23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(45)

“Shit,” Caxton said. “I was hoping the stun gun would work on them like it does on living people, but no dice. Now we’re screwed.”

Gert clucked her tongue. “No we’re not. It ran away, girl.” Caxton sighed in frustration. “You don’t know about these things. They’re weak, and cowardly, and they can’t shoot the side of a barn. But the problem is, they never work alone. That one wasn’t running away. It was running for help.”





23.

Caxton sped out of the storeroom and slid to a stop in the hall. If she could catch the half-dead before it reached others of its kind she could save herself a lot of trouble. She wasted a half-second peering through the gloom back the way she’d come before she heard running footfalls and realized that the half-dead was running farther down the corridor, past the storerooms and into the deep shadows at the far end. Cursing, she chased after the retreating sound—knowing that what she was doing was stupid. She couldn’t see a thing. She could trip over something on the floor and break an ankle. She could miss a turn in the corridor and run smack into a wall and break her nose or worse.

She didn’t have much choice. She’d been very lucky back in the SHU. The package of sticky foam had provided her with a few extra hours of life, but there’d only been one of them, and she didn’t have any more tricks to play.

Gasping for breath, she tore down the hallway anyway, spurred on by the same reckless instincts that had kept her alive for the last few years, kept her alive when so many vampires couldn’t say the same. She held her hands out in front of her, which would give her a split second’s warning if she was about to run into anything. Not enough time to stop herself, but maybe enough to prevent giving herself a concussion. She almost cried out in triumph as her fingertips brushed cloth and she realized that she was about to catch the half-dead. It collided hard with something in front of it, something softer than a brick wall anyway, and she threw herself onto it, grabbing for anything she could get a handle on, an article of clothing, a stray limb, hair.

The half-dead had run into a door. It turned the knob just as she hit it from behind, and together they went sprawling through, into light so bright it dazzled Caxton’s eyes and momentarily blinded her.

The half-dead went down, its face hitting a cement floor with an ugly crunch. Caxton’s fall was softened by its body, but still she felt the impact like a punch in the gut. She sucked air into her lungs and looked up, blinking away the glare in her eyes.

She was in the kitchen, the same kitchen where she’d met Guilty Jen and her set. Back then it had been staffed by human prisoners cooking up meals for the other inmates for a few pennies an hour.

Now it was full of half-deads.

They were standing at counters chopping up vegetables or stirring huge pots on industrial stoves or carrying trays of food. One of them, who stood in the middle of the room with its hands on its hips, was wearing a white chef’s toque.

Every single one of them was staring at her. They were as surprised to see her as she was to see them, and they had frozen in place, unsure of what to do next.

That wouldn’t last.

Caxton had no idea what Malvern had ordered her slaves to do if they found her lying facedown on the floor, all but defenseless. She could guess, however, that it involved a lot of knives and a very brief but furious attempt to hurt her as much as possible without actually killing her.

She didn’t have to think very hard about what she needed to do. She grabbed the shotgun from under her shoulder and fired her plastic bullet into the neck of the one in the chef’s hat. The first rule of fighting dirty was that your first target was whoever appeared to be in charge.

Fighting dirty was her only option. She watched as the chef’s head flopped backward on a nearly severed neck and then rolled to the side, behind a stainless-steel table covered in chopped carrots. She could hear the half-deads screaming in their obscene falsetto voices, asking each other what to do, shouting that they needed to call for backup, or just howling for her blood.

Caxton broke open the shotgun and started loading another slug. Before she could even get it out of her makeshift bandolier, carrot peelings showered down on her head and she looked up to see a half-dead diving over the table to get at her. It had a steel mortar in its hand, the kind used to crush herbs in a pestle, and it was holding it like a club, ready to dash in her brains.

She yanked the pepper spray out of her bra and squirted the thing in its bloodshot eyes. It screamed and rolled to the side, tearing and gouging at its own eyeballs. Half-deads might not feel pain the same way living humans did, but nobody enjoyed getting a full load of capsaicin right in the mucous membranes.