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?”
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.
The thump came again. Then a high, cackling voice said, “Keep it down in there, ladies! We’re trying to sleep!”
The prisoners started in again with the noise instantly, but this time it was different. Before it had been howls of outrage and anger. Now they were screaming in fear.
19.
Take off your jacket,” the warden said, pointing a pistol at
Clara’s stomach. Clara didn’t protest. She removed her jacket and folded it over the back of a wooden chair. The warden gestured and Franklin came forward to fit a nylon cuff around Clara’s biceps. A strap held it in place around her arm. He pulled the strap tight enough to hurt, but Clara refused to give him the satisfaction of crying out. The cinch on the strap locked with a special key that he tossed over to the warden. She caught it with her free hand. Clara studied the cuff and saw that it had a small black box attached to it. Metal prongs from the box poked through her shirt sleeve and felt cold on her skin.
“This is the latest thing in compliance measures,” the warden told her. “We’re still trying it out. There were, admittedly, some side effects we didn’t like.” She stepped closer and brought her gun around in a wide sweep that missed smashing it into Clara’s nose by a fraction of an inch. Reflexively Clara threw her arm up to ward off the blow.
The pouch at her back gave off a deafening shriek. Clara howled in pain.
“There’s a motion sensor built into the cuff. If you try to make any sudden movements—say, if you try to run away, or if you attack someone, or just try to take the thing off—it’ll give you that warning tone. That lasts for one second. If you don’t immediately stop moving, it’ll hit you with a pulse of enough electricity to disable every muscle in your body.”
Clara frowned. “What are the side effects?”
The warden shrugged. “For one, when it goes off, you shit your pants. We’re not going to let that happen, though, are we? You’re going to be nice and quiet and obey the cuff. You can walk, slowly, but I wouldn’t try scratching your nose too vigorously. With this thing we can keep you close and not have to worry about watching you every single second.” The warden smiled. “It’s better than being hog-tied and gagged and thrown in a locked room, right?”
Clara wanted to spit in the woman’s face. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded.
The warden surprised her by giving her a straight answer. “I have colon cancer.”
Clara sputtered in surprise. “I’m—I’m so sorry.”
The warden ignored her sympathy. “I let it go too long before I got checked out, and now the doctors say it’s inoperable. There are all kinds of treatments they can try, but none of them are an actual cure. I’ve got this evil little blob inside of me that gets bigger every day and eventually it’s going to kill me. Maybe ten years from now. Maybe tomorrow.” She shrugged. “I don’t want to die. That’s not so hard to understand, is it? So when Malvern started contacting various staff members here at the prison, looking for someone she could manipulate, I shot up to number one on her list. Luckily for me.”
“Luckily?” Clara said, surprised.
“If I hadn’t been so receptive to her advances, she would have attempted to seduce someone else. Any of the administrative staff or even some of the more senior COs would have served her purpose. If it hadn’t been me that she chose, I would have been killed first when she took over the prison. This cancer inside of me, which I have been afraid of for so long, turned out to be my ticket to eternal life.”
“She offered to make you a vampire? And you
Together they looked at Malvern, who was deep in conversation with a half-dead standing just outside the door of the warden’s office. Her shoulders stuck out like knife blades and her skin looked like cheap paper.
“In a few hours she’ll look a whole lot better,” the warden said. “Besides. It took her three hundred years to look like that. For the first century, she tells me, she was beautiful. Powerful beyond anything a human body can hope for. I’ll have my time like that as well, for however long it lasts. Even if I only get another fifty years of health and strength, it’ll be worth it. I’ll be stronger than I am now. I’ll have sharper senses. I don’t see a lot of downsides.”
Clara scowled. “You just have to give up your humanity.”
The warden laughed. “You cops. You always amaze me when you think you’re making a difference. The streets are full of drugs and guns, and the people on drugs have the most guns— when everything goes bad, which it always does, the results end up here with me. I get to babysit the human messes you couldn’t prevent. I’ve seen women come through this office who choked their grandmothers to death for enough money to buy just one more rock. I’ve met pretty little girls whose teeth are rotted out of their heads because they can’t stop smoking meth. Teenagers who killed their own babies because they wouldn’t stop crying. You want humanity? You can keep it.”
Clara was shocked. “How did you ever end up in this job? If you feel that way, then why would you even want it? I would think if you devoted your life to caring for prisoners, you would at least try to believe in them.”
Bellows rolled her eyes. “I was young once, like you. I thought big, grand thoughts like that. Then I saw the reality. It’s been years since I thought of myself as a caretaker. And that’s not even the job anymore. We used to talk about rehabilitating prisoners. That was the term we used, the justification for why we lock them up in such brutal conditions. Now—the term we use is warehousing. This prison, all the prisons like this all over the world, they aren’t places of healing. They’re places where you store people, like you would store toxic waste.”
“That’s horrible. I can’t accept that,” Clara said.
The warden shrugged. “Accept it or don’t, I’m just stating fact. I don’t care—society doesn’t care—if Malvern eats every single piece of human wreckage in Marcy The women in here don’t care about each other, even. They fight constantly. They kill each other over the most pathetic of slights. They certainly don’t care about me. I can’t
