23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

19.

Take off your jacket,” the warden said, pointing a pistol at

Clara’s stomach. Clara didn’t protest. She removed her jacket and folded it over the back of a wooden chair. The warden gestured and Franklin came forward to fit a nylon cuff around Clara’s biceps. A strap held it in place around her arm. He pulled the strap tight enough to hurt, but Clara refused to give him the satisfaction of crying out. The cinch on the strap locked with a special key that he tossed over to the warden. She caught it with her free hand. Clara studied the cuff and saw that it had a small black box attached to it. Metal prongs from the box poked through her shirt sleeve and felt cold on her skin.

“This is the latest thing in compliance measures,” the warden told her. “We’re still trying it out. There were, admittedly, some side effects we didn’t like.” She stepped closer and brought her gun around in a wide sweep that missed smashing it into Clara’s nose by a fraction of an inch. Reflexively Clara threw her arm up to ward off the blow.

The pouch at her back gave off a deafening shriek. Clara howled in pain.

“There’s a motion sensor built into the cuff. If you try to make any sudden movements—say, if you try to run away, or if you attack someone, or just try to take the thing off—it’ll give you that warning tone. That lasts for one second. If you don’t immediately stop moving, it’ll hit you with a pulse of enough electricity to disable every muscle in your body.”

Clara frowned. “What are the side effects?”

The warden shrugged. “For one, when it goes off, you shit your pants. We’re not going to let that happen, though, are we? You’re going to be nice and quiet and obey the cuff. You can walk, slowly, but I wouldn’t try scratching your nose too vigorously. With this thing we can keep you close and not have to worry about watching you every single second.” The warden smiled. “It’s better than being hog-tied and gagged and thrown in a locked room, right?”

Clara wanted to spit in the woman’s face. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded.

The warden surprised her by giving her a straight answer. “I have colon cancer.”

Clara sputtered in surprise. “I’m—I’m so sorry.”

The warden ignored her sympathy. “I let it go too long before I got checked out, and now the doctors say it’s inoperable. There are all kinds of treatments they can try, but none of them are an actual cure. I’ve got this evil little blob inside of me that gets bigger every day and eventually it’s going to kill me. Maybe ten years from now. Maybe tomorrow.” She shrugged. “I don’t want to die. That’s not so hard to understand, is it? So when Malvern started contacting various staff members here at the prison, looking for someone she could manipulate, I shot up to number one on her list. Luckily for me.”

“Luckily?” Clara said, surprised.

“If I hadn’t been so receptive to her advances, she would have attempted to seduce someone else. Any of the administrative staff or even some of the more senior COs would have served her purpose. If it hadn’t been me that she chose, I would have been killed first when she took over the prison. This cancer inside of me, which I have been afraid of for so long, turned out to be my ticket to eternal life.”

“She offered to make you a vampire? And you want that? It’s not a medical treatment option. It’s a curse. You’ll live forever, alright—-just like her.”

Together they looked at Malvern, who was deep in conversation with a half-dead standing just outside the door of the warden’s office. Her shoulders stuck out like knife blades and her skin looked like cheap paper.

“In a few hours she’ll look a whole lot better,” the warden said. “Besides. It took her three hundred years to look like that. For the first century, she tells me, she was beautiful. Powerful beyond anything a human body can hope for. I’ll have my time like that as well, for however long it lasts. Even if I only get another fifty years of health and strength, it’ll be worth it. I’ll be stronger than I am now. I’ll have sharper senses. I don’t see a lot of downsides.”

Clara scowled. “You just have to give up your humanity.”

The warden laughed. “You cops. You always amaze me when you think you’re making a difference. The streets are full of drugs and guns, and the people on drugs have the most guns— when everything goes bad, which it always does, the results end up here with me. I get to babysit the human messes you couldn’t prevent. I’ve seen women come through this office who choked their grandmothers to death for enough money to buy just one more rock. I’ve met pretty little girls whose teeth are rotted out of their heads because they can’t stop smoking meth. Teenagers who killed their own babies because they wouldn’t stop crying. You want humanity? You can keep it.”

Clara was shocked. “How did you ever end up in this job? If you feel that way, then why would you even want it? I would think if you devoted your life to caring for prisoners, you would at least try to believe in them.”

Bellows rolled her eyes. “I was young once, like you. I thought big, grand thoughts like that. Then I saw the reality. It’s been years since I thought of myself as a caretaker. And that’s not even the job anymore. We used to talk about rehabilitating prisoners. That was the term we used, the justification for why we lock them up in such brutal conditions. Now—the term we use is warehousing. This prison, all the prisons like this all over the world, they aren’t places of healing. They’re places where you store people, like you would store toxic waste.”

“That’s horrible. I can’t accept that,” Clara said.

The warden shrugged. “Accept it or don’t, I’m just stating fact. I don’t care—society doesn’t care—if Malvern eats every single piece of human wreckage in Marcy The women in here don’t care about each other, even. They fight constantly. They kill each other over the most pathetic of slights. They certainly don’t care about me. I can’t walk around this place without wearing a stab-proof vest. So why should I care about them? What I do care about is myself. My continued existence. I wasted my life, I see that now. I just want a second chance to get it right, and if I have to drink blood to get it—if I have to rot away slowly, fine. It’s better than the alternative, which is death. Life is always worth more than death.”

“And you think Malvern’s doing this out of the goodness of her heart? Did it ever occur to you that she’s just using you?” Clara fumed. “Did you think it’s a coincidence that she approached you only after Laura Caxton was sentenced to this prison? This particular prison? She doesn’t care about your second chance. She cares about getting to Caxton, and that’s it.”

Bellows laughed bitterly. “Of course! I’m not an idiot, and you should make a point of remembering that. Of course she’s using me. And in return, I’m using her right back. That’s how it works. That’s how it always works.” She glanced up. Malvern was beckoning to her. “Come on. If you walk too fast, you’ll know it.”

Clara shuffled forward, glaring over her shoulder at the warden as she followed Malvern out of the office. Franklin, the CO who had brought Clara in, brought up the rear. He seemed to be the warden’s personal bodyguard or maybe her chief of staff.

A receiving line of half-deads stood outside, lined up against the walls of the corridor. Most of them were wearing the uniforms of COs, COs who had to be dead by now. It looked like the half-deads were running the prison now, on Malvern’s behalf.

Clara thought about the crime scenes she’d investigated with Glauer, the audacious murders Malvern had committed in the days just before she took over the prison. She realized why things had gotten so explosive now. They’d thought it must be because Malvern needed so much blood. Clearly she’d also wanted as many victims as possible—she needed her own private army of half-deads to run the prison. Each and every one of these creatures had been a living human being once with a family, with friends. Now they were just slaves.

Clara found it hard to sympathize, though, when they sniggered and leered at her as she walked past.

The four of them, Malvern, Clara, Franklin, and the warden, made their way through the maze of locked doors deep into the prison. There was no waiting at control gates this time or any checking of IDs. The doors were mostly unlocked, and those that weren’t opened before Malvern even reached them. Clara glanced up at the ceiling and saw there were cameras watching every hallway, every small room they passed through. There must be half-deads in a central command center somewhere, watching.

She was starting to worry that everything was not going to be okay. That even Laura couldn’t save her from this situation. The idea had never occurred to her before that moment, but once it arrived she couldn’t get it out of her head.

She could die there, in that prison. Worse, she could be used as bait to lure Laura into a trap. And then both of them would be killed. Or worse. She was pretty sure that Malvern intended to make Laura a vampire. Malvern had done that to other vampire killers, in the past. She seemed to find it deliciously ironic.

As for herself, Clara doubted she’d be given the same option.

The four of them passed through one last door, a massive sheet of reinforced iron. Malvern smiled and stepped aside. “Best if they don’t see me as of yet,” she said. “You go first, child.” She gestured for Clara to step forward, through the door. Clara shuffled forward and was instantly engulfed in noise. They had reached one of the dormitories—what a previous generation might have called a cell block—and the women housed inside were going crazy. The noise was intense and oceanic. Though it had to be made up of individual shouts and questions and profanities, the stone walls and steel bars of the prison reverberated with the noise and made it just one clamorous roar.

Clara looked up and saw three levels of cells, rising up to the ceiling far above her head. As she watched, a flaming roll of toilet paper came sailing out of one of the upper-level cells, unwrapping as it flew. She was very careful not to flinch. Elsewhere in the top two rows women were squirting bottles of water through their bars or throwing down bits of broken wood or crumpled paper. On the bottom level prisoners were beating on the bars of their cells with cups or cafeteria trays or just hitting and kicking at them with their bare feet and hands. Everywhere she looked she saw hard faces staring back at her, hard eyes watching her every move. Women flipped her the finger or waggled their tongues at her or showed her their naked buttocks. Others tried spitting at her, though few of them got any range.

The warden stepped into the dorm and raised her hands high. When that didn’t change the volume of the shouting, she reached behind her and Franklin handed her a megaphone. She switched it on and shouted over the din, “You want to know what’s going on? Then shut the fuck up right now! Or you can all just sit here with no dinner. I’ve got four more dorms to talk to. You lot can be last in that line, if you want.”

The shouts and calls never really died out, but they definitely lessened in volume. It took a while. Clara looked around at the cells on either side of her. The women inside were pressed up against the bars, most of them watching the warden now. There seemed to be eight of them in every cell—cells that might comfortably have held four. There was only one toilet in every cell, and no room for the women to move around much. The stink of unwashed bodies and shit wafted back and forth across the way and Clara wondered if it was always like this. If people were actually forced to live in these conditions, for years at a time. She remembered Fetlock’s nasty little joke, when he suggested that going to prison was like being sent away to summer camp for Laura. Well, everyone did sleep in bunk beds, Clara saw. Otherwise…

The warden finally decided that the noise had dropped to an acceptable level. “There’s been some changes, ladies, and they’re going to affect all of us. This facility is no longer under the control of the Bureau of Prisons. That means, whatever rights and privileges you thought you were entitled to before, you’ve got jack shit now. You want to eat tonight, you’re going to have to play ball with me. Lucky for you I don’t expect good behavior, or a reforming attitude. All I want is your blood.”

The shouting started up again, but the warden just waited for it to pass. Then she gestured back at Franklin and he, in turn, gestured at someone out in the hall. Four half-deads came running into the dorm, each of them pushing a rolling cart loaded down with medical supplies: rubber tubing, packs of sterilized needles, IV stands, and bags to hold collected blood.

“Dinner is ready to be served. You’ll be eating in your cells from now on. I hope that’s alright,” the warden said, in a tone that made it clear she didn’t care what they thought. “To get dinner, you have to give me a couple ounces of blood, that’s all. Not enough that you’ll ever notice it’s gone. If you want to donate, you just stick your left arm through the bars and make a fist. These guys with no faces will be taking it from you. You can choose to cooperate with them, you can smile and say nice things to them, as ugly as they may be, and make it easy for them to take the blood. Or you can fight them. You can refuse to give them your arm. That’s just fine. In that case, she goes into your cell and rips your throat out.”

“She who, cuntlips?” someone shouted from the second level.

Malvern stepped into the dorm then. She turned her ravaged face up to look at the three tiers of cells. Then she smiled, showing all of her broken, vicious teeth.

A hush, a real hush, something very close to silence, ran through the dorm.

The warden let the vampire’s appearance sink in for a while. Then she raised the megaphone again. “Now. Let me tell you about option three.”