23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(58)

Caxton had heard about such devices before. They’d been developed for use in understaffed prisons to deny access to sensitive areas. There was no one on the other side of that camera. The rifle was under the control of a robotic system that simply watched its surroundings twenty-four hours a day, looking for signs of intrusion on its programmed territory—and then attacked anything that moved.

It looked like the truck’s cab was just inside that territory. To get to the powerhouse, Caxton was going to have to find a way around that gun.

“Gert, Gert, calm down,” Caxton said, when she realized her celly was hyperventilating. “Just calm down. You aren’t really hurt.”

“It hurts like f*cking hell!” Gert assured her.

“It didn’t puncture the skin. That thing’s firing pepperballs. They look like gum balls but they’re just pepper spray in a casing that’s designed to break open on impact. It’s like it’s shooting water balloons at you.”

“Yeah, water balloons full of f*cking pain!”

Caxton shrugged. “That’s what it feels like to get hit with a paintball. It stings, yeah, but you’ll be okay. And I need you to be okay right now.”

“What? Why? What do you want me to do now, flash my tits at the next half-dead that runs by to distract it? Maybe cut off my head so you can throw it at somebody.”

“Um, no,” Caxton said, explaining as carefully as she could. “I need you to run out there, as fast as you can, waving your arms. To get that thing’s attention and make it shoot at you. For about thirty seconds.”





31.

You’re out of your mind.”

Caxton shook her head. “Listen, it’s just a robot. It has lousy depth perception and it can never really lead a target, especially if you run in a zigzag pattern. If you keep moving fast enough, it won’t be able to hit you at all.”

“Oh, boy,” Gert said. “And I’m going to do this… why? To entertain you?”

Caxton picked up one of her homemade grenades. “It can only track one target at a time—most likely the fastest-moving target it sees. I’ll come out a second after you do, and make my way inside there with these. Once I’m inside you can run around the side of the building and you’ll be safe. Okay?”

Gert said nothing.

“I need you for this,” Caxton said. “I know I haven’t been straight with you. I know you don’t care about Clara, and whether she lives or dies. But I really need you. I need you to be useful to me, right now. I need to count on you. Because we’re cellies. And cellies watch each other’s backs.”

Gert stared at her for a long time, her nostrils flaring. Her lips compressed as if she was trying to keep herself from saying something. Then, without a word, she pushed her door open and jumped out.

Immediately the robot started shooting at her, pff-pff-pff. Gert screamed and spun and ran with her arms up in the air. Caxton wasn’t sure if she’d been hit or if she was just following instructions.

It didn’t much matter, as long as Gert kept moving. Caxton pushed her door open and jumped down to the ground, the five cans sloshing in her arms as she bent over and duckwalked toward the powerhouse. The robot’s gun started to swing toward her, but she just stopped in her tracks and it went back to shooting at Gert.

Moving as fast as she dared, Caxton made her way to the door of the powerhouse. It was locked, of course, but she hit it a couple of times with her shoulder and it gave way. She stepped into a dimly lit room full of machinery that gave off a crackling hum.

The prison was attached to the local power grid, but it consumed so much electricity every day that it needed its own substation, as well as backup generators in case of a power outage. The powerhouse supplied the entire facility. If she could take it down she would shut off every piece of electrical equipment inside. There would be backups on the backup systems, she knew, and eventually the half-deads would restore some kind of power, but it would give her some time to enact the next stage of her plan, time she desperately needed.

The big turbine generators and the step-down power conditioners were all locked away in cages with thick bars, and anyway she didn’t think her grenades would do them much harm. Instead she found a main power coupling, where all that electricity was shunted through one thick bundle of cables that ran down into the floor. The cables would spread out underground and form a network of wires throughout the facility as tangled and complex as the roots of an ancient oak tree, but inside the powerhouse every line was gathered up in one single bundle of insulated cabling. She placed her grenades carefully around the bundle, where they could do the most damage.