23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(48)

“Sometimes,” Gert said, very slowly, “when I was high? I would start thinking that God was trying to tell me something. Just—-just listen for a sec, okay? I would have like a really crappy day. The kids wouldn’t stop crying. The bitch at the grocery store wouldn’t let me buy cigarettes with my WIC coupons. There would be all kinds of bills in the mail for shit I didn’t even remember buying, and then when I would run in my room and slam the door, it would turn out that my mom had cleaned my room while I was out and got rid of my stash. She would never say anything, never even give me a nasty look. But she would find my crystal and flush it down the toilet, like it was just some trash I left lying around. Days like that, sometimes I felt like a voice was talking just to me. A voice telling me to do something bad. Like cut myself, or maybe burn some old letters and pictures, you know, stuff I’d been keeping for years.”

“Okay,” Caxton said.

“I need you to think real hard,” Gert said. “I want to know if this suspicion of yours is anything at all like that voice I used to hear.”

Caxton held her peace.

“Because,” Gert went on, “I found in general, doing the things that voice told me to do wasn’t always such a shit hot idea.”

Caxton took her celly’s point. There was no use worrying about the deeper game unless she could win on the surface. There was a diagram above the control panel that showed the whole of the prison’s yard, all the structures and features of the grounds between the wall and the building itself. It showed in special detail the layered defenses between the loading dock and the main gate. Gert had done a pretty good job describing the gates and tire shredders a truck had to pass through to get back to the kitchens, but she’d missed a few things. The trucks had to make three tight corners before they could reach the main gate, and each corner was watched by a machine-gun position. Then there was the main gate itself. Caxton had seen it on her way into the prison, a big slab of metal thick enough to resist a direct attack by a tank. If that gate was closed, there was no truck in the world that could just smash through it.

Still. The gate, the exit, was right there—no more than two hundred yards away. There were three trucks sitting in the loading bay, abandoned in place when the prison was taken over by half-deads. It was the best chance she was going to get to break out, to reach safety and help and sanity—

She was still considering her escape plan when the security monitors over her head switched themselves on. In the dark guard post the white light they blasted over her was difficult to look at, and at first she had no idea what the image on the monitor was supposed to be. It was in color, though there wasn’t much color to see, just a tinge of red in one corner of each screen on an otherwise unbroken field of white.

Then the view moved backward and showed that the red was the dully glowing pupil of a vampire’s eye. The view pulled back farther to display all of Malvern’s face, horribly ravaged by time. But just as horrible was the fact that it didn’t look as bad as it should. The skin was intact and snowy white. If it was heavily lined, if there were dark pouches under the vampire’s eye and eye sockets, if the ears weren’t quite able to hold themselves up under their own weight, it was still a face of something vibrantly and dangerously alive.

Caxton had only once in her life seen Malvern look that good, and it had been in one of the vampire’s own memories, transmitted to her via a psychic link they no longer possessed. In the real world Malvern’s flesh had never looked so healthy, so vital, so whole.

The camera kept moving backward. Soon Caxton could see all of Malvern’s upper body, and what looked like the arm and hip of someone standing next to her. Malvern was quite gently holding the other person by the elbow. Caxton knew that it would take only the slightest muscular pressure on Malvern’s part to turn that soft touch into a bone-snapping vise grip.

There was no sound to go with the picture, and nothing moved within the frame. Every once in a while Malvern blinked. Then she said something that Caxton couldn’t make out—it was hard to read a vampire’s lips since all those teeth got in the way—and the camera jerked sideways, the entire picture swaying. When it stopped moving, two figures were visible on the screens. Malvern and Clara.

Someone off camera handed Clara a piece of paper. Written on it in large block letters was

23 HOURS.





25.

They walked Clara, very slowly, to the central command center of the prison, a round room located on the top level of the facility’s main building. Broad windows let in a little light, but far more came from dozens of flickering security monitors, most of them displaying empty hallways and locked doors. Every few seconds the view on each screen would change, or pan back and forth to show another section of the prison. On one screen Clara saw a view of B Dorm. It looked like the prisoners had mostly turned in for the night, though a few were still pacing their cells, obviously concerned about what the next day would bring.