23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(65)

“Gah!” she said, a noise of pure revulsion. A hand had come out of the darkness and touched her left breast.

There was no thought process for what she did then. Clara’s hands moved of their own volition, obeying a reflex as old as time. One hand grabbed at the half-dead’s clothes and pulled it close to her. The other hand went over its mouth. Then she brought up her knee, right into its crotch.

It struggled and tried to bite her hand. Its own hands grabbed at her lapels, at her hair. In pure animal fear Clara grabbed its head in both hands and twisted, trying to break the thing’s neck. She felt bones grinding against each other inside the rotten envelope of its flesh and felt its hands grab ever more desperately at her, but she had the element of surprise and she kept twisting, clamped her hands tighter around the half-dead’s head and twisted and twisted—

And then the head came off in her hands. It felt like she was holding a squishy bowling ball. She heard the half-dead’s body slump against the wall, but she couldn’t see anything.

The head kept trying to bite her fingers where they covered its mouth. Clara threw the head away from herself and heard it smack the floor and go rolling down the hall.

Time to run, she thought. She’d been as quiet as she could, but surely someone had heard her outburst or the half-dead calling for Dupree. Clara pushed forward again and found another doorway. She pulled it open and ran through. The hallway beyond was better lit, though not much—an emergency light box was shedding a fading yellow glow from somewhere far down its length. She couldn’t see any half-deads moving through the murky light, so she ran forward, her sensible shoes clopping loudly on the floor. Up ahead she saw a sign and as she got closer she could just read it in the gloom:

INFIRMARY

Stab-Protective Vests

Must Be Worn Beyond

This Point!

There was a massive barred gate beyond the sign. She was just going to have to find a way to get it open. She couldn’t go back, couldn’t—

She heard two things then, and both of them made ice cubes chatter in her blood. One was a cough, from somewhere in the shadows. The other was the BlackBerry which chose that moment to start ringing in her pocket.





35.

Get the f*ck off of me,” Gert moaned, but her heart wasn’t in it. Caxton opened another bottle of dish detergent and squirted it into her celly’s eyes.

“This is going to feel pretty good in a couple of seconds,” Caxton explained as she rubbed the detergent into Gert’s eyelids and then used a scrunched-up paper towel to scrape at the girl’s cheeks and mouth. Gert kept trying to push her away, but Caxton held on tight. The pepperballs had left a thick pasty residue all over Gert’s face that was burning her skin. It had to come off, one way or another.

When she’d scrubbed her celly’s face enough she let Gert lie back on the cot and sat down herself in a folding chair. She was exhausted. She used to be able to go without sleep for days at a time, but in the SHU her body had gone flabby and her muscles had started to atrophy. Just fifteen hours to go, she thought. At the end of Malvern’s deadline, either she or the vampire would be dead. Either way, she could rest then. In the meantime she had plenty of work to do.

“What the f*ck,” Gert said, rolling over on the cot. It had taken Caxton far too long to revive the girl and get the PAVA residue off her face, but it had to be done. “What happened? What did you just do to me? My mouth tastes like ass.” She smacked her lips. “Soapy ass.”

“You were hit in the face with a couple pepperballs from that robot gun,” Caxton explained. “I got you out of there, but you were suffering from respiratory distress. You weren’t breathing very well. So I found the prison’s infirmary and brought you inside. I had a hell of a time getting the door open. Then I had to clean you up to get the pepper out of your system. The soap you’re tasting is dishwashing detergent. You can’t just wash capsaicin off with water—that makes it worse. You need to scrub it off with soap. Milk works, too, but I couldn’t find any. They keep a ton of detergent on hand here, probably because there’s so much pepper spray in the prison that accidents happen all the time. I tried to be gentle.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Gert said. She tried to open her eyes and grunted in pain. She brought her hands up to rub at her eyes, and Caxton grabbed them and pushed them back down to her sides.

“You’ll just grind it in. Trust me—it’s nasty stuff, but I’ve worked with it before.”