23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(34)

The face was wracked by a grimace of pure madness. It took Caxton a long time to realize that she recognized it. First she had to consider a fact that hadn’t yet gripped her: Gert wasn’t in the cell. She hadn’t been inside when Harelip dragged Caxton in.

Gert had been busy, apparently. She must have sneaked out of the cell while Caxton and Harelip were wrestling with the SHU’s main door. She must have found her way to the cell where Caxton had fought the half-dead, and found the knife there.

Now—she had found a use for it.

“Where’s the CO?” Caxton demanded, even though she knew perfectly well.

“I told you I could be useful,” Gert said, and stepped inside.





18.

Oh God, no,” Caxton said, and put a hand over her mouth. Gert had—had killed Harelip. She stepped outside of the cell and saw the CO’s body shoved up against one wall. A pool of blood glistened around her, staining her blue uniform and slicking across her throat and lower face.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” she moaned. “This was the last thing you should have done!”

Gert came up behind Caxton and grabbed her shoulders. She started to knead them until Caxton jumped away from her.

“She was jamming you up,” Gert said. “Even after you saved her ass. Don’t tell me you ain’t grateful. I could have let you rot in that cell, girl! I could have kept my head down, played nice. Instead I gave you a chance to survive, right?”

It was true, in its way. Like most crazy people, Gert operated on a logical basis. It was just a basis built on a very shaky foundation.

Caxton breathed through her mouth and tried to think. Harelip could have been a valuable ally. Caxton’s plan up until that point had been to find a group of COs somewhere else in the prison and explain to them what was going on, then get them to help her fight her way out. If she’d been able to convince even one of their number, it would have gone a long way toward enlisting their aid. Now she was going to have to approach them as an escaping prisoner, a situation in which they would be likely to shoot first and ask questions later. Furthermore, Harelip had done well against the half-deads. She had kept her cool and thought things through. She would have made a good partner for the fighting to come.

Now Caxton was all alone. She was trapped inside the walls of a maximum-security prison where no one, neither CO nor fellow prisoner, would be likely to offer her any help.

At least, no one except Gert.

“Who are you?” Caxton snapped. “I mean—what did you do to get put in a place like this? You’re no gangbanger.”

Gert sucked on her lower lip. “I killed some… people.”

Caxton shook her head.

“It wasn’t my fault! When you’re high, you don’t always know what you’re doing. You can’t be held accountable, you know?”

Caxton had never used drugs in her life. She had met lots of people who had, and rarely had she found one of them trustworthy. Never had she found one whom she would want watching her back.

She was going to have to go it alone. Which meant she needed to start planning.

Whether she was locked in the cell or free to move around the SHU, she was still trapped in a prison that was overrun by a vampire and full of half-deads. Malvern wanted her alive, but she really didn’t want to find out why. She was going to have to protect herself.

Calling for backup was her first instinct. She’d been trained, as a cop, to never be out of touch if she could help it. She headed inside the guard post and studied the control board. There was a telephone handset mounted on one side to allow the CO manning the post to communicate with the rest of the prison. There was no keypad—instead individual telephones around the prison could be selected from a series of buttons that dialed directly. She picked it up and then started punching buttons at random, calling the infirmary, the commissary, the staff lounge, the main gate. Anywhere but central command, which she knew had been compromised.

She was not surprised when she didn’t even get a dial tone. Malvern might be hundreds of years old, but she was conversant with modern communications. Cutting the phone lines had probably been one of her first moves.

Well, if Caxton couldn’t call for help, she would have to help herself. That meant finding some weapons.

She only had to look around herself to find a miniature armory. A row of stun guns sat in chargers on one side of the control board. They would be useless against half-deads, who experienced pain in a far different way than human beings did, but she grabbed one anyway, in case she had to deal with any more COs who thought it was more important to contain the situation than it was to save lives. Underneath the board was a twelve-gauge shotgun, held in a pair of metal clips. She noticed for the first time that the stock was marked with a band of yellow paint, which meant it was to be loaded only with nonstandard ammunition. She pulled it free and broke it open, checking to make sure there was no round loaded already. In a bin beneath the board she found plenty of beanbag rounds but ignored those in favor of a box of rubber bullets. The name was doubly misleading: they were neither rubber nor, strictly, bullets. Instead they were shotgun slugs about four inches long made of polyvinyl chloride. They were designed not to penetrate the skin but to hurt someone enough to make them want to vacate an area. Against half-deads they would be even more effective than the beanbag round Harelip had used.