Gert shrugged. “Kinda. The trucks come in through the main gate, then drive around the side of E Dorm. They gotta go through two gates on the way, and there’s a place where the hogs can blow out their tires if there’s a problem.”
Caxton stared at her cell mate.
“What?” Gert asked. “I been here a couple years. You think me and my old celly never talked about how we would break out? People see things, yeah, and they talk about them. Everybody wants to know how this place works. And how to get out.”
Caxton laughed. She hadn’t considered that at all. “Okay,” she said. “So how would you do it?”
Gert shrugged. “Well, first you have to fuck a guard. Some of ’em will do that, you know. They’ll come in the cell saying they’re gonna do a shank search, and then you just take your clothes off if you want to do it. You do that often enough, they start bringing you little things.”
Caxton’s eyebrows went up. “Like what? Chocolate? Lipsticks?”
Gert rolled her eyes. She threw her can of pineapples into a corner, then headed for the next door down the hall and threw it open. “No, dummy,” she called, stepping inside. “Like rock. Crystal. You know, drugs. That’s how a lot of girls in here get high. But if they really like you, you can ask them for things. It can’t be anything too obvious. But there’s one kind of toothbrush you can snap off the head and it makes a real nasty shank. Or a good hairbrush, the kind that’s metal inside, you can do a lot with a piece of metal if you’ve got time to work it. Make lock picks, say. So either you take a screw hostage, which shouldn’t be too hard if his pants are around his ankles and his dick is hanging out—or you pick a couple locks outside the infirmary and that gets you as far as the wall. Then you just have to get over the wall. We never did figure that part out.”
Caxton frowned and followed Gert into a room full of chairs. Hundreds of them had been stacked up inside, and in the dark the stacks made weird, spiky shadows. “I can see a couple of problems with us implementing that plan. For one thing, half-deads aren’t interested in sex.”
“Yeah, well—hey. You know, it’s seriously dark back here,” Gert said. “Like, deep end of a coal mine dark.”
“Not quite that dark,” Caxton said. She’d been in a few coal mines in her time.
Gert tripped on something and caught herself against a stack of chairs. They rattled and squeaked loud enough to wake the dead. Caxton tensed herself, just by reflex, and grabbed the stun gun off her belt.
When she felt a knife pass through the air inches from her face, she knew there was a reason she had grown so paranoid. She could just see the blade glittering in the low light. She estimated where the blow had come from and jabbed at it with the stun gun, then squeezed the trigger.
There was a loud snapping sound of arcing electricity, and a high-pitched scream. Then the half-dead hit her hard with a fist to the stomach and knocked her down going past. She saw it silhouetted briefly against the doorway, and then it was gone.
“Shit,” Caxton said. “I was hoping the stun gun would work on them like it does on living people, but no dice. Now we’re screwed.”
Gert clucked her tongue. “No we’re not. It ran
23.
Caxton sped out of the storeroom and slid to a stop in the hall. If she could catch the half-dead before it reached others of its kind she could save herself a lot of trouble. She wasted a half-second peering through the gloom back the way she’d come before she heard running footfalls and realized that the half-dead was running farther down the corridor, past the storerooms and into the deep shadows at the far end. Cursing, she chased after the retreating sound—knowing that what she was doing was stupid. She couldn’t see a thing. She could trip over something on the floor and break an ankle. She could miss a turn in the corridor and run smack into a wall and break her nose or worse.
She didn’t have much choice. She’d been very lucky back in the SHU. The package of sticky foam had provided her with a few extra hours of life, but there’d only been one of them, and she didn’t have any more tricks to play.
Gasping for breath, she tore down the hallway anyway, spurred on by the same reckless instincts that had kept her alive for the last few years, kept her alive when so many vampires couldn’t say the same. She held her hands out in front of her, which would give her a split second’s warning if she was about to run into anything. Not enough time to stop herself, but maybe enough to prevent giving herself a concussion. She almost cried out in triumph as her fingertips brushed cloth and she realized that she was about to catch the half-dead. It collided hard with something in front of it, something softer than a brick wall anyway, and she threw herself onto it, grabbing for anything she could get a handle on, an article of clothing, a stray limb, hair.
The half-dead had run into a door. It turned the knob just as she hit it from behind, and together they went sprawling through, into light so bright it dazzled Caxton’s eyes and momentarily blinded her.
The half-dead went down, its face hitting a cement floor with an ugly crunch. Caxton’s fall was softened by its body, but still she felt the impact like a punch in the gut. She sucked air into her lungs and looked up, blinking away the glare in her eyes.
She was in the kitchen, the same kitchen where she’d met Guilty Jen and her set. Back then it had been staffed by human prisoners cooking up meals for the other inmates for a few pennies an hour.
Now it was full of half-deads.
They were standing at counters chopping up vegetables or stirring huge pots on industrial stoves or carrying trays of food. One of them, who stood in the middle of the room with its hands on its hips, was wearing a white chef’s toque.
Every single one of them was staring at her. They were as surprised to see her as she was to see them, and they had frozen in place, unsure of what to do next.
That wouldn’t last.
Caxton had no idea what Malvern had ordered her slaves to do if they found her lying facedown on the floor, all but defenseless. She could guess, however, that it involved a lot of knives and a very brief but furious attempt to hurt her as much as possible without actually killing her.
She didn’t have to think very hard about what she needed to do. She grabbed the shotgun from under her shoulder and fired her plastic bullet into the neck of the one in the chef’s hat. The first rule of fighting dirty was that your first target was whoever appeared to be in charge.
Fighting dirty was her only option. She watched as the chef’s head flopped backward on a nearly severed neck and then rolled to the side, behind a stainless-steel table covered in chopped carrots. She could hear the half- deads screaming in their obscene falsetto voices, asking each other what to do, shouting that they needed to call for backup, or just howling for her blood.
Caxton broke open the shotgun and started loading another slug. Before she could even get it out of her makeshift bandolier, carrot peelings showered down on her head and she looked up to see a half-dead diving over the table to get at her. It had a steel mortar in its hand, the kind used to crush herbs in a pestle, and it was holding it like a club, ready to dash in her brains.
She yanked the pepper spray out of her bra and squirted the thing in its bloodshot eyes. It screamed and rolled to the side, tearing and gouging at its own eyeballs. Half-deads might not feel pain the same way living humans did, but nobody enjoyed getting a full load of capsaicin right in the mucous membranes.
She finished loading the shotgun just as a pair of half-deads came around the side of the table toward her. They were both armed with kitchen knives, wicked and sharp and glowing in the brilliant light of the kitchen. She had time to notice that one of the knives was still flecked with bits of chopped parsley.
