“Really, really, old men,” Clara said.
Malvern chuckled. “’Twas all the rage, whist, in the year of our Lord seventeen-and-twelve. It is a game played without speaking, where only the eyes may make strategy. It was considered thus a poor game for women, as we were believed unable to go so long without gossiping.” Malvern shot a sly glance at Clara. “But oh, how the discriminating gentlemen favored it— for hours they would sit and be still and the only true thing in the universe seemed the fall of the lead, and the dance that followed, as each played looking to take book, and then the odd tricks—”
“Excuse me,” Clara interrupted, “but I beg your fucking pardon. What has this got to do with anything?”
Malvern had been standing next to the window. A heartbeat later she was leaning over Clara’s shoulder, resting her bony chin on Clara’s clavicle. Clara had never seen a human move that fast. She’d never seen a vampire move that fast. “My point is only this, dear. The odds may shift and flow. The wagers may be steep or thin. Yet a result may never be called until the last card is turned o’er. Do not discount me yet, nor until you see my heart torn out and burnt by your lover’s hand. Like all good ladies who play at a game, I may just have a high trump down my sleeve.”
17.
The stun gun pressed hard against Caxton’s back. It was a flat plastic weapon, almost all grip, with just a pair of metal stubs sticking out from the business end. When they both connected with conductive material, like human flesh, they formed a circuit and an electric current passed between them.
The current wasn’t particularly strong. It had a high voltage, upward of fifty thousand volts, but extremely low amperage— it wasn’t designed to electrocute the victim, simply to send a pulsed charge through their nervous system that mimicked the body’s own neural signals, essentially sending a message to every muscle in the victim’s body telling it to activate at full strength and not release.
The amount of power that required was easily delivered by a standard nine-volt battery. To the victim, however, it felt like being hit by a truck.
Electricity surged through Caxton’s body. Her muscles spasmed, some contracting, some expanding, all of them fighting each other. Her eyeballs quivered in their sockets and she felt a pure white bolt of pain run up her spine to explode inside her head.
Darkness grabbed her up in its velvety arms and held her like a child.
But just for a second.
When she came to, she felt like she’d been flash-fried. She was lying on the floor. Staring up at the glare of the klieg lights in the ceiling. She blinked her eyes. It was about all she could manage. Eventually she was able to lick her lips.
A boot prodded her in the rib cage. She tried to roll over and get away from it, but that just took too much energy.
Harelip squatted down next to her. “Don’t try to get up,” she said.
“Okay,” Caxton squeaked.
The CO rubbed at her face. “Listen. I guess I owe you for your help. I guess we saved the unit, together. And I’m not going to forget that. But there are rules, and they’re good rules, and they’re there for a reason.”
“Ah,” Caxton said.
“It ain’t easy, being a CO. I know you cons think we’re all sadistic assholes. That’s only, see, it’s just because you can’t see our side of it, you know? You used to be a cop. You know what it’s like when you’re looking at somebody who would kill you if they could. Who would take any chance to fuck with you, just because of who you are.”
Caxton had to admit that was true. Every vampire she’d ever dealt with had felt that way, as well as a few human criminals she’d encountered.
“Imagine you were surrounded by that kind of aggro every single day of your life. Imagine if the second you came on the floor of a unit, a hundred eyeballs was watching your every move, looking for you to make one little mistake. To forget one little thing, so they could take advantage. It’s possible—-just possible—in that kind of a situation, to keep your head above the shit. But you got to be a serious hard case to make it work.”
Caxton lifted her left hand a fraction of an inch. Her muscles felt sore and rubbery and they didn’t want to obey her commands, but they were starting to listen on a provisional basis.
“Don’t,” Harelip said, and pressed her hand back against the cement floor with the tip of her baton. “Just chill.”
“You got it,” Caxton said.
“We get plenty of training before they set us loose in here. They make us take all kinds of courses. One of the things they teach is what’s called CTS. Contain the Situation. That means no matter what happens, when you’re a CO, you’re in charge. No matter how bad things get you have to be on top of it. And if you gotta be a little mean, you do it. If you gotta call people names that aren’t so nice, or even if you gotta stun somebody when their back is turned, you have no damned choice but to do just that. There are no exceptions to CTS. There is no way I can let you walk around outside your cell, ever. So I’m going to have to put you back in. I’m going to have to lock you in. I will protect you, I promise. I will get you out of this situation. I’ll evacuate you and all the other prisoners once the warden sends an all-clear signal. Okay?”
Caxton swiveled her head from side to side. “No. Please. Just give me a chance to explain. They’re not going to stop trying to get through that door. They’ll bring down cutting equipment and they’ll get through. On your own you might stop the first wave, but they’ll send more of those things. And if that doesn’t work, Malvern will come herself. She’s weak, for a vampire, but that doesn’t mean much. She’ll have fed—a lot—and regained enough strength that you won’t stand a chance against her. I know how to kill her, but it’s not something I can teach you in the time we have. We—”
She stopped speaking, because suddenly the floor was moving underneath her. Or—no. That wasn’t it. She was moving along the floor. She was being dragged by her heels across the rough cement. Her head bounced painfully and she tried to hold it up. She could just see Harelip pulling her along. Then the female CO bent down and picked Caxton up and slung her over one shoulder. Harelip grunted with the effort, but she managed to get Caxton inside her cell. She dumped Caxton on Gert’s bunk—Caxton saw the pictures of Gert’s babies directly across from her face.
She struggled to get back full control of her body, but it was still fighting her. She managed to flop off of the bunk and get up on one knee—-just in time to see the cell door close in front of her, and hear the metallic thunk as the mechanical lock was engaged.
No, she screamed, inside her head. No!
She grabbed at the padding on the door and pulled and tugged at it, but it was designed to resist tearing and she could barely get a handhold. She slammed herself against the door, over and over again, knowing full well she would never manage to get through it.
Eventually she calmed down. There had to be something she could do. There had to be a way to communicate with Harelip. She stared out through the window in the door, but there was nothing to see out there except for the bodies of the dead prisoners and the crushed arm of the half-dead. Harelip was nowhere in sight.
She could hear something, though.
It sounded like someone was having trouble swallowing.
Like they were gagging on a piece of gristly food. Caxton couldn’t quite figure it out. She pressed her face up against the glass, trying to get a better view, but she couldn’t see anything. Eventually she gave up and started pacing back and forth in the cell. The sound went away. It had never been very loud—maybe it wasn’t even something happening in the SHU, she decided. Maybe it was just water flowing through pipes in the walls.
She was still pacing, clutching herself for comfort, when the door opened again.
Caxton whirled around in shock. She hadn’t had a chance to prepare herself. What if someone was coming to kill her?
The figure that appeared in the doorway was covered in blood. It was clutching the serrated hunting kni
fe, and it was wearing a blue stab-proof vest. But the vest had been strapped on over the orange jumpsuit of a prisoner.
The face was wracked by a grimace of pure madness. It took Caxton a long time to realize that she recognized it. First she had to consider a fact that hadn’t yet gripped her: Gert wasn’t in the cell. She hadn’t been inside when Harelip dragged Caxton in.
Gert had been busy, apparently. She must have sneaked out of the cell while Caxton and Harelip were wrestling with the SHU’s main door. She must have found her way to the cell where Caxton had fought the half-dead, and found the knife there.
Now—she had found a use for it.
“Where’s the CO?” Caxton demanded, even though she knew perfectly well.
“I told you I could be useful,” Gert said, and stepped inside.
18.
Oh God, no,” Caxton said, and put a hand over her mouth. Gert had—had killed Harelip. She stepped outside of the cell and saw the CO’s body shoved up against one wall. A pool of blood glistened around her, staining her blue uniform and slicking across her throat and lower face.
“You shouldn’t have done this,” she moaned. “This was the last thing you should have done!”
Gert came up behind Caxton and grabbed her shoulders. She started to knead them until Caxton jumped away from her.
“She was jamming you up,” Gert said. “Even after you saved her ass. Don’t tell me you ain’t grateful. I could have let you rot in that cell, girl! I could have kept my head down, played nice. Instead I gave you a chance to survive, right?”
It was true, in its way. Like most crazy people, Gert operated on a logical basis. It was just a basis built on a very shaky foundation.
Caxton breathed through her mouth and tried to think. Harelip could have been a valuable ally. Caxton’s plan up until that point had been to find a group of COs somewhere else in the prison and explain to them what was going on, then get them to help her fight her way out. If she’d been able to convince even one of their number, it would have gone a long way toward enlisting their aid. Now she was going to have to approach them as an escaping prisoner, a situation in which they would be likely to shoot first and ask questions later. Furthermore, Harelip had done well against the half-deads. She had kept her cool and thought things through. She would have made a good partner for the fighting to come.
Now Caxton was all alone. She was trapped inside the walls of a maximum-security prison where no one, neither CO nor fellow prisoner, would be likely to offer her any help.
At least, no one except Gert.
“Who are you?” Caxton snapped. “I mean—what did you do to get put in a place like this? You’re no gangbanger.”
Gert sucked on her lower lip. “I killed some… people.”
Caxton shook her head.
“It wasn’t my fault! When you’re high, you don’t always know what you’re doing. You can’t be held accountable, you know?”
Caxton had never used drugs in her life. She had met lots of people who had, and rarely had she found one of them trustworthy. Never had she found one whom she would want watching her back.
She was going to have to go it alone. Which meant she needed to start planning.
Whether she was locked in the cell or free to move around the SHU, she was still trapped in a prison that was overrun by a vampire and full of half-deads. Malvern wanted her alive, but she really didn’t want to find out why. She was going to have to protect herself.
Calling for backup was her first instinct. She’d been trained, as a cop, to never be out of touch if she could help it. She headed inside the guard post and studied the control board. There was a telephone handset mounted on one side to allow the CO manning the post to communicate with the rest of the prison. There was no keypad—instead individual telephones around the prison could be selected from a series of buttons that dialed directly. She picked it up and then started punching buttons at random, calling the infirmary, the commissary, the staff lounge, the main gate. Anywhere but central command, which she knew had been compromised.
She was not surprised when she didn’t even get a dial tone. Malvern might be hundreds of years old, but she was conversant with modern communications. Cutting the phone lines had probably been one of her first moves.
Well, if Caxton couldn’t call for help, she would have to help herself. That meant finding some weapons.
She only had to look around herself to find a miniature armory. A row of stun guns sat in chargers on one side of the control board. They would be useless against half-deads, who experienced pain in a far different way than human beings did, but she grabbed one anyway, in case she had to deal with any more COs who thought it was more important to contain the situation than it was to save lives. Underneath the board was a twelve-gauge shotgun, held in a pair of metal clips. She noticed for the first time that the stock was marked with a band of yellow paint, which meant it was to be loaded only with nonstandard ammunition. She pulled it free and broke it open, checking to make sure there was no round loaded already. In a bin beneath the board she found plenty of beanbag rounds but ignored those in favor of a box of rubber bullets. The name was doubly misleading: they were neither rubber nor, strictly, bullets. Instead they were shotgun slugs about four inches long made of polyvinyl chloride. They were designed not to penetrate the skin but to hurt someone enough to make them want to vacate an area. Against half-deads they would be even more effective than the beanbag round Harelip had used.
There were other weapons to be had, but they were all what used to be called less-lethal weaponry (the most recent term was “compliance weapons”)—useful for controlling prisoners you didn’t want to actually kill. There was a can of pepper spray, a hollow aluminum baton, and a squishy bag of some compound Caxton couldn’t readily identify. She took all of it except the bag, though two concerns limited her arming herself.
For one thing, none of it—nothing in the SHU—would be of any use against a vampire, even one as decrepit and weak as Malvern. The hunting knife could carve out her heart, assuming she would stand still long enough, but Caxton knew better than to fight a vampire without proper firearms. It was just asking for a quick and painful death.
The other big concern was that she had no way to carry it all. There was no belt on her jumpsuit, nor were there any belt loops. The jumpsuit had been designed to be bright enough to see in the dark and easy to wash. Fashion hadn’t been much of a concern, and it was baggy and shapeless. It didn’t even have any pockets.
At least there was something she could do about that, though it was a grisly task to contemplate. Caxton went over to Harelip’s body and removed her belt. It fit over Caxton’s shoulder like a very thin bandolier, and she was able to clip the stun gun to it and slide the shotgun and the baton underneath it if she pulled it tight. The pepper spray she slipped inside her bra. That left just the knife.
“Gert, you have to give that to me,” she said, and held out her hand.
Caxton’s celly looked her up and down. “You got the utility belt. I’m keeping the knife.”
Caxton sighed. “I need it more than you do. In fact, you’re not going to need it at all.”
“What do you mean?” Gert asked.
Caxton stood up straight. “You’re going back in the cell now.”
Gert laughed. “You shitting me? I saw what happened to those fools in the cells when that thing came through. I ain’t getting locked up again!”
Caxton was about to reply when a loud bang startled her. She whirled around and saw a woman staring at her through the glass window in her cell door. “I’m with her,” the woman shouted, her voice just audible through the door. “Let me out! I don’t want to die in here!”
Over across the SHU there came a rapid hammering on another door. “What about me, bitch?” another prisoner demanded.
Soon half the cell doors were rattling in their jambs. Caxton whirled around, looking at the cells, wondering what she was supposed to do about the women inside. Then
she ran back to the guard post and turned on the intercom that would broadcast to the speakers inside the cells.
“Listen,” she said, speaking into a microphone on the control board. “We are in a very bad situation here, but I’m in charge now and I have things under control, at least for the moment. I need all of you to stay calm.”
The cells erupted with shouts and obscenities and manic pounding on doors and windows.
Caxton gritted her teeth and looked around at the cell doors. Almost every window had a face plastered against it. An angry, demanding face.
“There are more of those things outside the SHU,” Caxton announced. “They’ve come for me. Just for me—I plan on leaving here soon, and when I do, I think they’ll leave you alone. For now, though, you have to trust me! The safest place for you is inside your cells.”
She stared at Gert as she finished.
Gert stared back with a look of utter scorn on her face. “If you was one of us,” she asked, raising her voice over the chorus of shouts and catcalls, “would you buy any of that shit?”
They don’t have a choice, Caxton thought. They were murderers and gangbangers and women who were a danger to them-selves. Three of them were on death row. She couldn’t trust them. She might have all the weapons, but they could easily mob her and overpower her and take away even that advantage.
It was just like Harelip had said. You had to contain the situation. You couldn’t leave your back unguarded for a second. And yet Gert had a point. Who was Caxton to deny these women a chance to defend themselves? Maybe they could even help her. If they would just pipe down, that would help a lot. It would let her think—
A booming, echoing thud came from the main door of the SHU, and suddenly there was silence. The shouting stopped, though the women stayed glued to the windows, every eye looking toward the door.
23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale Page 9