Clara nodded again.
“Good. Move, now.” Guilty Jen pulled open the door in front of her and they flowed out into the yard. Clara was shocked by how dark it seemed. The sun was still above the horizon, but it was below the level of the prison’s walls and long shadows were draping the grounds in gloom.
They headed around the side of a low outbuilding. Judging by the number of pipes sticking out of its walls, it must have been the control center for the prison’s water supply. Feather-wood dashed up to one corner of the structure and peered around its side for a second, then flashed a hand signal back to the rest of them to say the way ahead was clear.
This couldn’t be the fastest way to the central tower. Clara remembered the route Guilty Jen had taken before, and this was a far more roundabout path. She wasn’t surprised by that, however. Guilty Jen was smart enough to know that the warden might be laying a trap for them, and so she was taking an alternate route to throw off anyone who might be lying in wait for them.
It wasn’t much farther to the Hub. They passed around the side of a softball diamond and then entered a covered walkway that led back to the central tower. Long before they reached it Clara started hearing a noise. A repetitive, metallic, hammering kind of noise, as if someone were dropping rocks off a high place onto a corrugated tin roof. She wasn’t the only one who heard it, either.
“Sounds like some artillery in there,” Queenie said. “Sounds automatic. Big caliber, too.”
Guilty Jen nodded. “It might be Caxton. Maybe she got into the hogs’ toy box.”
“We ain’t got any guns,” Maricón pointed out. “I ain’t sure about this—”
One look from Jen shut the woman up.
“We’re going in,” Guilty Jen said. “You know the drill.”
47.
Caxton pulled her knees in closer and made sure the top of her head wasn’t exposed. She wanted to take a peek to see what was going on, but she didn’t dare. Every time the smallest part of her body was exposed, the machine gun started firing again.
She hadn’t been prepared for this. Half-deads never used guns. They lacked the coordination to aim properly, and the recoil from anything heavier than a derringer could rip a half-dead’s rotten arm right off. Apparently the half-dead in the machine-gun nest had figured out the answer. A mounted gun didn’t transfer its recoil to its operator, and with something that big and fast you didn’t need to aim. You could spray down the whole room as if you were using a garden hose. Some of the other half-deads had been killed in the process, but they weren’t known for looking after one another’s well-being. The thing in the nest wanted only one thing, which was to kill her as quickly as possible.
Caxton had barely survived the first volley of the machine gun, diving behind the only cover available. It wasn’t even particularly good cover. There was a small kiosk built into one wall of the Hub, a counter where COs signed in and out every time they moved a prisoner from one wing of the facility to another. Behind the counter was a tiny booth just big enough for a chair. Caxton had dived over the counter when the machine gun started firing and now had a concrete wall between her and certain death, but she was pinned down. The other half-deads, cowards to the last, had fled the Hub when the shooting started. If they came back she would be a sitting duck. She couldn’t stay there forever, and she couldn’t leave her hiding hole, either. If they came back—but then, they didn’t have to, did they? Sundown was very close now. Caxton didn’t have a watch to time it, but she’d been fighting vampires long enough to have an uncanny sense of where the sun was in the sky, even when she couldn’t see it. When you hunted vampires, knowing when it was day and when it was night was something that kept you alive.
The moment the sun was down Malvern would be coming for her, Caxton knew. She didn’t need to send in waves of half-deads. She could just come to the Hub herself, and drag Caxton out of her hiding place with her own two hands.
Caxton needed to get out of this trap before that happened. But how? Her weapons were useless to her. She had dropped her shotgun, thinking she wouldn’t have time to reload. It was still sitting on the floor outside the kiosk. It might as well be on the far side of the moon. She had a stun gun, a hunting knife, and a collapsible baton. They were worth nothing against the bad end of the continuum of lethality.
Maybe at least she could get a look at what was going on. The kiosk had originally had a plastic window set above the counter, designed to be pulled down by the CO inside in case of an attack. It had been meant to protect against knives and thrown objects, not machine-gun rounds, and the first time it was shot at it had collapsed in long jagged shards. Some of them lay on the floor around Caxton. She picked one up. If she held it up, just so, she could see a reflection in it of the room beyond the counter, and by turning it slowly from side to side she could scan the room.
The machine gun opened fire again, chewing through the paint on the wall behind the counter. The half-dead inside the nest must have seen a flash of light from her improvised periscope. Caxton tried not to flinch as she turned the shard slowly to the left. There—she could see the machine gun firing. It was impossible to see into the nest from where she was, though. She couldn’t tell how much ammunition the half-dead had left, or whether anyone else was coming, or—
—except, maybe she could. It looked like—it could just be that—something was moving on the far side of the room. Behind the machine-gun nest. It wasn’t a half-dead, though. At least, Caxton was pretty sure it wasn’t, because it was sticking very carefully to the shadows, staying out of the machine gun’s fire zone. Moving slowly, not showing much of itself at all.
Then something else rushed out of the shadows, a flash of orange. The machine gun pivoted quickly to track it, and the orange blur started zigzagging back and forth. The machine gun opened fire, but for a moment it seemed the orange blur was moving too erratically, too randomly.
Then—then there was a scream.
It was a human scream, not the high-pitched piteous wailing of a half-dead. It was human and it went on and on. Caxton turned her shard of plastic to try to see what had happened, but the orange blur was nowhere to be found. Instead she could see the machine-gun nest. Its door had been pried open. The machine gun was pointed up at the ceiling, its barrel smoking but silent.
There was another scream, and it was a half-dead this time. It was cut off very abruptly.
Then a living woman said Caxton’s name very softly.
Caxton knew the voice. She knew she’d been rescued. Sort of. She started to stand up, the hunting knife held carefully in one hand she kept out of view beneath the counter. The other hand held the collapsible baton. She brought that one up in plain view. “Guilty Jen,” she said.
It wasn’t the gangbanger she saw first, though. It was one of her set, a black woman with a broken nose. Caxton remembered breaking that nose. The scream she’d just heard, the horrible drawn-out scream of pain, had come from that woman’s throat. It was the last noise she was ever going to make. Her orange jumpsuit had been torn open along one side by the machine gun, and her rib cage was a gaping, steaming mess. She was dead, her eyes staring up at the ceiling, her hands curled lifelessly at her sides.
Guilty Jen stepped out of the machine-gun nest. Her hands were empty, but she was smiling, which Caxton knew was a bad sign. “Hey,” she said, and waved cheerily. “You want to come out of there?”
“You going to give me a good reason?” Caxton asked. She kept glancing down at the dead woman on the floor. She wasn’t squeamish about dead bodies—in her line of work that would be a serious problem—but something about this death bothered her. Not the cause of death, not the severity of the injuries, but the sheer stupidity of it.
Guilty Jen had sacrificed one of her set to distract the attention of the machine gunner. The dead woman had been utterly loyal to her leader. She had run into gunfire just because Guilty Jen had ordered her to. That act of stupid courage had saved Caxton’s life. But for what?
/> “I got a couple reasons,” Guilty Jen said. She didn’t move closer. She kept herself half concealed by the door of the machine-gun nest, ready to jump back inside if Caxton was holding a gun underneath the counter. “One is, I can just come over there and pull you out whenever I want to.”
“You can try,” Caxton said.
Guilty Jen nodded, her pigtails swinging back and forth. “The other one is, I got your girlfriend. I know you’ll come out of there for her.” She shook her head when she saw Caxton peering into the shadows of the Hub. “Not here. But close by. I got people sitting on her, of course.”
Caxton sighed. “So… what now? I come out, and then we fight. If I lose, you kill me. And probably Clara too. If I win, you’ll let her go?”
“Nah.” Guilty Jen’s smile broadened. “If you win, and that doesn’t seem real likely, but let’s say I trip and crack my head open before I can even touch you—if you win, they got orders to kill her anyway.” The gangbanger shrugged. “That’s just how I roll.”
48.
She could jump over the counter and be through one of the
Hub’s many doors before Guilty Jen could catch her. She could find Clara somehow and overpower her guards. There’d be time for a quick hug, and then they would take down Malvern together and—
No. It wouldn’t work. She would never find Clara in time.
She had the hunting knife, which would work as well on Guilty Jen as it would on a half-dead. She could throw it, because Jen wouldn’t be expecting that. It was painted green, so it wouldn’t even glint as it sailed through the air. She could make sure it hit Jen somewhere painful but nonfatal, and then she could make the gangbanger tell her where Clara was being kept, and then—
Not a chance. Jen was too fast. She would hear the knife coming, or something.
There didn’t seem to be any way of saving Clara. There didn’t seem to be a real chance of surviving a fight with Guilty Jen. She’d tried that once already, back when she’d actually had a full belly and a night’s sleep. Jen was too fast, and her training in the martial arts just made her too deadly. Caxton was great at killing vampires. That took brains, determination, and high-tech guns. She knew next to nothing about unarmed combat against human opponents.
Across from her, still standing in the doorway of the machine-gun nest, Jen glanced at her wrist. She wasn’t wearing a watch, but Caxton understood the gesture. Nodding in resignation, she put one knee up on the counter. “I guess you know me pretty well,” Caxton said.
“I know your type,” Jen agreed.
Caxton slipped the hunting knife inside her stab-proof vest. Her best plan was to keep it hidden, then bring it out when Jen least expected it. She doubted it would work, but it was the only clever idea she had. “What type’s that?”
“The type that cares about people getting hurt. You’ll do just about anything if I threaten your girlfriend. You’d get down on your knees and lick my cunt right now if I said I’d spare her life, wouldn’t you?”
Caxton grunted as she grabbed the edge of the counter and hauled herself out of her hiding place. “Is that an offer?”
“No,” Guilty Jen said.
Caxton dropped to her feet on the far side of the counter. The burning trash can that was the Hub’s sole source of light was slightly to her left. She moved so that it was between her and the other woman.
“It’s a weakness. It’s something your enemies can exploit.” Jen tilted her head to one side. “So why do you let yourself feel that way?”
Caxton squinted at the gangbanger. Did she really need to ask that question? Maybe she did. Guilty Jen seemed to live in a world with a few very basic rules. Love and its obligations did not seem to be one of them. “I don’t think I can explain it very well. I guess you could say it’s what separates me from the monsters. I knew a guy once, my mentor. He didn’t care about people. He only cared about killing vampires. He was willing to use innocent people as cannon fodder. As diversions. Even as bait.” He’d used Caxton as vampire bait more than once. She had put up with it because she was learning from him every time he put her in danger. He was dead now. She wasn’t. “I swore I’d never be like that, that I would manage to have some kind of life besides just killing vampires. That meant having people like Clara, who—”
“Bored.” Guilty Jen sighed dramatically. “You want the first swing?”
Caxton smiled. She knew a trap when she heard one. “Let’s just wing it,” she said. She flicked her baton outward, extending it to its full length.
Jen bowed. And then she attacked.
She had to cover five yards of empty space before she could land a blow on Caxton. Those five yards included the burning trash can. She started to dodge left around it, signaling the move to force Caxton to dodge the other way and keep it between them. Caxton chose instead to roll to her right, closing the distance between them faster than Jen expected. She came out of her roll with her baton swinging upward, grip first. If she could shatter Jen’s kneecap straight out of the gate, this could be over very fast.
But Jen’s knee wasn’t there when her swing followed through. Instead her leg was up in the air, spinning through the deadly arc of a roundhouse kick. Caxton managed to get her head down before it was knocked off her neck, but that left her in a bad position, one knee and one arm down on the floor, her back arched up in the air, unable to see very well where the next blow would come from.
Jen spun around like a top and brought her feet down in a fighting stance like a sumo wrestler. Her hands were bunched into fists at her waist and she cried out in victory as she readied a double punch toward Caxton’s kidneys.
A punch like that would kill her. The trauma to her kidneys could lead to massive internal bleeding. Without prompt medical attention, which was definitely not available, there would be no way to stop the bleeding, and she would die in a matter of minutes. Caxton’s body knew what to do next, even if her mind was stuck for ideas. Her legs flashed out and backward like the legs of a frog jumping off a hot stone. It wasn’t much of a sweep, but it caught Guilty Jen off guard and made her stumble backward to keep her balance.
That gave Caxton just enough time to get back up on her feet and facing Jen.
Guilty Jen grinned and dropped into a low fighting crouch, one fist extended toward Caxton, the other at her hip.
“We’re wasting each other’s time here,” Caxton said. “The vampire—”
“Bored.” Without warning Jen lunged forward in an attack.
Caxton shoved her hand under her vest and pulled out the hunting knife. She didn’t have time to swing, so it would need to be a lunge, right into the other woman’s attack. Hopefully the knife would be a surprise for Jen, one she couldn’t prepare for. Caxton braced herself against the blow, bringing her other arm up to protect her face, just as Guilty Jen’s body twisted in midair. Jen’s back collided painfully with Caxton’s chest and her arms lifted up, hard. The knife was tugged out of Caxton’s grip and flew through the air to clatter on the floor.
Jen’s hands grabbed Caxton’s now-empty knife hand in a tight grip. She felt something hot and wet slick against the back of her hand—she must have cut Jen, anyway, must have sliced her palm—and then—
Hot agony raced up Caxton’s arm, all the way to her shoulder. She felt her arm twisting under pressure, felt her bones resisting, felt them start to give way—
She screamed as half the bones in her hand and forearm snapped, all at once. Guilty Jen gave her a last sadistic yank and dropped Caxton, moaning, to the floor.
She tried to force herself to get up, tried to will her body to obey her, but her muscles were twitching wildly and her blood was roaring in her ears. It was all she could do to breathe, all she could do to keep from passing out from the pain.
Leaning over her, Guilty Jen reached down and placed a hand on either side of her throat. And started to squeeze.
It was at that precise moment that the lights in the Hub came back on.
49.
> There was a blaring, high-pitched tone and a series of deep clunking sounds as the lights came on one by one. The ventilation system kicked in a second later, sighing out dusty warm air on the back of Caxton’s neck.
Guilty Jen looked up, but she was disciplined enough not to let go of Caxton’s throat. She twisted her hands together and Caxton started to feel the pressure on her windpipe.
“Jen? Jen, what just happened?” a voice said near Caxton’s ear. It sounded like a cell phone set to speakerphone mode. “Jen? Is Caxton dead?”
Caxton tried to raise her baton, which was still clutched in her good hand. She couldn’t find the strength to even begin to swing it, though, before Jen brought one leg around and knocked it out of Caxton’s grip with one knee.
“Jen? Can you hear me?”
Guilty Jen rolled her eyes and stared down at Caxton. “Gimme a second,” she said.
“What? Jen, there’s something you should know, the—”
“I said fucking hold on!” Guilty Jen cursed. Then she growled in frustration and released Caxton’s throat. Caxton started to get up, but Guilty Jen just kicked her in the face and she went back down, hard.
Jen pulled the zipper down on her jumpsuit and reached into her panties. She brought out an expensive-looking Black-Berry and held it up near her mouth. “You got lousy timing, Featherwood. What the hell is going on that’s so important it can’t wait, huh? I got Caxton right where I want her, but I need about thirty seconds to finish things here. Okay? Is that too much to ask?”
“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?”
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