23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale v-4

by David Wellington

  “No,” Laura said. As if she could change reality by denying it. “No. We worked too hard to get here.” She picked up a riot gun. Its barrel turned ninety degrees from its stock and pointed at the wall. In disgust she threw it hard against the far wall to make an impotent clattering noise when it hit the floor.

  “It makes sense, I guess,” Clara said. “The half-deads couldn’t use the guns, and the vampires don’t need them. Why leave them lying around? Just in case anybody wandered in here. Say, someone like Guilty Jen.”

  Laura shook her head. “No. No! This wasn’t just about hedging bets. Malvern knew I would come here. She’s been leading me around like a bull with a ring in its nose. She let me get this far. Her pal the warden even gave me directions! She wanted me to see this.”

  Clara sighed. “Does it matter?”

  Laura didn’t answer. Instead she grabbed Clara’s arm and pulled her out of the armory and back to the stairs. Together they headed up to the top level, to the central command center. Gert came trailing after.

  Laura kicked open the door and stepped through. There was one half-dead in the room, sitting in a chair watching a bank of monitors. It had its back to them. Before it could turn around Laura ran up behind it and bashed its head forward against the HVAC control board. It didn’t fight back.

  “You stay here,” Laura said. “You can watch me on the monitors. You know how to work all this stuff?”

  “I can figure it out,” Clara said, “but—”

  “If you see me walking into trouble, use the intercom. I’ll be able to hear you just about anywhere. If you find Malvern, let me know where she is.”

  “Or,” Clara began.

  Laura gave her a cautious look.

  “Or,” Clara continued, “you could stay here with me. We can call Fetlock. Let him storm this place and take care of Malvern. That way we’ll both live.” She gave the cautious look right back. “You know perfectly well that without a gun you don’t have a chance against her. You’re going down there to kill yourself.”

  “No,” Laura protested. “I’m going down there to kill Malvern or die trying. I thought that was clear.”

  “I thought—” Clara said. But she knew she couldn’t change Laura’s mind. “It doesn’t matter what I thought.” I thought you were the same woman I fell in love with, she was thinking. I thought the last couple of years didn’t matter anymore, that this could all be over, that we could try to work things out, to be a couple again. That I wouldn’t have to break up with you.

  The look in Laura’s eyes said different. When Clara had first met Laura she was already fighting vampires. She hadn’t stopped since, not even long enough to be a proper girlfriend. To be in love, even for just one day.

  “Go,” Clara said. For the same reason she always had. Because it was selfish and stupid to ask someone to stop saving the world just because you thought they were sexy. “Go! You need to do this. It’s who you are. I’ve got your back.”

  Laura nodded. It was a serious nod. A businesslike nod. It broke Clara’s heart, but she would never admit it out loud.

  The second she left central command, Clara locked the door and pushed a chair up under the knob. That should hold against any half-deads who came up to get a look at the monitors. She had no doubt a vampire could get through the barricade without lifting more than a finger or two, but it was something. She shoved the half-dead out of its chair and started working the boards. She needed to call Fetlock. She needed to figure out how the video board worked.

  “You can help me,” she said to Gert, and turned to look for Laura’s cellmate. But the red-haired girl was gone, too. She had taken apart the pathetic barricade and left the room without a word, leaving Clara all alone. She felt absurdly familiar with the situation. Laura was out chasing vampires and Clara was stuck alone watching TV

  55.

  Laura—I’ve got her. Malvern’s in C Dorm, along with a couple of half-deads. They’re taking donations.” Clara’s voice wasn’t as loud as Caxton had expected it to be. “I’ve figured out how to use individual intercoms without turning on the entire system at once—so they didn’t just hear me say that.”

  “That’s a plus,” Caxton said. She stopped for a second and looked up at the camera in the stairwell’s ceiling. “Did you just hear me?”

  Clara didn’t respond. So the intercoms didn’t work both ways. She would be able to hear Clara but not talk to her. It was still better than going it alone.

  “No sign of the other two vampires,” Clara said. “I don’t think they know we’re free yet, but I’m thinking that someone will go and check on us eventually. I don’t know how much time you’ll have.”

  She was halfway down the stairs to the Hub when she heard a clattering behind her and saw Gert coming down the steps.

  “Go back,” Caxton said. “Go back and guard Clara.”

  Gert shook her head. “I came this far with you. I’m not backing off now. Are you really going to tell me you don’t want an extra pair of hands right now, when you only got one that works?”

  “Fine. Just don’t get yourself killed.” Caxton reached the door to the Hub and glanced up at the nearest camera.

  “All clear,” Clara told her. “Nothing moving in there, anyway.”

  Caxton pushed open the door and stepped inside the circular room at the heart of the prison. She scooped her shotgun off the floor—no one had bothered to remove it—and went straight to the armory and found a box of shotgun shells. They were loaded with plastic bullets, of course, and therefore absolutely useless against vampires. But maybe she could do something about that.

  “Here,” she told Gert, handing her a box of .22-caliber bullets. “Pry six of these out of their casings.” There was a pretty good set of machine tools in the armory, useful for adjusting and refitting the now ruined guns. With a pair of pliers she pulled the plastic bullet free of its casing and threw it away. It wasn’t easy doing it with one good arm, but she gritted her teeth and got through the pain. As Gert handed her the bullets she loaded them into the shell casing as if they were buckshot. They weren’t perfect. They weren’t spherical, so they would tumble when the shell’s gunpowder went off, making them even less accurate that normal shot. They were too big, as well, and the shell had half the load of powder a normal shotgun shell used—the plastic bullet didn’t need to travel as fast as a lethal round. But if she got up close, very close, and fired point blank into Malvern’s chest—maybe. Maybe the makeshift shot would punch a hole right through the vampire’s chest cavity. Maybe it would be enough to destroy her only vulnerable spot, her heart.

  She would be well fed, which meant she would be able to resist an awful lot of damage. Caxton would never get in more than one shot, not even if she took Malvern completely by surprise. But it was better than the alternative, which was to try to shiv the vampire with a sharpened spoon. She knew that would never work.

  When she’d finished loading her hand-built shell, she checked the shotgun a couple of times to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with. She shoved it into the armpit of her good right arm. Then she nodded to Gert and stepped out of the armory.

  Now. Which way?

  There were exits leading out of the Hub in every direction, some of them darker than others, some of them behind heavy barred gates, some wide open. “Third exit on your right,” Clara said. C Dorm was behind a locked gate, but as Caxton approached a buzzer sounded and the gate clanked open on its hinges automatically. “I can open any door in the prison from here,” Clara said.

  Caxton looked up at a camera and mimed turning a key.

  “You’re asking—oh, you’re asking if I can lock them, too? No, unfortunately. The controls up here are just for emergency use, if there’s a fire or something. They have to be locked by hand with an actual key.”

  “At least we can go wherever we want,” Gert said.

  Caxton didn’t bother replying. She headed through the open gate and into a long hallway that led straight to the dor
m.

  It was lined on either side with checkpoints and defensive kiosks, but Caxton ignored those.

  Except—there was a weird smell in the air. Caxton had learned a long time ago that when weird things happened around vampires it didn’t pay to ignore them. She sniffed around and found the smell was coming from one of the kiosks. It was a smell almost like roasted pork, though more sickly sweet. Like someone had been burning the hair off of a pig, perhaps.

  “Smells like my daddy’s barbecue,” Gert whispered when Caxton asked if she smelled it too. “He had a half an oil drum full of coals, big enough to roast a horse if he wanted to, he always said. He used to do a whole suckling pig for Fourth of July.”

  Caxton hadn’t eaten in a long time. She was pretty sure that what she found in the kiosk would not be a pig roast.

  Except—in a way, it was. In a very sick, very darkly humorous way.

  “I think that’s the warden,” Caxton said, when she popped open the door of the kiosk. Inside, lying on the floor, was a charred human corpse. “The clothes look right.”

  Clara’s voice came very softly over the intercom. “That’s the warden!” she said.

  “Yeah.” They had known already that Malvern had killed the warden. Now they knew how. The vampires must have doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. “I don’t get it. That’s not Malvern’s style. Sometimes vampires like to torture their victims— they get off on it—but she was never that kind. I think this is a message, except I don’t know how to read it, you know?”

  Gert’s open face suggested she didn’t know. “You been after Malvern a long time, huh?”

  “You could say that.” It had only been a couple of years, really. But in that time Malvern had cost Caxton a girlfriend, a mentor, half the police force of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and, least of all, her career.

  “You really want her dead.”

  “Oh, yes.” Caxton wanted nothing more in the entire world. She would let Fetlock take the other two. She didn’t know them, had no history with them. But Malvern had to die now. Once it was done, Caxton would be finished with vampires. She could go back to being a model prisoner, do her bit, and then restart her life.

  Or she could die in the next thirty seconds.

  She was pretty much okay with either scenario, as long as she got one shot in.

  There was nothing they could do for the warden, even if they wanted to. They left her body where it lay and moved to the far end of the corridor, where another barred gate was all that stood between them and C Dorm. “The plan’s pretty simple. We rush in there. You distract the half-deads, however you can. I get as close as possible to Malvern and I shoot.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we play it by ear. You ready?”

  Gert nodded. Caxton looked up at the video camera in the ceiling.

  “She’s close to the far end of the dorm,” Clara whispered. “There are three half-deads between you and her. It’s just a straight run and she doesn’t look like she has any idea that something is up.” The intercom crackled for a second—Clara had left it turned on, though she wasn’t saying anything. Finally she came back and said, “Laura. Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Caxton said, even if Clara couldn’t hear her. Then she pointed at the gate and held up three fingers. Two fingers. One.

  The gate popped open with an electronic buzz.

  They stepped through. Every light in the dorm was on, and Caxton had no trouble seeing the rows of cells, the medical carts in the walkway, the half-deads drawing blood from the arms that prisoners shoved through the bars. Dead ahead, not fifty yards away Malvern had her back turned. She was wearing her decrepit mauve nightgown, and the skin on her head and bare shoulders was perfect, creamy, unblemished.

  Caxton’s vision narrowed down to a spot just left of Malvern’s spine, just below the wing shape of her shoulder blade. Right where her heart would be. She was running so fast, she didn’t even feel her feet moving beneath her.

  You didn’t aim a shotgun, she told herself. You pointed it. You didn’t squeeze the trigger. You yanked it. You could do all that with just one hand.

  Caxton had closed half the distance, Gert right by her side, when the intercom blared again. Clara wasn’t whispering this time.

  “Laura, look out! They were hiding on the upper level the whole time!”

  Caxton stumbled to a stop. Malvern turned around to look at her with a wicked grin full of nasty teeth. Caxton turned around and looked up at the galleries above her, to the second tier of cells. From either side, a female vampire dropped down, landing effortlessly like a pair of cats.

  As if they had all the time in the world, they started walking toward her, their red eyes locked on her face.

  56.

  Have ye made your choice, then?” Malvern asked. “And were ye three unanimous in the choosing?”

  Caxton brought the shotgun up to shoulder level. She swiveled from side to side, pointing the weapon at one of the new vampires, then the other. She thought of how she’d tricked Hauser, but she didn’t have the time or the imagination to come up with something like that again. Anyway, she knew Malvern. Malvern would have stuck the stupidest of her brand-new brood with guard duty. These two would be smarter than Hauser.

  They were getting closer. They clearly enjoyed the anticipation, the moment before the kill. One of them, the one in a stab-proof vest and panties, was licking her lips. The other, dressed in a jumpsuit with the sleeves torn off, kept wiggling her fingers in the air as if trying out a new set of claws for the first time. Vampire fingernails looked just like their human counterparts (if paler), but they could tear through sheet metal without breaking. They had no trouble at all taking apart a human body.

  “Forbin, please secure Miss Caxton,” Malvern said. As scared as she was, Caxton thought that was odd. Always before Malvern had referred to her by her first name. What game was the old bat playing? “I think we can forgo the niceties now. She’s turned me down, and more’s the pity. We could have made history together, dear.”

  Forbin was the one with the torn sleeves. The other one didn’t have to be told to go for Gert. Maybe, Caxton thought, she could give Gert a chance to run away. Not that she could outrun a vampire, but—

  Forbin lunged for Caxton, trying to grab her shoulders, but she telegraphed the move and Caxton just ducked under her arms. She spun around on her heel and stuck the muzzle of her shotgun right into the other vampire’s stab-proof vest. Without any hesitation she fired her one and only shell.

  It was too bad, then, that Forbin was even faster than Caxton had reckoned. Forbin recovered from her failed lunge and brought her elbow backward, into the small of Caxton’s back, throwing her across the room—and ruining her aim.

  The shotgun went off with a roar and the hand-loaded shot tore through the vampire’s body, but well to the left of her heart. The vest caught fire and for a second the vampire’s arm swung free at her shoulder, barely connected to her torso. She looked down at it with a grimace and lifted a finger to touch the edge of the gaping wound.

  On the floor Caxton rolled over onto her back, her broken arm flopping painfully at her side. “Gert, get out of here!” she screamed.

  Gert didn’t need much encouragement. She was already running for the door behind her. The wounded vampire didn’t try to stop her. She was too fascinated by the wound in her chest. It was healing rapidly, white smoke filling in the hole, new skin flowing over the exposed muscles and bones. When it was done she lifted her arm and made a fist, perhaps checking to see if the arm still worked.

  Only then, after all that, did she begin to chase Gert. She got to the door before Caxton’s celly was halfway there. Gert stopped running. Started to back up.

  Meanwhile Forbin straddled Caxton’s body, one foot on either side of her stomach. She raised one index finger and curled it repeatedly, gesturing for Caxton to get up. Caxton knew it was useless, but she flipped the shotgun in her hand so she was holding the hot barrel and
rammed the stock into Forbin’s stomach as hard as she could.

  It was like hitting a boulder with a rubber mallet. It just bounced off.

  Forbin took the shotgun out of Caxton’s hand. It would have been incorrect to say she grabbed it away from Caxton, because that would have implied there was some kind of struggle. She lifted one knee and broke the shotgun in half across her thigh, springs and bits of metal flying down to bounce off Caxton’s face and chest. Then she threw the two halves of the weapon behind her. And repeated her come-hither gesture.

  The second Caxton got up, she knew, Forbin would repeat the move on her spine. Of course, if she didn’t get up, Forbin might just stomp her to death.

  None of the vampires, however, had counted on Clara.

  As the half-naked vampire stalked Gert around the dorm, Malvern came closer to watch the free entertainment. She was the first to look up, as if she’d heard something inaudible to Caxton. That didn’t last long. Half a second later the dorm was shaking as an electronic buzzer sounded loud enough to wake the dead. A strobe light near the dorm’s main exit started to flash and then a row of red lights went on, one over each cell all along both tiers.

  Then, all at the same time, every door in the dorm slid open on well-greased rails. All the exits. All the cell doors. At the other end of the dorm, the far end from the Hub, a green sign lit up reading EMERGENCY FIRE EXIT.

  Caxton looked over into the cell nearest her face. There were eight women inside of various ages and races. Most of them had had their arms sticking through the bars with their jumpsuit sleeves pushed back. They had to jerk their arms backward quickly or have them torn off as the door opened. Suddenly they weren’t behind bars anymore. Suddenly they were just standing there, not ten feet away, watching the vampires, watching Caxton and Gert, or just staring at empty space where a second ago there had been prison bars.

  It took only a few seconds before one of them decided to make a break for it. A white woman with glasses who couldn’t be more than twenty raced out of the cell, looking over her shoulder the whole way as she headed for the fire exit. When no one tried to stop her, a middle-aged black woman came running down the stairs from the upper tier. And then suddenly there was a stampede.