23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(93)

Clara shrugged. “How should I know?”

“You really are useless, aren’cha?” Featherwood grimaced and dialed a number.

“What are you doing, loca?” Maricón asked. “You think she wants to be disturbed just now?”

“I ain’t dying here just because she lost track of time.” Featherwood glanced over her shoulder as if worried Guilty Jen might be standing right there. From what Clara had seen of the set and how it operated, that was a pretty sane precaution.

“Here, you,” she said, slapping Clara on the back, “get me a picture of what’s going on down there. Let me see if Caxton’s dead or not.”

They all waited while Featherwood stared at the ceiling, presumably listening to the phone on the other end ring.

Then Featherwood said, “Jen? Jen, what just happened? Jen? Is Caxton dead? Jen? Can you hear me?” She glanced at Maricón and said, “She picked up, so it must be okay, right? You—I said, get me a view of the first floor.” She smacked Clara in the ear, hard enough to really hurt. Clara studied the controls on the video board, looking for a way to figure out which camera showed what part of the facility.

“What? Jen, there’s something you should know, the—”

Maricón growled. “Ask her if we can off the cerda already.”

“Sorry, Jen, but the sun’s down. I thought you’d want to know. It’s getting pretty dark outside, so the vampires should be waking up any second. I don’t see them on any of the monitors yet, but I figured—hey. Do you want us to kill the girlfriend now?”

Featherwood held the phone away from her ear. “What the f*ck? There was this really loud buzzing noise and now all I get is a dial tone. What happened, stupid?”

She hit Clara with the phone. Clara shied away, but didn’t protest. “I think I have a picture for you now. This one says it’s of the Hub.” She flipped a switch and a monitor over their heads flickered. When the image cleared it showed a brightly lit room with many exits. The floor was littered with gun refuse—brass shell casings, an abandoned shotgun, craters in the floor tiles dug up by high-velocity machine-gun rounds. Lying in the middle of it, in a pool of blood, was Queenie. She was clearly very dead.

For a while the three of them just stared at the image.

“Holy f*ck,” Maricón said. “What the hell happened down there?”

Featherwood grunted. “She said she had Caxton down to rights. I don’t know any more than you f*cking do, so shut up and let me think!”

“Um, excuse me,” Marty said. It was the first thing Clara had heard him say in hours. The three women spun around to stare at the ex-CO, who had been sitting quietly in a rolling chair in the middle of the room. His hands were still bound, so Featherwood and Maricón had figured he was harmless there. His eyes were wide now and sweat was rolling down his forehead. He was trying to kick his way across the room, but one of the wheels on his chair was stuck so he was just going in pathetic circles.

Clara looked up and saw that one of the window panels of the central command center was missing. Not broken, not torn out of its frame. Just gone. Cold evening air was blowing in, lifting her hair and getting it in her eyes.

Then the shadows in the room moved. Five white shapes stepped out of the gloom. And within the space of twenty seconds everyone but Clara was dead.





51.

Marty was the first to die. Malvern moved forward faster than he could push himself away in the chair and snapped his neck, turning his head almost all the way around. Before she could scream, Maricón was grabbed by one of the others, a female vampire in an orange jumpsuit with the sleeves torn off. The vampire started to lean in to savage Maricón’s neck, but Malvern flashed across the room and slapped the vampire away from the Latina gangbanger.

“None of you shall drink here,” she said. “Ye can’t yet handle the madness the blood brings.” Then she choked Maricón until her face turned purple and her tongue stuck out of her mouth.

“Stay the f*ck back,” Featherwood said, brandishing a shank. Another of the new vampires—this one naked—ran up to the burned woman and laughed as the shank sank into her chest again and again. As it came out each time, the wounds were already healing.

“You didn’t say it would feel this good,” the vampire growled. Then she spun around and slammed her forearm up against Featherwood’s throat, crushing her trachea. The burned gangbanger dropped to her knees and stared up at Clara as she struggled for a breath she couldn’t take.