23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(56)

“Grab the wheel,” she said. She knew better than to rub at her eyes—that would only smear the tear gas deeper into her mucous membranes. It hurt to talk, but she had no choice. “Watch the mirrors. What’s behind us?”

“The wall!”

Caxton forced her eyes to open up. They immediately clamped shut again. They stung like they were on fire, even when they were closed, but when she tried to open them the pain was ten times worse. “Turn the wheel left. Toward me,” she said, as calmly as she could. “How far is the wall?”

“I don’t know. Too close,” Gert said, sounding panicked.

“We’ll be okay. There might be more of them coming, so we need to move, alright?” She kept her foot on the gas a second longer, then braked to keep the truck from jackknifing, then threw the stick into forward gear. “What are we pointed at?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Gert told her. “But you’re facing the wrong way! The main gate is behind us.”

“That’s okay,” Caxton said. “We’re not going to the main gate.”

“We’re not?”

“It’s too heavily defended. We wouldn’t make it halfway there. Trust me. I know what I’m doing.” And I’m not about to share, she thought, so don’t ask any questions. She hadn’t figured out yet how to explain to Gert that their mission had changed. That they weren’t going to try to escape from the prison anymore. She doubted Gert would want to hear that. “What do you see ahead of us? Open grass?”

“There’s no grass. Just—-just a basketball court.”

“That’s fine,” Caxton said.

“But it’s surrounded by a fence. With barbed wire and everything,” Gert told her.

“That’s what I needed to know.” Caxton upshifted and poured on the gas. “Now, just as we’re about to hit the fence— get down,” she said.

She felt Gert duck below the dashboard almost at once. Caxton leaned over to her right, covering Gert’s body with her own. The truck hit the fence hard, traveling at almost twenty miles an hour.

The truck went through the fence like a knife through paper, tearing through posts and chain link and barbed wire without even losing much speed. The truck had enough mass to shear off the posts at ground level without any trouble. The fence didn’t just part in the middle to let them through, however. It wrapped around the front of the truck and stretched—for a few milliseconds. Then it snapped in a dozen places at once and hundreds of pounds of metal wire and three-inch pipe came scrabbling and sparking up the hood to collide with the windshield. It shattered instantly and covered both of them in glass, while one piece of metal post shot through the cab and impaled the seat cushion where Caxton had been sitting up a second earlier.

Gert started to sit up.

“Not yet,” Caxton shouted, as the truck shot across the basketball court—and then through another fence on the far side. A coil of barbed wire dragged across Caxton’s back, tearing through her stab-proof vest but missing her skin.

After that it was smooth driving all the way to the powerhouse.





30.

Caxton blinked away the last of the tear gas and blew her nose hard into her sleeve. She could see the low brick shape of the powerhouse ahead of her through the shattered windshield. There was a signpost fifteen yards away and she downshifted and braked carefully to miss hitting it, but she’d never driven a big rig before and she could just make out half of what it said before the truck plowed right into the sign and bent it over backward.

It had read WARNING: THIS AREA PROTECTED BY and then something else, something she hadn’t caught before it was too late. Protected by what? Guard dogs? Land mines?

Cursing, she put the truck in reverse and gave it a little gas. What resulted was one of the ugliest noises she’d ever heard— metal grinding on metal, and wheels spinning without getting anywhere. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Can’t anything ever be easy around here?” The sign must have gotten stuck in the truck’s front axle. She tried gunning the engine, tried driving forward, tried hauling the wheel all the way over to one side, then back the other way, but nothing worked.

She switched off the engine and rested her head on the steering wheel.

The truck settled around her, its vibrations and its rumbles shutting down one by one. Eventually all she could hear was the engine pinging as it cooled down.