23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  A baby killer.

  Gert had been locked up for her own safety. Because half the women in the prison wanted to see her dead.

  “Enough,” Caxton said again. “I don’t care,” she told Gert. “I don’t care what you did, that doesn’t matter—I mean, of course it matters, but—but you helped me, you were there for me when I needed you, maybe not in the ways I wanted you to be there, but—but—”

  Gert started to snore then.

  Caxton closed her eyes. She saw Clara, in her head, as plain as if she was standing right in front of her. She knew what she needed to do.

  Leaving Gert to sleep it off, she headed down the stairs toward the Hub.

  She took the hunting knife with her. And Gert’s shoes, as well.

  44.

  There was another votive candle waiting on the landing of the stairs leading down to the Hub. Its flickering light illuminated the doorway that led out into the bottom floor of the central tower, a very simple door painted white with a brushed aluminum knob. All Caxton had to do was turn that knob and walk through.

  She didn’t like walking into a bad situation without knowing what she was about to face. That wasn’t how you lived through moments like this. She had no choice, however. Not if she wanted to save Clara. Not if she wanted to finally kill Malvern, and be done with vampires forever. She checked her shotgun one more time, making sure it was ready to fire, making sure she had one of her few remaining plastic bullets loaded in the chamber. Then she reached out and touched the knob.

  She hesitated.

  The bulk of the warden’s half-deads were in there, she knew. So far she’d been very lucky. She’d only faced a few at a time, she’d been able to surprise them, mostly, and she’d had Gert watching her back.

  Laura Caxton wasn’t immortal, and she certainly wasn’t invulnerable. She’d been wounded many times in fights with vampires and half-deads. She knew it only took one knife wound to kill a human being, and she knew that if she marched out into the Hub, into a small army of the faceless abominations, she would be asking to die. She had her limits, and she’d finally reached them.

  She reached for the knob again.

  And then she turned it, opened the door, and stepped through.

  The first thing she saw in the Hub was a half-dead staring at her, surprised to see anyone come through that door. It was dressed in a prisoner’s orange jumpsuit and it was clutching a long-bladed kitchen knife close to its chest. Its face hung in tatters from its cheeks and chin like a dry, papery beard. She brought her shotgun up fast and put a plastic bullet into its chest, high up near its throat.

  It dropped its knife and sank to its knees, clutching at the wound. It shrieked, a horrible, high-pitched keening that hurt her ears.

  The second thing she saw in the Hub was the group of six more half-deads standing in the center of the room, huddled around a metal trash can full of burning paper. They all looked up when they heard the scream, and turned to see what was happening.

  They all had knives. These weren’t kitchen staff armed with ladles and rolling pins. These were soldiers in Malvern’s undead army. They were fresh, their bodies still mostly intact, and some of their faces were still partly attached to their skulls. One by one their knives came up, held high as if they were slashers in a horror movie. One by one they peeled off from the trash can and came running at her.

  Caxton waded in, knowing that in a knife fight the only good defense was to get inside your opponent’s reach. She dropped the shotgun, empty now and useless, and drew her baton with one hand and Gert’s hunting knife with the other.

  A heavy, serrated bread knife whistled through the air toward her face. Caxton stepped under it and sank the hunting knife into the first target she found—the arm that was swinging toward her. The half-dead it belonged to screamed and jumped back.

  Another half-dead came at her from her right. Caxton flipped the baton in her hand until she was holding it hilt first. The baton was collapsible and hollow, meant for inflicting pain rather than breaking bones. Its rubberized grip was the only solid part of its construction. She caved in a half-dead’s torn face and then brought her knee up between its legs, knocking it backward.

  A knife touched the back of her neck, sliding through her skin, and she gasped in pain. She was moving too fast for them to stab her effectively, but little wounds like that could add up in a hurry—if she started losing blood, if she started letting herself react to the little cuts, she would slow down and they would have her. She brought her head back fast and hard, pushing the knife there back, then whirled around and sank the hunting knife into the ear of the half-dead behind her.

  They didn’t die like human beings. They were already dead. You couldn’t knock them down with electric shocks or stun them into submission by hitting them hard on the forehead. They didn’t need to breathe, so tear gas and pepper spray had minimal effect on them. Having already been drained by the vampire who killed them, there was no blood in their bodies to spill. But they were weak, and cowardly, and they felt pain. If you hurt them enough they fell down, or ran away to lick their wounds, or just collapsed in pieces. The pieces kept moving but could safely be ignored.

  It was horrible work, it was butcher’s work. Their very existence was wrong, though, an abomination. You were doing them a favor, Caxton told herself, when you cut them to pieces. When you sent them back to dreamless sleep.

  Another knife in front of her. Caxton brought the baton around fast and smacked the wrist, knocking the knife free. Then she spun and parried another blow, and cut a half-dead across the eyes, blinding it.

  They kept coming. Had she taken out the original six? She’d lost count. She could hear footsteps running toward her. Reinforcements on the way. She needed to at least get her back against a wall, or they were going to mob her. It would all be over if they could effectively surround her. Their blows were slow and unsteady, but she only had two hands and could only counter two attacks at once.

  She glanced up and around—but before she could see anything useful, a knife sank right through her stab-proof vest.

  The vests were designed specifically for the kind of attacks COs met with in normal prison situations. They were very good at stopping shanks—sharpened toothbrushes, flattened-out spoons, at worst a blunt icepick. They could stop most commercially available knives, too, but by stop the designers of the vests had meant “Allow a blade to penetrate no more than one-quarter inch.” That was enough to keep one from being killed instantly by a knife wound, but it still allowed for a serious injury.

  Caxton gulped air and tried not to throw up. The knifepoint caught the small of her back, just left of her spine, cutting through skin and subcutaneous fat and just piercing the layers of muscle underneath. She felt something in her back give and she sagged to the side.

  She didn’t stop to think. Instead she roared and ran backward, pushing the knife in deeper but knocking over the half-dead behind her and wrenching the weapon from its grip. She kept going, fast enough to throw off any other half-deads who were trying to sneak up behind her, kept going until her back collided painfully with a cinder-block wall behind her. She was sweating hard, and panting, but for the moment she was free of the pack of murderous bastards.

  They took a moment to regroup and come at her again. She took the pause this gave her to firm up her grips on her two weapons, and to grit her teeth so she didn’t scream from the pain.

  Then the half-deads came at her like a brick wall. She didn’t have time to count them. She didn’t have time to look at what they were wearing, or where their weapons were, or what their faces looked like. Sometimes time slowed down at moments like this, when death was so close.

  Sometimes it didn’t. Caxton brought her weapons up in front of her chest, ready to push back the first attack. And then a noise like thunder rolling through the room made the half-deads jump and spin.

  One ravaged face exploded in a red cloud. An arm flew out of the group and smacked the wall next to w
here Caxton was crouching. Some of the half-deads just fell down like sacks of broken bricks. A few of them managed to run away.

  When they were gone, when the room in front of her was clear, Caxton saw what had happened. She just had time to swear before it happened again.

  There was a machine-gun nest built into the hub, a narrow guard post at the very center of the room with gun slits carved into its concrete walls. The smoking muzzle of a machine gun was sticking out of one, pointed right at her. Without any preamble it started roaring and spitting bullets at her, hundreds of them per minute.

  45.

  Guilty Jen peered out through one of the narrow windows of the interrogation room. “Not long now. Maybe an hour until the sun goes down. Then we get out of here, right, girls?”

  Queenie said, “Fuckin’ yeah.” The others seemed to agree with the sentiment.

  Clara glanced over at Marty the former CO again, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. She had bought herself a little time, it was true. By convincing Jen to hand her over only to Malvern herself, she had kept herself alive a little longer.

  Now it seemed like it wasn’t going to make any difference. Fetlock had to be out there somewhere. He’d had half the day to gather SWAT teams and get in place. And yet she’d heard nothing from him on the BlackBerry, nor had she or any of the others noticed if the prison was being noisily surrounded by cops. What was holding him up?

  Maybe she’d been a fool to put her faith in her boss. She knew how slow he was to take action. He thought of it as being cautious. She also knew what Laura thought about people who were overly cautious when dealing with vampires. They might, it was true, survive through the night. But other people just died in their place.

  Fetlock had been willing to bide his time when Malvern was at large, murdering people every night. He had wanted to let her have time to make a mistake, to give herself away. Instead he’d just given her time to work the kinks out of her master plan, to make sure of every little detail in her bid to take over the prison. Now—how many lives would he waste, waiting for the perfect time to strike? He had to be out there. He knew what was going on. But he wanted to make sure he, too, had every little thing just in place before he made his move.

  Clara knew that the second the sun went beneath the horizon, her life was effectively over. She had long since given up hope that Laura would rescue her. Or maybe… maybe there was one tiny shred of hope left, but it was undernourished and rapidly fading away.

  She looked up at the table as the BlackBerry rang once more. She stared at it, then at Guilty Jen. Maybe it was Fetlock, saying he was on his way—

  “Hello?” Jen asked, pressing the button to set the handheld to speaker mode.

  “Hello, Jen. Your friendly neighborhood warden again, just checking in.”

  Guilty Jen slapped the table so hard the phone jumped. “I told you, bitch, we’re not negotiating with you. I want to talk to the cunt in charge, and I’m more than willing to wait until she wakes up.”

  The warden chuckled. “Oh, I heard you the first time. I just wanted to bring you up to speed with the latest news. I know you and Laura Caxton are old friends, and I thought you’d like to know I just ran into her.”

  Clara’s heart sped up. She made a point of not staring at the phone with wide eyes, not wanting to give away her excitement.

  “She didn’t kill you, I see,” Guilty Jen replied. “I knew she was weak.”

  “She might have, but I’m more slick than you give me credit for. Anyway, I left her heading down to the Hub. You know where the Hub is, don’t you, Jen? It can be reached easily from anywhere in the prison. Wherever you’re holed up, for instance, can’t be more than a few minutes away from there. All the doors between you and the Hub are open, by the way. Not that you have any reason to go down there, of course.”

  “That’s right,” Jen said. “You’re not going to catch me out like a sucker. I’m not going down there just so you can ambush us and get your hostage back. What do you take me for, an idiot? Anyway, Caxton’ll be dead in an hour. When the vampire wakes up, she’ll suck her blood.”

  “Are you so sure of that, Jen? You’ve never actually met Miss Malvern, have you? I have. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with her, actually. Enough to know she appreciates a nice ironic turn of events. She doesn’t want to kill Caxton. She wants to turn her out. You know, make her a vampire.”

  “Bullshit.”

  The warden was silent for a moment. “You can believe what you want. But I want to remind you of something. The first time you met Caxton, when you jumped her in the kitchens— she didn’t kill any of your set in that fight. She didn’t want a murder rap on her jacket. Even pulling her punches, though, she managed to make mincemeat out of every one of your girls.”

  “If your hogs hadn’t come in before I had a chance, I would have—”

  “You might have taken her, I know. You’re a real hard case, I get it. But when she’s a vampire, she’ll be ten times as strong and tougher than you can imagine. And she won’t have a single compunction left when it comes to killing worthless scum like you and yours. Just a thought I wanted to share.”

  Every pair of eyes in the room was staring at the phone. Slowly, as each brain worked through what had just happened, the eyes turned toward Guilty Jen.

  Clara knew what the sociopath was thinking. It might as well be written on her face. Laura Caxton had made a fool of her. She had disrespected Jen in a way that could not be forgiven. Under the very strange code of ethics that Jen followed, that meant Laura Caxton had to die. It would be preferable if she could die at Guilty Jen’s hands, but if Malvern wanted to shred her to pieces in a very painful way, that would have been enough.

  If Malvern had different plans for her, though—if she wanted to make her stronger, more dangerous, and nearly bulletproof—

  At the best, Guilty Jen would never get her revenge. At the worst, she would have a merciless bloodsucker dogging her trail for the rest of her life, which wouldn’t be a very long time.

  “Stop looking at me, Featherwood,” Jen said. She chewed on her lower lip.

  “Sorry, Jen,” Featherwood stammered, looking away.

  “I don’t like being stared at.”

  Featherwood shook her head. Clara wasn’t sure, but she thought the burned girl looked scared of something. “I’m not, I swear I’m not looking at—”

  Guilty Jen hit the white girl hard enough to knock her halfway across the room. Featherwood’s head bounced off the wall and she slid down into a heap, but Guilty Jen was already on top of her, punching her again and again in the stomach.

  Queenie and Maricón grabbed at her shoulders and tried to haul her away. For a while Guilty Jen fought them off, still punching her underling over and over, but eventually she let them pull her clear.

  Featherwood sat up very slowly. She was bleeding from her mouth and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She looked down at the floor and wouldn’t lift her head, even when Guilty Jen said, “You got something to say?”

  With a clearly painful effort, Featherwood gathered herself together enough to wheeze, “I’m sorry, Jen. I shouldn’t have looked at you like that, I—I’m sorry.”

  “It’s alright,” Guilty Jen said. “Don’t do it again.”

  “That’s good, keep your people in line,” the warden said, and Clara jumped at the sound of her voice. She hadn’t realized the BlackBerry was still transmitting. “You’ll need them all if you’re going to take down Caxton.”

  “Shut up, bitch,” Jen said, and grabbed up the PDA. “Did I not tell you, I’m not dealing with you?”

  “Fine. Be that way. I have to go now, Jen. Good luck.” The warden ended the call abruptly.

  Guilty Jen growled and shoved the BlackBerry into her pocket. “I’ve made my decision,” she said, “but it’s got nothing to do with what that dried-up old twat wants. This is about what I want, and that’s what—”

  A sudden noise interrupted her. The sound of a gunshot, comi
ng from quite nearby.

  “What the hell was that?” Marty asked. Then he turned his face away as Guilty Jen stormed toward him. She didn’t bother to hit him—maybe all she’d wanted was to see him flinch.

  “It don’t matter what that was,” Guilty Jen said. She glanced around the room, staring long and hard at Marty and at Clara. “Alright,” she said, “pack up. We’re moving out.”

  46.

  For a while it was all Clara could do to stay on her feet. Queenie was dragging her along by one arm and didn’t mind twisting it whenever Clara stumbled or slowed down, even for a second.

  Guilty Jen’s set moved quickly and silently. She’d trained them well. They had their marching orders—follow Jen—and they didn’t need additional supervision. Clara shuddered to think what they would be capable of if they did manage to escape from the prison. She was a cop, of sorts. Enough to know that a cop’s worst nightmare is not some raving killer on the loose or a drugged-out maniac with a machine gun. It was a well-organized group of criminals with a leader smart enough to know exactly how to operate on the wrong side of the law and get away with it. A killer on a rampage could do a lot of damage in one night before he was inevitably gunned down, but a smart gang could do immeasurable amounts of harm over a period of years before they were caught.

  When she managed to get her feet properly under her and match her stride with Queenie’s, she knew what her next duty was. “You’re making a mistake,” she said, calling out to Guilty Jen, knowing she was asking for trouble. She needed to do something, though, needed to make a case for Laura no matter how pointless it seemed. “You’re letting the warden lead you around by the nose. Do you really think she has your best interests at heart? And killing Caxton won’t gain you anything right now. It won’t get you out of here any—”