23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “You want some of this?” Jen asked, after she’d had the first serving.

  Clara had to admit she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten anything since before her visit with Laura the day before. “Yes,” she said. “Please.”

  “Too fucking bad,” Jen said, and laughed, spraying bits of wet noodle in Clara’s face. “There ain’t enough to go around.”

  Clara had been wondering who this woman was, who had the discipline and willpower to master a martial art and the natural leadership abilities to form a gang out of women of different races and backgrounds, and yet still had been desperate enough to resort to criminal activity for her livelihood. Now she was beginning to see.

  Guilty Jen was a sociopath.

  38.

  Gert’s finger strayed along a row of boxes on a high shelf. She had a playful, quite innocent expression on her face.

  It was not lost on Caxton that they were holed up in the prison’s pharmaceutical dispensary nor that Gert had a history of substance abuse. Caxton was a cop and she knew all about people with drug problems. “Don’t,” she told her celly and got back to work.

  Gert shrugged. Whistled a few notes. And then went back to browsing the shelf. “There’s some good stuff in here.”

  “I’m sure it’s fantastic. You don’t need it. Why don’t you come over here and help me? It’ll make it easier not to get distracted.”

  Gert thrummed her lower lip. Then, as if she were just playing with it, she picked a box off the shelf and closed her hand around it.

  “Did you think I didn’t see that? What have you got?”

  Gert pouted. “Like I said, good stuff. As in, good for you. It’s just Excedrin, okay? That’s like aspirin, and I have a really bad headache.”

  “There’s real aspirin over on this side,” Caxton said. “Excedrin is full of caffeine. Anyway, if you do have a headache it’s just because you haven’t eaten in a long time. Have some of this.” Caxton had found a brown bag in the bottom of the dispensary freezer, under all the bottles of insulin. At first she’d been wary to open it, but when she had she’d found inside a green salad, a soggy hamburger, and a beautifully ripe, non-rotten apple. One of the doctors or nurses who worked in the dispensary had apparently brought their lunch to work and never had a chance to eat it. Caxton had been ravenous, enough to eat it all herself, but she’d been very careful to only take half and leave the rest for Gert. It remained untouched on a table next to Caxton’s elbow, beckoning to her.

  “I’m not hungry. Anyway, what’s wrong with a little caffeine now and again? Millions of people all over the world drink coffee all day long and nobody gives them shit for it. You’re one of them, aren’t you? I bet you got a real Starbucks habit, Caxton. I bet you’re just jonesin’ for a double tall frothy latte mocha grandecino, or whatever.”

  Caxton had never been much of a coffee drinker. She would, in fact, have given one of her weapons in exchange for a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. She wasn’t about to admit it.

  “So how is it fair, huh? I need a little help sometimes. I got clinical depression and shit, um, chronic fatigue syndrome. I got drains on my energy you could not believe, and out of all the people in the whole world, I am the one, the only one, who can’t have a goddamned motherfucking Excedrin?”

  Caxton sighed. She remembered the sign posted on their cell door. STIMSON, GERTRUDE. NO STIMULANTS.

  “And besides, we’re not exactly in the middle of chill time, here. We are in one bona fide emergency situation. You and I could both benefit from getting amped up right now. It improves your reaction speed. Makes you stronger and faster and it helps you think. I could really use something right now to help me think, how about you?”

  Caxton sighed again.

  Gert had a point. A very good point. Which was always the problem with junkies. They weren’t insane. They were quite rational. They just needed something their bodies couldn’t supply on their own. Needed it enough that they felt that need, all the time, in the back of their heads. Like a little man back there, a quiet, unassuming little man who just every once in a while would raise one finger in the air and say, “Excuse me, but if you aren’t too busy…” Junkies could develop extremely convincing reasons why they needed their fix. They could explain those reasons patiently to anyone who was listening, at great length, and eventually, always, they could wear down the resistance of whoever it was they needed to get past, whoever it might be who had access to the drugs.

  Unless that person happened to know that the calm, reasonable person in front of them was, in fact, a drooling drug fiend underneath.

  “You did methamphetamine outside, right? How’d you do it? Snort it? Inject it? Pills?” Caxton asked.

  Gert’s face didn’t betray her at all. She didn’t look embarrassed or like she’d been caught out when she said, “You know, however it came. I wasn’t particular.”

  “And now you have bad teeth. At the age of twenty-two. You’ve probably got all kinds of health problems—liver, kidneys, pancreas. How long have you been clean?”

  “Since I been inside. I had a little party, I guess, the night before my trial date came up.” Gert twisted her head around until she wasn’t looking at Caxton. “Listen, I heard all this stuff before. Every day I’m clean is a day of freedom, right? But that’s a fucking joke. You can’t be free if you’re locked up. So what does it matter? I’ll be clean outside, then I’ll really be free. I will show you, I will show the world, that I can do it. And then I will find some nice guy, some guy with green eyes, maybe. I always wanted a baby with green eyes and red hair. And I will be the best mother who ever lived. But that’s all in the future. That’s if we survive through the night. Right now, I’m looking at almost certain death. I’m looking at the inside of a prison, still, even though we kinda broke out. I cannot imagine why I would try to be squeaky clean right now.”

  “No,” Caxton said. She pulled a strap through a buckle and pulled it tight with a loud snap.

  “It’s just headache medicine!”

  “No. Come here.”

  Gert shuffled closer. She threw the box of Excedrin down on the cot next to Caxton. Caxton grabbed it and shoved it inside her jumpsuit. It was important not to leave it out where Gert could see it. Where she might try to grab it again.

  “Here,” Caxton said, and handed a pair of restraints to Gert. “Look at this. It’s pretty simple. Just a nylon strap, about twenty-eight inches long. Holes all down its length. On one end there’s a buckle.”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” Gert said.

  “Good. This is a restraint. They used them to keep the prisoners in their beds while they were here receiving treatment. There are a whole lot of them in this box.” She kicked the cardboard box at her feet. It was big enough to hold a wide-screen television set. “Watch what I do.” She took two of the restraints and fed the loose end of one through the buckle of the other. She closed the buckle on a hole about six inches along the restraint, then tied the dangling end in a tight knot around the buckle. When she was done she held up the joined restraints and snapped them. “As good as a climbing rope, right?” She repeated the process with a third restraint. She already had six good lengths going. When she joined them together they would form a rope twenty feet long. “We need about fifty or sixty feet. Help me.”

  Gert sat down hard on the cot and picked up a couple of restraints from the box. Caxton watched her carefully as she put them together.

  “Good.”

  “You know, caffeine can improve your manual dexterity,” Gert suggested. “I could do this a lot faster if I—”

  “No,” Caxton said, and snapped another pair of joined restraints.

  Eventually they had a rope.

  Caxton led Gert out into the hospital ward, where the empty beds lay on either side of a narrow aisle. Together they looked up at the ceiling. The hospital wing was the same height as the other buildings that comprised the prison, but unlike the other buildings only had one floor. That meant the ceiling o
f the ward was twenty-five feet above their heads. A complicated tangle of pipes and lighting fixtures ran along the ceiling, suspended from thick metal brackets every few feet. Almost hidden among the lights were a row of skylights. There were no bars on the skylights—the architects of the prison had probably thought no prisoner would ever be able to get up there, not without a stepladder. Caxton had searched the infirmary from end to end and had completely failed to find a stepladder of any kind.

  Her rope was going to have to do instead. She hoped it would hold her weight.

  “Find me something heavy but small to use as a weight,” Caxton said, unreeling her makeshift rope length by length. Gert came back with a metal bedpan. “Fair enough,” Caxton said. There was a hole punched in one side of the bedpan, perhaps so it could be drained or attached to a catheter. Caxton fed the end of her rope through the hole, then tied it tight.

  She looked up at the skylight closest to her. There was a thick pipe running alongside it, as well as a cluster of light fixtures. Caxton paid out a little line, got a good swing going, and cast for the pipe.

  The bedpan sailed up between the lights and clanged off the side of the pipe. Gert ran madly to avoid getting hit as it came back down.

  Caxton hadn’t really expected to get the range right the first time. She took a step back, gathered her line, and tried again.

  The bedpan went over the pipe this time—and got stuck. It was wedged between the pipe and the ceiling.

  Gert started to cheer, but Caxton shook her head and pulled hard on the rope. The bedpan came loose and fell down to hit one of the beds. It bounced off and clanged on the floor. “Third time’s the charm,” Caxton promised. She reeled in her line, swung, and cast. This time the bedpan went right through the gap between the pipe and the ceiling and came down the far side, dropping like a stone. Caxton let the line play out between her hands, then grabbed it before it could get away from her.

  “Tie that end to one of the beds. That should be heavy enough to act as a counterweight,” Caxton told Gert. When her celly had done as she asked, Caxton grabbed hold of the other end of the rope and started climbing.

  The buckles creaked. The nylon straps groaned. It held. It was even better than a real rope, because it had hand-and footholds every few feet along its length. She was feeling pretty good about herself when she reached the pipe and got an arm around it. Getting what leverage she could, she swung and kicked at the skylight. It was made of dirty, sun-damaged transparent plastic and it cracked when she hit it, even with her bare feet. One more swing and she knocked it right out of its frame. The way to the roof was clear.

  “Gert, your turn,” she called. “It’s an easy climb. You know how to climb a rope, right?”

  There was no answer. Caxton looked down and couldn’t see Gert anywhere in the ward.

  “Gert!” she shouted. “Gert! You get out here right now, or I’ll leave you behind!”

  Gert came running out of the dispensary when she heard that. She looked up at Caxton with the eyes of an innocent fawn, who had definitely not been doing anything bad.

  There was nothing Caxton could do about it. She told Gert how to climb the rope, and waited for her celly to join her up by the pipe.

  39.

  Maricón winced a little as the needle dipped in and out of the skin on the back of her hand, but she didn’t make any noise. Queenie kept glancing up at her face as if worried she were hurting Maricón. Then she would dip the needle into Maricón’s hand again and leave another dot of ink.

  The needle, a normal mundane sewing needle, was held in the barrel of a ballpoint pen, and wrapped around and around with a piece of thread that had been soaked in the ink. The ink cartridge from the pen had been cut open to get the blue ink inside, which was mixed with cigarette ash for color and saliva to keep it from drying up as the thread was dragged through it again and again until it was dripping.

  The only concession toward hygiene the women made was to hold the needle under a lighter flame until it was black with soot—which darkened the ink, as well. Clara had cringed more than Maricón the first time the needle pierced the Latina’s skin.

  This was going to be a cover-up tattoo. Maricón had several tattoos already, some of them done professionally but a lot of them done in this same makeshift fashion. Her prison tattoos tended to be simple, usually just a string of letters—coded gang marks that you had to know how to interpret. “ALKN” meant Almighty Latin King Nation, Maricón had told Clara, while “PV” stood for Por Vida, for life, meaning Maricón would die before leaving her gang. The one Queenie was covering up read “BO,” for Brown Only, and that was unacceptable in Guilty Jen’s mixed-race set. So Queenie had drawn a new logo over the faded letters. The new tattoo read “GJ,” for Guilty Jen, with a crude teardrop dangling from the hook of the J.

  “You’re up next, Featherwood,” Maricón said, squinting a little as the needle scratched on her hand. “That Nazi bullshit on your ears.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Featherwood said. She was standing guard by the door, listening for the sound of anyone moving out in the hallway. “Anyway, maybe it should be Marty who gets the next one.”

  The former CO, who was crouching in one corner as if he was afraid he was about to be beaten, didn’t even look up. Clara had tried to talk to him briefly before she realized he wanted to be left alone. When she asked him if he was okay, if the set had hurt him too much, Guilty Jen’s eyes had lit up. She was just waiting for a new sign of weakness from him, something she could use to twist him deeper into her clutches.

  Now she’d found an opening. “What about it, hog? You down with me, you gotta wear my name on you somewhere. How about on your forehead, would you like that? Or the palm of your right hand. You can get a lot of respect for ink on your palm, you know. It’s supposed to be the place it hurts the most.”

  Marty glanced up but studiously avoided making eye contact.

  “How about on his balls?” Queenie asked, and the women had a good laugh at that. “You know,” Queenie added, “if he can find them again.”

  Clara thought she should try to defuse the situation. If Marty reacted, the women would hound him mercilessly—but if he didn’t react at all, they would probably hurt him just to make him react. “That’s real loyalty,” she said, louder than she’d meant to. “Getting Maricón to cover that one up.”

  Guilty Jen turned very slowly to look at Clara. Then she got down from the table, moving like a cat, and came over to where Clara sat against one wall. She started to crouch down in front of Clara, then swung around to make clawing motions at Marty while stomping one foot on the floor.

  The ex-CO jumped. Not much, but enough to get another laugh.

  “My bitches are color-blind,” Guilty Jen told Clara. “That’s the first thing you get rid of when you join my set. It don’t help nobody, hating on people of color. That right, Featherwood?”

  “That’s right, Jen,” Featherwood agreed. “You helped me see that.”

  “I’m impressed,” Clara said. “I know most gangs in prison gather around racial lines, because—”

  “What the boys do in their gangs is bullshit, and it means nothing to us. When you got a dick, you lose the ability to think straight.” Guilty Jen crouched down easily next to Clara. “Sometimes I think you dykes have the right idea. No men around to fuck things up, no men to play stupid games about who can piss farther or make the smellier fart. Women join gangs for protection, that’s all. They don’t really care, deep down, if your hair is straight or kinky. They know life is more complicated than that. Oh, they can memorize the bullshit lines the men hand them, about racial purity this, and ten thousand years of history that. They can talk it back to you all day. But they join the gangs in the first place because they want somebody to watch their back. So they don’t get stabbed over some drama they didn’t even start.”

  “Is that why Queenie joined up with you?” Clara asked. “Or Maricón?”

  “No,” Guilty Jen said. “The
y came to me because they wanted some respect. They wanted to respect themselves. They wanted to share the respect I get. I taught ’em that, that there’s more to life than being safe and protected. Anybody can take a beating if they have to. Maybe they don’t believe it at first, but they learn. Not just anybody can fight back, get revenge. That’s where respect comes from. These girls know I’m tougher than anybody else they’re likely to meet. They know if somebody disses them, somebody puts a hand on their stuff or maybe grabs their ass in the showers, they know I’ll be there to kick that somebody’s teeth out. That’s respect.”

  Clara looked at the women of the set. Featherwood’s face was scalded. Queenie’s jaw was puffy and bruised, and when she tried to eat it hurt her too much to chew. Maricón was wearing thick bandages over one eye. “You must have kicked a lot of teeth out for these three.”

  “You shoulda seen Carol, she had her leg snapped,” Maricón said. “And Shanice, she’s gonna get plastic surgery on her nose, they said, ’cause they didn’t set it until it was too late. They were both in hospital when this shit came down. Thanks to your girlfriend.”

  Clara’s mouth formed an O. “I see,” she said. “It was Caxton who did all this. And yet—the last time I saw her she was just fine.”

  Guilty Jen’s face remained calm. Her eyes didn’t widen, her nostrils didn’t flare. But down by her side, she brought the fingernails of one hand together and then flicked them apart violently. This was clearly a sore spot.

  “She’ll get what’s coming to her. She’s going to die, there’s no question about that. In fact,” Guilty Jen said, and she started to smile again, “I think we might be able to do a little worse than just kill her, now that we have you. Like maybe, we get her to come in, turn herself in, whatever, for the vampire, and then, just as she’s about to get her blood sucked, I cut your throat while she watches. That would work for me.”