The fire went out of the dead vampire’s eyes.
“Ye shall not defy me,” Malvern rasped, getting to her feet again. “Ye may be strong, but I am stronger.”
Every single red glowing eye in the room was fixed on the heart in Malvern’s hand. It was dark, almost black in color, and it was still beating, though without any kind of human rhythm. It slowed down as they watched, and eventually stopped.
Clara didn’t think about what she did while they were distracted. It wasn’t as if she had any kind of plan. Her hands crept across the control board behind her, the one that monitored and administered the prison’s communication systems. She turned a knob here, flipped a switch there. And leaned toward a microphone that stuck out from the top of the board on a flexible wand.
They weren’t going to kill her. Not right away. She could get away with this, and still they wouldn’t kill her. She just hoped they didn’t know spinal anatomy the way Guilty Jen did, or some even more horrible way of letting her live but making her wish she was dead.
“Fetlock,” she shouted at the microphone, “if you’re waiting for the right time to attack—this is it!”
Every intercom speaker in the prison picked up the message and relayed it at ear-shattering volume. Clara could hear her words echoing around the prison yard and bouncing upward into the darkening night sky.
The vampires looked around the room as if they expected federal agents to come storming out of closets and crawl spaces, machine guns blazing.
That didn’t happen.
Clara begged, silently, for some sign. Some signal, of any kind, that meant Fetlock had heard her. That he was out there, ready to save her. Maybe he could have shot a flare over the prison. Maybe he could have called in on the prison’s multiband radio system.
But he didn’t.
Malvern took a step toward Clara, and suddenly she was right there, so close that every hair on Clara’s body stood up at once. Then Malvern hit her, and—
52.
Jesus,” Clara said, “that hurt.”
She was conscious again. She kind of wished she wasn’t. Her whole jaw felt like it had been dislocated, knocked backward off its joints and into the fleshy part of her neck. It hurt to talk. It hurt to sit up. It hurt a little every time she breathed, a twinge that went all the way up to the top of her sinuses and deep into her chest. She touched, carefully, the skin of her neck and throat and felt it swollen and tender. It hurt to touch her face, so she stopped doing that.
It hurt to open her eyes, but she had to know where she was. She was still alive, and she presumed she was still a prisoner of the vampires, but beyond that what her eyes told her didn’t help explain very much.
She was in some kind of cage, just tall enough for her to stand up in if she ducked her head, and just long enough that she could lie down in it. It was made of crisscrossing bars, spaced about six inches apart. All the bars were wrapped with yellow spongy foam rubber, which was patched here and there with duct tape. The cage had a rubber sheet on its floor that smelled like someone had peed on it, then hosed it off with harsh detergents but not very thoroughly.
Similar cages filled the room around her. Two of them were occupied but the people in them were either asleep, unconscious, or dead. Both of them wore orange jumpsuits.
There was also a desk in the room, with a portable generator sitting next to it. The generator was switched off. Sitting at the desk was a vampire. The one wearing a sleeveless jumpsuit. The vampire was reading a magazine.
Or trying to. She would bring it up close to her eyes as if she had trouble making out the words in the dimly lit room, then sigh angrily and flip rapidly through three or four pages before repeating the operation.
“I can read, sort of,” the vampire growled. “I can understand the words. I mean, I was never a big reader before, but I knew how. But now they mostly look like weird little squiggly shapes. And even when I try hard, I can read a sentence and then forget how it started before I reach the end. It just don’t seem to matter, you know? Like whatever this asshole was trying to say about Brad and Angelina just isn’t all that important anymore.”
“You knew I was awake,” Clara said.
“Well, you sat up, for one thing. That’s a fucking easy sign right there. Plus I saw your blood go faster. When you sleep your blood slows down. Your heart beats slower. Did you know I can see your heart? It’s like I got x-ray eyes. That’s pretty cool, I guess.”
It’s seriously creepy, Clara thought. “You’re not human anymore,” she told the vampire.
“What the fuck you just say, girl?”
Clara cringed. But she knew that as long as she was engaged in a nice, civil conversation with this bloodsucker, she wasn’t being dismembered, eaten, or tortured. That was worth something. “I didn’t mean any offense. It’s just—vampires don’t care about the same things human beings care about. You’re not supposed to. Celebrity gossip has got to be pretty low on the list of things important to vampires.”
“Yeah? What’s at the top?”
Blood. Clara tried very hard not to say that out loud. Even if it was true. Blood was the single thing vampires truly cared the most about. Pretty much the only thing. “I don’t know,” she said, instead. “I guess you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.”
“I still feel pretty human. I mean, better. Stronger. But I’m still wondering about my kids, and what they’ll think about this change. And about their daddy. Except… I keep thinking about the hair on his back. It never used to bother me before, or at least, I put it out of my head. But now I keep seeing it, seeing him on top of me like I’m looking down at him from the ceiling and all I can see is this thick rug of hair. Oh, and his smell. He never would shower before we did it, that always bugged me. Now when I think about it, it kinda makes me sick.”
Vampires had their own body odor. One that didn’t wash off. They smelled like the bottom of a hamster cage—a sick hamster’s cage. It was a nasty, animal smell, very faint, but it was one of the signs a vampire was nearby. Clara could just smell it now from ten feet away.
“You’re—Hauser, right? I was there when you took the curse,” Clara said, for lack of anything better. “In the warden’s office. Where is the warden, by the way?”
“Dead,” Hauser told her. “That was pretty much the first thing Malvern did, when she woke up tonight and found out how fucked up things got during the day.”
Clara closed her eyes. If she’d had a plan—she hadn’t, not really, she knew she was screwed. But the brain kept trying to piece things together, even when all hope was gone. If she had consciously tried to think of a plan, it would have involved playing Malvern and the warden off each other. Widening the rift between the two of them. Apparently Malvern had taken the expedient course toward solving that problem.
“Hey, you. Hey,” Hauser said. She got up from the desk and took a step toward one of the other cages. “I know you’re awake.” The vampire kicked the cage and made it slide a foot and a half across the floor. Inside it someone struggled to grab at the bars and pull themselves upright.
“Laura,” Clara breathed, when she saw who it was.
Laura said nothing. She just sat down on the floor of her cage and lowered her head. One of her arms looked wrong. It was tucked up across her chest in a way that looked painful. Her face was bruised and one lip was puffy and swollen. But she was still alive.
“And you. Who the fuck are you?” the vampire snarled, and grabbed the third occupied cage. She picked it up easily and then dropped it to the floor with a deafening clang. The woman inside rolled over and batted at the bars with one weak hand.
“You can call me… Gert. Or Gerty, whichever… you like.”
“She was Laura—I mean Caxton’s cellmate,” Clara told the vampire. If she could get Hauser to sit down again, to sit calmly, there was less chance of her accidentally killing one of them. Clearly she had orders not to, but vampires sometimes didn’t know their own strength. “She helped Caxt
on escape from the SHU.”
“This piece of trash got out of the hole? Shee-it,” Hauser said. “She’s about likely to have a heart attack right now. Well, fuck her. She don’t have to survive very much longer. Just ’til five o’clock.”
Clara frowned. “What happens then?”
The vampire shrugged. “Ain’t up to me. It’s you three that decides. Malvern said twenty-three hours, and that’s what she’s got. When it’s almost up I’m supposed to ask you, do you want to be like me. Tougher than nails and live forever. Or do you want to die? Only there’s a catch.”
Of course there was. “What’s the catch?” Clara asked.
“You gotta be unanimous. All three of you become vampires or all three of you die. It seems kind of simple to me, but if even one of you vetoes it, you all get eaten.”
And so we’re going to die, Clara thought. There was no way any logical, thinking person would take the other choice, and become—
“I say yes, please,” Gert whispered.
In her cage, Caxton said nothing. She was picking at a piece of tape holding the foam rubber around a steel bar, just scraping away at it with a fingernail. She hadn’t even looked over at Clara. Hadn’t said a word.
Clara couldn’t help but think that was a bad sign.
53.
The tape came away, leaving Caxton’s fingers sticky and one fingernail broken. She dug a finger into the foam rubber wrapped around the bar of her cage and felt a sharp edge underneath. It was as she’d suspected—the bars weren’t bars at all, but strips of steel as flat as ribbons. You could cut yourself pretty well on the edge.
She looked up and saw the vampire standing over Clara’s cage. They were still talking. Well, that was fine. For now. She knew what Clara was trying to achieve. Hauser was a brand-new vampire. There was still plenty of humanity left in her—it took weeks for the bloodlust to take hold. Over time it would erode Hauser’s personality until there was nothing left. Each night she woke in a coffin she would feel less connection to the person she had once been. Each night she would think more and more often about blood, and how good it would taste running down her throat, and how little it mattered if she had to hurt people to get it. But for now, on her first night post-death, Hauser could be reasoned with. She could be talked around.
That wasn’t what Caxton had in mind, though.
They’d taken all her weapons. They’d taken her stab-proof vest when they came and found her in the stairwell, reeling in pain, barely able to move. They couldn’t take away her brain, though. Her knowledge of what made vampires tick.
She grabbed the naked steel bar of her cage and jerked her hand along the sharp edge. The pain was intense but short-lived. It barely made her gasp. She felt her skin give way, though, felt hot wet blood well up across the creases of her palm. She flexed her hand over and over again, pumping blood out of her veins, until it was dripping on the floor of her cage.
The vampire’s head lifted and she looked around. As if something was calling her name.
“Did I say something wrong?” Clara asked, trying to sound innocent. “I was just asking about your parents because—”
“Hold on,” Hauser said. Her nose twitched. Vampire senses were sharper than those of human beings. Where blood was involved they were positively acute. Like a shark, a vampire could smell blood a mile away. “There’s something—I shouldn’t—”
Caxton flicked her wrist. Droplets of blood stained the foam rubber bars in front of her. A few of them sailed through the air and splattered the floor outside the cage. She flexed her hand a few more times and then brushed her palm against the bars, spreading even more blood all over them.
There was no apprehension in her, no fear that this wouldn’t work. It would definitely work. It would almost certainly get her killed, too. That was okay. She’d stopped believing she could end this neatly. She couldn’t see a lot of positive outcomes. But she would die trying, and that had to count for something.
Hauser padded over toward her, nose rummaging through the air. Her red eyes fixed on a spot of blood a few feet outside of Caxton’s cage.
“I cut myself,” Caxton said, her tone flat and emotionless.
“That was kind of stupid, bitch. It’s not like I’m going to come in there and bandage you up,” Hauser said. But she was still looking at the blood.
“I wonder what it tastes like,” Caxton said. “You know. If we’re going to be vampires. I wonder what it tastes like to you.”
Hauser seemed to recover herself a little. “Yeah. Well, you can lick it off the floor later. I’m supposed to sit at that desk and just watch you guys. Make sure you talk over Malvern’s offer real good.”
“I bet it tastes like—what? Wine? Maybe really good chocolate,” Caxton suggested. She hadn’t expected Hauser to put up this much resistance.
The vampire squatted down and put one white fingertip next to the blood spot. And just stared at it. Didn’t touch it. Didn’t move. When they wanted to, vampires could stand so still you’d think they were marble statues. They didn’t breathe. Their muscles never got stiff or tired.
“You don’t have to do this,” Clara shouted. “You can fight it.”
“Clara, please,” Caxton said, trying not to sound too angry. “Don’t. Not right now.”
“She’ll kill you on the spot,” Clara whispered. “Suck you dry!”
“No I won’t,” Hauser said. “The last one did that, Malvern tore her heart out while we watched. I ain’t stupid, you know? I may not be a genius, but—”
She stopped talking in midsentence as if something had interrupted her train of thought. Then she trailed her finger through the cooling spot of blood. Lifted it carefully to her face and sniffed at it.
Then she licked her fingertip. And her eyelids drifted shut.
For a while there was no sound in the room. No one moved or spoke. Caxton held her breath. Then, when the vampire didn’t open her eyes again, she said, “Look. I got it all over these bars. I kind of made a mess.”
The eyelids snapped open. The red eyes were burning.
For a vampire the first taste of blood was like a junkie’s first fix of heroin. It would never taste as good as that first time. It would never be so clean, and pure, and fulfilling. It took them places, took them to dark new worlds that were theirs to explore. Places human beings couldn’t go.
It made them want more.
Endlessly more.
Hauser attacked the cage with a sudden savagery that had Caxton reeling backward. She felt her bad arm hit the side of the cage and she winced in pain, but her brain wouldn’t let her feel much. It was too busy overloading her body with adrenaline. Getting her ready to run. But there was no place to run. The cage bars bent inward and snapped as Hauser licked and tore at them, tearing the foam rubber to crumbs, smashing through the lock on the cage’s door.
Caxton had been careful to smear as much blood as she could spare on that lock.
The door flew open and Caxton rolled out onto the floor. She grabbed the first thing her hand could find.
The vampire turned and glared at her. Her mouth opened wide and Caxton could see the dozens of nasty fangs in there. A few of them were wet with her blood. There was no intelligence in Hauser’s eyes now. There was nothing to reason with.
No thinking going on at all. Just pure vampire instinct.
The vampire pounced. Caxton braced herself and twisted her head away at the last possible moment. Hauser’s teeth clicked on the floor where her jugular vein had been. The vampire lifted her head up again to howl in frustration—
—and screamed in agony instead.
Caxton had grabbed a broken piece of steel bar, part of her cage before the vampire demolished it. She had held it in front of her like a spike and let momentum do the rest. The bar had been broken off at an angle, giving it a good point. Caxton knew exactly where to place it for maximum effect.
It pierced the vampire’s heart like a needle, and came out through the skin of her b
ack.
The vampire’s body convulsed, demonically strong muscles pounding the floor, thrashing at the air. A blow hit Caxton in the thigh, instantly numbing the flesh there. Another slapped at her face, but they were getting weaker now. Hauser’s jaws flashed open and closed as she tore and rent at death itself, but she couldn’t put it off for long. Little by little the red fire in her eyes went out. The tension in her muscles eased. She died a second and final time, pinning Caxton underneath her corpse.
Using the impaling bar as a lever, Caxton pushed the body off of her. Then she searched the vampire, looking for keys. She found one that had a tiny white label on it reading CDR, which she assumed meant Cooling Down Rooms. That was what the warden had called these cages.
She unlocked Clara’s cage, and, after a moment’s hesitation, Gert’s, too. Her celly crawled out of the cage with a look of sheepish self-hatred on her face. “I was supposed to be useful to you,” she said. “I was supposed to help. I let you down.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Caxton said. “I—”
She didn’t bother finishing the thought. Clara was too busy grabbing her in a desperate embrace. Then she pressed her lips hard against Caxton’s and kissed her, again and again.
54.
Clara filled Laura in on the situation as quickly as she could.
There were two remaining vampires other than Malvern in the prison, and an unknown number of half-deads. The warden was dead, and so were Guilty Jen and her set, which meant there wasn’t a single living person at large in the facility other than herself, Laura, and Gert. Fetlock was supposed to be outside with a small army of SWAT troopers, but so far he hadn’t made his presence known.
There were nine hours left until the twenty-three-hour deadline.
“We’re not going to be here when the deadline comes,” Laura said. “One way or the other. Malvern’s playing a game with us. I don’t want to play anymore.”
23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale Page 25