23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(3)

In a second Caxton was up, feet spread on the floor, torso bent low with her arms up to protect her head. Someone tried to grab her back and she rolled into it, head-butting them in the stomach hard enough to make them let go.

She still had no idea how many assailants she was facing or how long she had to hold them off before the COs bothered to check the kitchen. She could try to make a break for it, run out of the kitchen and back into the cafeteria, but she figured Guilty Jen had to be organized enough to have someone watching the door.

Her other option was to fight her way out. She danced backward, trying to get a wall behind her, and let her eyes flick around the room, assessing. She counted six orange jumpsuits. Jen’s girls were a mixed set, black, Latina, white, and Asian. That was weird: prison gangs normally formed up on racial lines. It looked like Jen had found something else to unite them.

Caxton could think about that later, if she got the chance. Right now she had a fight on her hands. Six women she would have to fight, including Jen, including the one with the burnt leg. They were already regrouping, getting ready to mob her. If they all came at her at once she would be done for. They could just pile on top of her and hold her down and beat her into submission.

She needed to thin the herd, right away. She looked for the opponent closest to her. To her left was a brown-haired white girl. Tattooed on her earlobes was a pair of tiny swastikas. She must have been a member of the Aryan Brotherhood once. Caxton felt no moral compunctions about grabbing a huge tureen full of boiling soup and sloshing it all over her.

The Nazi girl went down in agony, out for the count. A black woman wearing a do-rag came at Caxton from the right, puffing with anger. Caxton laid her out with a haymaker punch that probably fractured her jaw.

A third inmate tried to be sneaky and attack while her back was turned. Caxton threw her head back, hard, and felt her skull connect with the unseen woman’s nose. She felt the bones there break. Hot blood went spurting down the back of her collar. That must have hurt, Caxton figured, but it wasn’t necessarily enough to put her assailant down. Caxton spun in place and brought both fists toward each other, the knuckles digging hard into the woman’s kidneys.

She dropped to the floor, grabbing at Caxton’s hips and legs, but her hands just didn’t have the strength to grapple properly. Caxton looked down at her victim and thought about stomping on her head or her stomach. For a second she almost did, but she managed to pull back.

It was going to be hard to end this fight without killing anyone. Caxton had gone through plenty of unarmed-fighting courses at the State Police Academy in Hershey, but she’d never really bothered learning how to incapacitate enemies. On the perps she’d been taking down outside, those kinds of moves were never enough. You had to fight to kill or be killed yourself.

Caxton had spent years learning how to fight and kill vampires. Vampires were bigger than she was, much stronger, and much tougher. Any wounds she gave them healed over almost instantly. She had to remind herself constantly that Guilty Jen’s set didn’t have supernatural resistance to injuries.

Killing the downed woman would be a big mistake here. It would get Caxton in all kinds of trouble and mean losing what few privileges she had, as well as draw the kind of attention she most wanted to avoid. So when she turned to face Guilty Jen and her remaining two gangbangers, she hesitated for just a second, to give them a chance to run away.

They didn’t.

“Impressive,” Guilty Jen said. “But stupid. This counts as disrespect, you know that? And I can’t allow that, or I look like a bitch. So now I do have to kill you.”

“There are other ways to resolve—” Caxton began, but Jen’s two underlings were on her before she could finish her thought. One of them, a Latina wearing lipstick and mascara, came at her low and fast, hands stretched out to grab.

It was a feint, Caxton knew. The other one, a Korean woman, had a shank made from a metal spoon, flattened out and sharpened all around its edge. The leg of her coveralls was smoldering—it must have been she who caught the heated nail. The injury was slowing her down a little, but not enough.

Caxton took a step toward the Latina and raised one arm as if to strike—then launched herself at the Korean and came down hard on her burnt leg. She felt the knee there give way, and the woman collapsed under Caxton’s weight. She grabbed the shank out of the woman’s flailing hand and threw it underhand at the Latina, who was still coming toward her.

It went right into her eye.

For a moment everyone was screaming and rolling around on the floor. Then the two people who weren’t—Caxton and Guilty Jen—made eye contact, and everything else just fell away. Caxton’s entire focus shifted to the gang leader. It was a showdown, an old-fashioned gunslinger standoff, but without the guns.