23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

50.

Maricón and Featherwood were arguing. Clara was paying attention with half an ear, just enough to hear if they started talking about her. Occasionally they did, and always it was to ask each other whether it was time to kill Clara or if they should wait for some kind of sign from Guilty Jen. The second that Laura was dead, they were supposed to cut her throat. Of course, they would have no way of knowing whether or not Laura was dead until Guilty Jen came up the stairs, probably brandishing some grisly trophy from the fight. Laura’s severed head, maybe, or just an ear to—

Stop it! Stop it! Clara howled inside her own head. She had managed to make her face blank, and had even stopped shivering. But she couldn’t stop the fear from getting inside. She couldn’t stop thinking about the future. About the very brief future.

The possibility that Laura might kill Guilty Jen never seemed to occur to the members of the set.

Clara put most of her attention in front of her. If she concentrated on something else, if she really focused on the fine details, she could keep from crying in panic. It was the same trick, really, that she had used with her camera when she started feeling queasy at Malvern’s crime scenes. If you just focused on what your eyes were actually seeing, just the colors and the shapes, you didn’t have to think about what anything actually meant.

So she studied the prison’s nerve center. Its controls. The prison had been updated frequently since it had been built, almost fifty years ago. The technology of warehousing human beings had advanced by light-years since then. Instead of tearing out all the old equipment and replacing it all at once, however, clearly the prison’s keepers had kludged everything together, shoving computer terminals in beside old black-and-white analog closed-circuit television equipment, stringing bundles of Ethernet cable as thick as Clara’s arm along the top of control panels in old worn steel cases and covered in black plastic knobs. Everything was patched together with duct tape and ancient wiring furry with dust, and all the controls had been relabeled with pieces of masking tape, written on with Sharpie pen. The communications board was a nightmare of dials and switches and toggles. The master control board that opened and closed the prison’s doors was simpler but built to be taken seriously, in black enamel lined with scuffed rivets. Big red panic buttons were everywhere, usually accompanied by labels that read in huge letters, DO NOT TOUCH! EVER!

All of it was dead, of course, and perfectly silent. Without power the prison couldn’t breathe, couldn’t live the way it was meant to. So when the power did come back on, all at once, for a second Clara could do nothing but gasp as red and white lights flared to life, as sirens, buzzers, Klaxon, and alarms rang all over the boards, as every television screen and computer monitor in the cluttered space flickered back on at the same time.

“—why it matters, she’s supposed to die anyway, and then we only have to worry about Marty, and he’s nothing. You and me could take turns having a nap, right, and—”

“Hey,” Featherwood said.

“—-just a thought, but maybe—”

“Hey!” Featherwood shouted. “You! The girlfriend. What the fuck did you just do?” the burned woman demanded. She ran over to the control board, where Clara stood dumbfounded, and ran her hands over the dials and knobs, obviously unsure of how to turn it all off.

“I didn’t do anything,” Clara said. “It just happened. Look— there.” She pointed at one of the television monitors. It showed a monochrome view of a claustrophobic room full of machinery. A shaky time stamp in the corner of the screen read 12:00:00 PWRHS, CAM 1. “That’s a view inside the powerhouse. Where the power comes from,” Clara explained. “Caxton cut the power, but the warden sent a bunch of half-deads to get it back online, somehow. I guess they found a way.”

On the screen a couple of half-deads were giving each other a high-five. They looked up at the camera and waved cheerily, obviously proud of what they’d accomplished. On the floor a third one lay, its torn face blackened and its fingers burned down to little more than stubs. Clearly they’d had some trouble with the repairs.

Maricón chose that moment to look out the window. “Just in time,” she said. “It was gonna get real dark in here soon. Look. The sun’s down.”

Featherwood spun around. “Oh, shit. I didn’t realize this was taking so long. Goddamn it. I know Jen has a real hard-on for whacking this Caxton, but we cannot still be here when the vampires wake up. Here—how does this phone work?” she asked, looking at Clara. She had picked up a phone handset from the communications panel. “Do I need to dial nine or something?”

Clara shrugged. “How should I know?”

“You really are useless, aren’cha?” Featherwood grimaced and dialed a number.

“What are you doing, loca?” Maricón asked. “You think she wants to be disturbed just now?”

“I ain’t dying here just because she lost track of time.” Featherwood glanced over her shoulder as if worried Guilty Jen might be standing right there. From what Clara had seen of the set and how it operated, that was a pretty sane precaution.

“Here, you,” she said, slapping Clara on the back, “get me a picture of what’s going on down there. Let me see if Caxton’s dead or not.”

They all waited while Featherwood stared at the ceiling, presumably listening to the phone on the other end ring.

Then Featherwood said, “Jen? Jen, what just happened? Jen? Is Caxton dead? Jen? Can you hear me?” She glanced at Maricón and said, “She picked up, so it must be okay, right? You—I said, get me a view of the first floor.” She smacked Clara in the ear, hard enough to really hurt. Clara studied the controls on the video board, looking for a way to figure out which camera showed what part of the facility.

“What? Jen, there’s something you should know, the—”

Maricón growled. “Ask her if we can off the cerda already.”

“Sorry, Jen, but the sun’s down. I thought you’d want to know. It’s getting pretty dark outside, so the vampires should be waking up any second. I don’t see them on any of the monitors yet, but I figured—hey. Do you want us to kill the girlfriend now?”

Featherwood held the phone away from her ear. “What the fuck? There was this really loud buzzing noise and now all I get is a dial tone. What happened, stupid?”

She hit Clara with the phone. Clara shied away, but didn’t protest. “I think I have a picture for you now. This one says it’s of the Hub.” She flipped a switch and a monitor over their heads flickered. When the image cleared it showed a brightly lit room with many exits. The floor was littered with gun refuse—brass shell casings, an abandoned shotgun, craters in the floor tiles dug up by high-velocity machine-gun rounds. Lying in the middle of it, in a pool of blood, was Queenie. She was clearly very dead.

For a while the three of them just stared at the image.

“Holy fuck,” Maricón said. “What the hell happened down there?”

Featherwood grunted. “She said she had Caxton down to rights. I don’t know any more than you fucking do, so shut up and let me think!”

“Um, excuse me,” Marty said. It was the first thing Clara had heard him say in hours. The three women spun around to stare at the ex-CO, who had been sitting quietly in a rolling chair in the middle of the room. His hands were still bound, so Feather-wood and Maricón had figured he was harmless there. His eyes were wide now and sweat was rolling down his forehead. He was trying to kick his way across the room, but one of the wheels on his chair was stuck so he was just going in pathetic circles.

Clara looked up and saw that one of the window panels of the central command center was missing. Not broken, not torn out of its frame. Just gone. Cold evening air was blowing in, lifting her hair and getting it in her eyes.

Then the shadows in the room moved. Five white shapes stepped out of the gloom. And within the space of twenty seconds everyone but Clara was dead.