? Vampires will be vampires. “Now, I considered offering my services to that vampire, but I’m guessing she’s not looking for lieutenants. What she is going to be looking for, real soon now, is hostages. She’s going to have SWAT teams on top of her, and maybe worse, maybe National Guard if that boss of yours thinks you’re in trouble. Worse still, she’s going to have Caxton hanging on her tail, and maybe Caxton isn’t as tough as me, but I understand she’s hell on bloodsuckers. So our friend the vampire is going to need somebody to serve as a human shield. That’s where you come in. I hand you over to her, she gives me what I want.”

  “Which is?” Clara asked.

  “Not much. I just want her to hold the door open while me and my set walk away. We’re going to appreciate this shitstorm from a distance.”

  Clara licked her lips. “Maybe we can arrange the same result a different way. Maybe I can talk to my boss. Get your sentences commuted, get you out of here before anything happens. I can get you some money too, and a car. That’ll get you a lot farther than anything Malvern can offer.”

  Guilty Jen’s smile vanished from her face. “They teach you that in cop school? Hostage Negotiation 101, offer ’em all kinds of shit, get ’em on your side, then when it all turns out to be a lie you shoot ’em in the back while they’re running away, thinking they’re home free? Yeah, I bet they teach you that trick. What they should teach you is that I am not fucking stupid.”

  Guilty Jen’s hand lashed out and Clara’s head snapped back, fast enough and hard enough that she worried she would get whiplash. It took a second for the pain in her cheek to arrive, a hot blossom of agony that grew and grew.

  “Okay,” Guilty Jen said. “Lesson learned. Let’s move. Featherwood, what’s it look like out there?”

  The burned woman was over near the door. She cracked it open for a quick peek, then said, “Looks clear. Those ugly sons of bitches were running around like welfare moms on a first Monday two seconds ago, but now they’ve cleared out.”

  Guilty Jen nodded. She scooped up the pistol off the floor and put it inside her jumpsuit, deep enough that no one could just reach in and grab it away from her. “We need to get someplace we won’t be interrupted. Lucky for us, my crew here’ve been in and out of Marcy so many times they got the place memorized. There’s an interrogation room up on the second floor of the admin wing. There won’t be anybody there, and it’s nice and quiet.” She gave Clara a knowing glance. “Soundproofed.”

  The women under Jen’s charge moved quickly and silently through the dark corridor that led back toward central command. They acted like a trained military unit, effortlessly responding to their leader’s hand signals. There was one exception, though, and it wasn’t a woman. Jen had a CO under her care as well, a living human prison guard still dressed in his navy blue uniform. He had some bad cuts on his face and his hands were bound behind him in plastic handcuffs. He moved like it hurt him to do so. Jen made him keep pace with the others by repeatedly jabbing him in the kidneys with his own collapsible baton. Occasionally he would shoot a glance Clara’s way, as if imploring her for help, but every time she returned his gaze he just looked away as if he were embarrassed to have anyone see him in this condition.

  Clara could sympathize.

  Jen led them down a side corridor and through a pair of swinging doors. For a minute they were outside, walking under a covered walkway. Barely a hundred yards away was the wall, separated from them by first fenced-in exercise yards, then three layers of razor wire. Clara looked up at a watchtower, hoping there would be someone there, someone she could signal to, but even if there was someone up there it would probably be a half-dead, and she didn’t want them to know where she was.

  Back into the prison, then, back into darkness. They climbed a flight of stairs without any light at all, Clara banging her shins again and again but not daring to even gasp in pain. At the top of the stairs they passed through a short corridor and into the promised interrogation room. It wasn’t much to look at. There was a simple wooden table and two chairs. One chair had nylon restraints dangling from its arms and coiled around its legs. The walls were covered in a flocked wallpaper that would eat up any sound. Light came from a pair of very narrow windows in one wall. The glass inside the windows was reinforced with chicken wire, even though the windows were too thin for even a child’s hand to pass through.

  There was a stain on the table that could have been a very old coffee spill or dried blood. Guilty Jen hopped up on the table and pulled her legs into an easy lotus position.

  “Who are you?” Clara asked, when the door had been closed. “I mean—how does someone like you end up doing all this?”

  Guilty Jen just smiled. “Featherwood, Queenie, you get lunch going. I’m starved. Maricón, you’re on guard duty.”

  The woman called Maricón was a Latina wearing pronounced lipstick and mascara—at least on her good eye. The other one was covered in a thick bandage.

  “Okay,” Clara said. “Can you tell me why you call her that? I know that word, it’s Mexican slang for a… for a male homosexual.”

  “I call her Maricón because she wears so much makeup, she looks like a drag queen.” Guilty Jen’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t get any ideas, though. She plays for the straight team. So do we all. If you try to cop a feel or kiss one of us—”

  Clara held up her hands in surrender. “Don’t worry. I’m not exactly turned on at the moment. What about Featherwood, how did she get her name?”

  “That’s what the Aryan Brotherhood call their women. It’s a nicer version of what they call each other—Peckerwoods.”

  “Charming.”

  “Queenie gets her name the same way. In the black gangs they call their women queens. That’s a little more like it, right?” Guilty Jen smiled. Her hands rested palm up on her folded knees. It looked like a posture she’d spent a lot of time in.

  “Will you tell me how it is that you and your set aren’t locked up right now? I didn’t think the warden was the type to just leave one of the cells unlocked.”

  The male CO looked up as if his name had been called.

  “Marty here helped us out. Didn’t you, Mart-o? He brings in the drugs, I sell ’em, we split the money. Until now. Now I’m on top. Yesterday, when everything went bad, right? Marty came and saw me. He asked me for protection. Can you believe that? He knew that COs were going missing all over the place. He tried using his radio for help, but he just got the sound of some asshole giggling in his ear. He knew I was his best bet. So he came to our cell—me and my set, we all got jungled up together in one cell, sweet, right? That took some cash money to arrange. Marty came to our cell and we invited him in. He locked himself in there with us and sat tight. Some dude with his face hanging off came by looking for him, but we hid him under some bedding an
d eventually the dude went away. Then, when the coast was clear, we used Marty’s keys to get out of the cell. Now he’s one of us, one of the set. Of course, we had to beat him in, a little, and one or two of the girls had some fun with him, but he’s my property and I’ll keep him safe. You just think of me as your mommy, Mart-o. Mommy’s gonna keep you all safe and clean, won’t let anything happen to you, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” Marty said, enthusiastically.

  “Yes, what, bitch?”

  The CO glanced at Clara, but only for a split second. “Yes, Mommy.”

  Guilty Jen laughed. “Marty’s down. Marty’s my Tiny Gangster, gonna come work for me outside when this is over. He sure as hell can’t ever work as a screw again, not after what he’s done the last twenty-four hours.”

  Queenie and Featherwood had been hard at work preparing a meal while Jen was talking. None of them had eaten since Malvern took over the prison, and they needed their strength if they were going to keep moving. They had produced from somewhere a carefully prepared tin can and a couple of packets of ramen noodles. One of the cans had been wrapped around and around with toilet paper, maybe a whole roll, meticulously pulled tighter and tighter until it looked as dense as wood. When it was lit on fire it burned slowly but with a good orange flame that didn’t give off too much smoke. Soon water inside the can was boiling and the women dumped in the noodles, adding bits of hot dog and a couple dozen packets of ketchup. The result was a nasty, gooey mess that bore some distant resemblance to spaghetti and meatballs. The amount of time and energy it must have taken to get the meal together astonished Clara, but then she supposed when you were serving a long prison sentence there wasn’t much to do except wrap toilet paper around cans and steal extra ketchup from the cafeteria.