23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(55)

Five more half-deads were climbing up onto its cab.





29.

Gert,” Caxton yelled, “get it moving! Put it in gear!” The truck didn’t move.

Caxton ran forward and grabbed at the half-dead nearest to her. It was wearing a stab-proof vest, so she grabbed the straps and hauled it bodily off of the truck. Spinning it around, she slammed her baton across the back of its head and reached for another. One of them was crawling up onto the truck’s hood, using the top of the tire as a foothold. Caxton grabbed it around the neck and twisted, hard. She heard a series of pops from inside its collar as its cervical vertebrae snapped, one after the other. She knocked it to the ground and then grabbed the top of the passenger’s-side window. She brought her bare feet up and slid inside the truck, landing with a bounce in the passenger’s seat.

Gert was staring at her as if she’d just won the gold medal for gymnastics.

“Don’t look at me! Look at them. And get this thing moving—we can shake them off,” Caxton said. A half-dead was climbing up on top of the cab while another was reaching toward Gert’s window.

Gert nodded, grabbed the truck’s gearshift, and pushed it forward.

The truck’s engine roared for a second, then sputtered and stalled. The smell of burning gears filled the cab.

“I thought you said you could drive this thing,” Caxton insisted.

“I said I could drive a truck. Like a pickup truck. I never even sat in one of these before,” Gert told her.

Gert’s window exploded inward, showering them both with tiny cubes of safety glass. The half-dead there had a hammer that he swung into the cab. Gert managed to pull back far enough that it hit the steering wheel instead of her jawbone.

Caxton cursed, then lunged across Gert’s lap to grab at the hammer and the hand that gripped it. She pulled hard and the half-dead came screaming into the cab with them. Caxton punched its face and twisted the hammer out of its hand, then smashed its head forward against the dashboard. It stopped struggling then, so she pushed it out the window and moved on to the next task.

“Switch places,” Caxton said, and Gert slid toward her across the seats. Caxton grabbed her shotgun and climbed over Gert to get into the driver’s seat.

Something hit the top of the cab hard enough to make a dent in the ceiling. Caxton pointed her shotgun at the dent and started to depress the trigger—then realized the mistake in that and stopped herself. The plastic bullet in the shotgun was designed not to penetrate human flesh. It certainly wouldn’t pass through sheet metal. If she fired at the ceiling the bullet would bounce off, at dangerously high speed, and probably hit her or Gert.

The half-dead up there hit the roof again, and the dent got wider.

At the same time another half-dead climbed up over the truck’s grille and grabbed the hood ornament. In its other hand it held a can-shaped grenade with no pin.

“They have grenades?” Gert asked, her voice high enough to count as hysterical.

“CS grenades. They don’t kill you; they’re just full of tear gas,” Caxton said. She couldn’t imagine the prison having any other kind of grenade in its arsenal. Not that it mattered. “If it gets that thing in here it might as well be high-explosive. It’ll pump out a hundred cubic feet of gas in a second, and we’ll suffocate even with the windows open.”

“So shoot it,” Gert suggested.

“Just a—”

The half-dead on the roof of the cab struck a third time and the metal roof tore open. The sharp point of a pickax came through the ceiling between the two women. Gert screamed, but Caxton just readied her shotgun. The pick drew back the way it had come and Caxton looked out through the hole it had made. She could see the half-dead on the cab’s roof. It was looking back down at her.

She shoved the barrel of her shotgun through the hole and fired. There was a scream and then a rattling series of thumps as the half-dead fell off of the cab.

“What about this motherf*cker?” Gert asked, pointing through the windshield.

Caxton hit the truck’s ignition, then threw it into reverse.

She’d been in the highway patrol once. She knew the importance of double-clutching. The truck lurched backward, out of the loading bay, and the half-dead on the hood went flying backward. Its grenade went off instantly in a spray of yellow smoke that rolled across the windshield. Caxton caught a whiff of the tear gas before they were clear of the yellow plume, and her eyes clamped tightly shut as her throat spasmed with a nasty dry cough.