23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(103)

Then there were so many of them that Caxton couldn’t see what any of them were doing individually. She could only see them as a faceless crowd in constant motion. She had to roll to the side and dash into an empty cell to avoid being crushed. Forbin started after her, but even a vampire had trouble fighting against the current of two hundred women all moving in the same direction. She tried grabbing them and throwing them out of her way, but that just increased the desperate pace of the crowd and made it harder to slog through. Of the other vampire, the one she’d shot, there was no sign. Caxton saw that Gert had climbed up on one of the medical carts and was trying to keep her balance as it was rocked by colliding bodies. The noise was intense, a surging, oceanic roar of shouts of excitement and also panic, of hundreds of feet pounding on the steel catwalk of the upper gallery, of cursing and pleas for help when the fire exit was jammed with bodies. Some of the women seemed to think they’d have better luck heading toward the Hub, and soon there were two currents flowing through the dorm. Bodies filled up all the available space outside the cells and suddenly Caxton couldn’t even see Forbin anymore.

Her spine went rigid when she realized she couldn’t see Malvern, either.





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.