It was coming back. Her focus was coming back. She had waited until she and the warden were alone in the room, then she had grabbed the warden, knowing the electroshock band on her arm would go off. Also knowing that whoever she was touching when that happened would get shocked as well. She’d been pretty sure that the warden, who was older than she and badly wounded, would get worse effects than she would. That she would recover more quickly than the warden, giving her some time to escape.
She also knew the warden was a tough bitch and that it would be a close thing.
She couldn’t just run away, though. The band was still on her arm and she was pretty sure it had enough juice for more than one shock. If she ran now she would just get zapped again. She bent down over the warden— slowly—and went through her pockets. She found the special key that locked the band onto her biceps and removed it easily. She dropped it on the floor and then hurriedly went back to the warden’s pockets and took out the woman’s BlackBerry—and her pistol, a SIG Sauer P228.
Clara stared at the pistol for a while. She even pointed it at the warden’s face. Surely if anyone deserved to be shot while they were down it was this woman. She had betrayed her trust and put over a thousand women at risk. She had fed some of her prisoners to Malvern. She had ordered half-deads to kill Laura.
Clara couldn’t do it. She put the pistol in her pocket.
It wasn’t that she didn’t think the warden deserved to die, though. It was because Laura wouldn’t have done it. Laura had no compunctions about killing monsters, but she’d never kill a human being, no matter how much they deserved it. Clara couldn’t imagine doing such a thing, either.
So instead, she wrapped the electroshock band around the warden’s arm and locked it tight. There was a heating vent in one wall of the room. She slipped the key through the vents and listened to it clunk and ding its way down into the bowels of the prison’s ventilation system.
Then she went to the room’s door, checked to see no one was looking, and slipped out into the hall, a free woman.
34.
The hallway was almost pitch dark. There were no windows anywhere along its length, and the only light came from an open door down at the far end. A fan of murky light spread outward from the doorway, striped or occluded now and then as a half-dead passed in front of it. Clara could hear them talking down there in their grotesque high-pitched voices. They sounded confused and frightened.
Clara was glad she wasn’t the only one. She headed in the other direction, feeling her way along the wall. She wanted to run. Her body wanted to move, to get out of there as fast as it possibly could. She couldn’t afford to make any noise, though. If she were discovered now the warden would probably have her killed just for revenge.
Her fingertips brushed the molding around a door. She stopped and leaned close to the door and listened, held her breath and waited to hear anything from the other side. When she was sure that no one was behind the door, she searched for its knob and then turned it slowly. The door’s hinges didn’t creak as it opened. That was a small blessing, and she was thankful for it.
The room behind the door was almost as dark as the hallway. There was a single narrow window high in one wall that illuminated some uninteresting furniture—a desk, a few chairs. A computer sat on top of the desk, as well as a multiline telephone, but she knew they wouldn’t work, so she didn’t bother with them. Laura had cut all power to the prison, it seemed. Clara wondered how the prisoners in the dorms would be reacting. They must be going crazy wondering what was going on.
She couldn’t help them. Or rather, she could. She was going to help everybody, but not directly. Clara climbed under the desk and took the warden’s BlackBerry out of her pocket. It was a high-end model with a full keyboard and a built-in camera. The screen lit up when she touched the space bar and it displayed a list of email subjects. Clara didn’t have time for those. They would be important evidence later, when the warden was brought to trial, but for now all she needed was a cell phone. It took her a while to figure out how to just dial a phone number, but eventually she got Glauer’s cell number typed in and hit
The phone on the other end rang once, twice, three times. Clara bit her lip and nearly switched off the phone when she heard footsteps passing outside the room. This was too important, though. Even if she got caught in midcall, she needed to get the word out to Glauer and Fetlock. On the fifth ring the call went to voice mail.
“This is Glauer. You’ve reached my official phone. If this is personal, call me back on my other number. If you don’t know that number, it can’t be too personal.”
Clara cursed silently and waited for the beep. She had practiced what she was going to say and didn’t have to think about it. “Glauer, it’s Hsu,” she whispered. “I’m at SCI-Marcy Malvern is here and she’s taken over, with the assistance of the warden, um, Augusta Bellows. The whole facility is under their control and they’re recruiting prisoners to become new vampires. Caxton is here, alive, and at large inside the prison walls, but she’s alone and unarmed. I’m currently at large but very much alone and definitely outgunned. Get Fetlock. Get the state police. Get anybody and get up here.”
She hit
She heard someone out in the hall and froze in panic. Just footsteps, and they kept going past. She wondered how long it would take Franklin or one of the other half-deads to find the warden. When she recovered from her shock, would she scream for help? Clara couldn’t have much more than five minutes.
She couldn’t stay where she was. They would search every door on this hallway for her, and this room would be the first place they looked. She needed to get to a different part of the prison without being detected. She supposed there must be heating ducts in the ceiling. People in the movies crawled through heating ducts all the time.
Then she realized that if people did it in the movies all the time, the person who had designed the prison might have seen it done and therefore known not to make the heating ducts big enough even for a petite woman like Clara to get into. She remembered the heating vent she’d thrown the key into: it had been no more than eleven inches across. So that idea was out. She looked up at the window above her, but it was reinforced with chicken wire and had bars on the outside.
She was going to have to chance the hallway. There was no other way.
Clara went to the door and went through the same routine she’d used when she entered the room. She held her breath and listened, and only when she was sure there was no one outside did she open the door and step outside. She closed the door silently behind her and pressed her back up against a wall.
She couldn’t go down the hall toward the open doorway. She was certain there would be half-deads down there. So she had only one direction she could head. It saved her from having to make a difficult choice. She pressed on, deeper into the darkness, until she couldn’t even see shadows, just uninterrupted blackness.
She very nearly walked right into a wall at the end of the corridor. Her outstretched hand knocked into it and she had to force herself not to keep walking, to stop in midstep so she didn’t collide with the wall face first. When she’d stopped completely she let out a long sighing breath.
“Dupree,” someone said. “Is that you?” The voice was high and hysterical.
Slowly Clara reached toward her pocket where she’d put the warden’s pistol. It would be suicide to try to shoot now, of course—there was no way she could hit anything in the darkness, and the noise of the shot would draw all kinds of unwanted attention.
“Dupree?” the voice asked again. From closer by.
She could try to slip past the half-dead. Clearly it couldn’t see her—it had only heard the sound of her hand hitting the wall, or maybe her exhalation. If she knew where it was she could just step around it and—
