23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  “Jen? Can you hear me?”

  Guilty Jen rolled her eyes and stared down at Caxton. “Gimme a second,” she said.

  “What? Jen, there’s something you should know, the—”

  “I said fucking hold on!” Guilty Jen cursed. Then she growled in frustration and released Caxton’s throat. Caxton started to get up, but Guilty Jen just kicked her in the face and she went back down, hard.

  Jen pulled the zipper down on her jumpsuit and reached into her panties. She brought out an expensive-looking Black-Berry and held it up near her mouth. “You got lousy timing, Featherwood. What the hell is going on that’s so important it can’t wait, huh? I got Caxton right where I want her, but I need about thirty seconds to finish things here. Okay? Is that too much to ask?”

  “Sorry, Jen, but the sun’s down. I thought you’d want to know. It’s getting pretty dark outside, so the vampires should be waking up any second. I don’t see them on any of the monitors yet, but I figured—hey. Do you want us to kill the girlfriend now?”

  Guilty Jen started to open her mouth to respond.

  Down on the floor, at that same moment, Caxton was staring at the gangbanger’s ankle. Guilty Jen was wearing prison-issue slippers, but her ankles were exposed. Caxton could see bare skin there.

  In a moment, Jen was going to tell her set to kill Clara. This was Caxton’s absolute last chance. Jen had already disarmed her of her hunting knife and her baton. Her shotgun was lying on the floor somewhere nearby, but there was no time to reach it and it wasn’t loaded anyway.

  Luckily for Caxton, she had one weapon left. Her stun gun. Striking like a snake, striking for Clara’s life, she lashed out with it and zapped Guilty Jen right in the side of her foot.

  The gangbanger dropped the BlackBerry as her whole body started to shake. Her eyes wobbled in her head as she staggered back and forth, trying not to fall down. Caxton released the gun’s trigger and scrambled up to her feet, pivoting before she was even upright to head for the stairs.

  Behind her Guilty Jen grabbed at the back of her stab-proof vest.

  Hell no, Caxton thought, but she didn’t waste time processing what was happening. She got to the stairs and started stumping up them two at a time, even as Guilty Jen came rushing up behind her.

  Caxton must not have given Jen a full charge from the stun gun, she decided. Or maybe Guilty Jen was just that tough. Caxton had heard stories about bikers who could take a full stun gun jolt and not even slow down, but they were always huge guys, big mountains of fat, and they tended to be extremely drunk or high when they did it. Guilty Jen couldn’t weigh more than one-twenty, but she looked like the stun gun had just pissed her off.

  Caxton sped past the second-floor landing. She didn’t bother looking into the cooling-down rooms there for Gert— there was no time. She kicked aside the votive candle that still burned on the landing and started up the last flight of stairs to the central command center.

  The woman who had called Guilty Jen had said she could see the security monitors. That could only mean that she—and Clara—were up in the top of the central tower. Caxton was sure of it. And Jen’s underlings would never dare to hurt Clara until they knew whether Jen had killed Caxton or not. They would follow her orders to the letter, lest they tick Jen off and suffer the violent consequences. Caxton was sure of it.

  She couldn’t afford not to be sure. This was Clara’s only chance.

  The door to the command center was right in front of her. She had only to reach up and turn the knob. The gang members in there would be surprised to see her, she could overpower them before they could really react, and then—

  Caxton’s legs went out from under her. Guilty Jen had grabbed one of her feet and yanked upward. Caxton went flying and bounced off the steps, sliding downward. Her broken arm collided hard with one wall and she sang out in pain as she slammed into the landing, her teeth grating on the concrete there.

  Above her, higher up the stairs, Guilty Jen stood looking down. She was breathing a little faster than normal, and there was a drop of sweat on one of her cheeks. One of her hands was striped with blood where Caxton had cut her. Otherwise she was unscathed. The door to the central command center was right behind her. Caxton would never reach it now. She wasn’t going to save Clara. She wasn’t going to save herself. In a few seconds she would be dead, and everything she had ever cared about and the one woman she had ever truly loved would be destroyed. This was it. The moment she’d known was coming for years now. The moment when her calling failed her.

  “I gotta say,” Guilty Jen told her, “you can hold your mud. Well. It’s been fun.”

  The gangbanger took a step down toward Caxton. Another step.

  Caxton couldn’t have fought back against a kitten just then. Pain, exhaustion, and utter desolation were all dragging her down. Telling her she was finished.

  Behind Guilty Jen the door to central command swung open.

  Guilty Jen just had time to look surprised as a snow-white hand reached around her face and yanked her backward, out of Caxton’s line of sight.

  There was a muffled scream. The instantly recognizable sound of a human neck being snapped, the vertebrae letting go one after the other like popcorn popping. And then a sound that Caxton found far too familiar. The squelching, sucking noise of human blood being drained from a grievous wound.

  The vampires were awake, alright.

  50.

  Maricón and Featherwood were arguing. Clara was paying attention with half an ear, just enough to hear if they started talking about her. Occasionally they did, and always it was to ask each other whether it was time to kill Clara or if they should wait for some kind of sign from Guilty Jen. The second that Laura was dead, they were supposed to cut her throat. Of course, they would have no way of knowing whether or not Laura was dead until Guilty Jen came up the stairs, probably brandishing some grisly trophy from the fight. Laura’s severed head, maybe, or just an ear to—

  Stop it! Stop it! Clara howled inside her own head. She had managed to make her face blank, and had even stopped shivering. But she couldn’t stop the fear from getting inside. She couldn’t stop thinking about the future. About the very brief future.

  The possibility that Laura might kill Guilty Jen never seemed to occur to the members of the set.

  Clara put most of her attention in front of her. If she concentrated on something else, if she really focused on the fine details, she could keep from crying in panic. It was the same trick, really, that she had used with her camera when she started feeling queasy at Malvern’s crime scenes. If you just focused on what your eyes were actually seeing, just the colors and the shapes, you didn’t have to think about what anything actually meant.

  So she studied the prison’s nerve center. Its controls. The prison had been updated frequently since it had been built, almost fifty years ago. The technology of warehousing human beings had advanced by light-years since then. Instead of tearing out all the old equipment and replacing it all at once, however, clearly the prison’s keepers had kludged everything together, shoving computer terminals in beside old black-and-white analog closed-circuit television equipment, stringing bundles of Ethernet cable as thick as Clara’s arm along the top of control panels in old worn steel cases and covered in black plastic knobs. Everything was patched together with duct tape and ancient wiring furry with dust, and all the controls had been relabeled with pieces of masking tape, written on with Sharpie pen. The communications board was a nightmare of dials and switches and toggles. The master control board that opened and closed the prison’s doors was simpler but built to be taken seriously, in black enamel lined with scuffed rivets. Big red panic buttons were everywhere, usually accompanied by labels that read in huge letters, DO NOT TOUCH! EVER!

  All of it was dead, of course, and perfectly silent. Without power the prison couldn’t breathe, couldn’t live the way it was meant to. So when the power did come back on, all at once, for a second Clara could do nothing but gasp as re
d and white lights flared to life, as sirens, buzzers, Klaxon, and alarms rang all over the boards, as every television screen and computer monitor in the cluttered space flickered back on at the same time.

  “—why it matters, she’s supposed to die anyway, and then we only have to worry about Marty, and he’s nothing. You and me could take turns having a nap, right, and—”

  “Hey,” Featherwood said.

  “—-just a thought, but maybe—”

  “Hey!” Featherwood shouted. “You! The girlfriend. What the fuck did you just do?” the burned woman demanded. She ran over to the control board, where Clara stood dumbfounded, and ran her hands over the dials and knobs, obviously unsure of how to turn it all off.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Clara said. “It just happened. Look— there.” She pointed at one of the television monitors. It showed a monochrome view of a claustrophobic room full of machinery. A shaky time stamp in the corner of the screen read 12:00:00 PWRHS, CAM 1. “That’s a view inside the powerhouse. Where the power comes from,” Clara explained. “Caxton cut the power, but the warden sent a bunch of half-deads to get it back online, somehow. I guess they found a way.”

  On the screen a couple of half-deads were giving each other a high-five. They looked up at the camera and waved cheerily, obviously proud of what they’d accomplished. On the floor a third one lay, its torn face blackened and its fingers burned down to little more than stubs. Clearly they’d had some trouble with the repairs.

  Maricón chose that moment to look out the window. “Just in time,” she said. “It was gonna get real dark in here soon. Look. The sun’s down.”

  Featherwood spun around. “Oh, shit. I didn’t realize this was taking so long. Goddamn it. I know Jen has a real hard-on for whacking this Caxton, but we cannot still be here when the vampires wake up. Here—how does this phone work?” she asked, looking at Clara. She had picked up a phone handset from the communications panel. “Do I need to dial nine or something?”

  Clara shrugged. “How should I know?”

  “You really are useless, aren’cha?” Featherwood grimaced and dialed a number.

  “What are you doing, loca?” Maricón asked. “You think she wants to be disturbed just now?”

  “I ain’t dying here just because she lost track of time.” Featherwood glanced over her shoulder as if worried Guilty Jen might be standing right there. From what Clara had seen of the set and how it operated, that was a pretty sane precaution.

  “Here, you,” she said, slapping Clara on the back, “get me a picture of what’s going on down there. Let me see if Caxton’s dead or not.”

  They all waited while Featherwood stared at the ceiling, presumably listening to the phone on the other end ring.

  Then Featherwood said, “Jen? Jen, what just happened? Jen? Is Caxton dead? Jen? Can you hear me?” She glanced at Maricón and said, “She picked up, so it must be okay, right? You—I said, get me a view of the first floor.” She smacked Clara in the ear, hard enough to really hurt. Clara studied the controls on the video board, looking for a way to figure out which camera showed what part of the facility.

  “What? Jen, there’s something you should know, the—”

  Maricón growled. “Ask her if we can off the cerda already.”

  “Sorry, Jen, but the sun’s down. I thought you’d want to know. It’s getting pretty dark outside, so the vampires should be waking up any second. I don’t see them on any of the monitors yet, but I figured—hey. Do you want us to kill the girlfriend now?”

  Featherwood held the phone away from her ear. “What the fuck? There was this really loud buzzing noise and now all I get is a dial tone. What happened, stupid?”

  She hit Clara with the phone. Clara shied away, but didn’t protest. “I think I have a picture for you now. This one says it’s of the Hub.” She flipped a switch and a monitor over their heads flickered. When the image cleared it showed a brightly lit room with many exits. The floor was littered with gun refuse—brass shell casings, an abandoned shotgun, craters in the floor tiles dug up by high-velocity machine-gun rounds. Lying in the middle of it, in a pool of blood, was Queenie. She was clearly very dead.

  For a while the three of them just stared at the image.

  “Holy fuck,” Maricón said. “What the hell happened down there?”

  Featherwood grunted. “She said she had Caxton down to rights. I don’t know any more than you fucking do, so shut up and let me think!”

  “Um, excuse me,” Marty said. It was the first thing Clara had heard him say in hours. The three women spun around to stare at the ex-CO, who had been sitting quietly in a rolling chair in the middle of the room. His hands were still bound, so Feather-wood and Maricón had figured he was harmless there. His eyes were wide now and sweat was rolling down his forehead. He was trying to kick his way across the room, but one of the wheels on his chair was stuck so he was just going in pathetic circles.

  Clara looked up and saw that one of the window panels of the central command center was missing. Not broken, not torn out of its frame. Just gone. Cold evening air was blowing in, lifting her hair and getting it in her eyes.

  Then the shadows in the room moved. Five white shapes stepped out of the gloom. And within the space of twenty seconds everyone but Clara was dead.

  51.

  Marty was the first to die. Malvern moved forward faster than he could push himself away in the chair and snapped his neck, turning his head almost all the way around. Before she could scream, Maricón was grabbed by one of the others, a female vampire in an orange jumpsuit with the sleeves torn off. The vampire started to lean in to savage Maricón’s neck, but Malvern flashed across the room and slapped the vampire away from the Latina gangbanger.

  “None of you shall drink here,” she said. “Ye can’t yet handle the madness the blood brings.” Then she choked Maricón until her face turned purple and her tongue stuck out of her mouth.

  “Stay the fuck back,” Featherwood said, brandishing a shank. Another of the new vampires—this one naked—ran up to the burned woman and laughed as the shank sank into her chest again and again. As it came out each time, the wounds were already healing.

  “You didn’t say it would feel this good,” the vampire growled. Then she spun around and slammed her forearm up against Featherwood’s throat, crushing her trachea. The burned gangbanger dropped to her knees and stared up at Clara as she struggled for a breath she couldn’t take.

  Another of the vampires, this one wearing panties and a stab-proof vest, was behind Clara before she could even turn to run. The vampire’s hands settled on Clara’s shoulders. It felt like she was being pressed down by heavy stones. “Kneel,” the vampire said.

  Clara knelt.

  “She lives, for now,” Malvern announced. The vampire holding Clara nodded but didn’t let her go.

  The five of them came and stood around her, looking down at her. They were beautiful, in a way. They were hairless and their skin was perfect, creamy smooth and perfectly white. Their bodies were tight and lithe, even Malvern’s. All the blood she’d drunk the night before agreed with her—she didn’t even look wrinkled anymore. The only reason Clara even knew it was Malvern was that one of her eyes was missing, leaving just an empty socket in her head. That, and that she was wearing her old mauve nightdress, which didn’t look like an empty sack on her anymore. Now it clung to the filled-in curves of her body.

  Otherwise they were all identical. Their ears were long and came to sharp tips. Their eyes glowed a dull red. And their mouths were filled with rows of wicked, translucent teeth.

  There was a clattering sound from the stairwell—from the stairs that led down to the Hub. It had to be Guilty Jen, coming up to announce that Laura was dead. Clara’s head dropped forward, her body unable to support its weight anymore.

  For a moment the five vampires just stood looking at the door. It didn’t open. One of the vampires moved to the door, eventually, and stared at it as if she could see right through it. The
n she tore it open, reached through, and pulled Guilty Jen into the room so fast the gangbanger barely had time to scream. The vampire holding her grabbed Jen around the waist and around the mouth, effortlessly holding her motionless. But then Guilty Jen did something Clara would have thought impossible. Writhing like a snake, she slid right through the vampire’s arms and ducked between her legs, rolling out the other side. Immediately she sprang upward into a combat stance, one hand held out in front of her like a blade.

  The vampire turned on her heel, her face lit up with excitement. Even Clara could see the deep cut in Guilty Jen’s palm. And the drop of blood rolling down her forearm.

  Malvern growled, no words at all, just a pure animal noise. The vampire facing Guilty Jen didn’t seem to notice. She was watching the hand, watching the blood. Malvern started to move, but the vampire got there first. Grabbing Jen again, she pulled the gangbanger’s hand into her mouth and bit down hard. There was a noise like someone trying to suck up the last bit of frozen strawberry from the bottom of a milk shake, and then Guilty Jen lost all her color.

  The gangbanger tried one last roundhouse kick. She got halfway through her arc before collapsing to the floor. She wasn’t breathing.

  The newly fed vampire dropped to her knees. Her chest shook and her hands grabbed at the floor, her fingernails digging deep channels through the linoleum tile. When she looked up her cheeks were slightly pink, as if she’d applied a layer of blush, and her eyes were on fire.

  Malvern hadn’t stopped moving. She collided with the blood-drunk vampire, hard enough to knock her over on her back. Then she raised one arm and brought it down like a pile driver, her fingers sinking into the vampire’s flesh as if through so much milk. There was a horrible sucking noise and an elastic snap and then Malvern pulled the vampire’s heart out right through her shattered rib cage.