23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(63)

There was a smell of scorched fabric in the air, and her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. Carefully she pulled it free with one finger.

No, she wasn’t at school. She was having trouble focusing her thoughts, but she knew—she knew she was at the prison. The prison where they had Laura locked up. And there had been… vampires… and—

“Shit,” she breathed. She looked down and saw she was still lying half on top of the prison’s warden. The warden’s face was twitching wildly and one arm was beating against the floor as if she was keeping time.

Clara didn’t have much time. She yawned hugely—she couldn’t help herself. She needed to get up, needed to get something before—she needed to get the warden’s phone. And a key. The key to—the key to the band around her arm. The electroshock band around her arm.

Confusion. Disorientation. Not knowing where you were or how you got there. That was one of the side effects of electroshock. So was crapping your pants. Clara gave the air an exploratory sniff and smelled urine but not feces.

“Oh, no,” she said, and reached one hand down between her legs. It came back dry. She’d managed to control her bodily functions, but it looked as if the warden hadn’t been so lucky.

She had to move quickly

It was coming back. Her focus was coming back. She had waited until she and the warden were alone in the room, then she had grabbed the warden, knowing the electroshock band on her arm would go off. Also knowing that whoever she was touching when that happened would get shocked as well. She’d been pretty sure that the warden, who was older than she and badly wounded, would get worse effects than she would. That she would recover more quickly than the warden, giving her some time to escape.

She also knew the warden was a tough bitch and that it would be a close thing.

She couldn’t just run away, though. The band was still on her arm and she was pretty sure it had enough juice for more than one shock. If she ran now she would just get zapped again. She bent down over the warden—slowly—and went through her pockets. She found the special key that locked the band onto her biceps and removed it easily. She dropped it on the floor and then hurriedly went back to the warden’s pockets and took out the woman’s BlackBerry—and her pistol, a SIG Sauer P228.

Clara stared at the pistol for a while. She even pointed it at the warden’s face. Surely if anyone deserved to be shot while they were down it was this woman. She had betrayed her trust and put over a thousand women at risk. She had fed some of her prisoners to Malvern. She had ordered half-deads to kill Laura.

Clara couldn’t do it. She put the pistol in her pocket.

It wasn’t that she didn’t think the warden deserved to die, though. It was because Laura wouldn’t have done it. Laura had no compunctions about killing monsters, but she’d never kill a human being, no matter how much they deserved it. Clara couldn’t imagine doing such a thing, either.

So instead, she wrapped the electroshock band around the warden’s arm and locked it tight. There was a heating vent in one wall of the room. She slipped the key through the vents and listened to it clunk and ding its way down into the bowels of the prison’s ventilation system.

Then she went to the room’s door, checked to see no one was looking, and slipped out into the hall, a free woman.





34.

The hallway was almost pitch dark. There were no windows anywhere along its length, and the only light came from an open door down at the far end. A fan of murky light spread outward from the doorway, striped or occluded now and then as a half-dead passed in front of it. Clara could hear them talking down there in their grotesque high-pitched voices. They sounded confused and frightened.

Clara was glad she wasn’t the only one. She headed in the other direction, feeling her way along the wall. She wanted to run. Her body wanted to move, to get out of there as fast as it possibly could. She couldn’t afford to make any noise, though. If she were discovered now the warden would probably have her killed just for revenge.

Her fingertips brushed the molding around a door. She stopped and leaned close to the door and listened, held her breath and waited to hear anything from the other side. When she was sure that no one was behind the door, she searched for its knob and then turned it slowly. The door’s hinges didn’t creak as it opened. That was a small blessing, and she was thankful for it.

The room behind the door was almost as dark as the hallway. There was a single narrow window high in one wall that illuminated some uninteresting furniture—a desk, a few chairs. A computer sat on top of the desk, as well as a multiline telephone, but she knew they wouldn’t work, so she didn’t bother with them. Laura had cut all power to the prison, it seemed. Clara wondered how the prisoners in the dorms would be reacting. They must be going crazy wondering what was going on.