23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

57.

Clara took her hand off the panic button and sat back in her chair. She could barely believe what she’d just done. The board was alive with red lights. The telephone on the communications board wouldn’t stop ringing. And on the monitors—

She hadn’t known what else to do. Laura was about to be killed. Malvern was going to get away. So she had hit the panic button on the fire emergency board. A big sign at the top of the board said you weren’t supposed to do that unless local police units were ready to assist with an orderly evacuation. Otherwise, you could let hundreds of murderers and rapists escape into the surrounding community.

And a lot of the women had taken the opportunity to run away. The main gate was wide open now and inmates were streaming out, some forming small groups, some just running into the woods in random directions. The really dangerous ones, though, had stayed behind.

The women with nothing to lose.

On the monitors she could see it all. A middle-aged woman with a butch haircut was having her head slammed repeatedly against the tiles in one of the shower rooms. The five women holding her down were all half her age. A white gang had taken over the cafeteria and had barricaded the doors. They were armed now with shotguns and stun guns and pepper spray, and it looked like they planned on staying awhile—they had control of the prison’s food supply, which meant they could outlast a very long siege.

Out in the yard fights were breaking out everywhere she looked. People were being trampled. People were dying. Because she pushed a button.

In C Dorm, at least, she saw Laura and Gert both still alive. Both okay. Some of the worst violence in the prison happened in C Dorm, but it wasn’t directed at the ex-cop or her old cellmate. Instead the prisoners had turned on the vampires. It made sense, of course. When the doors opened, the vampires had been in the middle of draining the inmates dry. Malvern had never meant for any of these women to live more than a couple of days—either they would become part of her new brood of vampires, or they would become food—and they seemed to understand what that meant. They knew what they had to do.

In the Middle Ages, Clara knew, vampires had been like a plague on Europe. Every little fiefdom had its bloodsucker, sometimes whole lineages of them. But the people had learned ways to fight back, even with the most primitive of weapons. They had made up for their lack of firepower with superior numbers. If enough people jumped on top of a vampire, they would eventually weigh so much the vampire couldn’t shrug them off. If enough desperate warriors threw themselves at a vampire’s ravenous maw, eventually one of them would get close enough for the killing blow.

The women of C Dorm were trying their own version of the tactic. The half-naked vampire was down on the ground, fighting desperately to get up. Prisoners were clinging to her arms and legs and pushing her back down, dozens of them for just the one vampire. They had nothing but shanks and razor blades and homicidal frenzy.

Meanwhile Forbin and Malvern were moving. They’d been smart enough to realize they couldn’t contain the situation and had made a break for it very early on, heading out through the open fire exit and across the sheltering shadows of the yard. So far Clara hadn’t picked them up again on any of the monitors. She hoped, frankly, that they would keep running. That they would run right out of the prison and never come back. That was one way Laura could survive.

But she knew it wouldn’t happen that way. It couldn’t.

The phone kept ringing next to her left elbow. “Shut up!” she howled, but that was pointless. Finally she picked up the handset and lifted it to her ear. “Hsu here,” she said, thinking that was a stupid way to answer the call. The fire department wouldn’t know who she was—

“Clara?”

“Jesus. Oh my God. Is that you, Glauer?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m so glad—you’re okay, right? You’re alive in there? Oh, boy am I glad to hear it. Fetlock and I have been sitting out here in the trees for hours now, wondering what the hell was going on inside.”

“You’ve been there for hours? Didn’t you hear me telling you it was time to move in?” Clara demanded.

“We did, but Fetlock—”

“You son of a bitch! People have died in here because you didn’t listen to me. You were supposed to storm the place. You were supposed to come in here and save me! I am not a field agent. I am not equipped for what I just went through, do you understand? It is not acceptable to ask me to deal with this shit!”

“You’re alive. Is Caxton alive?”

Clara squeezed her temples. “Yes. For now.”

“Then I guess you did okay. Listen, I wanted to attack as soon as we got here. I promise. But Fetlock held me back. He’s got every SWAT team from every town from here to Baltimore assembled out here. Right now we’re just scooping up the prisoners as they try to escape.”

Well, at least that was something. Something to assuage her guilty conscience.

But not enough. “I could already be dead and you wouldn’t even know it!”

Glauer sounded like he was in physical pain when he responded. “I wanted to go in there alone. Just me and a gun to get you and Caxton out. But he wouldn’t let me. He gave me his big speech again. About how the SSU can’t afford public scrutiny how we can’t make any mistakes. You know that speech.”

“Yeah,” Clara said.

“I listened patiently and then I waited for him to turn around and then I tried making a run for it. I was going to come in anyway. He had me arrested. I guess technically nobody’s got me in handcuffs right now. But he’s made it clear that if I make a move without his authorization, I’ll be going to jail. And we’ve seen what he does with his agents when they break the law.”

“Christ. You did what you could, I guess—”

Glauer was still talking. It sounded like a confession now. “I wasn’t the only one. The SWAT teams wanted to move in hours ago. So did the local cops. But Fetlock called the governor’s office to make sure he had proper approval first. Big mistake. The governor sent down word that nobody was to make a move. That this was a hostage crisis, and that he was going to get the FBI to send trained negotiators down here. If anybody moved before the negotiators arrived, they’d lose their jobs. What I’m trying to tell you, Clara—”

“Is that Fetlock screwed us over good.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Yeah. But listen, that’s all changed now—the hostage negotiators got here a couple of minutes ago. They took one look at the situation and gave up. Said they should never have been called in—that things are too far gone for them to help.”

“Fetlock. That stupid dick,” she said. “He’s afraid of his own shadow, and they put him in charge of vampire cases.” She was angry. She was, to be honest, righteously pissed. But even so, she could recognize the logic. Fetlock’s orders always made sense, in an abstract fashion. They usually ended up in people getting killed, but they made perfect logical sense.

“I need you to tell me anything that can help us raid this place,” Glauer said.

“Alright. Alright! Fine! Listen. We’re down to two vampires in here. The half-deads are all, well, full-deads now. Laura’s alive but unarmed, and Malvern is going to kill her on sight.” She went on for a while providing a full situation report, telling him everything she knew about the gang wars and what was happening in the cafeteria. When she finished she took a deep breath. “How does Fetlock want to proceed?”

“We’re moving in en masse, as fast as we can. We’ll take the yard first, then secure the facility wing by wing. You stay put. We’ll extract you as soon as it’s safe.”

“Okay,” Clara said. “Thanks.”

“Listen. We’re going to get her,” Glauer said.

“Who? Malvern?”

“Yeah. And the other one. And do you know what that means? After tonight, there won’t be any more vampires. They’ll be extinct.”

Clara closed her eyes and started to weep. That couldn’t be right, could it? There would always be more vampires—except. Except the only two vampires left in the world were inside the prison walls. “After all this time,” she said. “After so many people died—it’ll be over,” she said, trying the words out to see if they sounded real when said aloud.

“Yeah,” Glauer said. “We did it.”