23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

6.

Lights-out never came.

The light in the ceiling never went out. Caxton wasn’t allowed to have a watch in her cell, and there was no clock, either, but as she lay on her bunk listening to Stimson snoring below her, she eventually realized that midnight must have come and gone, and nothing had changed.

She stared at the light for a long time, waiting to feel sleepy. The light came from a single bulb set in a shatterproof fixture designed in such a way that Caxton could neither open it nor get any kind of grip on it. A single cockroach had found its way inside the fixture and died there. It had only five legs. One of them must have rotted away.

Next to the fixture was a small black rectangle that Caxton knew must hide a camera. The light was left on so that the camera could watch her while she slept. She stared at the rectangle for a long time, too, because it was difficult to know she was being watched and not try to watch back.

Then she rolled over and pressed her face into the scratchy pillow for a long time, trying to keep her eyes closed. They kept drifting open of their own accord.

She tried pulling the pillow over her head to block out the light. That just made it difficult to breathe. She tried giving up, next, and sat up so she could read one of her paperbacks by the unblinking light. She was too tired to focus on the words, though, and eventually she gave up on that, too.

Time passed. The night must have passed, somehow, though she couldn’t see anything but the walls of the cell and so she had no way of measuring how long she’d been awake until, out of nowhere, a buzzer sounded in the ceiling and Stimson stopped snoring with an abrupt wet sound and rolled out of her bunk.

“Wall up.” The sound came from the same place as the buzzer—a small speaker set into the ceiling, next to the light fixture and the camera’s black eye. Caxton jumped down from the top bunk and went to stand next to Stimson against the wall.

Together they waited for quite a while. Then the bean slot in the door slid back and a tray came through. Stimson stepped forward to grab it, then jumped back against the wall. A second tray came in and Caxton did the same thing. Then the bean slot slid back into place. It was designed so that the prisoners couldn’t open it from the inside.

Both trays were identical. They were wrapped in plastic. When Caxton pulled the plastic back on hers she found it contained three slices of toast, already slathered with butter, and two slices of melon that weren’t quite ripe. A shallow paper cup held apple juice. “No coffee?” Caxton said, a little upset.

“That’s my fault,” Stimson said, scraping at a moldy spot on one of her melon slices. “Sorry. I have a little teensy problem with, um, speed. I can’t have anything that’s an upper. Not even caffeine.”

“You’re a meth freak,” Caxton said, because she wasn’t feeling very charitable. “But I’m not.”

Stimson shrugged. Her mouth was full of toast. “I guess,” she said, showering crumbs everywhere, “they’re worried I might steal yours. So you don’t get none, either.” She washed down her mouthful with the juice. “Sorry.”

Caxton was hungry enough to eat everything on her tray quickly. That turned out to be a good thing—ten minutes after the trays had arrived, the order to wall up came again and the bean slot slid back so they could pass the trays out, whether they were finished or not.

The slot closed once more. And that was it. Breakfast. Afterward nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen, Caxton realized, until lunchtime. She imagined that meals were going to become the high points of her day.

Clearly conversation with Stimson wasn’t going to provide much in the way of entertainment. All Stimson wanted to talk about was what she was going to do when she was released. “Babies,” she said, and her eyes blazed with excitement. “I’m going to have some more babies. Babies are what life’s all about. You know how they smell? Babies smell good. I love playing with babies. I love the noises they make. Even when they cry.”

Caxton had never wanted children. It had just never occurred to her to think that might be a good use of her life. She tried to steer the conversation into another arena. She considered asking what Stimson had done to get sent to Marcy, but she had an idea that it was impolite to ask. Instead, she tried, “How long are you in for?”

“A good jolt. Twenty years,” Stimson said.

Caxton frowned. “Won’t you be too old to have babies then?”

Stimson wasn’t about to be brought down. “I’ll be forty-two, that’s not too old. And if it is, I can adopt. I know it’s hard to adopt when you’ve got a record, but when they see how much I want a baby, and what a good mother I can be, they’ll have to give me one. They’ll have to give me a baby.”

Caxton nodded politely and climbed back onto her bunk. Stimson kept talking, even after Caxton stopped listening. It seemed she was happy enough chattering away to herself.

Lunchtime came, eventually. A cold chicken sandwich and a cup of apple juice. They had ten minutes to eat it. Then nothing happened, again, for a while. Then the command to wall up came again and Caxton realized it was exercise time. The one chance she would have all day to get out of the cell.

A smile actually crept onto her face. She ran her fingers through her hair and tried to smooth the wrinkles out of her jumpsuit. She knew she was overreacting, but it was something, something different. Something to look forward to.

She waited for what felt like far too long and then finally, magically, the cell door was opened. A CO stood in the doorway and gestured for the two of them to step forward. Another CO was waiting with two pairs of shackles. Caxton’s feet were bound together. Then the CO did the same for Stimson. The whole time a third CO was always hovering over them with a stun gun.

They were made to shuffle forward until they were standing on the red line that ran around the circumference of the special housing unit. In his glass watch post, a CO eyed them carefully. He reached for a microphone and his voice was amplified until it squalled off the glaring white walls. “It’s raining outside, so exercise is indoors today.”

Caxton heard an angry moan go up from somewhere on the far side of the guard post. She glanced around the side of the post and saw four inmates over there, all of them shackled as she was. If every cell was full to capacity, there would be forty-eight women in the SHU, Caxton figured. Apparently only six were allowed to take exercise at any given time, with three COs supervising. Nothing in the SHU was ever allowed to get out of control. Nothing was ever left to chance. As a law enforcement officer, or rather, an ex–law enforcement officer, she had to admire the efficiency of the system. As an inmate she felt like she was being ground down, all her humanity scraped out of her one indignity at a time.

The COs got all six women in a line, then made them stand six feet apart from each other. Then the exercise began in earnest. They were told to walk around the SHU in a circle, keeping one foot on either side of the red line at all times. They were required to maintain the distance between them, to keep their hands in plain sight, and there was to be no talking. “Okay, walk,” one CO ordered.

Caxton walked. She watched the inmate ahead of her, a woman with frizzy brown hair, and did exactly as she was told. And liked it, despite herself. It felt good to use the muscles in her legs. It felt good to breathe air that she and Stimson hadn’t already breathed and exhaled a thousand times. It even felt good to be silent for a while, and not have to listen to Stimson talk or chew her nails.

She passed the time watching the cell doors go past on her left. She counted them and knew how many laps she’d made around the SHU, which kept some tiny part of her brain occupied. She wanted to see how many laps she made in an hour. Then she noticed that the woman ahead of her had a dark spot on the back of her jumpsuit. It grew steadily as she walked, never slowing down for a moment, and ran down the inside of her pantleg. Caxton watched in fascinated horror as a drop of yellow liquid fell from the orange cuff and splattered on the floor. Then another. Soon a narrow trickle was dribbling out behind the woman, and Caxton had to step carefully to avoid getting her slippers wet.

One of the COs came rushing in and pushed Caxton back. He grabbed the woman from behind and pulled her into a painful-looking armlock, then frog-marched her over to the guard post.

“Keep walking,” another CO ordered, and Caxton realized she’d stopped and that Stimson was right behind her, less than six feet away. Caxton got back to the line and started walking in circles again.

Eventually exercise time was over, and she was taken back to her cell and had her shackles removed. She went in and walled up next to Stimson and waited for the door to be officially closed again before she spoke.

“She peed herself!” Caxton exclaimed. “Did you see that? She peed—on herself. I think she did it on purpose. Why on earth would anyone do that? Was she sick, or just crazy?”

Stimson’s face broke into a wry and knowing smile. “When you been in here awhile, you’ll understand. She pissed herself,” Stimson said, as if it were perfectly rational, “so that one of the COs would have to clean her up.”