23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(40)

The half-deads weren’t even aware of the sticky foam exploding around them at first. They kept coming, legs lifting for the next stride, arms swinging to menace the waiting prisoners— and then froze in place. The hardening foam held them fast, barely able to move, their limbs trapped, their ravaged faces covered in the ropy mess. What little range of motion they had was spent trying to pull the sticky tendrils off their bodies, with little or no success.

Caxton had been surprised to see the foam pack in the guard post. She knew that the air-activated aqueous foam had been designed originally for use in prisons, as a way to immobilize rioting inmates and keep them from attacking the guards. She also knew that after a few live tests it had been all but banned from prison use, because it had a bad habit of covering its victims’ noses and mouths in solid gunk, making it impossible for them to breathe. The potential lawsuits had convinced the Bureau of Prisons to look elsewhere in its constant search for the next great compliance weapon.

Half-deads didn’t need to breathe. Even if they did, Caxton couldn’t care less. They couldn’t hurt her anymore, or take her captive, and that was what mattered.

“Oh my God,” Gert said, snorting with laughter. “Did you see the look on that guy’s face when—”

Caxton grabbed her celly’s arm. “Move,” she said. “There might be more on the way, and I only had one of those.”

Together the two women ran around the side of the stuck mass of half-deads. The creatures cried out in misery and a few, whose arms hadn’t been completely pinned by the foam, tried to reach for them or stab at them, but they couldn’t follow as Caxton and Gert made their escape from the SHU.

Now Caxton just had to figure out what she was going to do next.





21.

Just after midnight they brought the first batch of blood to Malvern in plastic bags, the kind hospitals used to store whole blood for transfusions. The prison had a full medical ward, and the necessary supplies were all in stores. A half-dead in a CO uniform pushed a wheeled cart into the warden’s office and unloaded the blood onto what had become Malvern’s desk. Six bags of it, each of them swollen to capacity. Clara knew this would be the first batch of many.

Malvern grabbed one up at random and pressed it to her mouth. She was able to shred the bag and suck the blood out without spilling a drop on her tattered nightdress. When it was gone she sighed, a strangely human sound. She closed her one eye. There were holes in the eyelid through which Clara could see that Malvern’s eye had rolled back into her head. As she watched, the holes shrank, the skin there healing visibly.

It wouldn’t be long, she knew, until Malvern was whole and healthy again, at full strength and more than a match even for Laura. Of course, that strength wouldn’t last—Malvern would start rotting away again almost immediately. But there was more blood where this came from, so much more.

And meanwhile the outside world had no idea she was here. No idea that the prison had been turned into one enormous blood drive. No idea that every prisoner in the facility was at enormous risk.

Clara had watched the first few donations. Hungry women had shoved their arms through the bars of their cells, more than willing to make a small sacrifice if it meant they didn’t have to go to sleep on an empty stomach. There had been far more volunteers than there were half-deads to take the blood. Nobody had refused—they knew what would happen if they did. The half-deads had moved down the dorm one cell after the other, moving quickly, stabbing needles into arms almost at random. The work clearly delighted them. They had not bothered to replace their needles between donations, or even to clean them off. Clara had protested—she knew little about phlebotomy, but she knew you could get any number of things from a dirty needle. How many of the prisoners had been IV drug users on the outside? How many of them had hepatitis? Or HIV, for that matter? Or who knew what else?

Her pleas had fallen, of course, on deaf ears. Neither the warden nor Malvern seemed to think that the spread of blood-borne illness was a significant problem. Which told Clara something. It told her they didn’t expect the prisoners to live long enough to get sick.

There had been few volunteers for option three. Maybe Malvern and the warden expected that to change. Or maybe they just knew that the prison was a short-term solution to Malvern’s long-term need for blood. Maybe they understood they couldn’t get away with this forever, and that meant they must have a contingency plan for what happened when SWAT teams stormed the prison, as they eventually must.