23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(46)

She finished loading the shotgun just as a pair of half-deads came around the side of the table toward her. They were both armed with kitchen knives, wicked and sharp and glowing in the brilliant light of the kitchen. She had time to notice that one of the knives was still flecked with bits of chopped parsley.

She fired a plastic bullet into the chest of one half-dead, then flipped the shotgun around and caved in the other one’s face with the weapon’s stock.

The two of them went down. Whether they were fully dead or just wounded enough not to bother her didn’t matter. The point was that they had to stay down. She was much more concerned, anyway, with the six half-deads right behind them, who were all coming straight for her.

She grabbed her baton. It wasn’t much of a weapon, just a hollow length of aluminum weighted at one end and with a rubberized grip at the other. Back when she’d been a cop, though, she had trained in how to use it.

The course she’d taken had focused on how to avoid breaking bones with the baton, and how to make sure you never, ever killed anyone with it. Like everyone else in the class, she had made a note of all the things she wasn’t supposed to do in case she needed to do them one day.

A half-dead armed with nothing but a steel ladle reached her first. It tried to duck under her arm, probably intending on grabbing her around the waist and knocking her over. She brought the baton around, grip end first, and jammed it in the soft spot just behind where its jaw attached to its skull. The half-dead screamed and dropped to the floor, where she stomped on it with both bare feet.

She really needed to find some heavy boots. Preferably with steel-reinforced toes.

The next half-dead had a cleaver that it brought whistling around to nearly cut open her throat. Maybe it hadn’t gotten the message that she was supposed to be brought in alive. Caxton grabbed its arm at the elbow and pulled it into its own swing, overbalancing it and sending it sprawling.

A third one came at her from the side while she was recovering from that move. It hit her hard in the side with a tenderizing mallet. If it had connected with her kidney, that might have been enough to drop her, but it only grazed the bottom of her rib cage. The pain was still intense and it almost kept her from focusing clearly enough to bring the baton down on the back of her assailant’s neck. It curled away from the blow, which wasn’t quite hard enough to paralyze it.

“Caxton, over here!” Gert shouted at that particular moment.

Caxton had all but forgotten her celly’s existence until then—hadn’t, in fact, given her a thought since she’d started running down the dark hallway. She looked around wildly and saw Gert standing next to an open door on one side of the kitchen. It wasn’t the door Caxton had intended to use when exiting the area. She had planned, or half-planned, to escape into the cafeteria, a wide-open space that would be easy to brawl in. The door Gert had chosen had two things to recommend it, however. It wasn’t locked, and there were no half-deads near it.

A kitchen knife flashed in the air and it was all Caxton could do to swivel away from where it was coming down. Instead of puncturing her chest, it flashed in front of her and sank deep into the back of another half-dead.

Caxton took the opportunity to get away from her enemies, rolling under a prep table and then launching herself out the other side, knocking over a pile of dirty pots and pans as she hurried through the door where Gert was waiting, dancing in anticipation. Beyond the door was a darkened area full of wooden crates, stacked high in towers reaching toward a ceiling lost in the gloom. Caxton saw a forklift ahead of her, its bright yellow paint just visible in the darkness. Beyond that were— trucks. Big eighteen-wheelers, white and ghostly and huge.

“This is the loading dock you were looking for,” Gert said. “Remember?”

Behind Caxton the door started rattling in its jamb. Gert must have had the presence of mind to close and lock it after Caxton came rushing through.

“Who’s got your f*cking back, huh?” Gert asked.

Caxton didn’t bother to answer. The door wouldn’t hold long. Half-deads were weak individually, but in groups they could bust down any barrier you put in their way. She needed a way to slow them down.

“Help me over here,” Caxton said, and hurried toward one of the tall stacks of crates. Together they kicked and pushed at the crate at the bottom of the stack. The ones above their heads started to totter.

“You’re supposed to say thank you now,” Gert insisted.

Caxton gave the bottom box a last kick. One side of it collapsed, spilling thousands of white plastic sporks in individualized wrappers all over her feet. The boxes above it fell with a great dusty crash, collapsing and shattering against the door, burying it in shattered wood and dented cans of baked beans and fingerling potatoes. That might hold the half-deads a minute or two longer.