23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

by David Wellington

  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.

  Women from every cell were coming out onto the floor of the dorm. With no COs to corral them and with the vampires distracted, it fell to the half-deads to try to stop them. That didn’t work very well. Three women from the same cell on the upper tier picked up a half-dead between them and threw it over the railing. Its skull made an audible pop when it hit. Another half-dead tried to flee but was trampled by the rush for the fire exit. Most of the women were bent on escaping, or at least getting away from the vampires, but some of the younger ones, the gangbanger convicts covered in jailhouse tattoos, were sticking around to play with the half-deads.

  Then there were so many of them that Caxton couldn’t see what any of them were doing individually. She could only see them as a faceless crowd in constant motion. She had to roll to the side and dash into an empty cell to avoid being crushed. Forbin started after her, but even a vampire had trouble fighting against the current of two hundred women all moving in the same direction. She tried grabbing them and throwing them out of her way, but that just increased the desperate pace of the crowd and made it harder to slog through. Of the other vampire, the one she’d shot, there was no sign. Caxton saw that Gert had climbed up on one of the medical carts and was trying to keep her balance as it was rocked by colliding bodies. The noise was intense, a surging, oceanic roar of shouts of excitement and also panic, of hundreds of feet pounding on the steel catwalk of the upper gallery, of cursing and pleas for help when the fire exit was jammed with bodies. Some of the women seemed to think they’d have better luck heading toward the Hub, and soon there were two currents flowing through the dorm. Bodies filled up all the available space outside the cells and suddenly Caxton couldn’t even see Forbin anymore.

  Her spine went rigid when she realized she couldn’t see Malvern, either.

  57.

  Clara took her hand off the panic button and sat back in her chair. She could barely believe what she’d just done. The board was alive with red lights. The telephone on the communications board wouldn’t stop ringing. And on the monitors—

  She hadn’t known what else to do. Laura was about to be killed. Malvern was going to get away. So she had hit the panic button on the fire emergency board. A big sign at the top of the board said you weren’t supposed to do that unless local police units were ready to assist with an orderly evacuation. Otherwise, you could let hundreds of murderers and rapists escape into the surrounding community.

  And a lot of the women had taken the opportunity to run away. The main gate was wide open now and inmates were streaming out, some forming small groups, some just running into the woods in random directions. The really dangerous ones, though, had stayed behind.

  The women with nothing to lose.

  On the monitors she could see it all. A middle-aged woman with a butch haircut was having her head slammed repeatedly against the tiles in one of the shower rooms. The five women holding her down were all half her age. A white gang had taken over the cafeteria and had barricaded the doors. They were armed now with shotguns and stun guns and pepper spray, and it looked like they planned on staying awhile—they had control of the prison’s food supply, which meant they could outlast a very long siege.

  Out in the yard fights were breaking out everywhere she looked. People were being trampled. People were dying. Because she pushed a button.

  In C Dorm, at least, she saw Laura and Gert both still alive. Both okay. Some of the worst violence in the prison happened in C Dorm, but it wasn’t directed at the ex-cop or her old cellmate. Instead the prisoners had turned on the vampires. It made sense, of course. When the doors opened, the vampires had been in the middle of draining the inmates dry. Malvern had never meant for any of these women to live more than a couple of days—either they would become part of her new brood of vampires, or they would become food—and they seemed to understand what that meant. They knew what they had to do.

  In the Middle Ages, Clara knew, vampires had been like a plague on Europe. Every little fiefdom had its bloodsucker, sometimes whole lineages of them. But the people had learned ways to fight back, even with the most primitive of weapons. They had made up for their lack of firepower with superior numbers. If enough people jumped on top of a vampire, they would eventually weigh so much the vampire couldn’t shrug them off. If enough desperate warriors threw themselves at a vampire’s ravenous maw, eventually one of them would get close enough for the killing blow.

  The women of C Dorm were trying their own version of the tactic. The half-naked vampire was down on the ground, fighting desperately to get up. Prisoners were clinging to her arms and legs and pushing her back down, dozens of them for just the one vampire. They had nothing but shanks and razor blades and homicidal frenzy.

  Meanwhile Forbin and Malvern were moving. They’d been smart enough to realize they couldn’t contain the situation and had made a break for it very early on, heading out through the open fire exit and across the sheltering shadows of the yard. So far Clara hadn’t picked them up again on any of the monitors. She hoped, frankly, that they would keep running. That they would run right out of the prison and never come back. That was one way Laura could survive.

  But she knew it wouldn’t happen that way. It couldn’t.

  The phone kept ringing next to her left elbow. “Shut up!” she howled, but that was pointless. Finally she picked up the handset and lifted it to her ear. “Hsu here,” she said, thinking that was a stupid way to answer the call. The fire department wouldn’t know who she was—

  “Clara?”

  “Jesus. Oh my God. Is that you, Glauer?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m so glad—you’re okay, right? You’re alive in there? Oh, boy am I glad to hear it. Fetlock and I have been sitting out here in the trees for hours now, wondering what the hell was going on inside.”

  “You’ve been there for hours? Didn’t you hear me telling you it was time to move in?” Clara demanded.

  “We did, but Fetlock—”

  “You son of a bitch! People have died in here because you didn’t listen to me. You were supposed to storm the place. You were supposed to come in here and save me! I am not a field agent. I am not equipped for what I just went through, do you understand? It is not acceptable to ask me to deal with this shit!”

  “You’re alive. Is Caxton alive?”

  Clara squeezed her temples. “Yes. For now.”

  “Then I guess you did okay. Listen, I wanted to attack as soon as we got here. I promise. But Fetlock held me back. He’s got every SWAT team from ev
ery town from here to Baltimore assembled out here. Right now we’re just scooping up the prisoners as they try to escape.”

  Well, at least that was something. Something to assuage her guilty conscience.

  But not enough. “I could already be dead and you wouldn’t even know it!”

  Glauer sounded like he was in physical pain when he responded. “I wanted to go in there alone. Just me and a gun to get you and Caxton out. But he wouldn’t let me. He gave me his big speech again. About how the SSU can’t afford public scrutiny how we can’t make any mistakes. You know that speech.”

  “Yeah,” Clara said.

  “I listened patiently and then I waited for him to turn around and then I tried making a run for it. I was going to come in anyway. He had me arrested. I guess technically nobody’s got me in handcuffs right now. But he’s made it clear that if I make a move without his authorization, I’ll be going to jail. And we’ve seen what he does with his agents when they break the law.”

  “Christ. You did what you could, I guess—”

  Glauer was still talking. It sounded like a confession now. “I wasn’t the only one. The SWAT teams wanted to move in hours ago. So did the local cops. But Fetlock called the governor’s office to make sure he had proper approval first. Big mistake. The governor sent down word that nobody was to make a move. That this was a hostage crisis, and that he was going to get the FBI to send trained negotiators down here. If anybody moved before the negotiators arrived, they’d lose their jobs. What I’m trying to tell you, Clara—”

  “Is that Fetlock screwed us over good.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “Yeah. But listen, that’s all changed now—the hostage negotiators got here a couple of minutes ago. They took one look at the situation and gave up. Said they should never have been called in—that things are too far gone for them to help.”

  “Fetlock. That stupid dick,” she said. “He’s afraid of his own shadow, and they put him in charge of vampire cases.” She was angry. She was, to be honest, righteously pissed. But even so, she could recognize the logic. Fetlock’s orders always made sense, in an abstract fashion. They usually ended up in people getting killed, but they made perfect logical sense.

  “I need you to tell me anything that can help us raid this place,” Glauer said.

  “Alright. Alright! Fine! Listen. We’re down to two vampires in here. The half-deads are all, well, full-deads now. Laura’s alive but unarmed, and Malvern is going to kill her on sight.” She went on for a while providing a full situation report, telling him everything she knew about the gang wars and what was happening in the cafeteria. When she finished she took a deep breath. “How does Fetlock want to proceed?”

  “We’re moving in en masse, as fast as we can. We’ll take the yard first, then secure the facility wing by wing. You stay put. We’ll extract you as soon as it’s safe.”

  “Okay,” Clara said. “Thanks.”

  “Listen. We’re going to get her,” Glauer said.

  “Who? Malvern?”

  “Yeah. And the other one. And do you know what that means? After tonight, there won’t be any more vampires. They’ll be extinct.”

  Clara closed her eyes and started to weep. That couldn’t be right, could it? There would always be more vampires—except. Except the only two vampires left in the world were inside the prison walls. “After all this time,” she said. “After so many people died—it’ll be over,” she said, trying the words out to see if they sounded real when said aloud.

  “Yeah,” Glauer said. “We did it.”

  58.

  Laura, the feds are—”

  Caxton couldn’t hear the rest of what Clara had to say over the intercom. The women of C Dorm were making so much noise that they drowned her out. She pushed her way through the crowd as best she could without being trampled and finally made her way over to the cart where Gert was crouched, barely keeping her balance.

  The crowd was starting to thin out a little. Most of the women had run out the fire exit. Those who remained were mostly in a heap on top of the half-naked vampire. Caxton could only see the occasional flash of milk-white skin underneath the pile.

  “Let’s move,” Caxton said, and Gert nodded eagerly.

  They made their way slowly back toward the gate that led to the Hub. There was a thick crowd around the warden’s body back there—it seemed more than a few prisoners had enough of a grudge against Augie Bellows to want to defile her corpse. The very thought sickened Caxton, but she knew there was no way she could stop so many of them. She also had more important things to do.

  “Did you see Malvern leave?” she asked Gert. “Do you know which way she went?”

  Gert shook her head. “I was too busy trying not to get killed.”

  Caxton sighed and pointed at the ceiling. “Clara was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear her. Let’s get someplace quieter so she can try again.” The two of them headed deeper into the prison, toward the Hub. Rioting prisoners filled the hallway, but they didn’t seem organized or dangerous. Some of them actually looked like they were having a good time.

  Then Caxton saw the flames, and she knew there was going to be trouble. Up in the Hub someone had found a bunch of filing cabinets and dragged them into the center of the room. Caxton had no idea what the cabinets contained, but she knew any facility like SCI-Marcy had to be stuffed full of paperwork. Prisoners were pulling out files and setting them alight, maybe with the intention of burning down the prison—maybe because they just wanted to see them burn. They’d built up a couple of pretty good bonfires already. Craning her head around to peer through the massed bodies there, she saw others filing in and out of the armory. They must have been disappointed to find the guns all destroyed, but they were arming themselves anyway with batons, with pepper spray, and with stun guns. More women were streaming into the Hub all the time, coming from the other dorms, and despite the smoke from the fires the central room was rapidly filling up. It would be next to impossible to get through there.

  “Come on,” she told Gert. “We’ll try another way.”

  She turned—and then stopped. Because there was a woman, a huge woman with a butch haircut, looking right at her. One of her former cellmates from when she’d been housed with the general population.

  “Hey, I know you—you’re that ex-cop,” the woman said. She didn’t sound particularly unfriendly. She and Caxton had never bothered each other much. Caxton nodded, tried to smile pleasantly, and pushed past.

  She was not surprised, though, when the crowd noise died around her, or when some of the women in the hallway started moving toward her, very nonchalantly, with no obvious violent intent.

  Every woman in the prison had a reason to hate the police. They’d all been arrested, after all, by cops. A sizable fraction of them were willing to do something about that resentment.

  “Run,” she shouted to Gert. She started to follow her own advice—and then a pair of thick arms grabbed her from behind. She managed to break free, even with only one good arm, but someone else tripped her and a third convict grabbed her bad arm and twisted it behind her back.

  All around her women were moving in, shanks appearing in their hands, or just bare fists drawing back to hit her. She tried to fight her way out, but the pain searing through her arm kept her from making any headway. Already she could smell nothing but unwashed bodies, and the light was growing dim—

  Then she heard a hissing sound and a meaty thud and Gert was spinning through the crowd, causing screams. Her pepper spray flicked across half a dozen eyes and her baton crashed down on wrists holding shanks, sending the makeshift knives clattering on the floor. She pushed her way in and got her shoulder under Caxton’s good armpit, then levered her up out of the mass of bodies.

  “Get the fuck back or you’ll be looking at a whole thirty-one flavors of this shit,” Gert growled, her voice low and angry. Even Caxton shrank back from that voice.

  “Just having a little fun,” one of the women
in the crowd said.

  Gert sprayed her right in the eyes. She screamed and ran away. The crowd started drawing back, no one wanting to be Gert’s next victim. They must not recognize her, Caxton thought. It was bad enough to be an ex-cop in a prison without supervision—but Gert was the hated baby killer. They’d put her in protective custody from the day she’d arrived.

  Except now she wasn’t Gertrude Stimson anymore. Now she was Caxton’s celly Her road bitch. And somehow that transformed her from a pimply speed freak into some kind of Viking warrior goddess. Nobody, not a soul, tried to stop her as she moved Caxton quickly through C Dorm and out of the fire exit.

  Outside, in the dark, she set Caxton down on a patch of dry grass.

  “Thanks,” Caxton said. “That was pretty good.”

  “I got your back, no prob,” Gert said. She watched Caxton’s face for a while, then said, “Listen. One thing I gotta ask.”

  Caxton nodded.

  “We ain’t escaping, are we? I mean, I know you said so before. But I was still holding out some hope. You’re not going to get me out of here, though.”

  Caxton stared at the girl. She supposed, in a way, she owed Gert the truth. She could lie and say she expected to live through the night. She could lie and say she would get Gert out of the prison, somehow. It would make her celly feel better to hear it. More willing to help Caxton with what came next.

  But it just wasn’t possible. Gert had killed the CO in the SHU. Worse than that, she had killed her own babies. Maybe prison wasn’t the best place for her. It was a degrading place, a soul-killing place where no one even pretended to want to rehabilitate her. But she couldn’t just be allowed to walk the streets, either.

  “I guess… all I can say is, I’ll still be your celly if we survive.”

  “And we’ll get along okay? We’ll be useful to each other, right? If I talk too much, you won’t try to make me shut up. That kind of thing.”