23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(38)

Clara looked up and saw three levels of cells, rising up to the ceiling far above her head. As she watched, a flaming roll of toilet paper came sailing out of one of the upper-level cells, unwrapping as it flew. She was very careful not to flinch. Elsewhere in the top two rows women were squirting bottles of water through their bars or throwing down bits of broken wood or crumpled paper. On the bottom level prisoners were beating on the bars of their cells with cups or cafeteria trays or just hitting and kicking at them with their bare feet and hands. Everywhere she looked she saw hard faces staring back at her, hard eyes watching her every move. Women flipped her the finger or waggled their tongues at her or showed her their naked buttocks. Others tried spitting at her, though few of them got any range.

The warden stepped into the dorm and raised her hands high. When that didn’t change the volume of the shouting, she reached behind her and Franklin handed her a megaphone. She switched it on and shouted over the din, “You want to know what’s going on? Then shut the f*ck up right now! Or you can all just sit here with no dinner. I’ve got four more dorms to talk to. You lot can be last in that line, if you want.”

The shouts and calls never really died out, but they definitely lessened in volume. It took a while. Clara looked around at the cells on either side of her. The women inside were pressed up against the bars, most of them watching the warden now. There seemed to be eight of them in every cell—cells that might comfortably have held four. There was only one toilet in every cell, and no room for the women to move around much. The stink of unwashed bodies and shit wafted back and forth across the way and Clara wondered if it was always like this. If people were actually forced to live in these conditions, for years at a time. She remembered Fetlock’s nasty little joke, when he suggested that going to prison was like being sent away to summer camp for Laura. Well, everyone did sleep in bunk beds, Clara saw. Otherwise…

The warden finally decided that the noise had dropped to an acceptable level. “There’s been some changes, ladies, and they’re going to affect all of us. This facility is no longer under the control of the Bureau of Prisons. That means, whatever rights and privileges you thought you were entitled to before, you’ve got jack shit now. You want to eat tonight, you’re going to have to play ball with me. Lucky for you I don’t expect good behavior, or a reforming attitude. All I want is your blood.”

The shouting started up again, but the warden just waited for it to pass. Then she gestured back at Franklin and he, in turn, gestured at someone out in the hall. Four half-deads came running into the dorm, each of them pushing a rolling cart loaded down with medical supplies: rubber tubing, packs of sterilized needles, IV stands, and bags to hold collected blood.

“Dinner is ready to be served. You’ll be eating in your cells from now on. I hope that’s alright,” the warden said, in a tone that made it clear she didn’t care what they thought. “To get dinner, you have to give me a couple ounces of blood, that’s all. Not enough that you’ll ever notice it’s gone. If you want to donate, you just stick your left arm through the bars and make a fist. These guys with no faces will be taking it from you. You can choose to cooperate with them, you can smile and say nice things to them, as ugly as they may be, and make it easy for them to take the blood. Or you can fight them. You can refuse to give them your arm. That’s just fine. In that case, she goes into your cell and rips your throat out.”

“She who, cuntlips?” someone shouted from the second level.

Malvern stepped into the dorm then. She turned her ravaged face up to look at the three tiers of cells. Then she smiled, showing all of her broken, vicious teeth.

A hush, a real hush, something very close to silence, ran through the dorm.

The warden let the vampire’s appearance sink in for a while. Then she raised the megaphone again. “Now. Let me tell you about option three.”





20.

The half-deads didn’t waste much time. They didn’t bother beating on the door or shouting threats through it at the women inside. Instead they decided to cut their way through.

The door of the SHU was a plate of steel a quarter-inch thick. It was designed to resist any attempt the inmates made to tear it down or pull it off its rails, but the prison’s architect had assumed they would never have access to an oxyacetylene torch. There was a loud hissing and a couple of high-pitched screams from behind the door, and then a spot near the middle of the door started to glow cherry red.