23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

33.

Spring came early to central Pennsylvania that year. At the university extension the students in forensic criminology were having trouble focusing during their morning physics class. Physics was probably the dullest of the subjects covered by the school—chemistry and genetics were a lot more exciting, because they had more practical applications for the work the students would eventually be doing. Too many of the students had been caught staring out the window. The trees around the quad were in bloom and more than one class was being conducted out on the grass, so the professor had relented and taken them all outside as well. They sat in a circle under a massive oak tree and held their notebooks at the ready. There had been a stiff breeze, but Clara just hugged her knees to her chest and watched as the professor took what looked like a normal metallic flashlight out of his bag and placed it in the middle of the circle.

“This one is worthy of James Bond,” he said, and got a few laughs. He was about fifty years old and handsome. The majority of the students in his class were female and he certainly didn’t lack for attention, though of course Clara didn’t swing that way. He handed the flashlight to Clara with a smile. “Turn it on,” he said.

She flipped its switch and a beam of light, barely visible under the shade of the tree, lit up the side of the classroom building. She waved it around for a second to show all the students it was on.

“Notice anything about it? Anything different from a normal flashlight?”

Clara studied it carefully. “This part is kind of strange,” she said, not sure what you called the front end of a flashlight. There was a thick ring of metal around the lens, which was divided into two pieces separated by a strip of rubber.

The professor nodded. “Very good. Now, touch it against my arm, here.” He rolled up his sleeve.

Clara raised one eyebrow, not sure where this was going, but she did as she was told, leaning over to tap it against his bare skin.

“Goddamn it!” the professor swore, jerking his arm away from the flashlight.

Some of the students laughed. Some gasped. Clara jerked the flashlight away from him and then dropped it on the grass.

“My apologies for startling you, Miss Hsu,” the professor said, smiling again. He looked a little pale. He picked the flashlight up from where it had fallen. “What we have here is a stun gun built into a police-grade flashlight. Pretty cool, huh? We’re going to talk today about electroshock weapons. It’s important you know about them because they’re being used more and more in police work and you need to understand how they work and what effect they have on the bad guys. We’re also going to take turns shocking each other so you all know what it feels like.”

There were a few unhappy murmurs. Then the professor insisted that the student next to Clara take the flashlight and shock his neighbor. That student jumped up to his feet and staggered backward a few steps before laughing and sitting back down. Then he got to shock the girl next to him in the circle. It looked like Clara would be the last in line and that the professor would be the one to shock her. She pulled her knees in tighter in anticipation.

“This is actually a very weak shock, as they go,” the professor said, raising his voice to compete with the giggles and stifled screams. “A real stun gun doesn’t just sting. It causes involuntary contraction of every muscle in your body. You fall down. You bend over at the waist. You get muscle spasms in your arms that make you drop any weapon you’re holding. You can see why the police like this. If someone is resisting arrest or threatening a civilian, one good solid shock can just… remove the problem.”

One of the students raised her hand and the professor nodded at her. “I’ve heard there are problems with them, though. That there have been some deaths,” she said.

The professor nodded agreement. “Yes, there have. The manufacturers of these weapons claim they’re perfectly nonlethal as long as they’re used according to strict instructions. But police officers in the field can never guarantee perfect conditions when they’re using a new weapon they’ve had only a few hours’ training in. The main thing you need to know about this is that every human body is different. A football linebacker in perfect physical shape is going to have a very different reaction to a stun weapon than an elderly woman suffering from a heart condition. The electric shock is low in amperes but extremely high in voltage: some electroshock weapons can deliver over a hundred thousand volts over a multisecond pulse. Most people will experience some muscle paralysis, a great deal of pain, and a desperate need to lie down. But the duration of those effects varies widely from individual to individual. The general rule of thumb is that a young, healthy, well-rested person will be incapacitated for a few seconds, while an older, sick or physically unfit, tired person can be out of action for several minutes. Now, Miss Hsu. Would you mind taking off your jacket?”

Clara looked up. She hadn’t noticed that the flashlight had come all the way around the circle. She took off her wind-breaker, then pushed up the sleeve of her sweater. “Does it hurt a lot?” she asked. The professor leaned toward her.

She opened her eyes. Her mouth was full of hair, and it wasn’t her own.

Coughing it out, she forced herself to sit up, though it hurt like hell. Every muscle down her side was sore as if she’d been working out for hours but only exercising her left arm and left leg.

There was a smell of scorched fabric in the air, and her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. Carefully she pulled it free with one finger.

No, she wasn’t at school. She was having trouble focusing her thoughts, but she knew—she knew she was at the prison. The prison where they had Laura locked up. And there had been… vampires… and—

“Shit,” she breathed. She looked down and saw she was still lying half on top of the prison’s warden. The warden’s face was twitching wildly and one arm was beating against the floor as if she was keeping time.

Clara didn’t have much time. She yawned hugely—she couldn’t help herself. She needed to get up, needed to get something before—she needed to get the warden’s phone. And a key. The key to—the key to the band around her arm. The electroshock band around her arm.

Confusion. Disorientation. Not knowing where you were or how you got there. That was one of the side effects of electroshock. So was crapping your pants. Clara gave the air an exploratory sniff and smelled urine but not feces.

“Oh, no,” she said, and reached one hand down between her legs. It came back dry. She’d managed to control her bodily functions, but it looked as if the warden hadn’t been so lucky.

She had to move quickly

It was coming back. Her focus was coming back. She had waited until she and the warden were alone in the room, then she had grabbed the warden, knowing the electroshock band on her arm would go off. Also knowing that whoever she was touching when that happened would get shocked as well. She’d been pretty sure that the warden, who was older than she and badly wounded, would get worse effects than she would. That she would recover more quickly than the warden, giving her some time to escape.

She also knew the warden was a tough bitch and that it would be a close thing.

She couldn’t just run away, though. The band was still on her arm and she was pretty sure it had enough juice for more than one shock. If she ran now she would just get zapped again. She bent down over the warden—slowly—and went through her pockets. She found the special key that locked the band onto her biceps and removed it easily. She dropped it on the floor and then hurriedly went back to the warden’s pockets and took out the woman’s BlackBerry—and her pistol, a SIG Sauer P228.

Clara stared at the pistol for a while. She even pointed it at the warden’s face. Surely if anyone deserved to be shot while they were down it was this woman. She had betrayed her trust and put over a thousand women at risk. She had fed some of her prisoners to Malvern. She had ordered half-deads to kill Laura.

Clara couldn’t do it. She put the pistol in her pocket.

It wasn’t that she didn’t think the warden deserved to die, though. It was because Laura wouldn’t have done it. Laura had no compunctions about killing monsters, but she’d never kill a human being, no matter how much they deserved it. Clara couldn’t imagine doing such a thing, either.

So instead, she wrapped the electroshock band around the warden’s arm and locked it tight. There was a heating vent in one wall of the room. She slipped the key through the vents and listened to it clunk and ding its way down into the bowels of the prison’s ventilation system.

Then she went to the room’s door, checked to see no one was looking, and slipped out into the hall, a free woman.