23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

44.

There was another votive candle waiting on the landing of the stairs leading down to the Hub. Its flickering light illuminated the doorway that led out into the bottom floor of the central tower, a very simple door painted white with a brushed aluminum knob. All Caxton had to do was turn that knob and walk through.

She didn’t like walking into a bad situation without knowing what she was about to face. That wasn’t how you lived through moments like this. She had no choice, however. Not if she wanted to save Clara. Not if she wanted to finally kill Malvern, and be done with vampires forever. She checked her shotgun one more time, making sure it was ready to fire, making sure she had one of her few remaining plastic bullets loaded in the chamber. Then she reached out and touched the knob.

She hesitated.

The bulk of the warden’s half-deads were in there, she knew. So far she’d been very lucky. She’d only faced a few at a time, she’d been able to surprise them, mostly, and she’d had Gert watching her back.

Laura Caxton wasn’t immortal, and she certainly wasn’t invulnerable. She’d been wounded many times in fights with vampires and half-deads. She knew it only took one knife wound to kill a human being, and she knew that if she marched out into the Hub, into a small army of the faceless abominations, she would be asking to die. She had her limits, and she’d finally reached them.

She reached for the knob again.

And then she turned it, opened the door, and stepped through.

The first thing she saw in the Hub was a half-dead staring at her, surprised to see anyone come through that door. It was dressed in a prisoner’s orange jumpsuit and it was clutching a long-bladed kitchen knife close to its chest. Its face hung in tatters from its cheeks and chin like a dry, papery beard. She brought her shotgun up fast and put a plastic bullet into its chest, high up near its throat.

It dropped its knife and sank to its knees, clutching at the wound. It shrieked, a horrible, high-pitched keening that hurt her ears.

The second thing she saw in the Hub was the group of six more half-deads standing in the center of the room, huddled around a metal trash can full of burning paper. They all looked up when they heard the scream, and turned to see what was happening.

They all had knives. These weren’t kitchen staff armed with ladles and rolling pins. These were soldiers in Malvern’s undead army. They were fresh, their bodies still mostly intact, and some of their faces were still partly attached to their skulls. One by one their knives came up, held high as if they were slashers in a horror movie. One by one they peeled off from the trash can and came running at her.

Caxton waded in, knowing that in a knife fight the only good defense was to get inside your opponent’s reach. She dropped the shotgun, empty now and useless, and drew her baton with one hand and Gert’s hunting knife with the other.

A heavy, serrated bread knife whistled through the air toward her face. Caxton stepped under it and sank the hunting knife into the first target she found—the arm that was swinging toward her. The half-dead it belonged to screamed and jumped back.

Another half-dead came at her from her right. Caxton flipped the baton in her hand until she was holding it hilt first. The baton was collapsible and hollow, meant for inflicting pain rather than breaking bones. Its rubberized grip was the only solid part of its construction. She caved in a half-dead’s torn face and then brought her knee up between its legs, knocking it backward.

A knife touched the back of her neck, sliding through her skin, and she gasped in pain. She was moving too fast for them to stab her effectively, but little wounds like that could add up in a hurry—if she started losing blood, if she started letting herself react to the little cuts, she would slow down and they would have her. She brought her head back fast and hard, pushing the knife there back, then whirled around and sank the hunting knife into the ear of the half-dead behind her.

They didn’t die like human beings. They were already dead. You couldn’t knock them down with electric shocks or stun them into submission by hitting them hard on the forehead. They didn’t need to breathe, so tear gas and pepper spray had minimal effect on them. Having already been drained by the vampire who killed them, there was no blood in their bodies to spill. But they were weak, and cowardly, and they felt pain. If you hurt them enough they fell down, or ran away to lick their wounds, or just collapsed in pieces. The pieces kept moving but could safely be ignored.

It was horrible work, it was butcher’s work. Their very existence was wrong, though, an abomination. You were doing them a favor, Caxton told herself, when you cut them to pieces. When you sent them back to dreamless sleep.

Another knife in front of her. Caxton brought the baton around fast and smacked the wrist, knocking the knife free. Then she spun and parried another blow, and cut a half-dead across the eyes, blinding it.

They kept coming. Had she taken out the original six? She’d lost count. She could hear footsteps running toward her. Reinforcements on the way. She needed to at least get her back against a wall, or they were going to mob her. It would all be over if they could effectively surround her. Their blows were slow and unsteady, but she only had two hands and could only counter two attacks at once.

She glanced up and around—but before she could see anything useful, a knife sank right through her stab-proof vest.

The vests were designed specifically for the kind of attacks COs met with in normal prison situations. They were very good at stopping shanks—sharpened toothbrushes, flattened-out spoons, at worst a blunt icepick. They could stop most commercially available knives, too, but by stop the designers of the vests had meant “Allow a blade to penetrate no more than one-quarter inch.” That was enough to keep one from being killed instantly by a knife wound, but it still allowed for a serious injury.

Caxton gulped air and tried not to throw up. The knifepoint caught the small of her back, just left of her spine, cutting through skin and subcutaneous fat and just piercing the layers of muscle underneath. She felt something in her back give and she sagged to the side.

She didn’t stop to think. Instead she roared and ran backward, pushing the knife in deeper but knocking over the half-dead behind her and wrenching the weapon from its grip. She kept going, fast enough to throw off any other half-deads who were trying to sneak up behind her, kept going until her back collided painfully with a cinder-block wall behind her. She was sweating hard, and panting, but for the moment she was free of the pack of murderous bastards.

They took a moment to regroup and come at her again. She took the pause this gave her to firm up her grips on her two weapons, and to grit her teeth so she didn’t scream from the pain.

Then the half-deads came at her like a brick wall. She didn’t have time to count them. She didn’t have time to look at what they were wearing, or where their weapons were, or what their faces looked like. Sometimes time slowed down at moments like this, when death was so close.

Sometimes it didn’t. Caxton brought her weapons up in front of her chest, ready to push back the first attack. And then a noise like thunder rolling through the room made the half-deads jump and spin.

One ravaged face exploded in a red cloud. An arm flew out of the group and smacked the wall next to where Caxton was crouching. Some of the half-deads just fell down like sacks of broken bricks. A few of them managed to run away.

When they were gone, when the room in front of her was clear, Caxton saw what had happened. She just had time to swear before it happened again.

There was a machine-gun nest built into the hub, a narrow guard post at the very center of the room with gun slits carved into its concrete walls. The smoking muzzle of a machine gun was sticking out of one, pointed right at her. Without any preamble it started roaring and spitting bullets at her, hundreds of them per minute.