23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(92)

The vampires were awake, alright.





50.

Maricón and Featherwood were arguing. Clara was paying attention with half an ear, just enough to hear if they started talking about her. Occasionally they did, and always it was to ask each other whether it was time to kill Clara or if they should wait for some kind of sign from Guilty Jen. The second that Laura was dead, they were supposed to cut her throat. Of course, they would have no way of knowing whether or not Laura was dead until Guilty Jen came up the stairs, probably brandishing some grisly trophy from the fight. Laura’s severed head, maybe, or just an ear to—

Stop it! Stop it! Clara howled inside her own head. She had managed to make her face blank, and had even stopped shivering. But she couldn’t stop the fear from getting inside. She couldn’t stop thinking about the future. About the very brief future.

The possibility that Laura might kill Guilty Jen never seemed to occur to the members of the set.

Clara put most of her attention in front of her. If she concentrated on something else, if she really focused on the fine details, she could keep from crying in panic. It was the same trick, really, that she had used with her camera when she started feeling queasy at Malvern’s crime scenes. If you just focused on what your eyes were actually seeing, just the colors and the shapes, you didn’t have to think about what anything actually meant.

So she studied the prison’s nerve center. Its controls. The prison had been updated frequently since it had been built, almost fifty years ago. The technology of warehousing human beings had advanced by light-years since then. Instead of tearing out all the old equipment and replacing it all at once, however, clearly the prison’s keepers had kludged everything together, shoving computer terminals in beside old black-and-white analog closed-circuit television equipment, stringing bundles of Ethernet cable as thick as Clara’s arm along the top of control panels in old worn steel cases and covered in black plastic knobs. Everything was patched together with duct tape and ancient wiring furry with dust, and all the controls had been relabeled with pieces of masking tape, written on with Sharpie pen. The communications board was a nightmare of dials and switches and toggles. The master control board that opened and closed the prison’s doors was simpler but built to be taken seriously, in black enamel lined with scuffed rivets. Big red panic buttons were everywhere, usually accompanied by labels that read in huge letters, DO NOT TOUCH! EVER!

All of it was dead, of course, and perfectly silent. Without power the prison couldn’t breathe, couldn’t live the way it was meant to. So when the power did come back on, all at once, for a second Clara could do nothing but gasp as red and white lights flared to life, as sirens, buzzers, Klaxon, and alarms rang all over the boards, as every television screen and computer monitor in the cluttered space flickered back on at the same time.

“—why it matters, she’s supposed to die anyway, and then we only have to worry about Marty, and he’s nothing. You and me could take turns having a nap, right, and—”

“Hey,” Featherwood said.

“—-just a thought, but maybe—”

“Hey!” Featherwood shouted. “You! The girlfriend. What the f*ck did you just do?” the burned woman demanded. She ran over to the control board, where Clara stood dumbfounded, and ran her hands over the dials and knobs, obviously unsure of how to turn it all off.

“I didn’t do anything,” Clara said. “It just happened. Look— there.” She pointed at one of the television monitors. It showed a monochrome view of a claustrophobic room full of machinery. A shaky time stamp in the corner of the screen read 12:00:00 PWRHS, CAM 1. “That’s a view inside the powerhouse. Where the power comes from,” Clara explained. “Caxton cut the power, but the warden sent a bunch of half-deads to get it back online, somehow. I guess they found a way.”

On the screen a couple of half-deads were giving each other a high-five. They looked up at the camera and waved cheerily, obviously proud of what they’d accomplished. On the floor a third one lay, its torn face blackened and its fingers burned down to little more than stubs. Clearly they’d had some trouble with the repairs.

Maricón chose that moment to look out the window. “Just in time,” she said. “It was gonna get real dark in here soon. Look. The sun’s down.”

Featherwood spun around. “Oh, shit. I didn’t realize this was taking so long. Goddamn it. I know Jen has a real hard-on for whacking this Caxton, but we cannot still be here when the vampires wake up. Here—how does this phone work?” she asked, looking at Clara. She had picked up a phone handset from the communications panel. “Do I need to dial nine or something?”