23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(30)

The buzzer sounded, and the door stopped opening. Then, slowly, far too slowly, it started to close again.

Caxton ran over to the door and nearly got brained by Harelip’s whirling baton. A half-dead was reaching in, trying to grab Harelip by the strap of her vest. Caxton grabbed the dead bastard’s arm and pulled it hard in the wrong direction. It snapped. The half-dead screamed.

Another one tried to get its foot inside the door, a big foot in a thick, steel-toed boot. Caxton grabbed the leg behind the ankle and pulled, hard, knocking the half-dead off its balance.

Harelip brought the end of her baton down hard on a half-dead’s head. The skull split open like a rotten melon. And then—

—the half-deads pulled back, away from the door. They had seen what happened when it closed before, and one of them had lost an arm. They were smart enough not to let any of their number get crushed this time.

When the door was finally, fully closed, Caxton leaned up hard against it and just tried to breathe for a while. She closed her eyes and didn’t think about anything. In a second she was going to have to deal with all of this. She was going to have to think about why vampires were attacking the prison, and what she was going to do about it. But for a second, at least, she could just lean there and be safe.

That was when she felt Harelip’s stun gun touch the small of her back.





16.

Franklin took off his sunglasses. The skin around his eyes was mostly gone, torn away by his own nails. If she’d had any doubts before, she was certain now—he was a half-dead. Malvern must have ordered him not to scratch his own face off, so that he could fit in better with the living people in the prison. He’d done the best he could, but he couldn’t resist gouging himself a little.

He gagged Clara and bound her hands behind her back with a strip of plastic that dug into her wrists. Then he left her alone. No one beat her, or stabbed her, or shoved her down a flight of stairs.

No one drank her blood.

Malvern made short work of the second prisoner, and the blood worked its magic on her.

Already the skin was starting to grow back over the hole in her forehead. Her hands didn’t look so much like bundles of twigs anymore—they were still mostly made of swollen knuckles and broken nails, but the balls of her thumbs looked positively fleshy. Her complexion was lightening, transforming from the brownish-yellow look of old, untanned leather toward more of the classic unhealthy pallor of an active vampire.

Her missing eye would never grow back, of course. Any wounds a vampire suffered before its first death were never healed, no matter how much blood they consumed. But the one working eye she possessed was growing clearer, and a dull red ember seemed to burn far back in its depths.

How many victims would it take before she was back to full strength? Until she was as powerful as the bloodthirsty killing machines Laura had been fighting for so long? Even then, of course, it wouldn’t last. For a vampire as old as Malvern, it would take a constant influx of new blood to maintain this level of vigor. Probably after the interrupted Tupperware party, or after the bar she’d attacked, there had been this same transformation, and then she had just rotted away again almost instantly afterward. But here, now—there was the promise of more blood to come. These few victims, Clara understood, were just the first of many. Malvern would be able to support her habit for a very, very long time now that she controlled the place. There would be no shortage of bodies for her to drain, not in this prison.

Clara stared at the warden. The older woman stared back calmly, without a trace of guilt on her features.

“If you want me to feel bad for these two, you can save your energy,” the warden said, reading Clara’s expression. “This one,” she said, kicking the corpse of the young blond, “was in for IDSI.”

Clara winced. IDSI was “indecent deviant sexual intercourse.” It was what the courts were calling the crime that had once been known as sodomy, and it could cover a wide range of offenses, none of them pretty.

“She raped her little sister with a hairbrush, if you want to know. The other one has been in and out of my prison since she was eighteen. Every time we let her out she would go right to her crack dealer and whore herself for a piece of rock. Before she knew it she would be right back in here. A total waste of human potential, and the kind of recidivist who has no desire to be rehabilitated. I’m not going to lose any sleep over either of them.”

Malvern rose slowly from where she’d been kneeling over the second victim. “Enough moralizing, girl. What shall ye tell me of the men ye cannot trust?”