23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

47.

Caxton pulled her knees in closer and made sure the top of her head wasn’t exposed. She wanted to take a peek to see what was going on, but she didn’t dare. Every time the smallest part of her body was exposed, the machine gun started firing again.

She hadn’t been prepared for this. Half-deads never used guns. They lacked the coordination to aim properly, and the recoil from anything heavier than a derringer could rip a half-dead’s rotten arm right off. Apparently the half-dead in the machine-gun nest had figured out the answer. A mounted gun didn’t transfer its recoil to its operator, and with something that big and fast you didn’t need to aim. You could spray down the whole room as if you were using a garden hose. Some of the other half-deads had been killed in the process, but they weren’t known for looking after one another’s well-being. The thing in the nest wanted only one thing, which was to kill her as quickly as possible.

Caxton had barely survived the first volley of the machine gun, diving behind the only cover available. It wasn’t even particularly good cover. There was a small kiosk built into one wall of the Hub, a counter where COs signed in and out every time they moved a prisoner from one wing of the facility to another. Behind the counter was a tiny booth just big enough for a chair. Caxton had dived over the counter when the machine gun started firing and now had a concrete wall between her and certain death, but she was pinned down. The other half-deads, cowards to the last, had fled the Hub when the shooting started. If they came back she would be a sitting duck. She couldn’t stay there forever, and she couldn’t leave her hiding hole, either. If they came back—but then, they didn’t have to, did they? Sundown was very close now. Caxton didn’t have a watch to time it, but she’d been fighting vampires long enough to have an uncanny sense of where the sun was in the sky, even when she couldn’t see it. When you hunted vampires, knowing when it was day and when it was night was something that kept you alive.

The moment the sun was down Malvern would be coming for her, Caxton knew. She didn’t need to send in waves of half-deads. She could just come to the Hub herself, and drag Caxton out of her hiding place with her own two hands.

Caxton needed to get out of this trap before that happened. But how? Her weapons were useless to her. She had dropped her shotgun, thinking she wouldn’t have time to reload. It was still sitting on the floor outside the kiosk. It might as well be on the far side of the moon. She had a stun gun, a hunting knife, and a collapsible baton. They were worth nothing against the bad end of the continuum of lethality.

Maybe at least she could get a look at what was going on. The kiosk had originally had a plastic window set above the counter, designed to be pulled down by the CO inside in case of an attack. It had been meant to protect against knives and thrown objects, not machine-gun rounds, and the first time it was shot at it had collapsed in long jagged shards. Some of them lay on the floor around Caxton. She picked one up. If she held it up, just so, she could see a reflection in it of the room beyond the counter, and by turning it slowly from side to side she could scan the room.

The machine gun opened fire again, chewing through the paint on the wall behind the counter. The half-dead inside the nest must have seen a flash of light from her improvised periscope. Caxton tried not to flinch as she turned the shard slowly to the left. There—she could see the machine gun firing. It was impossible to see into the nest from where she was, though. She couldn’t tell how much ammunition the half-dead had left, or whether anyone else was coming, or—

—except, maybe she could. It looked like—it could just be that—something was moving on the far side of the room. Behind the machine-gun nest. It wasn’t a half-dead, though. At least, Caxton was pretty sure it wasn’t, because it was sticking very carefully to the shadows, staying out of the machine gun’s fire zone. Moving slowly, not showing much of itself at all.

Then something else rushed out of the shadows, a flash of orange. The machine gun pivoted quickly to track it, and the orange blur started zigzagging back and forth. The machine gun opened fire, but for a moment it seemed the orange blur was moving too erratically, too randomly.

Then—then there was a scream.

It was a human scream, not the high-pitched piteous wailing of a half-dead. It was human and it went on and on. Caxton turned her shard of plastic to try to see what had happened, but the orange blur was nowhere to be found. Instead she could see the machine-gun nest. Its door had been pried open. The machine gun was pointed up at the ceiling, its barrel smoking but silent.

There was another scream, and it was a half-dead this time. It was cut off very abruptly.

Then a living woman said Caxton’s name very softly.

Caxton knew the voice. She knew she’d been rescued. Sort of. She started to stand up, the hunting knife held carefully in one hand she kept out of view beneath the counter. The other hand held the collapsible baton. She brought that one up in plain view. “Guilty Jen,” she said.

It wasn’t the gangbanger she saw first, though. It was one of her set, a black woman with a broken nose. Caxton remembered breaking that nose. The scream she’d just heard, the horrible drawn-out scream of pain, had come from that woman’s throat. It was the last noise she was ever going to make. Her orange jumpsuit had been torn open along one side by the machine gun, and her rib cage was a gaping, steaming mess. She was dead, her eyes staring up at the ceiling, her hands curled lifelessly at her sides.

Guilty Jen stepped out of the machine-gun nest. Her hands were empty, but she was smiling, which Caxton knew was a bad sign. “Hey,” she said, and waved cheerily. “You want to come out of there?”

“You going to give me a good reason?” Caxton asked. She kept glancing down at the dead woman on the floor. She wasn’t squeamish about dead bodies—in her line of work that would be a serious problem—but something about this death bothered her. Not the cause of death, not the severity of the injuries, but the sheer stupidity of it.

Guilty Jen had sacrificed one of her set to distract the attention of the machine gunner. The dead woman had been utterly loyal to her leader. She had run into gunfire just because Guilty Jen had ordered her to. That act of stupid courage had saved Caxton’s life. But for what?

“I got a couple reasons,” Guilty Jen said. She didn’t move closer. She kept herself half concealed by the door of the machine-gun nest, ready to jump back inside if Caxton was holding a gun underneath the counter. “One is, I can just come over there and pull you out whenever I want to.”

“You can try,” Caxton said.

Guilty Jen nodded, her pigtails swinging back and forth. “The other one is, I got your girlfriend. I know you’ll come out of there for her.” She shook her head when she saw Caxton peering into the shadows of the Hub. “Not here. But close by. I got people sitting on her, of course.”

Caxton sighed. “So… what now? I come out, and then we fight. If I lose, you kill me. And probably Clara too. If I win, you’ll let her go?”

“Nah.” Guilty Jen’s smile broadened. “If you win, and that doesn’t seem real likely, but let’s say I trip and crack my head open before I can even touch you—if you win, they got orders to kill her anyway.” The gangbanger shrugged. “That’s just how I roll.”