23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(23)

The half-dead went to the door of the next cell.

Two inmates in orange jumpsuits had managed to avoid its rampage. One prisoner was screaming as she ran toward the exit of the SHU. Another, the one who’d been carved up inside her cell but managed to get away, was leaning up hard against the wall, only a few cells down from where Caxton watched in terror. She was breathing heavily and her eyes were closed. She must have lost a lot of blood.

“Hey,” Caxton shouted, and beat on the inside of her cell door. “Hey you. Convict! Let me out of here. I know what to do! I can save everybody.”

The wounded woman’s eyes flickered open. She looked right at Caxton. Then she slumped to the floor in a puddle of her own blood.

Everyone was shouting by then. The women in the cells were shouting to know what was going on, shouting for help, bellowing in panic and fear. Caxton could still hear the screams that came from the third cell that the half-dead had opened. The screams were cut off quickly. After a moment the half-dead emerged again, covered now in blood and gore. One of its victims had torn the baseball cap off his head and Caxton could see its ravaged face clearly now. Its eyelids were completely gone, as were its lips. It looked both surprised and very happy, simultaneously.

It was really enjoying itself, and it was just getting started, that expression said. It was five doors down from Caxton’s cell.

“Gert,” Caxton said, “when that thing comes in here, you just dive under the bunks, okay? Get as far in as you can. If this goes badly, I’ll just tell it who I am, and hopefully, it’ll just kill me, or drag me off, or whatever it is it’s going to do. If you’re quiet and you don’t move, I think it’ll ignore you. Okay?”

Gert nodded. Her eyes were as wide as the half-dead’s.

“Okay,” Caxton said, steeling herself. Half-deads weren’t very strong. It was possible she could overpower it when it came into the cell. Of course, there was the knife to think about.

There was nothing in the cell Caxton could use as a weapon. Nothing she could use to defend herself. It was a maximum-security prison cell, and very smart people had spent a lot of time and money making sure she was harmless when she was locked inside.

She would have to crouch by the door, and wait for it to come in, and then—

Her thought was interrupted by a thunking noise from inside the door. With a gentle creak, it slid open just a crack. Lying on the floor just outside, Caxton saw the wounded prisoner, the one Caxton had thought was dead. She must have crawled over and used the last of her strength to pull back the lever.





12.

Inside the guard post Harelip was trying to pry the door open with a wooden baton. It was an act of desperation—she had completely lost control of the SHU.

In a cell just a few doors down, the half-dead was cutting up more inmates, looking for Caxton. It was up to her to stop him from killing anyone else.

There were other problems to think about—the prison was clearly under attack by vampires, for instance—but they were going to have to wait. Caxton eased open the door of her cell and stepped outside.

It felt weird, being outside of the cell without shackles on. Even as bad and scary as things had gotten, it still felt weird. Caxton tried to ignore the part of her brain that kept telling her she was in serious trouble, that the COs wouldn’t like this. The only CO who wasn’t dead in the SHU was locked inside her own guard post. Caxton considered trying to free Harelip. It would be nice to have some backup, for one thing, and there were weapons in there. But she doubted she could break into the post any better than Harelip could break out of it.

She stooped down to touch the throat of the woman who had opened her cell door. There was a pulse in her neck, but it was faint. The half-dead had really done a number on her, cutting her open from the armpit down to the hip and probably opening arteries and veins all the way down. The woman needed a lot more than first aid, and Caxton wasn’t sure she could be saved even by a team of paramedics. As much as she owed the woman, whose name she didn’t even know, there were other people she could help more. People she could save.

From inside a cell a few doors down Caxton heard a woman screaming and begging for her life. A trickle of blood rolled out through the open door and glistened on the concrete floor of the SHU. Caxton kicked off her slippers—they made a slip-slap noise when she walked—and padded barefoot over to the open door. It would be suicide to barge in and try to save the women inside. Half-deads weren’t very smart, or strong, or fast. But with its hunting knife and Caxton’s limited training in unarmed self-defense, this half-dead wouldn’t have to be any of those things to hurt her, and badly, if she rushed it. So she leaned up against the wall next to the door, flattening herself against it as tightly as possible, and cleared her throat noisily.