She had rescued dogs in the past. That had given her some sense of satisfaction. But the idea that dogs could replace both Clara and her calling was laughable.
The cell door closed behind Caxton with a buzz and a double thunk of locks slamming shut. She looked up and realized she had walked inside and walled up without even thinking about it. She glanced sideways and saw Stimson standing next to her, but her celly might as well have been in a different city. She wasn’t looking at Caxton. She wasn’t acknowledging her in any way.
The urge to talk to anyone, even Stimson, the need to unburden herself of her troubles, was compelling, even maddening. And yet she’d blown that chance, too, hadn’t she? Because she could never reach out to another human being without screwing it up somehow. Stimson had offered her kindness, and companionship, even friendship of a warped kind. And she’d pushed it away.
Caxton climbed up on her bunk and lay back. She closed her eyes and tried not to sob. It took some work.
Dinner came and went. She ate, but without paying much attention to what was going in her mouth. When she was done she got back up on the bunk and stared at the light fixture again. Just as she had the day before. Just as she would, she imagined, for the nearly eighteen hundred days yet to come.
When she heard the screaming start it barely registered.
In the dorms used by the general population of the prison you heard screams at night, sometimes, and you quickly learned to block them out. Women in prison had nightmares. A lot of them were mentally ill, but not in dangerous ways, so they were just crammed in with the rest of the inmates and convicts. The screams didn’t mean anything, and there was nothing you could do about them, anyway.
The SHU was much quieter at night, because the COs responded quickly to any excessive noise by forcibly extracting the offenders from their cells and dragging them away to cool-down rooms—what the prison called its padded cells. Still, even after the third or fourth scream, Caxton didn’t move, didn’t even roll over to wonder what was going on.
Stimson responded much more quickly She climbed out of her bunk and went to the small window in the cell door. She shielded her eyes with her hands as if she were studying what was going on out there.
A scream came next that sounded much closer. It was different from the screams Caxton expected, as well. It was longer, more drawn-out. It was a scream of real pain, of someone being violently hurt. Of someone being killed.
“Stimson,” Caxton whispered. “What’s going on?”
Caxton’s celly didn’t reply.
“Stimson!” Caxton hissed. “Come on. Tell me.” She sighed. “Gert,” she tried.
The other woman turned and glanced up at her with hard eyes. “What, are we friends now?”
Caxton tried to think of how to reply but she was forestalled by yet another scream. This one was cut off quickly. Abruptly. Caxton knew all too well what that meant. Someone had just been killed.
The speaker in the ceiling crackled to life. “Get back from your doors, right now!” it commanded. “There’s nothing to see.”
That was enough to make Caxton want to look out the window, too. She jumped down from the bunk and shoved her way in next to Stimson, their bodies touching as she tried to get a look.
There wasn’t much to see, after all. The SHU looked as it always had, blinding white paint, central guard post, single reinforced door at the far end. One thing was missing, though. Normally, even in the middle of the night, one guard sat inside the glass-walled guard post, while two COs walked circuits around the unit, keeping their eyes open, listening for trouble. Now the patrollers were gone and only one CO was visible inside the post.
“Where’d the others go?” Caxton asked.
“They hightailed it a couple of minutes ago,” Stimson told her. “Grabbed up their shotguns and booked out the door. That’s all I saw.”
Caxton looked at the CO in the guard post, and recognized her at once. It was Harelip, the female CO who had performed her body cavity search. The one who had knocked her down to the floor when she tried to read the warden’s BlackBerry.
“Alright, bitches, wall up for me now or there’s going to be some ass-whooping,” Harelip said over the intercom. Her voice echoed off the walls of Caxton’s cell.
Stimson ran back to the wall, but Caxton stayed where she was.
The screaming was far away again, when it came next. But there was a lot more of it.
“Laura!” Stimson called. “Get back! They’ll beat us both if you don’t.”
“Hold on,” Caxton said. “Someone’s coming.” And there was. A shadowy figure was coming down the hallway toward the big reinforced door of the SHU. As it stepped out into the light she saw it was a male CO in a stab-proof vest. His baseball cap had been pulled down low over his eyes, leaving his face mostly obscured. She could just make out his chin. It was red, but not with blood. The skin there had been scratched and torn at until it came away in long strips. She could see muscle tissue underneath, pinkish-gray and rubbery and bloodless.
“Oh, no,” Caxton moaned. “Not here. Not now.”
“Which one is Laura?” the half-dead CO asked. A moment later every door in the SHU unlocked itself with a heavy thunk.
11.
Caxton shoved against the cell door with her shoulder, but it wouldn’t move. The electronic lock had been released, but the mechanical lock was still in place. Someone was going to have to pull the lever on the outside of the door before she could get out.
There were two people on the floor of the SHU, two candidates who might let her out, but neither of them seemed like much of a bet.
“Murphy?” Harelip said, speaking into her microphone. She hadn’t turned off the intercom system, so her voice came down from the ceiling of Caxton’s cell. The female CO sounded worried but not panicked. Probably because she didn’t yet realize that the male CO stalking around the SHU wasn’t Murphy anymore. “What’s going on?”
“Where is she? I’ll find her on my own if I have to,” the thing said, approaching a cell door and peering in through the window. Its voice was all wrong. Male COs cultivated a gruff, deep voice that commanded respect. The voice this thing used was high-pitched and sounded like it came from just the far side of sanity.
“I called down to central, but there’s no reply. I’ve got chatter all over the open bands. People are freaking out! Is it a riot? It sounds like somebody broke in,” Harelip said. She was getting more scared, which Caxton thought was probably a good thing. Eventually she might notice the big difference between Murphy the CO and the thing that had invaded her SHU.
It didn’t have a face.
Oh, it had eyes, and a mouth, and maybe part of a nose left. But its face would be hanging down in ragged strips of skin, peeled away from its cheeks and forehead by its own fingernails. Murphy was dead. He had been dead, anyway, until a vampire called him back and gave him a second chance.
The vampire hadn’t done him any favors. The second chance only lasted about a week—reanimated bodies rotted away with incredible speed, and after a day or two they were already falling to pieces. They were also required to obey any vampire who commanded them, without fail, without question.
Perhaps the worst of it was that they came back without a soul. They knew constant pain, and they knew that what they had become was wrong. One look in a mirror and they understood they were not meant to exist. They tore off their own faces. They hurt themselves, and they took a joy in hurting others (especially with knives—they loved knives). They were vicious, and crazy and had no moral compunctions whatsoever.
Caxton, following a long tradition among American vampire hunters, called them half-deads. When you went looking for vampires, you found half-deads, usually lots of them. And when you found half-deads they were already trying to kill you.
“Murphy! The call came through for EIP stations,” Harelip went on. Caxton knew the acronym stood for “escape in progress,” the prison guard’s equivalent of a red alert or all h
ands on deck. “My two boys ran to comply.”
“Yes, I know,” the thing that had been Murphy said. “I caught them coming the other way. They’re not coming back.” It tittered as if it had just made a little joke. It grabbed the lever on the front of a cell door and yanked it back. It took two tries. Half-deads weren’t well coordinated, or particularly strong. Eventually it got the door open, however. Then it pulled a long hunting knife out of its belt.
Knives. Always with the knives. Half-deads loved knives, hatchets, cleavers, anything sharp. This was a hunting knife, six inches long and painted green—so the white-tailed deer wouldn’t see it glint when you pulled it out in the woods—and had a nasty serrated edge and a wicked curved point. The half-dead brandished it with obvious pleasure and stepped inside the cell.
“Stimson,” Caxton said. “I mean, Gert, please. Do you know the name of the CO in the guard post?”
Gert frowned. “Worth, maybe? Or it could be Wendt.”
Caxton shook her head. “Hey,” she shouted, pounding on the cell door. “Hey, CO! Hey, Screw! You’ve got to stop him!”
Harelip glanced in Caxton’s direction. “Wall up, fucker,” she said, and the speaker in the ceiling popped and whistled.
There was a scream from inside the open cell. A prisoner in an orange jumpsuit came staggering out, blood slicking down one side of her leg.
“Murphy!” Harelip shouted. “Murphy, what are you doing?”
Another scream. Then the half-dead came back out of the cell. There was blood on its knife and all over its stab-proof vest. “That wasn’t Laura. Laura? Where are you, Laura?” it sang. “I’m going to find you if I have to cut my way through every last one of these cells. Miss Malvern wants to see you.”
Harelip finally got what was happening, or at least some of it. She stood up inside the guard post and grabbed a shotgun. Then she hit a button on her control board. A beeping alarm went off and the door of the guard post started to slide open.
Then the alarm stopped, and it started to slide shut again.
Harelip looked as if she hadn’t been expecting that.
The half-dead went to the next cell in line and pulled back on its lever, using both hands this time. The door slid open on its rails. Both of the women inside came rushing out at once, but the half-dead tripped one of them up and knocked her to the floor. It grabbed her hair and pulled her face back. She was a black woman with long cornrows. “You’re not Laura, either,” it said, and then it slit her throat.
In the guard post Harelip hammered at the shatterproof door of what had become just another prison cell. Clearly that door could be opened and closed by remote control—-just like the door locks on the SHU cells. Someone in a central command center was intent on keeping Harelip locked up tight. She beat at the door with the butt of her shotgun, but it was inch-thick Lexan and it would probably stand up to the blast of a hand grenade.
The half-dead went to the door of the next cell.
Two inmates in orange jumpsuits had managed to avoid its rampage. One prisoner was screaming as she ran toward the exit of the SHU. Another, the one who’d been carved up inside her cell but managed to get away, was leaning up hard against the wall, only a few cells down from where Caxton watched in terror. She was breathing heavily and her eyes were closed. She must have lost a lot of blood.
“Hey,” Caxton shouted, and beat on the inside of her cell door. “Hey you. Convict! Let me out of here. I know what to do! I can save everybody.”
The wounded woman’s eyes flickered open. She looked right at Caxton. Then she slumped to the floor in a puddle of her own blood.
Everyone was shouting by then. The women in the cells were shouting to know what was going on, shouting for help, bellowing in panic and fear. Caxton could still hear the screams that came from the third cell that the half-dead had opened. The screams were cut off quickly. After a moment the half-dead emerged again, covered now in blood and gore. One of its victims had torn the baseball cap off his head and Caxton could see its ravaged face clearly now. Its eyelids were completely gone, as were its lips. It looked both surprised and very happy, simultaneously.
It was really enjoying itself, and it was just getting started, that expression said. It was five doors down from Caxton’s cell.
“Gert,” Caxton said, “when that thing comes in here, you just dive under the bunks, okay? Get as far in as you can. If this goes badly, I’ll just tell it who I am, and hopefully, it’ll just kill me, or drag me off, or whatever it is it’s going to do. If you’re quiet and you don’t move, I think it’ll ignore you. Okay?”
Gert nodded. Her eyes were as wide as the half-dead’s.
“Okay,” Caxton said, steeling herself. Half-deads weren’t very strong. It was possible she could overpower it when it came into the cell. Of course, there was the knife to think about.
There was nothing in the cell Caxton could use as a weapon. Nothing she could use to defend herself. It was a maximum-security prison cell, and very smart people had spent a lot of time and money making sure she was harmless when she was locked inside.
She would have to crouch by the door, and wait for it to come in, and then—
Her thought was interrupted by a thunking noise from inside the door. With a gentle creak, it slid open just a crack. Lying on the floor just outside, Caxton saw the wounded prisoner, the one Caxton had thought was dead. She must have crawled over and used the last of her strength to pull back the lever.
12.
Inside the guard post Harelip was trying to pry the door open with a wooden baton. It was an act of desperation—she had completely lost control of the SHU.
In a cell just a few doors down, the half-dead was cutting up more inmates, looking for Caxton. It was up to her to stop him from killing anyone else.
There were other problems to think about—the prison was clearly under attack by vampires, for instance—but they were going to have to wait. Caxton eased open the door of her cell and stepped outside.
It felt weird, being outside of the cell without shackles on. Even as bad and scary as things had gotten, it still felt weird. Caxton tried to ignore the part of her brain that kept telling her she was in serious trouble, that the COs wouldn’t like this. The only CO who wasn’t dead in the SHU was locked inside her own guard post. Caxton considered trying to free Harelip. It would be nice to have some backup, for one thing, and there were weapons in there. But she doubted she could break into the post any better than Harelip could break out of it.
She stooped down to touch the throat of the woman who had opened her cell door. There was a pulse in her neck, but it was faint. The half-dead had really done a number on her, cutting her open from the armpit down to the hip and probably opening arteries and veins all the way down. The woman needed a lot more than first aid, and Caxton wasn’t sure she could be saved even by a team of paramedics. As much as she owed the woman, whose name she didn’t even know, there were other people she could help more. People she could save.
From inside a cell a few doors down Caxton heard a woman screaming and begging for her life. A trickle of blood rolled out through the open door and glistened on the concrete floor of the SHU. Caxton kicked off her slippers—they made a slip-slap noise when she walked—and padded barefoot over to the open door. It would be suicide to barge in and try to save the women inside. Half-deads weren’t very smart, or strong, or fast. But with its hunting knife and Caxton’s limited training in unarmed self-defense, this half-dead wouldn’t have to be any of those things to hurt her, and badly, if she rushed it. So she leaned up against the wall next to the door, flattening herself against it as tightly as possible, and cleared her throat noisily.
The whimpering moans inside the cell didn’t stop, but she heard the scrape of a boot heel against the floor. The half-dead had heard her and was turning around to see what the noise meant.
It could choose to be stupid, or to be smart. If it was stupid it would come running out with its knife held up high. It would tri
p over her outstretched ankle and fall face forward onto the floor, losing its grip on the knife in the process. Then she could grab the knife and kill it before it could even start getting back up.
If it was smart, it would stay exactly where it was, and wait for her to come to it.
Caxton could hear her heart beating in her ears. She counted thirty heartbeats before she decided it had done the smart thing. Then she cursed to herself.
It heard that as well. “Is that you, Laura? Are you playing a little game with me? Why don’t you come in and say hi? I’m not supposed to kill you, you must know that. Miss Malvern just wants to talk.”
Caxton bit her lower lip. The half-dead might be lying, but she knew that was just wishful thinking. Malvern was behind the attack on the prison, of course. Justinia Malvern, the last living vampire in Pennsylvania. She and Caxton had a long history. Malvern had been making plans to pillage and destroy the good people of the Commonwealth for nearly a century and a half. In that time she’d created a legion of new vampires, whole armies of them, to aid her. For the last few of those years Caxton had been the one who foiled all her plans and slaughtered all her vampiric descendants. She’d never quite managed to track down Malvern herself, and now it sounded like she was going to pay for that failure.
Maybe Malvern wanted to torture her to death. Caxton knew the vampire wouldn’t let her die quickly, not if she could help it. Not if she could watch. There were other possibilities, too. Malvern had always wanted to turn Caxton into a vampire. It would be a great coup, and it would turn her greatest enemy into a valuable ally. More than once Malvern had made the offer, and every time Caxton had turned her down. Maybe the whole prison was suffering just so Caxton could have another chance to say no. Or maybe Malvern had something else in mind entirely, some brilliant but twisted scheme that involved Caxton in some diabolical way she couldn’t imagine.
23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale v-4 Page 6