She fired a plastic bullet into the chest of one half-dead, then flipped the shotgun around and caved in the other one’s face with the weapon’s stock.
The two of them went down. Whether they were fully dead or just wounded enough not to bother her didn’t matter. The point was that they had to stay down. She was much more concerned, anyway, with the six half-deads right behind them, who were all coming straight for her.
She grabbed her baton. It wasn’t much of a weapon, just a hollow length of aluminum weighted at one end and with a rubberized grip at the other. Back when she’d been a cop, though, she had trained in how to use it.
The course she’d taken had focused on how to avoid breaking bones with the baton, and how to make sure you never, ever killed anyone with it. Like everyone else in the class, she had made a note of all the things she wasn’t supposed to do in case she needed to do them one day.
A half-dead armed with nothing but a steel ladle reached her first. It tried to duck under her arm, probably intending on grabbing her around the waist and knocking her over. She brought the baton around, grip end first, and jammed it in the soft spot just behind where its jaw attached to its skull. The half-dead screamed and dropped to the floor, where she stomped on it with both bare feet.
She really needed to find some heavy boots. Preferably with steel-reinforced toes.
The next half-dead had a cleaver that it brought whistling around to nearly cut open her throat. Maybe it hadn’t gotten the message that she was supposed to be brought in alive. Caxton grabbed its arm at the elbow and pulled it into its own swing, overbalancing it and sending it sprawling.
A third one came at her from the side while she was recovering from that move. It hit her hard in the side with a tenderizing mallet. If it had connected with her kidney, that might have been enough to drop her, but it only grazed the bottom of her rib cage. The pain was still intense and it almost kept her from focusing clearly enough to bring the baton down on the back of her assailant’s neck. It curled away from the blow, which wasn’t quite hard enough to paralyze it.
“Caxton, over here!” Gert shouted at that particular moment.
Caxton had all but forgotten her celly’s existence until then—hadn’t, in fact, given her a thought since she’d started running down the dark hallway. She looked around wildly and saw Gert standing next to an open door on one side of the kitchen. It wasn’t the door Caxton had intended to use when exiting the area. She had planned, or half-planned, to escape into the cafeteria, a wide-open space that would be easy to brawl in. The door Gert had chosen had two things to recommend it, however. It wasn’t locked, and there were no half-deads near it.
A kitchen knife flashed in the air and it was all Caxton could do to swivel away from where it was coming down. Instead of puncturing her chest, it flashed in front of her and sank deep into the back of another half- dead.
Caxton took the opportunity to get away from her enemies, rolling under a prep table and then launching herself out the other side, knocking over a pile of dirty pots and pans as she hurried through the door where Gert was waiting, dancing in anticipation. Beyond the door was a darkened area full of wooden crates, stacked high in towers reaching toward a ceiling lost in the gloom. Caxton saw a forklift ahead of her, its bright yellow paint just visible in the darkness. Beyond that were— trucks. Big eighteen-wheelers, white and ghostly and huge.
“This is the loading dock you were looking for,” Gert said. “Remember?”
Behind Caxton the door started rattling in its jamb. Gert must have had the presence of mind to close and lock it after Caxton came rushing through.
“Who’s got your fucking back, huh?” Gert asked.
Caxton didn’t bother to answer. The door wouldn’t hold long. Half-deads were weak individually, but in groups they could bust down any barrier you put in their way. She needed a way to slow them down.
“Help me over here,” Caxton said, and hurried toward one of the tall stacks of crates. Together they kicked and pushed at the crate at the bottom of the stack. The ones above their heads started to totter.
“You’re supposed to say thank you now,” Gert insisted.
Caxton gave the bottom box a last kick. One side of it collapsed, spilling thousands of white plastic sporks in individualized wrappers all over her feet. The boxes above it fell with a great dusty crash, collapsing and shattering against the door, burying it in shattered wood and dented cans of baked beans and fingerling potatoes. That might hold the half-deads a minute or two longer.
Caxton sighed and looked around herself, trying to anticipate the next threat. When she saw Gert’s crazy eyes glowing in the dark, she remembered herself and managed to say, “Thank you.”
24.
Caxton had bought a little time. She needed more. She jumped on the forklift and started moving crates up against the door, a painfully slow process but the best way to make a strong barricade. The half-deads in the kitchen kept pushing and beating at the door, but they were making little headway. With half a ton of canned goods behind the door, there wasn’t much they could do. After a little while they stopped trying.
Caxton frowned. “They gave up,” she said.
Gert laughed. “That’s a good thing! What’s with you, huh? Every good thing that happens to us, you look like someone put cayenne pepper in your tampon.”
“That’s because I’m a realist,” Caxton said. “Half-deads don’t just stop trying to kill you. It’s possible they’re just going around another way. Check these doors,” she said, pointing at a pair of large rolling doors leading into the kitchen. They were big enough to drive the forklift through. Gert checked them both, bending low to look at their locks, then shook her head.
“Both locked up tight.”
Caxton rubbed her cheek absentmindedly It was possible the half-deads were going the long way around, and were going to come at them through the wide-open loading bay doors. Maybe there was something she could do about that.
The loading dock had its own guard post. The door was locked, but Caxton was still riding out the adrenaline rush she’d gotten from fighting the half-deads in the kitchen. She slammed into the door with her shoulder, careful to hit it just above the lock. It held, but she heard something small and metallic fly out of the door and bounce away. She got a running start and kicked the door just below the lock, careful to keep her foot flat against the wood. The lock disintegrated and the door swung open, vibrating wildly on its hinges.
Inside was a rolling chair sitting in front of a control panel. A pair of monitor televisions hung from the ceiling, angled downward so whoever was sitting in the chair could easily keep an eye on them. She studied the control panel, expecting to find a big red button, and was not disappointed. When designing the prison’s control systems the architects had at least known that there might come a time when someone needed to secure the loading dock without wasting time looking for the right controls. She slapped the red button with her hand and an alarm sounded as a chain-link gate rolled sideways across the open mouth of the loading bay. Weird shadows flickered across Gert’s face as the gate carved up the light. Caxton bent under the control board and found the cable that would let central command override the door controls. She pulled it, half expecting the door to roll open again because she’d pulled the wrong wire.
It didn’t.
“Now we’re safe, right?” Gert asked.
“There’s not a lot of difference between being safe and being trapped, at the moment. But we have time to think. That’s the main thing I was after.”
She found a few useful things. There was a stab-proof vest hanging on a hook, the standard vest every guard in the prison was supposed to wear whenever in the presence of an inmate. It was made of ultra–tightly woven para-aramid fabric that would stop an ice pick, but not a bullet, and definitely not a vampire’s teeth. She slid it over her jumpsuit and strapped it on tight. There were no boots in the guard post, but there was another box of plastic bullets, sitting under a row of metal clips. “There should be a couple of shotguns right here,” Caxton said, touching
