23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(21)

The SHU was much quieter at night, because the COs responded quickly to any excessive noise by forcibly extracting the offenders from their cells and dragging them away to cool-down rooms—what the prison called its padded cells. Still, even after the third or fourth scream, Caxton didn’t move, didn’t even roll over to wonder what was going on.

Stimson responded much more quickly She climbed out of her bunk and went to the small window in the cell door. She shielded her eyes with her hands as if she were studying what was going on out there.

A scream came next that sounded much closer. It was different from the screams Caxton expected, as well. It was longer, more drawn-out. It was a scream of real pain, of someone being violently hurt. Of someone being killed.

“Stimson,” Caxton whispered. “What’s going on?”

Caxton’s celly didn’t reply.

“Stimson!” Caxton hissed. “Come on. Tell me.” She sighed. “Gert,” she tried.

The other woman turned and glanced up at her with hard eyes. “What, are we friends now?”

Caxton tried to think of how to reply but she was forestalled by yet another scream. This one was cut off quickly. Abruptly. Caxton knew all too well what that meant. Someone had just been killed.

The speaker in the ceiling crackled to life. “Get back from your doors, right now!” it commanded. “There’s nothing to see.”

That was enough to make Caxton want to look out the window, too. She jumped down from the bunk and shoved her way in next to Stimson, their bodies touching as she tried to get a look.

There wasn’t much to see, after all. The SHU looked as it always had, blinding white paint, central guard post, single reinforced door at the far end. One thing was missing, though. Normally, even in the middle of the night, one guard sat inside the glass-walled guard post, while two COs walked circuits around the unit, keeping their eyes open, listening for trouble. Now the patrollers were gone and only one CO was visible inside the post.

“Where’d the others go?” Caxton asked.

“They hightailed it a couple of minutes ago,” Stimson told her. “Grabbed up their shotguns and booked out the door. That’s all I saw.”

Caxton looked at the CO in the guard post, and recognized her at once. It was Harelip, the female CO who had performed her body cavity search. The one who had knocked her down to the floor when she tried to read the warden’s BlackBerry.

“Alright, bitches, wall up for me now or there’s going to be some ass-whooping,” Harelip said over the intercom. Her voice echoed off the walls of Caxton’s cell.

Stimson ran back to the wall, but Caxton stayed where she was.

The screaming was far away again, when it came next. But there was a lot more of it.

“Laura!” Stimson called. “Get back! They’ll beat us both if you don’t.”

“Hold on,” Caxton said. “Someone’s coming.” And there was. A shadowy figure was coming down the hallway toward the big reinforced door of the SHU. As it stepped out into the light she saw it was a male CO in a stab-proof vest. His baseball cap had been pulled down low over his eyes, leaving his face mostly obscured. She could just make out his chin. It was red, but not with blood. The skin there had been scratched and torn at until it came away in long strips. She could see muscle tissue underneath, pinkish-gray and rubbery and bloodless.

“Oh, no,” Caxton moaned. “Not here. Not now.”

“Which one is Laura?” the half-dead CO asked. A moment later every door in the SHU unlocked itself with a heavy thunk.





11.

Caxton shoved against the cell door with her shoulder, but it wouldn’t move. The electronic lock had been released, but the mechanical lock was still in place. Someone was going to have to pull the lever on the outside of the door before she could get out.

There were two people on the floor of the SHU, two candidates who might let her out, but neither of them seemed like much of a bet.

“Murphy?” Harelip said, speaking into her microphone. She hadn’t turned off the intercom system, so her voice came down from the ceiling of Caxton’s cell. The female CO sounded worried but not panicked. Probably because she didn’t yet realize that the male CO stalking around the SHU wasn’t Murphy anymore. “What’s going on?”

“Where is she? I’ll find her on my own if I have to,” the thing said, approaching a cell door and peering in through the window. Its voice was all wrong. Male COs cultivated a gruff, deep voice that commanded respect. The voice this thing used was high-pitched and sounded like it came from just the far side of sanity.