23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

32.

Why can’t I see anything?” the warden demanded, smacking the side of a security monitor. “Is this the right view?”

The half-dead wearing the uniform of a CO named Franklin was standing next to her. It winced as she turned to glare at it with her good eye. “That’s the view from the loading dock, yes,” it told her. It reached up and scratched tentatively at what remained of the skin around its left ear. When Clara had first seen it, the half-dead had looked completely human except for a red scratch down one cheek. Now it had gouged all the skin away from its face until nothing remained but gray and pink muscle tissue, with here and there a pocket of yellow subcutaneous fat. It was one of the most disgusting things she’d ever seen.

“Well, make it focus or something,” the warden commanded. The view on the screen was no more than a blurred smear of brown and reddish yellow. Nothing at all could be made out of that view.

The half-dead winced again. “The cameras focus automatically. They can’t be adjusted from here. It’s possible that…”

“That what? Don’t keep me waiting, just spit it out.”

The half-dead nodded. “It’s possible she smeared something on the lens. Like Vaseline. Or lipstick. Just about anything viscous would do.”

“Pepper spray,” the warden said. “I’ll bet it was pepper spray. There’s enough of it in this place to paint the curtain wall.” She smacked the monitor again. “I need to know what’s going on in that loading bay. I sent a detail down there to kill Caxton and I would very much like to know if they succeeded or not. I imagine you would like to know that as well, hmm? Because it looks like she’s killing every half-dead she runs across, and if I don’t find out what I need to know, I’m going to send you personally down there to check and see what condition she’s in.”

Clara laughed. “You’re wasting your time.”

The warden turned and glared at her. “You have something to share?”

Clara started to shrug, then thought better of it. The band around her arm might interpret that as a sudden move and hit her with a near-lethal electric shock. “You can’t threaten them with death. They’ve been there once already, and believe me, they aren’t afraid to die again. It would be a mercy. You’re in pain, aren’t you?” she said, addressing Franklin.

The half-dead sneered at her. “None of your business, cunt.”

“They like to talk tough. But look at its face. You think that doesn’t hurt? But it can’t stop itself from scratching. Its whole existence is a scab, a temporary scab over a fatal wound. They only last for about a week before they fall apart, did you know that? All that’s left then is a pile of goo with maybe some eyes and fingers sticking out. And twitching. Still twitching.”

The half-dead’s eyes were bright and huge as it stared at her.

At its sides its hands were clutching at nothing and then relaxing, over and over again.

The warden coughed into her hand. “She’s taunting you,” she said. “Ignore it. I don’t know if she thinks that making you attack her will get her anywhere, or maybe she’s just bored. Either way, ignore everything she says.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Franklin said, and seemed to relax a little.

It had been worth a shot.

Clara had come to an inescapable conclusion. Her value to the warden was very small to begin with, and it was about to evaporate. Malvern had ordered her capture for use as an insurance policy. A way to control Laura. If the half-deads did manage to kill Laura—Please God, no, she thought, but if they did—then Clara would be completely useless to the warden. In fact, she would be a liability. She’d seen far too much. Knew too many secrets. The warden would have a very good reason to kill her.

If the half-deads failed to kill Laura, which Clara thought was more likely, she might gain a few extra hours of life. More time to sit around watching the warden’s plans unfold, more time to fret and worry and wonder just how she was going to die.

She had to do something. The risk was very high that by angering Franklin or the warden she would get herself hurt. But there were no other options. With the band on her arm she was unable to run away and unable to attack them herself. If Franklin attacked her, though, she might be able to get its weapon away from it. Then she could kill it and threaten the warden into removing the band on her arm, and then she could—she could—

The main problem with any of these theoretical plans was that she wasn’t Laura. She wasn’t fast, or tough. She didn’t instinctively know how to fight, or when to duck, or how to escape from a bad situation. She had been a police photographer. She was learning how to do crime lab science. Nothing in her law enforcement career had prepared her for violence. She didn’t even know how to shoot straight.

A half-dead ran into the room then, its mouth hanging open in shock. “They’re out of the loading bay,” it said, cowering as the warden came over to look down into its ravaged face.

“I beg your pardon?” the warden asked.

“I—-just—I saw them on another camera. There’s a truck. It’s driving around the yard. It has to be Caxton and her partner. But they’re being stupid. They’re driving the wrong way. Away from the main gate.”

The warden whirled around to stare at Clara. Clara shrugged, very, very slowly.

“Do you think Caxton is that stupid?” the warden demanded.

“No?” Clara offered.

“Neither do I. She must be up to something. Or maybe she just knows I have a team at the gate, ready to kill anyone who gets close. You,” she said to the half-dead who’d brought the news, “get back to your post. You,” she said to Franklin, “let me see this truck.”

Franklin tapped away at a keyboard and the view on the security monitor changed. Clara moved in close to watch— nobody stopped her. On the screen was the view from a camera mounted on one of the prison’s watchtowers. It showed a white tractor trailer careening across a concrete apron, with half-deads clinging to its hood. One by one they fell off and were either crushed by the truck’s wheels or simply left behind, unmoving and battered.

You go, girl, Clara thought.

The truck stormed right through a basketball court, dragging two lengths of fencing along for the ride. Then it slowed to a stop outside a small brick building.

The warden, Franklin, and Clara watched silently what came next. A prisoner in an orange jumpsuit and a blue vest—it wasn’t Laura—ran toward the building and was quickly subdued by an automatic gun, her body pelted by dozens of red balls that exploded into white powder when they hit.

The camera couldn’t really show what Laura was doing at the same time. The truck blocked most of the view.

“What is that building?” Franklin asked.

“It’s the powerhouse. She’s going to knock out our power. But how can she? She would need some kind of—”

The screen went black without warning. The lights in the room flickered off, leaving them with just the murky gray light coming in through the room’s high windows. The prison was suddenly very, very quiet.

And then the shouting began. The nearest dorm was down a long corridor and through several closed doors, but still Clara could hear the faint echo of women screaming and bellowing to know what was going on. By the sound of it, more than a few of them were laughing.

The warden turned to Franklin. “How did she do that?” she asked. She turned to face Clara again. “How?”

“Search me,” Clara said.

“Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck! This is going to make things much harder.” Bellows grabbed Franklin by the shoulder and squeezed. “There are flashlights down the hall in the equipment locker. Go get some. And then find somebody who knows about electrical engineering. I’ll take anyone who knows how to fix a toaster. There are thirteen hundred women in the dorms; at least one of them must know how to change a goddamned light-bulb.”

Franklin ran out of the room. Perhaps annoyed by the shouts echoing down the hall, the warden closed the door behind him. “We had to go and kill the custodial staff. Malvern said they couldn’t be trusted. She was right, of course, but we could have kept at least one person who knew how this place worked. What are you—”

She didn’t get to finish her thought. Her words were interrupted by an incredibly loud high-pitched alarm. It was coming from Clara’s armband.

She was moving fast, and she knew exactly what was going to happen next. She had one second to stop moving, but she didn’t. Instead she rushed at the warden and grabbed her up in a very close bear hug.

Clara had time to see the warden’s lips curl up in a nasty sneer before every nerve in her body fired at once, jolted to life by a fifty-thousand-volt shock. The pain was beyond anything she’d felt in her life. She felt her teeth burning, felt her eyeballs dancing in her head and then—