23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

11.

Caxton shoved against the cell door with her shoulder, but it wouldn’t move. The electronic lock had been released, but the mechanical lock was still in place. Someone was going to have to pull the lever on the outside of the door before she could get out.

There were two people on the floor of the SHU, two candidates who might let her out, but neither of them seemed like much of a bet.

“Murphy?” Harelip said, speaking into her microphone. She hadn’t turned off the intercom system, so her voice came down from the ceiling of Caxton’s cell. The female CO sounded worried but not panicked. Probably because she didn’t yet realize that the male CO stalking around the SHU wasn’t Murphy anymore. “What’s going on?”

“Where is she? I’ll find her on my own if I have to,” the thing said, approaching a cell door and peering in through the window. Its voice was all wrong. Male COs cultivated a gruff, deep voice that commanded respect. The voice this thing used was high-pitched and sounded like it came from just the far side of sanity.

“I called down to central, but there’s no reply. I’ve got chatter all over the open bands. People are freaking out! Is it a riot? It sounds like somebody broke in,” Harelip said. She was getting more scared, which Caxton thought was probably a good thing. Eventually she might notice the big difference between Murphy the CO and the thing that had invaded her SHU.

It didn’t have a face.

Oh, it had eyes, and a mouth, and maybe part of a nose left. But its face would be hanging down in ragged strips of skin, peeled away from its cheeks and forehead by its own fingernails. Murphy was dead. He had been dead, anyway, until a vampire called him back and gave him a second chance.

The vampire hadn’t done him any favors. The second chance only lasted about a week—reanimated bodies rotted away with incredible speed, and after a day or two they were already falling to pieces. They were also required to obey any vampire who commanded them, without fail, without question.

Perhaps the worst of it was that they came back without a soul. They knew constant pain, and they knew that what they had become was wrong. One look in a mirror and they understood they were not meant to exist. They tore off their own faces. They hurt themselves, and they took a joy in hurting others (especially with knives—they loved knives). They were vicious, and crazy and had no moral compunctions whatsoever.

Caxton, following a long tradition among American vampire hunters, called them half-deads. When you went looking for vampires, you found half-deads, usually lots of them. And when you found half-deads they were already trying to kill you.

“Murphy! The call came through for EIP stations,” Harelip went on. Caxton knew the acronym stood for “escape in progress,” the prison guard’s equivalent of a red alert or all hands on deck. “My two boys ran to comply.”

“Yes, I know,” the thing that had been Murphy said. “I caught them coming the other way. They’re not coming back.” It tittered as if it had just made a little joke. It grabbed the lever on the front of a cell door and yanked it back. It took two tries. Half-deads weren’t well coordinated, or particularly strong. Eventually it got the door open, however. Then it pulled a long hunting knife out of its belt.

Knives. Always with the knives. Half-deads loved knives, hatchets, cleavers, anything sharp. This was a hunting knife, six inches long and painted green—so the white-tailed deer wouldn’t see it glint when you pulled it out in the woods—and had a nasty serrated edge and a wicked curved point. The half-dead brandished it with obvious pleasure and stepped inside the cell.

“Stimson,” Caxton said. “I mean, Gert, please. Do you know the name of the CO in the guard post?”

Gert frowned. “Worth, maybe? Or it could be Wendt.”

Caxton shook her head. “Hey,” she shouted, pounding on the cell door. “Hey, CO! Hey, Screw! You’ve got to stop him!”

Harelip glanced in Caxton’s direction. “Wall up, fucker,” she said, and the speaker in the ceiling popped and whistled.

There was a scream from inside the open cell. A prisoner in an orange jumpsuit came staggering out, blood slicking down one side of her leg.

“Murphy!” Harelip shouted. “Murphy, what are you doing?”

Another scream. Then the half-dead came back out of the cell. There was blood on its knife and all over its stab-proof vest. “That wasn’t Laura. Laura? Where are you, Laura?” it sang. “I’m going to find you if I have to cut my way through every last one of these cells. Miss Malvern wants to see you.”

Harelip finally got what was happening, or at least some of it. She stood up inside the guard post and grabbed a shotgun. Then she hit a button on her control board. A beeping alarm went off and the door of the guard post started to slide open.

Then the alarm stopped, and it started to slide shut again.

Harelip looked as if she hadn’t been expecting that.

The half-dead went to the next cell in line and pulled back on its lever, using both hands this time. The door slid open on its rails. Both of the women inside came rushing out at once, but the half-dead tripped one of them up and knocked her to the floor. It grabbed her hair and pulled her face back. She was a black woman with long cornrows. “You’re not Laura, either,” it said, and then it slit her throat.

In the guard post Harelip hammered at the shatterproof door of what had become just another prison cell. Clearly that door could be opened and closed by remote control—-just like the door locks on the SHU cells. Someone in a central command center was intent on keeping Harelip locked up tight. She beat at the door with the butt of her shotgun, but it was inch-thick Lexan and it would probably stand up to the blast of a hand grenade.

The half-dead went to the door of the next cell.

Two inmates in orange jumpsuits had managed to avoid its rampage. One prisoner was screaming as she ran toward the exit of the SHU. Another, the one who’d been carved up inside her cell but managed to get away, was leaning up hard against the wall, only a few cells down from where Caxton watched in terror. She was breathing heavily and her eyes were closed. She must have lost a lot of blood.

“Hey,” Caxton shouted, and beat on the inside of her cell door. “Hey you. Convict! Let me out of here. I know what to do! I can save everybody.”

The wounded woman’s eyes flickered open. She looked right at Caxton. Then she slumped to the floor in a puddle of her own blood.

Everyone was shouting by then. The women in the cells were shouting to know what was going on, shouting for help, bellowing in panic and fear. Caxton could still hear the screams that came from the third cell that the half-dead had opened. The screams were cut off quickly. After a moment the half-dead emerged again, covered now in blood and gore. One of its victims had torn the baseball cap off his head and Caxton could see its ravaged face clearly now. Its eyelids were completely gone, as were its lips. It looked both surprised and very happy, simultaneously.

It was really enjoying itself, and it was just getting started, that expression said. It was five doors down from Caxton’s cell.

“Gert,” Caxton said, “when that thing comes in here, you just dive under the bunks, okay? Get as far in as you can. If this goes badly, I’ll just tell it who I am, and hopefully, it’ll just kill me, or drag me off, or whatever it is it’s going to do. If you’re quiet and you don’t move, I think it’ll ignore you. Okay?”

Gert nodded. Her eyes were as wide as the half-dead’s.

“Okay,” Caxton said, steeling herself. Half-deads weren’t very strong. It was possible she could overpower it when it came into the cell. Of course, there was the knife to think about.

There was nothing in the cell Caxton could use as a weapon. Nothing she could use to defend herself. It was a maximum-security prison cell, and very smart people had spent a lot of time and money making sure she was harmless when she was locked inside.

She would have to crouch by the door, and wait for it to come in, and then—

Her thought was interrupted by a thunking noise from inside the door. With a gentle creak, it slid open just a crack. Lying on the floor just outside, Caxton saw the wounded prisoner, the one Caxton had thought was dead. She must have crawled over and used the last of her strength to pull back the lever.