23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(87)

The set stopped instantly as Guilty Jen froze in front of a doorway. Slowly she turned and glared at Clara. “I’m the only thing keeping you alive right now,” she said. “It would be easier, and safer, to kill you, got it? I’m about ninety-eight percent ready to do it with my bare hands. I’m not at one hundred percent because there just might come a time in the next couple of minutes when you’ll be useful to me alive. The thing of it is, it don’t matter much if you’re alive and able to walk, or just alive. I know exactly how to kick you in the back so that your spinal cord would snap. You believe me?”

Clara nodded. She couldn’t have spoken at that moment if her life had depended on it. She was pretty sure her life depended on not speaking, which was fortunate.

“I can leave you in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, and it’ll only take me about ten seconds to do it. Queenie, Feather-wood, and Maricón could carry you from here—you ain’t that heavy. Caxton would still want you, even if you were a useless cripple. Now, we’ll move a little faster with you on your own feet, so I’m giving you one more chance. But you say another word and we’ll take a nice little ten-second pit stop. Okay?”

Clara nodded again.

“Good. Move, now.” Guilty Jen pulled open the door in front of her and they flowed out into the yard. Clara was shocked by how dark it seemed. The sun was still above the horizon, but it was below the level of the prison’s walls and long shadows were draping the grounds in gloom.

They headed around the side of a low outbuilding. Judging by the number of pipes sticking out of its walls, it must have been the control center for the prison’s water supply. Feather-wood dashed up to one corner of the structure and peered around its side for a second, then flashed a hand signal back to the rest of them to say the way ahead was clear.

This couldn’t be the fastest way to the central tower. Clara remembered the route Guilty Jen had taken before, and this was a far more roundabout path. She wasn’t surprised by that, however. Guilty Jen was smart enough to know that the warden might be laying a trap for them, and so she was taking an alternate route to throw off anyone who might be lying in wait for them.

It wasn’t much farther to the Hub. They passed around the side of a softball diamond and then entered a covered walkway that led back to the central tower. Long before they reached it Clara started hearing a noise. A repetitive, metallic, hammering kind of noise, as if someone were dropping rocks off a high place onto a corrugated tin roof. She wasn’t the only one who heard it, either.

“Sounds like some artillery in there,” Queenie said. “Sounds automatic. Big caliber, too.”

Guilty Jen nodded. “It might be Caxton. Maybe she got into the hogs’ toy box.”

“We ain’t got any guns,” Maricón pointed out. “I ain’t sure about this—”

One look from Jen shut the woman up.

“We’re going in,” Guilty Jen said. “You know the drill.”





47.

Caxton pulled her knees in closer and made sure the top of her head wasn’t exposed. She wanted to take a peek to see what was going on, but she didn’t dare. Every time the smallest part of her body was exposed, the machine gun started firing again.

She hadn’t been prepared for this. Half-deads never used guns. They lacked the coordination to aim properly, and the recoil from anything heavier than a derringer could rip a half-dead’s rotten arm right off. Apparently the half-dead in the machine-gun nest had figured out the answer. A mounted gun didn’t transfer its recoil to its operator, and with something that big and fast you didn’t need to aim. You could spray down the whole room as if you were using a garden hose. Some of the other half-deads had been killed in the process, but they weren’t known for looking after one another’s well-being. The thing in the nest wanted only one thing, which was to kill her as quickly as possible.

Caxton had barely survived the first volley of the machine gun, diving behind the only cover available. It wasn’t even particularly good cover. There was a small kiosk built into one wall of the Hub, a counter where COs signed in and out every time they moved a prisoner from one wing of the facility to another. Behind the counter was a tiny booth just big enough for a chair. Caxton had dived over the counter when the machine gun started firing and now had a concrete wall between her and certain death, but she was pinned down. The other half-deads, cowards to the last, had fled the Hub when the shooting started. If they came back she would be a sitting duck. She couldn’t stay there forever, and she couldn’t leave her hiding hole, either. If they came back—but then, they didn’t have to, did they? Sundown was very close now. Caxton didn’t have a watch to time it, but she’d been fighting vampires long enough to have an uncanny sense of where the sun was in the sky, even when she couldn’t see it. When you hunted vampires, knowing when it was day and when it was night was something that kept you alive.