23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

34.

The hallway was almost pitch dark. There were no windows anywhere along its length, and the only light came from an open door down at the far end. A fan of murky light spread outward from the doorway, striped or occluded now and then as a half-dead passed in front of it. Clara could hear them talking down there in their grotesque high-pitched voices. They sounded confused and frightened.

Clara was glad she wasn’t the only one. She headed in the other direction, feeling her way along the wall. She wanted to run. Her body wanted to move, to get out of there as fast as it possibly could. She couldn’t afford to make any noise, though. If she were discovered now the warden would probably have her killed just for revenge.

Her fingertips brushed the molding around a door. She stopped and leaned close to the door and listened, held her breath and waited to hear anything from the other side. When she was sure that no one was behind the door, she searched for its knob and then turned it slowly. The door’s hinges didn’t creak as it opened. That was a small blessing, and she was thankful for it.

The room behind the door was almost as dark as the hallway. There was a single narrow window high in one wall that illuminated some uninteresting furniture—a desk, a few chairs. A computer sat on top of the desk, as well as a multiline telephone, but she knew they wouldn’t work, so she didn’t bother with them. Laura had cut all power to the prison, it seemed. Clara wondered how the prisoners in the dorms would be reacting. They must be going crazy wondering what was going on.

She couldn’t help them. Or rather, she could. She was going to help everybody, but not directly. Clara climbed under the desk and took the warden’s BlackBerry out of her pocket. It was a high-end model with a full keyboard and a built-in camera. The screen lit up when she touched the space bar and it displayed a list of email subjects. Clara didn’t have time for those. They would be important evidence later, when the warden was brought to trial, but for now all she needed was a cell phone. It took her a while to figure out how to just dial a phone number, but eventually she got Glauer’s cell number typed in and hit send.

The phone on the other end rang once, twice, three times. Clara bit her lip and nearly switched off the phone when she heard footsteps passing outside the room. This was too important, though. Even if she got caught in midcall, she needed to get the word out to Glauer and Fetlock. On the fifth ring the call went to voice mail.

“This is Glauer. You’ve reached my official phone. If this is personal, call me back on my other number. If you don’t know that number, it can’t be too personal.”

Clara cursed silently and waited for the beep. She had practiced what she was going to say and didn’t have to think about it. “Glauer, it’s Hsu,” she whispered. “I’m at SCI-Marcy Malvern is here and she’s taken over, with the assistance of the warden, um, Augusta Bellows. The whole facility is under their control and they’re recruiting prisoners to become new vampires. Caxton is here, alive, and at large inside the prison walls, but she’s alone and unarmed. I’m currently at large but very much alone and definitely outgunned. Get Fetlock. Get the state police. Get anybody and get up here.”

She hit end and pressed her forehead against the plastic screen. How long would it be before he thought to check his messages? It was a workday and she’d called his work phone. Why hadn’t he answered it? It must be sitting in his car or, worse, maybe he’d forgotten it when he went in to work that morning.

She heard someone out in the hall and froze in panic. Just footsteps, and they kept going past. She wondered how long it would take Franklin or one of the other half-deads to find the warden. When she recovered from her shock, would she scream for help? Clara couldn’t have much more than five minutes.

She couldn’t stay where she was. They would search every door on this hallway for her, and this room would be the first place they looked. She needed to get to a different part of the prison without being detected. She supposed there must be heating ducts in the ceiling. People in the movies crawled through heating ducts all the time.

Then she realized that if people did it in the movies all the time, the person who had designed the prison might have seen it done and therefore known not to make the heating ducts big enough even for a petite woman like Clara to get into. She remembered the heating vent she’d thrown the key into: it had been no more than eleven inches across. So that idea was out. She looked up at the window above her, but it was reinforced with chicken wire and had bars on the outside.

She was going to have to chance the hallway. There was no other way.

Clara went to the door and went through the same routine she’d used when she entered the room. She held her breath and listened, and only when she was sure there was no one outside did she open the door and step outside. She closed the door silently behind her and pressed her back up against a wall.

She couldn’t go down the hall toward the open doorway. She was certain there would be half-deads down there. So she had only one direction she could head. It saved her from having to make a difficult choice. She pressed on, deeper into the darkness, until she couldn’t even see shadows, just uninterrupted blackness.

She very nearly walked right into a wall at the end of the corridor. Her outstretched hand knocked into it and she had to force herself not to keep walking, to stop in midstep so she didn’t collide with the wall face first. When she’d stopped completely she let out a long sighing breath.

“Dupree,” someone said. “Is that you?” The voice was high and hysterical.

Slowly Clara reached toward her pocket where she’d put the warden’s pistol. It would be suicide to try to shoot now, of course—there was no way she could hit anything in the darkness, and the noise of the shot would draw all kinds of unwanted attention.

“Dupree?” the voice asked again. From closer by.

She could try to slip past the half-dead. Clearly it couldn’t see her—it had only heard the sound of her hand hitting the wall, or maybe her exhalation. If she knew where it was she could just step around it and—

“Gah!” she said, a noise of pure revulsion. A hand had come out of the darkness and touched her left breast.

There was no thought process for what she did then. Clara’s hands moved of their own volition, obeying a reflex as old as time. One hand grabbed at the half-dead’s clothes and pulled it close to her. The other hand went over its mouth. Then she brought up her knee, right into its crotch.

It struggled and tried to bite her hand. Its own hands grabbed at her lapels, at her hair. In pure animal fear Clara grabbed its head in both hands and twisted, trying to break the thing’s neck. She felt bones grinding against each other inside the rotten envelope of its flesh and felt its hands grab ever more desperately at her, but she had the element of surprise and she kept twisting, clamped her hands tighter around the half-dead’s head and twisted and twisted—

And then the head came off in her hands. It felt like she was holding a squishy bowling ball. She heard the half-dead’s body slump against the wall, but she couldn’t see anything.

The head kept trying to bite her fingers where they covered its mouth. Clara threw the head away from herself and heard it smack the floor and go rolling down the hall.

Time to run, she thought. She’d been as quiet as she could, but surely someone had heard her outburst or the half-dead calling for Dupree. Clara pushed forward again and found another doorway. She pulled it open and ran through. The hallway beyond was better lit, though not much—an emergency light box was shedding a fading yellow glow from somewhere far down its length. She couldn’t see any half-deads moving through the murky light, so she ran forward, her sensible shoes clopping loudly on the floor. Up ahead she saw a sign and as she got closer she could just read it in the gloom:

INFIRMARY

Stab-Protective Vests

Must Be Worn Beyond

This Point!

There was a massive barred gate beyond the sign. She was just going to have to find a way to get it open. She couldn’t go back, couldn’t—

She heard two things then, and both of them made ice cubes chatter in her blood. One was a cough, from somewhere in the shadows. The other was the BlackBerry which chose that moment to start ringing in her pocket.