23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

53.

The tape came away, leaving Caxton’s fingers sticky and one fingernail broken. She dug a finger into the foam rubber wrapped around the bar of her cage and felt a sharp edge underneath. It was as she’d suspected—the bars weren’t bars at all, but strips of steel as flat as ribbons. You could cut yourself pretty well on the edge.

She looked up and saw the vampire standing over Clara’s cage. They were still talking. Well, that was fine. For now. She knew what Clara was trying to achieve. Hauser was a brand-new vampire. There was still plenty of humanity left in her—it took weeks for the bloodlust to take hold. Over time it would erode Hauser’s personality until there was nothing left. Each night she woke in a coffin she would feel less connection to the person she had once been. Each night she would think more and more often about blood, and how good it would taste running down her throat, and how little it mattered if she had to hurt people to get it. But for now, on her first night post-death, Hauser could be reasoned with. She could be talked around.

That wasn’t what Caxton had in mind, though.

They’d taken all her weapons. They’d taken her stab-proof vest when they came and found her in the stairwell, reeling in pain, barely able to move. They couldn’t take away her brain, though. Her knowledge of what made vampires tick.

She grabbed the naked steel bar of her cage and jerked her hand along the sharp edge. The pain was intense but short-lived. It barely made her gasp. She felt her skin give way, though, felt hot wet blood well up across the creases of her palm. She flexed her hand over and over again, pumping blood out of her veins, until it was dripping on the floor of her cage.

The vampire’s head lifted and she looked around. As if something was calling her name.

“Did I say something wrong?” Clara asked, trying to sound innocent. “I was just asking about your parents because—”

“Hold on,” Hauser said. Her nose twitched. Vampire senses were sharper than those of human beings. Where blood was involved they were positively acute. Like a shark, a vampire could smell blood a mile away. “There’s something—I shouldn’t—”

Caxton flicked her wrist. Droplets of blood stained the foam rubber bars in front of her. A few of them sailed through the air and splattered the floor outside the cage. She flexed her hand a few more times and then brushed her palm against the bars, spreading even more blood all over them.

There was no apprehension in her, no fear that this wouldn’t work. It would definitely work. It would almost certainly get her killed, too. That was okay. She’d stopped believing she could end this neatly. She couldn’t see a lot of positive outcomes. But she would die trying, and that had to count for something.

Hauser padded over toward her, nose rummaging through the air. Her red eyes fixed on a spot of blood a few feet outside of Caxton’s cage.

“I cut myself,” Caxton said, her tone flat and emotionless.

“That was kind of stupid, bitch. It’s not like I’m going to come in there and bandage you up,” Hauser said. But she was still looking at the blood.

“I wonder what it tastes like,” Caxton said. “You know. If we’re going to be vampires. I wonder what it tastes like to you.”

Hauser seemed to recover herself a little. “Yeah. Well, you can lick it off the floor later. I’m supposed to sit at that desk and just watch you guys. Make sure you talk over Malvern’s offer real good.”

“I bet it tastes like—what? Wine? Maybe really good chocolate,” Caxton suggested. She hadn’t expected Hauser to put up this much resistance.

The vampire squatted down and put one white fingertip next to the blood spot. And just stared at it. Didn’t touch it. Didn’t move. When they wanted to, vampires could stand so still you’d think they were marble statues. They didn’t breathe. Their muscles never got stiff or tired.

“You don’t have to do this,” Clara shouted. “You can fight it.”

“Clara, please,” Caxton said, trying not to sound too angry. “Don’t. Not right now.”

“She’ll kill you on the spot,” Clara whispered. “Suck you dry!”

“No I won’t,” Hauser said. “The last one did that, Malvern tore her heart out while we watched. I ain’t stupid, you know? I may not be a genius, but—”

She stopped talking in midsentence as if something had interrupted her train of thought. Then she trailed her finger through the cooling spot of blood. Lifted it carefully to her face and sniffed at it.

Then she licked her fingertip. And her eyelids drifted shut.

For a while there was no sound in the room. No one moved or spoke. Caxton held her breath. Then, when the vampire didn’t open her eyes again, she said, “Look. I got it all over these bars. I kind of made a mess.”

The eyelids snapped open. The red eyes were burning.

For a vampire the first taste of blood was like a junkie’s first fix of heroin. It would never taste as good as that first time. It would never be so clean, and pure, and fulfilling. It took them places, took them to dark new worlds that were theirs to explore. Places human beings couldn’t go.

It made them want more.

Endlessly more.

Hauser attacked the cage with a sudden savagery that had Caxton reeling backward. She felt her bad arm hit the side of the cage and she winced in pain, but her brain wouldn’t let her feel much. It was too busy overloading her body with adrenaline. Getting her ready to run. But there was no place to run. The cage bars bent inward and snapped as Hauser licked and tore at them, tearing the foam rubber to crumbs, smashing through the lock on the cage’s door.

Caxton had been careful to smear as much blood as she could spare on that lock.

The door flew open and Caxton rolled out onto the floor. She grabbed the first thing her hand could find.

The vampire turned and glared at her. Her mouth opened wide and Caxton could see the dozens of nasty fangs in there. A few of them were wet with her blood. There was no intelligence in Hauser’s eyes now. There was nothing to reason with.

No thinking going on at all. Just pure vampire instinct.

The vampire pounced. Caxton braced herself and twisted her head away at the last possible moment. Hauser’s teeth clicked on the floor where her jugular vein had been. The vampire lifted her head up again to howl in frustration—

—and screamed in agony instead.

Caxton had grabbed a broken piece of steel bar, part of her cage before the vampire demolished it. She had held it in front of her like a spike and let momentum do the rest. The bar had been broken off at an angle, giving it a good point. Caxton knew exactly where to place it for maximum effect.

It pierced the vampire’s heart like a needle, and came out through the skin of her back.

The vampire’s body convulsed, demonically strong muscles pounding the floor, thrashing at the air. A blow hit Caxton in the thigh, instantly numbing the flesh there. Another slapped at her face, but they were getting weaker now. Hauser’s jaws flashed open and closed as she tore and rent at death itself, but she couldn’t put it off for long. Little by little the red fire in her eyes went out. The tension in her muscles eased. She died a second and final time, pinning Caxton underneath her corpse.

Using the impaling bar as a lever, Caxton pushed the body off of her. Then she searched the vampire, looking for keys. She found one that had a tiny white label on it reading CDR, which she assumed meant Cooling Down Rooms. That was what the warden had called these cages.

She unlocked Clara’s cage, and, after a moment’s hesitation, Gert’s, too. Her celly crawled out of the cage with a look of sheepish self-hatred on her face. “I was supposed to be useful to you,” she said. “I was supposed to help. I let you down.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Caxton said. “I—”

She didn’t bother finishing the thought. Clara was too busy grabbing her in a desperate embrace. Then she pressed her lips hard against Caxton’s and kissed her, again and again.