23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

28.

Gert,” Caxton said, softly.

Her celly woke up instantly, her eyelids snapping open and her hand reaching for the knife she’d kept tucked under her arm while she slept. “Everything cool?” she asked.

Caxton nodded. “For the moment. I’ve been busy, and—”

“What time is it?”

Caxton shrugged. “I don’t have a watch. If I had to guess I’d say it’s around nine.” It had felt like about three hours since Malvern had made her dawn ultimatum. Twenty more to go.

“You think there’s any coffee?” Gert asked. “Maybe in one of these crates?”

“We wouldn’t have any way to brew it,” Caxton suggested.

“Oh, I’ll find a way. You know how long it’s been since I had caffeine? Way too fucking long, that’s how long. If I have to snort lines of freeze-dried instant, I will do it. You got me operating on three hours’ sleep, I’ll mainline the shit. What the fuck are those?”

She was looking at Caxton’s big project. The things that had taken her three hours to construct. The things she wasn’t sure would work, even so.

As she’d said, she’d been busy. She’d had to improvise and put them together from items she could find in the loading dock. She’d started with tin cans. She had as many of those as she could possibly want. In her search for supplies she’d found a small toolkit in one of the trucks. It had included a flathead screwdriver she’d used as a can opener. Very carefully she had emptied out five big cans that had contained creamed corn. She’d scraped them out and then let them dry. Then she had broken open a couple dozen crates and pried all the nails out of their boards. She had driven nails through the walls of the cans, all around, as many as she could without buckling the cans entirely. She’d made that mistake more than once.

The final step had left her gagging and sick, but it was necessary. There had been a garden hose on the dock, presumably used to wash the trucks. With a pair of bolt-cutters she had clipped off a four foot section of hose, which she had used to siphon gasoline out of the tanks of the three trucks. There had been a lot of spillage—the loading dock still reeked of gas—but she had managed to fill all five cans to the brim and seal them back up.

Sealing the cans took some work. There’d been a big economy-size pack of chewing gum in the glove compartment of one of the trucks. She chewed and chewed until her jaw was sore and used the wet gum to hold the lids on the cans and make seals around the nails to make the cans more or less watertight.

“Homemade fragmentation grenades,” Caxton explained.

“You light one of these on fire and it’ll blow up, throwing burning gas all over the place. Even better, when they go off the nails will shoot out in every direction as shrapnel. They should make a pretty good mess.”

“Well, shit,” Gert said, laughing. “I never took you for a pyro. You’re gonna blow down the main gate, huh? And then we just waltz right out of here. Or no—we can drive out, in one of the trucks. Jeez, Caxton, you’re pretty smart, huh?”

“I hope so. I hope I can make them work without killing both of us in the process.” She chose not to share what she really had in mind for her big unwieldy grenades. Gert might not understand what she truly hoped to achieve.

Caxton started loading the cans inside the cab of one of the big trucks. She was careful not to slosh them around too much— not because they might explode (it would take more than rough handling for that), but because she didn’t want to disturb the chewing-gum seals. They were the weak spot in her design. She thought there was a good chance that when the cans were set on fire, the burning gasoline would erupt upward and pop the lids right off the cans, rather than exploding outward and launching the nails. She would just have to hope for the best.

“Have you ever driven a truck?” Caxton asked Gert.

“Sure, no problem. Half my family had trucks,” her celly told her.

“That’s good. That’s a very good thing.” Caxton nodded and rubbed her hands on her jumpsuit. “Here’s what I want to do. You get in this one and get it ready to go. I’ll run up to the guard post and hit the control for the outer gate, then come and join you. We’re going to have to move fast. Once they figure out what we’re doing the half-deads will be all over us, regardless of what Malvern might want from me. You ready?”

Gert pulled herself up into the truck’s driver’s seat and cranked the engine until it was rumbling along well. Caxton threw her shotgun and her stun gun in through the passenger’s-side window, then jogged back to the guard post. She glanced up and saw that Malvern’s ultimatum was still running over and over on the monitor. She slapped the red button on the control panel and checked through the post’s window to make sure the gate was opening smoothly. When she saw it was, she reached for the post’s door.

Before her hand even found the knob the door burst inward. A half-dead barreled through it, its knife high and swinging downward to cut into her heart. Caxton shouted for Gert and half-jumped, half-fell backwards, colliding with the guard post’s chair. She stumbled and fell hard on her hip, one arm tucked uselessly beneath her.

It was a lousy defensive position. It was a great way to get killed, falling over herself like that.

The half-dead took a step closer to her, the knife held straight out in front of its body. Its torn face split in a wicked grin so wide that the muscles around its mouth bunched and split.

Caxton grabbed for the can of pepper spray in her bra. It felt suspiciously light in her hand and she realized she’d used it too many times. She couldn’t be guaranteed there’d be even one good spray left inside.

She rolled to her left as the knife came down at her, and sprayed anyway. The can sputtered out a thin mist of capsicum and then died on her. The half-dead didn’t even look annoyed.

Crap, she thought—she had put her best weapons in the truck, thinking she was safe from attack inside the loading bay. This half-dead must have been waiting just outside the outer gate, waiting for its big chance. She should have been smart enough to check outside the gate before she’d hit the red button. She should have done a lot of things smarter, she thought, as she rolled away from another blow.

She still had her baton. She yanked it free of the belt she was using as a bandolier and brought it up fast, just fast enough to parry the half-dead’s next strike. The blade dug a bright furrow through the black paint on the baton. Caxton grabbed it in both hands and pushed, struggling to get back up to her feet as the half-dead tried to keep her down on the ground by pushing down with its knife.

Caxton was stronger than any half-dead—their muscles and bones were rotten and got weaker with every second their unnatural existence continued. She got one foot under her and shoved the half-dead back, sending it sprawling backward out the door of the guard post. She followed through and came down hard on it, smashing the pommel of her baton into its forehead with a grotesque crunch.

Breathing hard, adrenaline making her skin feel prickly and tight, she jumped back up to her feet and started running toward the truck.

Five more half-deads were climbing up onto its cab.