23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(95)

Every intercom speaker in the prison picked up the message and relayed it at ear-shattering volume. Clara could hear her words echoing around the prison yard and bouncing upward into the darkening night sky.

The vampires looked around the room as if they expected federal agents to come storming out of closets and crawl spaces, machine guns blazing.

That didn’t happen.

Clara begged, silently, for some sign. Some signal, of any kind, that meant Fetlock had heard her. That he was out there, ready to save her. Maybe he could have shot a flare over the prison. Maybe he could have called in on the prison’s multiband radio system.

But he didn’t.

Malvern took a step toward Clara, and suddenly she was right there, so close that every hair on Clara’s body stood up at once. Then Malvern hit her, and—





52.

Jesus,” Clara said, “that hurt.”

She was conscious again. She kind of wished she wasn’t. Her whole jaw felt like it had been dislocated, knocked backward off its joints and into the fleshy part of her neck. It hurt to talk. It hurt to sit up. It hurt a little every time she breathed, a twinge that went all the way up to the top of her sinuses and deep into her chest. She touched, carefully, the skin of her neck and throat and felt it swollen and tender. It hurt to touch her face, so she stopped doing that.

It hurt to open her eyes, but she had to know where she was. She was still alive, and she presumed she was still a prisoner of the vampires, but beyond that what her eyes told her didn’t help explain very much.

She was in some kind of cage, just tall enough for her to stand up in if she ducked her head, and just long enough that she could lie down in it. It was made of crisscrossing bars, spaced about six inches apart. All the bars were wrapped with yellow spongy foam rubber, which was patched here and there with duct tape. The cage had a rubber sheet on its floor that smelled like someone had peed on it, then hosed it off with harsh detergents but not very thoroughly.

Similar cages filled the room around her. Two of them were occupied but the people in them were either asleep, unconscious, or dead. Both of them wore orange jumpsuits.

There was also a desk in the room, with a portable generator sitting next to it. The generator was switched off. Sitting at the desk was a vampire. The one wearing a sleeveless jumpsuit. The vampire was reading a magazine.

Or trying to. She would bring it up close to her eyes as if she had trouble making out the words in the dimly lit room, then sigh angrily and flip rapidly through three or four pages before repeating the operation.

“I can read, sort of,” the vampire growled. “I can understand the words. I mean, I was never a big reader before, but I knew how. But now they mostly look like weird little squiggly shapes. And even when I try hard, I can read a sentence and then forget how it started before I reach the end. It just don’t seem to matter, you know? Like whatever this * was trying to say about Brad and Angelina just isn’t all that important anymore.”

“You knew I was awake,” Clara said.

“Well, you sat up, for one thing. That’s a f*cking easy sign right there. Plus I saw your blood go faster. When you sleep your blood slows down. Your heart beats slower. Did you know I can see your heart? It’s like I got x-ray eyes. That’s pretty cool, I guess.”

It’s seriously creepy, Clara thought. “You’re not human anymore,” she told the vampire.

“What the f*ck you just say, girl?”

Clara cringed. But she knew that as long as she was engaged in a nice, civil conversation with this bloodsucker, she wasn’t being dismembered, eaten, or tortured. That was worth something. “I didn’t mean any offense. It’s just—vampires don’t care about the same things human beings care about. You’re not supposed to. Celebrity gossip has got to be pretty low on the list of things important to vampires.”

“Yeah? What’s at the top?”

Blood. Clara tried very hard not to say that out loud. Even if it was true. Blood was the single thing vampires truly cared the most about. Pretty much the only thing. “I don’t know,” she said, instead. “I guess you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.”

“I still feel pretty human. I mean, better. Stronger. But I’m still wondering about my kids, and what they’ll think about this change. And about their daddy. Except… I keep thinking about the hair on his back. It never used to bother me before, or at least, I put it out of my head. But now I keep seeing it, seeing him on top of me like I’m looking down at him from the ceiling and all I can see is this thick rug of hair. Oh, and his smell. He never would shower before we did it, that always bugged me. Now when I think about it, it kinda makes me sick.”