The half-dead up there hit the roof again, and the dent got wider.
At the same time another half-dead climbed up over the truck’s grille and grabbed the hood ornament. In its other hand it held a can-shaped grenade with no pin.
“They have grenades?” Gert asked, her voice high enough to count as hysterical.
“CS grenades. They don’t kill you; they’re just full of tear gas,” Caxton said. She couldn’t imagine the prison having any other kind of grenade in its arsenal. Not that it mattered. “If it gets that thing in here it might as well be high-explosive. It’ll pump out a hundred cubic feet of gas in a second, and we’ll suffocate even with the windows open.”
“So shoot it,” Gert suggested.
“Just a—”
The half-dead on the roof of the cab struck a third time and the metal roof tore open. The sharp point of a pickax came through the ceiling between the two women. Gert screamed, but Caxton just readied her shotgun. The pick drew back the way it had come and Caxton looked out through the hole it had made. She could see the half-dead on the cab’s roof. It was looking back down at her.
She shoved the barrel of her shotgun through the hole and fired. There was a scream and then a rattling series of thumps as the half-dead fell off of the cab.
“What about this motherfucker?” Gert asked, pointing through the windshield.
Caxton hit the truck’s ignition, then threw it into reverse.
She’d been in the highway patrol once. She knew the importance of double-clutching. The truck lurched backward, out of the loading bay, and the half-dead on the hood went flying backward. Its grenade went off instantly in a spray of yellow smoke that rolled across the windshield. Caxton caught a whiff of the tear gas before they were clear of the yellow plume, and her eyes clamped tightly shut as her throat spasmed with a nasty dry cough.
“Grab the wheel,” she said. She knew better than to rub at her eyes—that would only smear the tear gas deeper into her mucous membranes. It hurt to talk, but she had no choice. “Watch the mirrors. What’s behind us?”
“The wall!”
Caxton forced her eyes to open up. They immediately clamped shut again. They stung like they were on fire, even when they were closed, but when she tried to open them the pain was ten times worse. “Turn the wheel left. Toward me,” she said, as calmly as she could. “How far is the wall?”
“I don’t know. Too close,” Gert said, sounding panicked.
“We’ll be okay. There might be more of them coming, so we need to move, alright?” She kept her foot on the gas a second longer, then braked to keep the truck from jackknifing, then threw the stick into forward gear. “What are we pointed at?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Gert told her. “But you’re facing the wrong way! The main gate is behind us.”
“That’s okay,” Caxton said. “We’re not going to the main gate.”
“We’re not?”
“It’s too heavily defended. We wouldn’t make it halfway there. Trust me. I know what I’m doing.” And I’m not about to share, she thought, so don’t ask any questions. She hadn’t figured out yet how to explain to Gert that their mission had changed. That they weren’t going to try to escape from the prison anymore. She doubted Gert would want to hear that. “What do you see ahead of us? Open grass?”
“There’s no grass. Just—-just a basketball court.”
“That’s fine,” Caxton said.
“But it’s surrounded by a fence. With barbed wire and everything,” Gert told her.
“That’s what I needed to know.” Caxton upshifted and poured on the gas. “Now, just as we’re about to hit the fence— get down,” she said.
She felt Gert duck below the dashboard almost at once. Caxton leaned over to her right, covering Gert’s body with her own. The truck hit the fence hard, traveling at almost twenty miles an hour.
The truck went through the fence like a knife through paper, tearing through posts and chain link and barbed wire without even losing much speed. The truck had enough mass to shear off the posts at ground level without any trouble. The fence didn’t just part in the middle to let them through, however. It wrapped around the front of the truck and stretched—for a few milliseconds. Then it snapped in a dozen places at once and hundreds of pounds of metal wire and three-inch pipe came scrabbling and sparking up the hood to collide with the windshield. It shattered instantly and covered both of them in glass, while one piece of metal post shot through the cab and impaled the seat cushion where Caxton had been sitting up a second earlier.
Gert started to sit up.
“Not yet,” Caxton shouted, as the truck shot across the basketball court—and then through another fence on the far side. A coil of barbed wire dragged across Caxton’s back, tearing through her stab-proof vest but missing her skin.
After that it was smooth driving all the way to the powerhouse.
30.
Caxton blinked away the last of the tear gas and blew her nose hard into her sleeve. She could see the low brick shape of the powerhouse ahead of her through the shattered windshield. There was a signpost fifteen yards away and she downshifted and braked carefully to miss hitting it, but she’d never driven a big rig before and she could just make out half of what it said before the truck plowed right into the sign and bent it over backward.
It had read WARNING: THIS AREA PROTECTED BY and then something else, something she hadn’t caught before it was too late. Protected by what? Guard dogs? Land mines?
Cursing, she put the truck in reverse and gave it a little gas. What resulted was one of the ugliest noises she’d ever heard— metal grinding on metal, and wheels spinning without getting anywhere. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Can’t anything ever be easy around here?” The sign must have gotten stuck in the truck’s front axle. She tried gunning the engine, tried driving forward, tried hauling the wheel all the way over to one side, then back the other way, but nothing worked.
She switched off the engine and rested her head on the steering wheel.
The truck settled around her, its vibrations and its rumbles shutting down one by one. Eventually all she could hear was the engine pinging as it cooled down.
“I guess we walk from here,” she said.
Gert looked over at her with wide eyes. She was hugging herself and shivering.
“You alright?” Caxton asked.
“Uh-huh,” Gert said, and licked her lips. “Just a little scared, I guess.”
“That was kind of a wild ride,” Caxton admitted. “And I suppose you didn’t see those half-deads until they were all over us?”
“Yeah, except, um, no,” Gert said. “That stuff doesn’t scare me. I’ve seen shit like that in the movies. It’s you I’m scared of right now.”
“Me? I thought I was your road bitch.”
“Me too. Except, we had a great chance to escape back there and you didn’t take it. That’s not how a road bitch is supposed to act.”
“I told you, Gert, it was too well defended, and the main gate—”
Gert shook her head. “Nope.”
Caxton frowned. “Nope what?”
“Nope, I ain’t buying that bullshit. You think I’m stupid? After all we’ve been through, you still think I’m some kind of down-home trailer-trash fool? I know what’s going on. I know what you’re doing.”
“Oh,” Caxton said. She’d hoped to put off this confrontation for a while.
“You’re going to try to rescue your girlfriend. Which, you know, hoo-fucking-ray for you, big hero butch dyke, but it’s not what I signed on for. She’s cute and all, but she’s not my type. Mostly because she’s got tits and no dick.”
Caxton closed her eyes. She didn’t have time for this. According to the clock on the dashboard it was nearly ten— which meant she had only nineteen hours left. For what she had planned that wasn’t a lot of time. “You want to split up, then? You go your way, I’ll go mine?” Caxton asked. “The only thing between you and the outside world is the
wall over there.” Which was twenty-five feet high, topped by barbed wire, and in full sight of the machine-gun nests on two different guard towers, of course. If Gert wanted to try it, Caxton wouldn’t stop her.
Or—maybe she would, she reconsidered. Gert was a killer. She was in the prison for a very real reason. Caxton might not be a cop anymore, but it was her duty as a citizen if nothing else to keep Gert from escaping.
It was her duty as a celly to keep the girl alive.
Gert stared out her window, rubbing her arms as if to keep warm.
“I think, though, it’s still in your best interest to stick with me,” Caxton said. “I think that’s your best chance of getting through this without dying.”
“Yeah. Even a NASCAR-watching, sweatpants-wearing coupon queen’s white-trash daughter like me can figure that one out. Let’s just fucking go,” Gert said, and popped open her door. A flood of broken safety glass and pieces of chain-link fence sloughed out and spilled across the ground.
Gert put one foot down, careful not to slip in the mess, and started to climb down from the cab. Then Caxton heard a noise like a six-pack of soda cans being opened one after another, pff-pff-pff-pff-pff-pff. An instant later Gert started screaming. Caxton grabbed for her celly’s hands and pulled her roughly back into the cab.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Gert howled, “it stings—it stings so much—I think I got shot, oh motherfucker!”
Caxton pulled Gert closer and grabbed the leg of her jumpsuit. Something had indeed hit her very hard and left a white powdery residue that flaked away when Caxton scratched at it. She lifted her finger to her nose and nearly screamed herself.
Her eyes had barely recovered from the tear gas. Tears burst out from under her eyelids at the same time as she started sneezing and coughing uncontrollably. There was a distinct smell to the powder as well, one she knew all too well.
It was PAVA, sometimes also called Capsaicin II. It was made of superrefined capsaicin, the chemical in chili peppers that made them burn your mouth and made you want to die, except this chemical was two thousand times hotter than the same weight of jalapeño peppers. It was the same chemical used in pepper spray, but much more concentrated. A direct hit from that stuff on the face or chest would be enough to incapacitate anyone for hours.
Caxton squinted through the windshield and saw what was defending the powerhouse. There was a camera mounted on the front of the building, just above its door, a camera in a complicated housing that allowed it to swivel and point in any direction. Mounted just beneath the camera was a long, thin pipe painted black. It looked exactly like a rifle barrel, because that was exactly what it was.
Caxton had heard about such devices before. They’d been developed for use in understaffed prisons to deny access to sensitive areas. There was no one on the other side of that camera. The rifle was under the control of a robotic system that simply watched its surroundings twenty-four hours a day, looking for signs of intrusion on its programmed territory—and then attacked anything that moved.
It looked like the truck’s cab was just inside that territory. To get to the powerhouse, Caxton was going to have to find a way around that gun.
“Gert, Gert, calm down,” Caxton said, when she realized her celly was hyperventilating. “Just calm down. You aren’t really hurt.”
“It hurts like fucking hell!” Gert assured her.
“It didn’t puncture the skin. That thing’s firing pepperballs. They look like gum balls but they’re just pepper spray in a casing that’s designed to break open on impact. It’s like it’s shooting water balloons at you.”
“Yeah, water balloons full of fucking pain!”
Caxton shrugged. “That’s what it feels like to get hit with a paintball. It stings, yeah, but you’ll be okay. And I need you to be okay right now.”
“What? Why? What do you want me to do now, flash my tits at the next half-dead that runs by to distract it? Maybe cut off my head so you can throw it at somebody.”
“Um, no,” Caxton said, explaining as carefully as she could. “I need you to run out there, as fast as you can, waving your arms. To get that thing’s attention and make it shoot at you. For about thirty seconds.”
31.
You’re out of your mind.”
Caxton shook her head. “Listen, it’s just a robot. It has lousy depth perception and it can never really lead a target, especially if you run in a zigzag pattern. If you keep moving fast enough, it won’t be able to hit you at all.”
“Oh, boy,” Gert said. “And I’m going to do this… why? To entertain you?”
Caxton picked up one of her homemade grenades. “It can only track one target at a time—most likely the fastest-moving target it sees. I’ll come out a second after you do, and make my way inside there with these. Once I’m inside you can run around the side of the building and you’ll be safe. Okay?”
Gert said nothing.
“I need you for this,” Caxton said. “I know I haven’t been straight with you. I know you don’t care about Clara, and whether she lives or dies. But I really need you. I need you to be useful to me, right now. I need to count on you. Because we’re cellies. And cellies watch each other’s backs.”
Gert stared at her for a long time, her nostrils flaring. Her lips compressed as if she was trying to keep herself from saying something. Then, without a word, she pushed her door open and jumped out.
Immediately the robot started shooting at her, pff-pff-pff. Gert screamed and spun and ran with her arms up in the air. Caxton wasn’t sure if she’d been hit or if she was just following instructions.
It didn’t much matter, as long as Gert kept moving. Caxton pushed her door open and jumped down to the ground, the five cans sloshing in her arms as she bent over and duckwalked toward the powerhouse. The robot’s gun started to swing toward her, but she just stopped in her tracks and it went back to shooting at Gert.
Moving as fast as she dared, Caxton made her way to the door of the powerhouse. It was locked, of course, but she hit it a couple of times with her shoulder and it gave way. She stepped into a dimly lit room full of machinery that gave off a crackling hum.
The prison was attached to the local power grid, but it consumed so much electricity every day that it needed its own substation, as well as backup generators in case of a power outage. The powerhouse supplied the entire facility. If she could take it down she would shut off every piece of electrical equipment inside. There would be backups on the backup systems, she knew, and eventually the half-deads would restore some kind of power, but it would give her some time to enact the next stage of her plan, time she desperately needed.
The big turbine generators and the step-down power conditioners were all locked away in cages with thick bars, and anyway she didn’t think her grenades would do them much harm. Instead she found a main power coupling, where all that electricity was shunted through one thick bundle of cables that ran down into the floor. The cables would spread out underground and form a network of wires throughout the facility as tangled and complex as the roots of an ancient oak tree, but inside the powerhouse every line was gathered up in one single bundle of insulated cabling. She placed her grenades carefully around the bundle, where they could do the most damage.
The hard part about the plan was setting them off. She didn’t have the equipment or the expertise to build any kind of timed detonator. Instead she had to rely on a very crude, very simple source of ignition: a Molotov cocktail.
She had found an old soda bottle in the trash can on the loading dock. She had filled it with six ounces of gasoline, then shoved an oil-stained rag into the neck of the bottle to seal it.
A Molotov cocktail on its own would do very little damage to anything in the powerhouse. The concept behind the weapon was simple: you lit the rag and threw the bottle at your target. The bottle was supposed to smash on impact, and the gasoline inside would be dispersed as a fine mist which would then catch fire from the still-burning rag. This would create a cloud
of burning fuel that would last for only a few seconds before it died out. Effective, perhaps, against riot-control cops or anyone who could be psychologically damaged by the threat of being set on fire. However, a little flame inside the powerhouse would do nothing more dramatic than—maybe—melt some of the insulation on the cables.
It would, however, raise the temperature of her makeshift grenades by several hundred degrees for a split second. Which would be enough to make the gasoline inside them expand and hopefully ignite, bursting open the cans and sending the nails flying in every direction at very high speeds. That might just be enough to destroy the cable bundle and cut power to the prison.
It was an awful lot of mights and maybes and hopefullys she was looking at, but Caxton needed to take out the powerhouse if she had any hope of getting Clara out of the prison alive. She was just going to have to trust her luck.
She moved to the doorway of the powerhouse. The robot above her head was still spitting out pepperballs at high speed. There was nothing she could do about that—it was designed in such a way that it couldn’t be disabled without special tools. She sent Gert all the positive thoughts she could muster; it was all she could afford. She adjusted her stance so that as much of her body as possible was outside of the door, then gripped the Molotov cocktail in one hand and her stun gun in the other.
Please let this work, she thought. Please. It wasn’t a prayer, really, so much as a voice of desperation. She was asking herself not to make any mistakes.
She pressed the stun gun to the dangling end of the rag and triggered its test mode. A bright arc of electricity jumped across the shiny terminals at the business end of the gun. She wished, and not for the first time, that the prison didn’t have a strict no-smoking policy. A butane lighter or even just a pack of matches would have made this much easier.
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