23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  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.

  The rag refused to light the first time she hit it with the stun gun, and the second time. The third time a tiny ember of orange appeared on the end of the rag. It curled and bent and refused to grow, refused to start consuming the oily rag. Caxton shoved the stun gun into her jumpsuit and blew on the ember, fanned it with her free hand, willed it to enlarge, to expand.

  A thin flame leapt up and then the rag caught all at once. Fire dripped from it and evaporated before it could touch the ground. Caxton threw the bottle at her grenades, at the exact same time as she threw herself sideways, out of the powerhouse doorway.

  There was a noise like a barbecue grill starting up, then a second where all she heard was metal expanding under heat with tiny noises like pins dropping. Then a wall of noise and pressure hit the side of her head and rolled her over on her side. Black smoke boiled out of the powerhouse door and the orange light of flames lit up its windows.

  Above her the robotic gun drooped suddenly, its camera lowering to point at the ground. Caxton got up slowly, unsure if she’d managed to cut the power. When the gun didn’t follow her movements, she allowed herself a small yelp of triumph.

  Then she looked over at Gert, who was lying on the ground five yards away. She wasn’t moving. White powder covered most of her orange jumpsuit and all of her face. It had turned into a thick paste where it had mixed with tears and snot around her nose and her eyes.

  32.

  Why can’t I see anything?” the warden demanded, smacking the side of a security monitor. “Is this the right view?”

  The half-dead wearing the uniform of a CO named Franklin was standing next to her. It winced as she turned to glare at it with her good eye. “That’s the view from the loading dock, yes,” it told her. It reached up and scratched tentatively at what remained of the skin around its left ear. When Clara had first seen it, the half-dead had looked completely human except for a red scratch down one cheek. Now it had gouged all the skin away from its face until nothing remained but gray and pink muscle tissue, with here and there a pocket of yellow subcutaneous fat. It was one of the most disgusting things she’d ever seen.

  “Well, make it focus or something,” the warden commanded. The view on the screen was no more than a blurred smear of brown and reddish yellow. Nothing at all could be made out of that view.

  The half-dead winced again. “The cameras focus automatically. They can’t be adjusted from here. It’s possible that…”

  “That what? Don’t keep me waiting, just spit it out.”

  The half-dead nodded. “It’s possible she smeared something on the lens. Like Vaseline. Or lipstick. Just about anything viscous would do.”

  “Pepper spray,” the warden said. “I’ll bet it was pepper spray. There’s enough of it in this place to paint the curtain wall.” She smacked the monitor again. “I need to know what’s going on in that loading bay. I sent a detail down there to kill Caxton and I would very much like to know if they succeeded or not. I imagine you would like to know that as well, hmm? Because it looks like she’s killing every half-dead she runs across, and if I don’t find out what I need to know, I’m going to send you personally down there to check and see what condition she’s in.”

  Clara laughed. “You’re wasting your time.”

  The warden turned and glared at her. “You have something to share?”

  Clara started to shrug, then thought better of it. The band around her arm might interpret that as a sudden move and hit her with a near-lethal electric shock. “You can’t threaten them with death. They’ve been there once already, and believe me, they aren’t afraid to die again. It would be a mercy. You’re in pain, aren’t you?” she said, addressing Franklin.

  The half-dead sneered at her. “None of your business, cunt.”

  “They like to talk tough. But look at its face. You think that doesn’t hurt? But it can’t stop itself from scratching. Its whole existence is a scab, a temporary scab over a fatal wound. They only last for about a week before they fall apart, did you know that? All that’s left then is a pile of goo with maybe some eyes and fingers sticking out. And twitching. Still twitching.”

  The half-dead’s eyes were bright and huge as it stared at her.

  At its sides its hands were clutching at nothing and then relaxing, over and over again.

  The warden coughed into her hand. “She’s taunting you,” she said. “Ignore it. I don’t know if she thinks that making you attack her will get her anywhere, or maybe she’s just bored. Either way, ignore everything she says.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Franklin said, and seemed to relax a little.

  It had been worth a shot.

  Clara had come to an inescapable conclusion. Her value to the warden was very small to begin with, and it was about to evaporate. Malvern had ordered her capture for use as an insurance policy. A way to control Laura. If the half-deads did manage to kill Laura—Please God, no, she thought, but if they did—then Clara would be completely useless to the warden. In fact, she would be a liability. She’d seen far too much. Knew too many secrets. The warden would have a very good reason to kill her.

  If the half-deads failed to kill Laura, which Clara thought was more likely, she might gain a few extra hours of life. More time to sit around watching the warden’s plans unfold, more time to fret and worry and wonder just how she was going to die.

  She had to do something. The risk was very high that by angering Franklin or the warden she would get herself hurt. But there were no other options. With the band on her arm she was unable to run away and unable to attack them herself. If Franklin attacked her, though, she might be able to get its weapon away from it. Then she could kill it and threaten the warden into removing the band on her arm, and then she could—she could—

  The main problem with any of these theoretical plans was that she wasn’t Laura. She wasn’t fast, or tough. She didn’t instinctively know how to fight, or when to duck, or how to escape from a bad situation. She had been a police photographer. She was learning how to do crime lab science. Nothing in her law enforcement career had prepared her for violence. She didn’t even know how to shoot straight.

  A half-dead ran into the room then, its mouth hanging open in shock. “They’re out of the loading bay,” it said, cowering as the warden came over to look down into its ravaged face.

  “I beg your pardon?” the warden asked.

  “I—-just—I saw them on another camera. There’s a truck. It’s driving around the yard. It has to be Caxton and her partner. But they’re being stupid. They’re driving the wrong way. Away from the main gate.”

  The warden whirled around to stare at Clara. Clara shrugged, very, very slowly.

  “Do you think Caxton is that stupid?” the warden demanded.

  “No?” Clara offered.

  “Neither do I. She must be up to something. Or maybe she just knows I have a team at the gate, ready to kill anyone who gets close. You,” she said to the half-dead who’d brought the news, “get back to your post. You,” she said to Franklin, “let me see this truck.”

  Franklin tapped away at a keyboard and the view on the security monitor changed. Clara moved in close to watch— nobody stopped her. On the screen was the view from a camera mounted on one of the prison’s watchtowers. It showed a white tractor trailer careening across a concrete apron, with half-deads clinging to its hood. One by one they fell off and were either crushed by the truck’s wheels or simply left behind, unmoving and battered.

  You go, girl, Clara th
ought.

  The truck stormed right through a basketball court, dragging two lengths of fencing along for the ride. Then it slowed to a stop outside a small brick building.

  The warden, Franklin, and Clara watched silently what came next. A prisoner in an orange jumpsuit and a blue vest—it wasn’t Laura—ran toward the building and was quickly subdued by an automatic gun, her body pelted by dozens of red balls that exploded into white powder when they hit.

  The camera couldn’t really show what Laura was doing at the same time. The truck blocked most of the view.

  “What is that building?” Franklin asked.

  “It’s the powerhouse. She’s going to knock out our power. But how can she? She would need some kind of—”

  The screen went black without warning. The lights in the room flickered off, leaving them with just the murky gray light coming in through the room’s high windows. The prison was suddenly very, very quiet.

  And then the shouting began. The nearest dorm was down a long corridor and through several closed doors, but still Clara could hear the faint echo of women screaming and bellowing to know what was going on. By the sound of it, more than a few of them were laughing.

  The warden turned to Franklin. “How did she do that?” she asked. She turned to face Clara again. “How?”

  “Search me,” Clara said.

  “Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck! This is going to make things much harder.” Bellows grabbed Franklin by the shoulder and squeezed. “There are flashlights down the hall in the equipment locker. Go get some. And then find somebody who knows about electrical engineering. I’ll take anyone who knows how to fix a toaster. There are thirteen hundred women in the dorms; at least one of them must know how to change a goddamned light-bulb.”

  Franklin ran out of the room. Perhaps annoyed by the shouts echoing down the hall, the warden closed the door behind him. “We had to go and kill the custodial staff. Malvern said they couldn’t be trusted. She was right, of course, but we could have kept at least one person who knew how this place worked. What are you—”

  She didn’t get to finish her thought. Her words were interrupted by an incredibly loud high-pitched alarm. It was coming from Clara’s armband.

  She was moving fast, and she knew exactly what was going to happen next. She had one second to stop moving, but she didn’t. Instead she rushed at the warden and grabbed her up in a very close bear hug.

  Clara had time to see the warden’s lips curl up in a nasty sneer before every nerve in her body fired at once, jolted to life by a fifty-thousand-volt shock. The pain was beyond anything she’d felt in her life. She felt her teeth burning, felt her eyeballs dancing in her head and then—

  33.

  Spring came early to central Pennsylvania that year. At the university extension the students in forensic criminology were having trouble focusing during their morning physics class. Physics was probably the dullest of the subjects covered by the school—chemistry and genetics were a lot more exciting, because they had more practical applications for the work the students would eventually be doing. Too many of the students had been caught staring out the window. The trees around the quad were in bloom and more than one class was being conducted out on the grass, so the professor had relented and taken them all outside as well. They sat in a circle under a massive oak tree and held their notebooks at the ready. There had been a stiff breeze, but Clara just hugged her knees to her chest and watched as the professor took what looked like a normal metallic flashlight out of his bag and placed it in the middle of the circle.

  “This one is worthy of James Bond,” he said, and got a few laughs. He was about fifty years old and handsome. The majority of the students in his class were female and he certainly didn’t lack for attention, though of course Clara didn’t swing that way. He handed the flashlight to Clara with a smile. “Turn it on,” he said.

  She flipped its switch and a beam of light, barely visible under the shade of the tree, lit up the side of the classroom building. She waved it around for a second to show all the students it was on.

  “Notice anything about it? Anything different from a normal flashlight?”

  Clara studied it carefully. “This part is kind of strange,” she said, not sure what you called the front end of a flashlight. There was a thick ring of metal around the lens, which was divided into two pieces separated by a strip of rubber.

  The professor nodded. “Very good. Now, touch it against my arm, here.” He rolled up his sleeve.

  Clara raised one eyebrow, not sure where this was going, but she did as she was told, leaning over to tap it against his bare skin.

  “Goddamn it!” the professor swore, jerking his arm away from the flashlight.

  Some of the students laughed. Some gasped. Clara jerked the flashlight away from him and then dropped it on the grass.

  “My apologies for startling you, Miss Hsu,” the professor said, smiling again. He looked a little pale. He picked the flashlight up from where it had fallen. “What we have here is a stun gun built into a police-grade flashlight. Pretty cool, huh? We’re going to talk today about electroshock weapons. It’s important you know about them because they’re being used more and more in police work and you need to understand how they work and what effect they have on the bad guys. We’re also going to take turns shocking each other so you all know what it feels like.”

  There were a few unhappy murmurs. Then the professor insisted that the student next to Clara take the flashlight and shock his neighbor. That student jumped up to his feet and staggered backward a few steps before laughing and sitting back down. Then he got to shock the girl next to him in the circle. It looked like Clara would be the last in line and that the professor would be the one to shock her. She pulled her knees in tighter in anticipation.

  “This is actually a very weak shock, as they go,” the professor said, raising his voice to compete with the giggles and stifled screams. “A real stun gun doesn’t just sting. It causes involuntary contraction of every muscle in your body. You fall down. You bend over at the waist. You get muscle spasms in your arms that make you drop any weapon you’re holding. You can see why the police like this. If someone is resisting arrest or threatening a civilian, one good solid shock can just… remove the problem.”

  One of the students raised her hand and the professor nodded at her. “I’ve heard there are problems with them, though. That there have been some deaths,” she said.

  The professor nodded agreement. “Yes, there have. The manufacturers of these weapons claim they’re perfectly nonlethal as long as they’re used according to strict instructions. But police officers in the field can never guarantee perfect conditions when they’re using a new weapon they’ve had only a few hours’ training in. The main thing you need to know about this is that every human body is different. A football linebacker in perfect physical shape is going to have a very different reaction to a stun weapon than an elderly woman suffering from a heart condition. The electric shock is low in amperes but extremely high in voltage: some electroshock weapons can deliver over a hundred thousand volts over a multisecond pulse. Most people will experience some muscle paralysis, a great deal of pain, and a desperate need to lie down. But the duration of those effects varies widely from individual to individual. The general rule of thumb is that a young, healthy, well-rested person will be incapacitated for a few seconds, while an older, sick or physically unfit, tired person can be out of action for several minutes. Now, Miss Hsu. Would you mind taking off your jacket?”

  Clara looked up. She hadn’t noticed that the flashlight had come all the way around the circle. She took off her wind-breaker, then pushed up the sleeve of her sweater. “Does it hurt a lot?” she asked. The professor leaned toward her.

  She opened her eyes. Her mouth was full of hair, and it wasn’t her own.

  Coughing it out, she forced herself to sit up, though it hurt like hell. Every muscle down her side was sore as if she’d been working out for hours but only exercising her
left arm and left leg.

  There was a smell of scorched fabric in the air, and her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. Carefully she pulled it free with one finger.

  No, she wasn’t at school. She was having trouble focusing her thoughts, but she knew—she knew she was at the prison. The prison where they had Laura locked up. And there had been… vampires… and—

  “Shit,” she breathed. She looked down and saw she was still lying half on top of the prison’s warden. The warden’s face was twitching wildly and one arm was beating against the floor as if she was keeping time.

  Clara didn’t have much time. She yawned hugely—she couldn’t help herself. She needed to get up, needed to get something before—she needed to get the warden’s phone. And a key. The key to—the key to the band around her arm. The electroshock band around her arm.

  Confusion. Disorientation. Not knowing where you were or how you got there. That was one of the side effects of electroshock. So was crapping your pants. Clara gave the air an exploratory sniff and smelled urine but not feces.

  “Oh, no,” she said, and reached one hand down between her legs. It came back dry. She’d managed to control her bodily functions, but it looked as if the warden hadn’t been so lucky.

  She had to move quickly

  It was coming back. Her focus was coming back. She had waited until she and the warden were alone in the room, then she had grabbed the warden, knowing the electroshock band on her arm would go off. Also knowing that whoever she was touching when that happened would get shocked as well. She’d been pretty sure that the warden, who was older than she and badly wounded, would get worse effects than she would. That she would recover more quickly than the warden, giving her some time to escape.