23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

24.

Caxton had bought a little time. She needed more. She jumped on the forklift and started moving crates up against the door, a painfully slow process but the best way to make a strong barricade. The half-deads in the kitchen kept pushing and beating at the door, but they were making little headway. With half a ton of canned goods behind the door, there wasn’t much they could do. After a little while they stopped trying.

Caxton frowned. “They gave up,” she said.

Gert laughed. “That’s a good thing! What’s with you, huh? Every good thing that happens to us, you look like someone put cayenne pepper in your tampon.”

“That’s because I’m a realist,” Caxton said. “Half-deads don’t just stop trying to kill you. It’s possible they’re just going around another way. Check these doors,” she said, pointing at a pair of large rolling doors leading into the kitchen. They were big enough to drive the forklift through. Gert checked them both, bending low to look at their locks, then shook her head.

“Both locked up tight.”

Caxton rubbed her cheek absentmindedly It was possible the half-deads were going the long way around, and were going to come at them through the wide-open loading bay doors. Maybe there was something she could do about that.

The loading dock had its own guard post. The door was locked, but Caxton was still riding out the adrenaline rush she’d gotten from fighting the half-deads in the kitchen. She slammed into the door with her shoulder, careful to hit it just above the lock. It held, but she heard something small and metallic fly out of the door and bounce away. She got a running start and kicked the door just below the lock, careful to keep her foot flat against the wood. The lock disintegrated and the door swung open, vibrating wildly on its hinges.

Inside was a rolling chair sitting in front of a control panel. A pair of monitor televisions hung from the ceiling, angled downward so whoever was sitting in the chair could easily keep an eye on them. She studied the control panel, expecting to find a big red button, and was not disappointed. When designing the prison’s control systems the architects had at least known that there might come a time when someone needed to secure the loading dock without wasting time looking for the right controls. She slapped the red button with her hand and an alarm sounded as a chain-link gate rolled sideways across the open mouth of the loading bay. Weird shadows flickered across Gert’s face as the gate carved up the light. Caxton bent under the control board and found the cable that would let central command override the door controls. She pulled it, half expecting the door to roll open again because she’d pulled the wrong wire.

It didn’t.

“Now we’re safe, right?” Gert asked.

“There’s not a lot of difference between being safe and being trapped, at the moment. But we have time to think. That’s the main thing I was after.”

She found a few useful things. There was a stab-proof vest hanging on a hook, the standard vest every guard in the prison was supposed to wear whenever in the presence of an inmate. It was made of ultra–tightly woven para-aramid fabric that would stop an ice pick, but not a bullet, and definitely not a vampire’s teeth. She slid it over her jumpsuit and strapped it on tight. There were no boots in the guard post, but there was another box of plastic bullets, sitting under a row of metal clips. “There should be a couple of shotguns right here,” Caxton said, touching the clips.

“Maybe when the half-deads took over the prison, the guards in here took the shotguns and tried to defend themselves.”

“Possibly—except there were two shotguns. There’s only one chair in here.” She shrugged. “Maybe the guard took both of them, who knows? And then he locked the door behind him when he went off to fight off the half-deads. Leaving a perfectly defensible position to go alone, on foot, into the middle of a dangerous situation.” Caxton shook her head. “No, I think one of Malvern’s people took those shotguns. I think this place was prepared for us.”

“What? Like, they knew we were coming?”

Caxton tilted her head from side to side. “The doors we need are always open, or easily kicked in. We keep running across groups of half-deads, but they aren’t armed properly. Malvern must know exactly where we are,” Caxton said, pointing upward at a camera mounted in the ceiling, “but she hasn’t sent a whole pack of them with good knives after us. It’s like she’s letting us move around the prison—part of the prison, anyway. The part she wants us in.” She narrowed her eyes. “I’m starting to think we’re being led through a maze like a couple of rats. That Malvern wanted us to end up right here.”

“Sometimes,” Gert said, very slowly, “when I was high? I would start thinking that God was trying to tell me something. Just—-just listen for a sec, okay? I would have like a really crappy day. The kids wouldn’t stop crying. The bitch at the grocery store wouldn’t let me buy cigarettes with my WIC coupons. There would be all kinds of bills in the mail for shit I didn’t even remember buying, and then when I would run in my room and slam the door, it would turn out that my mom had cleaned my room while I was out and got rid of my stash. She would never say anything, never even give me a nasty look. But she would find my crystal and flush it down the toilet, like it was just some trash I left lying around. Days like that, sometimes I felt like a voice was talking just to me. A voice telling me to do something bad. Like cut myself, or maybe burn some old letters and pictures, you know, stuff I’d been keeping for years.”

“Okay,” Caxton said.

“I need you to think real hard,” Gert said. “I want to know if this suspicion of yours is anything at all like that voice I used to hear.”

Caxton held her peace.

“Because,” Gert went on, “I found in general, doing the things that voice told me to do wasn’t always such a shit hot idea.”

Caxton took her celly’s point. There was no use worrying about the deeper game unless she could win on the surface. There was a diagram above the control panel that showed the whole of the prison’s yard, all the structures and features of the grounds between the wall and the building itself. It showed in special detail the layered defenses between the loading dock and the main gate. Gert had done a pretty good job describing the gates and tire shredders a truck had to pass through to get back to the kitchens, but she’d missed a few things. The trucks had to make three tight corners before they could reach the main gate, and each corner was watched by a machine-gun position. Then there was the main gate itself. Caxton had seen it on her way into the prison, a big slab of metal thick enough to resist a direct attack by a tank. If that gate was closed, there was no truck in the world that could just smash through it.

Still. The gate, the exit, was right there—no more than two hundred yards away. There were three trucks sitting in the loading bay, abandoned in place when the prison was taken over by half-deads. It was the best chance she was going to get to break out, to reach safety and help and sanity—

She was still considering her escape plan when the security monitors over her head switched themselves on. In the dark guard post the white light they blasted over her was difficult to look at, and at first she had no idea what the image on the monitor was supposed to be. It was in color, though there wasn’t much color to see, just a tinge of red in one corner of each screen on an otherwise unbroken field of white.

Then the view moved backward and showed that the red was the dully glowing pupil of a vampire’s eye. The view pulled back farther to display all of Malvern’s face, horribly ravaged by time. But just as horrible was the fact that it didn’t look as bad as it should. The skin was intact and snowy white. If it was heavily lined, if there were dark pouches under the vampire’s eye and eye sockets, if the ears weren’t quite able to hold themselves up under their own weight, it was still a face of something vibrantly and dangerously alive.

Caxton had only once in her life seen Malvern look that good, and it had been in one of the vampire’s own memories, transmitted to her via a psychic link they no longer possessed. In the real world Malvern’s flesh had never looked so healthy, so vital, so whole.

The camera kept moving backward. Soon Caxton could see all of Malvern’s upper body, and what looked like the arm and hip of someone standing next to her. Malvern was quite gently holding the other person by the elbow. Caxton knew that it would take only the slightest muscular pressure on Malvern’s part to turn that soft touch into a bone-snapping vise grip.

There was no sound to go with the picture, and nothing moved within the frame. Every once in a while Malvern blinked. Then she said something that Caxton couldn’t make out—it was hard to read a vampire’s lips since all those teeth got in the way—and the camera jerked sideways, the entire picture swaying. When it stopped moving, two figures were visible on the screens. Malvern and Clara.

Someone off camera handed Clara a piece of paper. Written on it in large block letters was

23 HOURS.