23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

43.

Gert. I’m sorry about this,” Caxton said.

“About what?” Gert asked. She was barely able to stand up straight. She was crashing hard.

Caxton grabbed the quick-release tabs of Gert’s stab-proof vest and tore it off of her. Then she pulled down on the plastic zipper of Gert’s jumpsuit, stripping her to the waist. A white cardboard box fell out from between Gert’s breasts and crashed to the floor. Caxton picked up the box, zipped her celly’s jumpsuit back up, and then steered her over to the warden’s desk and made her sit down.

The box held a bottle of pills. The plastic safety seal on the bottle had been torn open, and when Caxton took the lid off the bottle she saw the foil seal underneath had been pushed in. She shook out a few pills into her hand and saw they were simple round, white tablets. She didn’t recognize them—her training had been in illicit street drugs, not prescription medication. “Methylphenidate 20mg,” she read from the side of the box. “What are these?”

“Vitamin R,” Gert slurred. The hunting knife fell out of her hand and clanged on the floor.

“You mean—Ritalin? You took Ritalin? Do you have ADD, then, too?”

“Chronic fatigue,” Gert said. “I said! You know. It’s just a little… boost. A little boosty to keep me goin’.”

“How many did you take?”

Gert didn’t answer. Caxton went over to the other side of the desk and grabbed Gert’s chin. The younger woman made a grab for the bottle, but Caxton held it out of reach.

“Just stay with me a second, and I promise you can sleep as long as you want,” Caxton said. “How many did you take?”

“Five or six.”

Caxton shook her head in dismay. On the box it said that dosage should not exceed two tablets a day. There was a warning on the side of the box that told you what to do in case of an accidental overdose. You were supposed to call your local poison control center immediately.

Caxton ran a hand through her hair in frustration. She was no doctor, and she had no access to medical care. Gert could be in serious danger, but there was absolutely nothing she could do.

There was a possibility that Gert could just sleep it off. That she would be fine after a little nap. Keep telling yourself that, Caxton thought. She took Gert’s wrist between her index finger and thumb and felt her pulse. It was racing—and yet the girl looked as if she couldn’t stay awake a moment longer. That had to be a bad sign, didn’t it?

The only thing that Caxton could think to do was make Gert vomit. If some of the pills were still in her stomach it would at least keep the problem from getting worse. Of course, she also knew that in some cases of poisoning, inducing vomiting was the last thing you wanted to do—but she would have to take her chances. She had no other ideas. She tried grabbing Gert around the waist and squeezing her, but Gert just pushed her away, with surprising strength given how exhausted she seemed. Caxton sighed and tried another way. She yanked Gert’s mouth open and shoved her index finger down her celly’s throat.

Gert’s eyes went wide and Caxton worried she would clamp down and bite the intruding finger clean off. Instead she jerked backward and then vomited explosively all over the desk, the floor, and her own jumpsuit. She coughed and gagged and spat up long ropes of drool. Caxton lowered her to the floor, well away from the puddles of sick, and got her on her side. She knew that much—if someone was throwing up and passing out at the same time, you put them on their side so they couldn’t choke on their own puke. Then Caxton wiped her finger on her own jumpsuit and sat back on her haunches, wishing she had any idea of what to do next.

Other lives depended on her. She couldn’t just sit with Gert until the girl woke up and felt better. By then Clara could be dead—and half the prison’s inmates, as well. Twilight was coming at six o’clock, and when the sun set Malvern would wake up and be ready for another night’s rampage.

And yet… if she just left Gert, if she walked away while the girl was still moaning and wheezing on the floor… how was that different from watching the warden shoot herself and doing nothing to stop it?

While she was trying to decide what to do, Gert’s chest started to shake. Caxton thought she might be having a seizure, but when she checked she found that instead Gert was just sobbing, letting out huge, noisy gusts of tears.

“It’s not fair,” she cried. “It isn’t fair. It was an accident!”

“Shh,” Caxton said, and rubbed her celly’s shoulder. “Shh. Try to lie still.”

“I never meant to do it. Nobody would ever want to do that! How can they lock you up for something you didn’t even want to do? Something you can barely remember doing at all?”

Caxton’s hand stopped moving on Gert’s arm.

She had never asked Gert what it was she had done to get herself in prison, or why she was under protective custody in the SHU. At first, when she’d been locked up with Gert, she’d figured she didn’t want to know. That asking would just get Gert talking, when what she’d wanted at that point was for her celly to shut up. Later there hadn’t been time.

She still wasn’t sure she wanted to know. The warden had seemed to think it was something bad, something that would make Caxton regret partnering with Gert even if the option was going it alone.

“They wouldn’t stop crying,” Gert said. She wiped at her nose with one sleeve and it came away slick with snot. “I couldn’t seem to fix them. I would feed them, I would change their fucking diapers, and they never… they never stopped. And then my mom said I had to move out, and I was packing up but still, still they were crying…”

“Gert, stop,” Caxton said. “Please don’t say any more.”

“Little Charity, she was sick, she had colic, and it made her crazy, and Blaine, her brother—he would hear her crying, and it would wake him up, and nothing would make him go back to sleep. I just needed Charity to be quiet, just for a little while, so I could think. Think about where we were going to go. And she wouldn’t. She just… wouldn’t. I’m a good person. I know I did something horrible, but in my heart, where it counts, I’m still good…”

“Enough!” Caxton said. She didn’t want to know any of this. She didn’t want to think about what came next in this stupid, sordid little story. She didn’t want to remember why Gert’s name had been familiar the first time she’d heard it. Why Gert had said she was a little famous, and why she’d told Caxton not to believe everything she’d heard.

Half the women in the prison were mothers, mothers of children they got to see for an hour a week at most. Children they couldn’t play with, or help with their homework, or feed, or put to bed—children being raised now by other people. Those prisoners would do just about anything to prove they weren’t bad mothers. And for a certain kind of person, a person prone already to violence, to not thinking things through carefully, it made sense, that to prove you were a good mother, you had to hurt someone who’d already proved she was the worst kind of mother of all.

A baby killer.

Gert had been locked up for her own safety. Because half the women in the prison wanted to see her dead.

“Enough,” Caxton said again. “I don’t care,” she told Gert. “I don’t care what you did, that doesn’t matter—I mean, of course it matters, but—but you helped me, you were there for me when I needed you, maybe not in the ways I wanted you to be there, but—but—”

Gert started to snore then.

Caxton closed her eyes. She saw Clara, in her head, as plain as if she was standing right in front of her. She knew what she needed to do.

Leaving Gert to sleep it off, she headed down the stairs toward the Hub.

She took the hunting knife with her. And Gert’s shoes, as well.