23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(22)

“I called down to central, but there’s no reply. I’ve got chatter all over the open bands. People are freaking out! Is it a riot? It sounds like somebody broke in,” Harelip said. She was getting more scared, which Caxton thought was probably a good thing. Eventually she might notice the big difference between Murphy the CO and the thing that had invaded her SHU.

It didn’t have a face.

Oh, it had eyes, and a mouth, and maybe part of a nose left. But its face would be hanging down in ragged strips of skin, peeled away from its cheeks and forehead by its own fingernails. Murphy was dead. He had been dead, anyway, until a vampire called him back and gave him a second chance.

The vampire hadn’t done him any favors. The second chance only lasted about a week—reanimated bodies rotted away with incredible speed, and after a day or two they were already falling to pieces. They were also required to obey any vampire who commanded them, without fail, without question.

Perhaps the worst of it was that they came back without a soul. They knew constant pain, and they knew that what they had become was wrong. One look in a mirror and they understood they were not meant to exist. They tore off their own faces. They hurt themselves, and they took a joy in hurting others (especially with knives—they loved knives). They were vicious, and crazy and had no moral compunctions whatsoever.

Caxton, following a long tradition among American vampire hunters, called them half-deads. When you went looking for vampires, you found half-deads, usually lots of them. And when you found half-deads they were already trying to kill you.

“Murphy! The call came through for EIP stations,” Harelip went on. Caxton knew the acronym stood for “escape in progress,” the prison guard’s equivalent of a red alert or all hands on deck. “My two boys ran to comply.”

“Yes, I know,” the thing that had been Murphy said. “I caught them coming the other way. They’re not coming back.” It tittered as if it had just made a little joke. It grabbed the lever on the front of a cell door and yanked it back. It took two tries. Half-deads weren’t well coordinated, or particularly strong. Eventually it got the door open, however. Then it pulled a long hunting knife out of its belt.

Knives. Always with the knives. Half-deads loved knives, hatchets, cleavers, anything sharp. This was a hunting knife, six inches long and painted green—so the white-tailed deer wouldn’t see it glint when you pulled it out in the woods—and had a nasty serrated edge and a wicked curved point. The half-dead brandished it with obvious pleasure and stepped inside the cell.

“Stimson,” Caxton said. “I mean, Gert, please. Do you know the name of the CO in the guard post?”

Gert frowned. “Worth, maybe? Or it could be Wendt.”

Caxton shook her head. “Hey,” she shouted, pounding on the cell door. “Hey, CO! Hey, Screw! You’ve got to stop him!”

Harelip glanced in Caxton’s direction. “Wall up, f*cker,” she said, and the speaker in the ceiling popped and whistled.

There was a scream from inside the open cell. A prisoner in an orange jumpsuit came staggering out, blood slicking down one side of her leg.

“Murphy!” Harelip shouted. “Murphy, what are you doing?”

Another scream. Then the half-dead came back out of the cell. There was blood on its knife and all over its stab-proof vest. “That wasn’t Laura. Laura? Where are you, Laura?” it sang. “I’m going to find you if I have to cut my way through every last one of these cells. Miss Malvern wants to see you.”

Harelip finally got what was happening, or at least some of it. She stood up inside the guard post and grabbed a shotgun. Then she hit a button on her control board. A beeping alarm went off and the door of the guard post started to slide open.

Then the alarm stopped, and it started to slide shut again.

Harelip looked as if she hadn’t been expecting that.

The half-dead went to the next cell in line and pulled back on its lever, using both hands this time. The door slid open on its rails. Both of the women inside came rushing out at once, but the half-dead tripped one of them up and knocked her to the floor. It grabbed her hair and pulled her face back. She was a black woman with long cornrows. “You’re not Laura, either,” it said, and then it slit her throat.

In the guard post Harelip hammered at the shatterproof door of what had become just another prison cell. Clearly that door could be opened and closed by remote control—-just like the door locks on the SHU cells. Someone in a central command center was intent on keeping Harelip locked up tight. She beat at the door with the butt of her shotgun, but it was inch-thick Lexan and it would probably stand up to the blast of a hand grenade.