23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

35.

Get the fuck off of me,” Gert moaned, but her heart wasn’t in it. Caxton opened another bottle of dish detergent and squirted it into her celly’s eyes.

“This is going to feel pretty good in a couple of seconds,” Caxton explained as she rubbed the detergent into Gert’s eyelids and then used a scrunched-up paper towel to scrape at the girl’s cheeks and mouth. Gert kept trying to push her away, but Caxton held on tight. The pepperballs had left a thick pasty residue all over Gert’s face that was burning her skin. It had to come off, one way or another.

When she’d scrubbed her celly’s face enough she let Gert lie back on the cot and sat down herself in a folding chair. She was exhausted. She used to be able to go without sleep for days at a time, but in the SHU her body had gone flabby and her muscles had started to atrophy. Just fifteen hours to go, she thought. At the end of Malvern’s deadline, either she or the vampire would be dead. Either way, she could rest then. In the meantime she had plenty of work to do.

“What the fuck,” Gert said, rolling over on the cot. It had taken Caxton far too long to revive the girl and get the PAVA residue off her face, but it had to be done. “What happened? What did you just do to me? My mouth tastes like ass.” She smacked her lips. “Soapy ass.”

“You were hit in the face with a couple pepperballs from that robot gun,” Caxton explained. “I got you out of there, but you were suffering from respiratory distress. You weren’t breathing very well. So I found the prison’s infirmary and brought you inside. I had a hell of a time getting the door open. Then I had to clean you up to get the pepper out of your system. The soap you’re tasting is dishwashing detergent. You can’t just wash capsaicin off with water—that makes it worse. You need to scrub it off with soap. Milk works, too, but I couldn’t find any. They keep a ton of detergent on hand here, probably because there’s so much pepper spray in the prison that accidents happen all the time. I tried to be gentle.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Gert said. She tried to open her eyes and grunted in pain. She brought her hands up to rub at her eyes, and Caxton grabbed them and pushed them back down to her sides.

“You’ll just grind it in. Trust me—it’s nasty stuff, but I’ve worked with it before.”

“Back when you were a cop.”

Caxton nodded. Then she realized Gert couldn’t see her, so she said, “Yeah. I’ve used pepper spray on people, a couple of times, when I needed to stop them from running away. It’s supposed to be more humane than shooting them in the legs.”

“I think next time I’ll try my luck with a bullet.” Gert managed to open one eye and stare up at the dark ceiling.

Caxton handed her an ice pack. The infirmary’s refrigerator had gone down when the power was cut, of course, but it was well enough insulated that things in the freezer were still frozen when she opened it. “This’ll help, too. It’ll take some of the swelling down.”

Gert’s face was a mess, puffy and bruised. There was no permanent damage, though. That was the point of pepperballs, of course. They belonged in the middle of what police called the continuum of lethality—a rainbow of options for controlling subjects that went from demanding in a firm voice that they stop all the way up to gunning them down with automatic weapons. Pepperballs were closer to the latter, but you could live through a direct hit and eventually be fine. Well, most of the time. Caxton had read about Victoria Snelgrove, a journalism student who had been caught in the middle of a riot in Boston where the cops had used pepperballs to control the crowd. The cop who shot Snelgrove hadn’t even been aiming for her, but he managed to put one through her eye. It had broken through the bone behind her eye socket and caused massive bleeding in her brain. Ambulances couldn’t reach the scene fast enough because the panicked crowd wouldn’t let them through. The cop who fired that pepperball had received a forty-five-day suspension without pay.

Gert had been lucky. One of the pepperballs had hit the ridge of her eyebrow. An inch lower and it could have killed her.

“You didn’t just leave me there,” Gert said, sounding surprised. “You went out of your way to help me out.”

Caxton shrugged. “You were helping me when you got hit. It seems fair.”

Gert shook her head. “No, sure. But you have somebody else to save, somebody you care about a lot more than me. Wasting time on me maybe makes it harder to save your girlfriend, right?”

“I don’t see it that way,” Caxton said. It was just a small lie, she told herself. “What are you getting at, Gert? Anybody would have done the same.”

“You ain’t been inside long, you think that,” Gert snorted. “There’s girls in here wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. And there’s some people who… maybe you shouldn’t help.”

Caxton shrugged. “Who, like Adolph Hitler?”

Gert laughed, but she looked like she had something on her mind. “Yes, and maybe some people who aren’t as bad as that but who did real bad things. Things that can’t be forgiven.”

Caxton shook her head. “I don’t know who I am to judge who’s worth saving or not. Lie down and rest for a while. We’ll move again soon, but you need to take it easy.” She went over to a desk on the far side of the room. She found paper and a pen and started making a map of the prison, sketching out its layout based on what she’d seen of the place from outside and what she knew about prison design, which wasn’t much. SCI-Marcy was surrounded by a squarish wall with watchtowers every hundred feet around its perimeter. The prison itself was made up of eight long buildings: the five dorms, the infirmary wing, an administrative wing, and the cafeteria and kitchens, which also incorporated the SHU. Each building radiated outward from where they were connected at one end to a central tower, like rays coming out of a central sun. At the top of the main tower was the central command center. Outbuildings and covered walkways connected the buildings here and there, making the prison look from above like a half-finished spiderweb.

It was designed to be easy to get around, if you were a guard. If you were a prisoner it quickly became a maze of locked doors and heavily armed checkpoints.

She couldn’t see any way around it. If she could rescue Clara and save Malvern before nightfall, that was fine. Malvern couldn’t put up a fight during the daylight hours. She would be trapped in her coffin, unable to move, unaware of what was going on, and Caxton could just reach in, pluck out the vampire’s heart, and destroy it as she saw fit. Malvern would never even wake up. But if, as was becoming more and more likely, she needed to fight Malvern during the hours of darkness, she was going to need guns—real guns, loaded with real bullets.

There were machine guns up in the watchtowers, but there was no way for Caxton to get through all that barbed wire without a pair of wire cutters and a lot of free time. There had to be an armory full of rifles and handguns inside the prison as well. She had no concrete proof of where it might be located—it wasn’t the kind of thing the guards were likely to tell a prisoner—but looking at her crude map, she saw that it could only be in one place. A riot could break out in any dorm, at any time. The COs didn’t ordinarily carry lethal firearms on their persons, because it would be too easy for a prisoner to take a gun from an unsuspecting CO and kill him with it. The real guns only came out in emergencies—but that meant they needed to be available at any time. If the warden decided that the less-lethal elements of the continuum of lethality had been tried and found wanting, that deadly force was a reasonable response to prisoner violence, then the guards would need to arm themselves in a hurry and from a central location. The armory had to be on the ground floor of the central tower.

Which was where all the half-deads were, of course. It would be the most heavily defended spot in the prison, she was sure.

It was going to be her next stop.

She put down her pen and got up. Now she just had to figure out how to get there. The central tower was just on the other side of the infirmary, she knew. It was no more than a couple hundred yards away. But Caxton had already made a quick check of the prison’s medical wing. There was the pharmacy, where she and Gert were holed up, and beyond that a single long room full of beds. Empty beds. There must have been patients in some of those beds when the prison was overrun, but they were gone now, probably shoved in cells in one dorm or another where they could be more easily watched. Beyond the room of beds was a barred gate that she would never be able to get through, not without heavy-duty cutting equipment she didn’t have.

She stretched and rubbed at the bridge of her nose, trying to wake herself up. Maybe she could go around to one of the dorms, and make her way through to—

Suddenly she stopped in place.

“What’s going on?” Gert asked, grabbing her hunting knife from where Caxton had placed it under the cot.

“Shh,” Caxton hissed. She’d heard something. Someone screaming. It sounded like it came from the far side of the barred gate. It hadn’t sounded like a half-dead. It sounded like a human being, in real trouble.

Whoever they were, there was nothing she could do for them, she told herself. But she kept listening all the same.