23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

29.

Gert,” Caxton yelled, “get it moving! Put it in gear!” The truck didn’t move.

Caxton ran forward and grabbed at the half-dead nearest to her. It was wearing a stab-proof vest, so she grabbed the straps and hauled it bodily off of the truck. Spinning it around, she slammed her baton across the back of its head and reached for another. One of them was crawling up onto the truck’s hood, using the top of the tire as a foothold. Caxton grabbed it around the neck and twisted, hard. She heard a series of pops from inside its collar as its cervical vertebrae snapped, one after the other. She knocked it to the ground and then grabbed the top of the passenger’s-side window. She brought her bare feet up and slid inside the truck, landing with a bounce in the passenger’s seat.

Gert was staring at her as if she’d just won the gold medal for gymnastics.

“Don’t look at me! Look at them. And get this thing moving—we can shake them off,” Caxton said. A half-dead was climbing up on top of the cab while another was reaching toward Gert’s window.

Gert nodded, grabbed the truck’s gearshift, and pushed it forward.

The truck’s engine roared for a second, then sputtered and stalled. The smell of burning gears filled the cab.

“I thought you said you could drive this thing,” Caxton insisted.

“I said I could drive a truck. Like a pickup truck. I never even sat in one of these before,” Gert told her.

Gert’s window exploded inward, showering them both with tiny cubes of safety glass. The half-dead there had a hammer that he swung into the cab. Gert managed to pull back far enough that it hit the steering wheel instead of her jawbone.

Caxton cursed, then lunged across Gert’s lap to grab at the hammer and the hand that gripped it. She pulled hard and the half-dead came screaming into the cab with them. Caxton punched its face and twisted the hammer out of its hand, then smashed its head forward against the dashboard. It stopped struggling then, so she pushed it out the window and moved on to the next task.

“Switch places,” Caxton said, and Gert slid toward her across the seats. Caxton grabbed her shotgun and climbed over Gert to get into the driver’s seat.

Something hit the top of the cab hard enough to make a dent in the ceiling. Caxton pointed her shotgun at the dent and started to depress the trigger—then realized the mistake in that and stopped herself. The plastic bullet in the shotgun was designed not to penetrate human flesh. It certainly wouldn’t pass through sheet metal. If she fired at the ceiling the bullet would bounce off, at dangerously high speed, and probably hit her or Gert.

The half-dead up there hit the roof again, and the dent got wider.

At the same time another half-dead climbed up over the truck’s grille and grabbed the hood ornament. In its other hand it held a can-shaped grenade with no pin.

“They have grenades?” Gert asked, her voice high enough to count as hysterical.

“CS grenades. They don’t kill you; they’re just full of tear gas,” Caxton said. She couldn’t imagine the prison having any other kind of grenade in its arsenal. Not that it mattered. “If it gets that thing in here it might as well be high-explosive. It’ll pump out a hundred cubic feet of gas in a second, and we’ll suffocate even with the windows open.”

“So shoot it,” Gert suggested.

“Just a—”

The half-dead on the roof of the cab struck a third time and the metal roof tore open. The sharp point of a pickax came through the ceiling between the two women. Gert screamed, but Caxton just readied her shotgun. The pick drew back the way it had come and Caxton looked out through the hole it had made. She could see the half-dead on the cab’s roof. It was looking back down at her.

She shoved the barrel of her shotgun through the hole and fired. There was a scream and then a rattling series of thumps as the half-dead fell off of the cab.

“What about this motherfucker?” Gert asked, pointing through the windshield.

Caxton hit the truck’s ignition, then threw it into reverse.

She’d been in the highway patrol once. She knew the importance of double-clutching. The truck lurched backward, out of the loading bay, and the half-dead on the hood went flying backward. Its grenade went off instantly in a spray of yellow smoke that rolled across the windshield. Caxton caught a whiff of the tear gas before they were clear of the yellow plume, and her eyes clamped tightly shut as her throat spasmed with a nasty dry cough.

“Grab the wheel,” she said. She knew better than to rub at her eyes—that would only smear the tear gas deeper into her mucous membranes. It hurt to talk, but she had no choice. “Watch the mirrors. What’s behind us?”

“The wall!”

Caxton forced her eyes to open up. They immediately clamped shut again. They stung like they were on fire, even when they were closed, but when she tried to open them the pain was ten times worse. “Turn the wheel left. Toward me,” she said, as calmly as she could. “How far is the wall?”

“I don’t know. Too close,” Gert said, sounding panicked.

“We’ll be okay. There might be more of them coming, so we need to move, alright?” She kept her foot on the gas a second longer, then braked to keep the truck from jackknifing, then threw the stick into forward gear. “What are we pointed at?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Gert told her. “But you’re facing the wrong way! The main gate is behind us.”

“That’s okay,” Caxton said. “We’re not going to the main gate.”

“We’re not?”

“It’s too heavily defended. We wouldn’t make it halfway there. Trust me. I know what I’m doing.” And I’m not about to share, she thought, so don’t ask any questions. She hadn’t figured out yet how to explain to Gert that their mission had changed. That they weren’t going to try to escape from the prison anymore. She doubted Gert would want to hear that. “What do you see ahead of us? Open grass?”

“There’s no grass. Just—-just a basketball court.”

“That’s fine,” Caxton said.

“But it’s surrounded by a fence. With barbed wire and everything,” Gert told her.

“That’s what I needed to know.” Caxton upshifted and poured on the gas. “Now, just as we’re about to hit the fence— get down,” she said.

She felt Gert duck below the dashboard almost at once. Caxton leaned over to her right, covering Gert’s body with her own. The truck hit the fence hard, traveling at almost twenty miles an hour.

The truck went through the fence like a knife through paper, tearing through posts and chain link and barbed wire without even losing much speed. The truck had enough mass to shear off the posts at ground level without any trouble. The fence didn’t just part in the middle to let them through, however. It wrapped around the front of the truck and stretched—for a few milliseconds. Then it snapped in a dozen places at once and hundreds of pounds of metal wire and three-inch pipe came scrabbling and sparking up the hood to collide with the windshield. It shattered instantly and covered both of them in glass, while one piece of metal post shot through the cab and impaled the seat cushion where Caxton had been sitting up a second earlier.

Gert started to sit up.

“Not yet,” Caxton shouted, as the truck shot across the basketball court—and then through another fence on the far side. A coil of barbed wire dragged across Caxton’s back, tearing through her stab-proof vest but missing her skin.

After that it was smooth driving all the way to the powerhouse.