23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

52.

Jesus,” Clara said, “that hurt.”

She was conscious again. She kind of wished she wasn’t. Her whole jaw felt like it had been dislocated, knocked backward off its joints and into the fleshy part of her neck. It hurt to talk. It hurt to sit up. It hurt a little every time she breathed, a twinge that went all the way up to the top of her sinuses and deep into her chest. She touched, carefully, the skin of her neck and throat and felt it swollen and tender. It hurt to touch her face, so she stopped doing that.

It hurt to open her eyes, but she had to know where she was. She was still alive, and she presumed she was still a prisoner of the vampires, but beyond that what her eyes told her didn’t help explain very much.

She was in some kind of cage, just tall enough for her to stand up in if she ducked her head, and just long enough that she could lie down in it. It was made of crisscrossing bars, spaced about six inches apart. All the bars were wrapped with yellow spongy foam rubber, which was patched here and there with duct tape. The cage had a rubber sheet on its floor that smelled like someone had peed on it, then hosed it off with harsh detergents but not very thoroughly.

Similar cages filled the room around her. Two of them were occupied but the people in them were either asleep, unconscious, or dead. Both of them wore orange jumpsuits.

There was also a desk in the room, with a portable generator sitting next to it. The generator was switched off. Sitting at the desk was a vampire. The one wearing a sleeveless jumpsuit. The vampire was reading a magazine.

Or trying to. She would bring it up close to her eyes as if she had trouble making out the words in the dimly lit room, then sigh angrily and flip rapidly through three or four pages before repeating the operation.

“I can read, sort of,” the vampire growled. “I can understand the words. I mean, I was never a big reader before, but I knew how. But now they mostly look like weird little squiggly shapes. And even when I try hard, I can read a sentence and then forget how it started before I reach the end. It just don’t seem to matter, you know? Like whatever this asshole was trying to say about Brad and Angelina just isn’t all that important anymore.”

“You knew I was awake,” Clara said.

“Well, you sat up, for one thing. That’s a fucking easy sign right there. Plus I saw your blood go faster. When you sleep your blood slows down. Your heart beats slower. Did you know I can see your heart? It’s like I got x-ray eyes. That’s pretty cool, I guess.”

It’s seriously creepy, Clara thought. “You’re not human anymore,” she told the vampire.

“What the fuck you just say, girl?”

Clara cringed. But she knew that as long as she was engaged in a nice, civil conversation with this bloodsucker, she wasn’t being dismembered, eaten, or tortured. That was worth something. “I didn’t mean any offense. It’s just—vampires don’t care about the same things human beings care about. You’re not supposed to. Celebrity gossip has got to be pretty low on the list of things important to vampires.”

“Yeah? What’s at the top?”

Blood. Clara tried very hard not to say that out loud. Even if it was true. Blood was the single thing vampires truly cared the most about. Pretty much the only thing. “I don’t know,” she said, instead. “I guess you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.”

“I still feel pretty human. I mean, better. Stronger. But I’m still wondering about my kids, and what they’ll think about this change. And about their daddy. Except… I keep thinking about the hair on his back. It never used to bother me before, or at least, I put it out of my head. But now I keep seeing it, seeing him on top of me like I’m looking down at him from the ceiling and all I can see is this thick rug of hair. Oh, and his smell. He never would shower before we did it, that always bugged me. Now when I think about it, it kinda makes me sick.”

Vampires had their own body odor. One that didn’t wash off. They smelled like the bottom of a hamster cage—a sick hamster’s cage. It was a nasty, animal smell, very faint, but it was one of the signs a vampire was nearby. Clara could just smell it now from ten feet away.

“You’re—Hauser, right? I was there when you took the curse,” Clara said, for lack of anything better. “In the warden’s office. Where is the warden, by the way?”

“Dead,” Hauser told her. “That was pretty much the first thing Malvern did, when she woke up tonight and found out how fucked up things got during the day.”

Clara closed her eyes. If she’d had a plan—she hadn’t, not really, she knew she was screwed. But the brain kept trying to piece things together, even when all hope was gone. If she had consciously tried to think of a plan, it would have involved playing Malvern and the warden off each other. Widening the rift between the two of them. Apparently Malvern had taken the expedient course toward solving that problem.

“Hey, you. Hey,” Hauser said. She got up from the desk and took a step toward one of the other cages. “I know you’re awake.” The vampire kicked the cage and made it slide a foot and a half across the floor. Inside it someone struggled to grab at the bars and pull themselves upright.

“Laura,” Clara breathed, when she saw who it was.

Laura said nothing. She just sat down on the floor of her cage and lowered her head. One of her arms looked wrong. It was tucked up across her chest in a way that looked painful. Her face was bruised and one lip was puffy and swollen. But she was still alive.

“And you. Who the fuck are you?” the vampire snarled, and grabbed the third occupied cage. She picked it up easily and then dropped it to the floor with a deafening clang. The woman inside rolled over and batted at the bars with one weak hand.

“You can call me… Gert. Or Gerty, whichever… you like.”

“She was Laura—I mean Caxton’s cellmate,” Clara told the vampire. If she could get Hauser to sit down again, to sit calmly, there was less chance of her accidentally killing one of them. Clearly she had orders not to, but vampires sometimes didn’t know their own strength. “She helped Caxton escape from the SHU.”

“This piece of trash got out of the hole? Shee-it,” Hauser said. “She’s about likely to have a heart attack right now. Well, fuck her. She don’t have to survive very much longer. Just ’til five o’clock.”

Clara frowned. “What happens then?”

The vampire shrugged. “Ain’t up to me. It’s you three that decides. Malvern said twenty-three hours, and that’s what she’s got. When it’s almost up I’m supposed to ask you, do you want to be like me. Tougher than nails and live forever. Or do you want to die? Only there’s a catch.”

Of course there was. “What’s the catch?” Clara asked.

“You gotta be unanimous. All three of you become vampires or all three of you die. It seems kind of simple to me, but if even one of you vetoes it, you all get eaten.”

And so we’re going to die, Clara thought. There was no way any logical, thinking person would take the other choice, and become—

“I say yes, please,” Gert whispered.

In her cage, Caxton said nothing. She was picking at a piece of tape holding the foam rubber around a steel bar, just scraping away at it with a fingernail. She hadn’t even looked over at Clara. Hadn’t said a word.

Clara couldn’t help but think that was a bad sign.