23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(61)

The warden whirled around to stare at Clara. Clara shrugged, very, very slowly.

“Do you think Caxton is that stupid?” the warden demanded.

“No?” Clara offered.

“Neither do I. She must be up to something. Or maybe she just knows I have a team at the gate, ready to kill anyone who gets close. You,” she said to the half-dead who’d brought the news, “get back to your post. You,” she said to Franklin, “let me see this truck.”

Franklin tapped away at a keyboard and the view on the security monitor changed. Clara moved in close to watch— nobody stopped her. On the screen was the view from a camera mounted on one of the prison’s watchtowers. It showed a white tractor trailer careening across a concrete apron, with half-deads clinging to its hood. One by one they fell off and were either crushed by the truck’s wheels or simply left behind, unmoving and battered.

You go, girl, Clara thought.

The truck stormed right through a basketball court, dragging two lengths of fencing along for the ride. Then it slowed to a stop outside a small brick building.

The warden, Franklin, and Clara watched silently what came next. A prisoner in an orange jumpsuit and a blue vest—it wasn’t Laura—ran toward the building and was quickly subdued by an automatic gun, her body pelted by dozens of red balls that exploded into white powder when they hit.

The camera couldn’t really show what Laura was doing at the same time. The truck blocked most of the view.

“What is that building?” Franklin asked.

“It’s the powerhouse. She’s going to knock out our power. But how can she? She would need some kind of—”

The screen went black without warning. The lights in the room flickered off, leaving them with just the murky gray light coming in through the room’s high windows. The prison was suddenly very, very quiet.

And then the shouting began. The nearest dorm was down a long corridor and through several closed doors, but still Clara could hear the faint echo of women screaming and bellowing to know what was going on. By the sound of it, more than a few of them were laughing.

The warden turned to Franklin. “How did she do that?” she asked. She turned to face Clara again. “How?”

“Search me,” Clara said.

“Fuck! Fuck f*ck f*ck! This is going to make things much harder.” Bellows grabbed Franklin by the shoulder and squeezed. “There are flashlights down the hall in the equipment locker. Go get some. And then find somebody who knows about electrical engineering. I’ll take anyone who knows how to fix a toaster. There are thirteen hundred women in the dorms; at least one of them must know how to change a goddamned light-bulb.”

Franklin ran out of the room. Perhaps annoyed by the shouts echoing down the hall, the warden closed the door behind him. “We had to go and kill the custodial staff. Malvern said they couldn’t be trusted. She was right, of course, but we could have kept at least one person who knew how this place worked. What are you—”

She didn’t get to finish her thought. Her words were interrupted by an incredibly loud high-pitched alarm. It was coming from Clara’s armband.

She was moving fast, and she knew exactly what was going to happen next. She had one second to stop moving, but she didn’t. Instead she rushed at the warden and grabbed her up in a very close bear hug.

Clara had time to see the warden’s lips curl up in a nasty sneer before every nerve in her body fired at once, jolted to life by a fifty-thousand-volt shock. The pain was beyond anything she’d felt in her life. She felt her teeth burning, felt her eyeballs dancing in her head and then—





33.

Spring came early to central Pennsylvania that year. At the university extension the students in forensic criminology were having trouble focusing during their morning physics class. Physics was probably the dullest of the subjects covered by the school—chemistry and genetics were a lot more exciting, because they had more practical applications for the work the students would eventually be doing. Too many of the students had been caught staring out the window. The trees around the quad were in bloom and more than one class was being conducted out on the grass, so the professor had relented and taken them all outside as well. They sat in a circle under a massive oak tree and held their notebooks at the ready. There had been a stiff breeze, but Clara just hugged her knees to her chest and watched as the professor took what looked like a normal metallic flashlight out of his bag and placed it in the middle of the circle.