23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(105)

“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.”





58.

Laura, the feds are—”

Caxton couldn’t hear the rest of what Clara had to say over the intercom. The women of C Dorm were making so much noise that they drowned her out. She pushed her way through the crowd as best she could without being trampled and finally made her way over to the cart where Gert was crouched, barely keeping her balance.

The crowd was starting to thin out a little. Most of the women had run out the fire exit. Those who remained were mostly in a heap on top of the half-naked vampire. Caxton could only see the occasional flash of milk-white skin underneath the pile.

“Let’s move,” Caxton said, and Gert nodded eagerly.

They made their way slowly back toward the gate that led to the Hub. There was a thick crowd around the warden’s body back there—it seemed more than a few prisoners had enough of a grudge against Augie Bellows to want to defile her corpse. The very thought sickened Caxton, but she knew there was no way she could stop so many of them. She also had more important things to do.

“Did you see Malvern leave?” she asked Gert. “Do you know which way she went?”

Gert shook her head. “I was too busy trying not to get killed.”

Caxton sighed and pointed at the ceiling. “Clara was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear her. Let’s get someplace quieter so she can try again.” The two of them headed deeper into the prison, toward the Hub. Rioting prisoners filled the hallway, but they didn’t seem organized or dangerous. Some of them actually looked like they were having a good time.

Then Caxton saw the flames, and she knew there was going to be trouble. Up in the Hub someone had found a bunch of filing cabinets and dragged them into the center of the room. Caxton had no idea what the cabinets contained, but she knew any facility like SCI-Marcy had to be stuffed full of paperwork. Prisoners were pulling out files and setting them alight, maybe with the intention of burning down the prison—maybe because they just wanted to see them burn. They’d built up a couple of pretty good bonfires already. Craning her head around to peer through the massed bodies there, she saw others filing in and out of the armory. They must have been disappointed to find the guns all destroyed, but they were arming themselves anyway with batons, with pepper spray, and with stun guns. More women were streaming into the Hub all the time, coming from the other dorms, and despite the smoke from the fires the central room was rapidly filling up. It would be next to impossible to get through there.

“Come on,” she told Gert. “We’ll try another way.”

She turned—and then stopped. Because there was a woman, a huge woman with a butch haircut, looking right at her. One of her former cellmates from when she’d been housed with the general population.

“Hey, I know you—you’re that ex-cop,” the woman said. She didn’t sound particularly unfriendly. She and Caxton had never bothered each other much. Caxton nodded, tried to smile pleasantly, and pushed past.

She was not surprised, though, when the crowd noise died around her, or when some of the women in the hallway started moving toward her, very nonchalantly, with no obvious violent intent.

Every woman in the prison had a reason to hate the police. They’d all been arrested, after all, by cops. A sizable fraction of them were willing to do something about that resentment.

“Run,” she shouted to Gert. She started to follow her own advice—and then a pair of thick arms grabbed her from behind. She managed to break free, even with only one good arm, but someone else tripped her and a third convict grabbed her bad arm and twisted it behind her back.

All around her women were moving in, shanks appearing in their hands, or just bare fists drawing back to hit her. She tried to fight her way out, but the pain searing through her arm kept her from making any headway. Already she could smell nothing but unwashed bodies, and the light was growing dim—