while. We’ll move again soon, but you need to take it easy.” She went over to a desk on the far side of the room. She found paper and a pen and started making a map of the prison, sketching out its layout based on what she’d seen of the place from outside and what she knew about prison design, which wasn’t much. SCI-Marcy was surrounded by a squarish wall with watchtowers every hundred feet around its perimeter. The prison itself was made up of eight long buildings: the five dorms, the infirmary wing, an administrative wing, and the cafeteria and kitchens, which also incorporated the SHU. Each building radiated outward from where they were connected at one end to a central tower, like rays coming out of a central sun. At the top of the main tower was the central command center. Outbuildings and covered walkways connected the buildings here and there, making the prison look from above like a half-finished spiderweb.
It was designed to be easy to get around, if you were a guard. If you were a prisoner it quickly became a maze of locked doors and heavily armed checkpoints.
She couldn’t see any way around it. If she could rescue Clara and save Malvern before nightfall, that was fine. Malvern couldn’t put up a fight during the daylight hours. She would be trapped in her coffin, unable to move, unaware of what was going on, and Caxton could just reach in, pluck out the vampire’s heart, and destroy it as she saw fit. Malvern would never even wake up. But if, as was becoming more and more likely, she needed to fight Malvern during the hours of darkness, she was going to need guns—real guns, loaded with real bullets.
There were machine guns up in the watchtowers, but there was no way for Caxton to get through all that barbed wire without a pair of wire cutters and a lot of free time. There had to be an armory full of rifles and handguns inside the prison as well. She had no concrete proof of where it might be located—it wasn’t the kind of thing the guards were likely to tell a prisoner—but looking at her crude map, she saw that it could only be in one place. A riot could break out in any dorm, at any time. The COs didn’t ordinarily carry lethal firearms on their persons, because it would be too easy for a prisoner to take a gun from an unsuspecting CO and kill him with it. The real guns only came out in emergencies—but that meant they needed to be available at any time. If the warden decided that the less-lethal elements of the continuum of lethality had been tried and found wanting, that deadly force was a reasonable response to prisoner violence, then the guards would need to arm themselves in a hurry and from a central location. The armory had to be on the ground floor of the central tower.
Which was where all the half-deads were, of course. It would be the most heavily defended spot in the prison, she was sure.
It was going to be her next stop.
She put down her pen and got up. Now she just had to figure out how to get there. The central tower was just on the other side of the infirmary, she knew. It was no more than a couple hundred yards away. But Caxton had already made a quick check of the prison’s medical wing. There was the pharmacy, where she and Gert were holed up, and beyond that a single long room full of beds. Empty beds. There must have been patients in some of those beds when the prison was overrun, but they were gone now, probably shoved in cells in one dorm or another where they could be more easily watched. Beyond the room of beds was a barred gate that she would never be able to get through, not without heavy-duty cutting equipment she didn’t have.
She stretched and rubbed at the bridge of her nose, trying to wake herself up. Maybe she could go around to one of the dorms, and make her way through to—
Suddenly she stopped in place.
“What’s going on?” Gert asked, grabbing her hunting knife from where Caxton had placed it under the cot.
“Shh,” Caxton hissed. She’d heard something. Someone screaming. It sounded like it came from the far side of the barred gate. It hadn’t sounded like a half-dead. It sounded like a human being, in real trouble.
Whoever they were, there was nothing she could do for them, she told herself. But she kept listening all the same.
36.
The BlackBerry rang again. Clara pressed her hands over her pocket to try to muffle the sound, but she knew there was no point.
In the darkness she could feel people moving around her. Human people. Half-deads, like vampires, were unnatural creatures. You could tell when they were nearby because the hair on your arms stood up. Your skin prickled with gooseflesh, your body reacting to the sheer wrongness of the undead. The people gathering around her were human. She could only sense them by the small sounds they made. The noise of slippers dragging along the cement floor. Their breathing.
They said that when your sense of vision was impaired—say when you were in a perfectly dark room—your other senses grew stronger. It helped a lot if you were terrified that you were about to die, Clara discovered.
The handheld rang a third time. It felt like time was slowing down. Coming to a stop. Clara expected her life to flash before her eyes.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” someone said, in the shadows. It was not a pleasant voice, even if it had the normal human timbre. Someone else laughed and it was definitely not a nice laugh.
Clara reached into her pocket and took out the BlackBerry. Its screen lit up the darkness for a few feet around her, but not enough to reveal what was lurking in the shadows. Just enough to hurt her eyes. She fumbled with the handheld, looking for the button that would answer the call.
“Put it on speaker so we can all hear it,” the voice from the shadows instructed.
They could see her. She was sure of that. They could see her face in the light of the BlackBerry’s screen. She nodded carefully. Then she looked at the glowing keyboard and pressed the appropriate buttons.
“Hsu? Hsu, are you there?” the BlackBerry demanded.
Clara bit her lip. It was Fetlock on the other end. “Uh. Hi. Deputy Marshal, this isn’t a good time—”
“So I gather,” he said. “Glauer wasn’t here to get your message. I sent him to fetch our lunch while we planned what to do about your absence. Lucky for you I monitor all of your calls, both incoming and outgoing. It sounds like you’re in real trouble. I’ve called the local authorities for Tioga county. They’re waiting for me to take the lead on any assault on the prison. As soon as Glauer gets back we’ll head up there—it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. Can you hang on that long?”
Clara gritted her teeth. “I’m not alone right now,” she said, hoping Fetlock would take the hint. “I can’t really talk.”
“I need information, Hsu, if I’m going to put together an appropriate response strategy,” Fetlock insisted. He was not the type to take no for an answer. “Tell me about Caxton. You said you went up there to visit her, well, that’s very commendable of you, I’m sure. You get a gold star for being a good girlfriend. It turned out to be lousy timing, though. You said Caxton was at large. Has she killed any vampires yet?”
“No,” Clara said. “She—”
A hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed the Black-Berry away from Clara. “She’s going to have to call you back, pig. Right now she’s too busy begging for her life.” Before Fetlock could say anything more the shadowy hand pressed a button to end the call. The BlackBerry’s screen went dark.
A moment later it started ringing again. That would be Fetlock calling back, Clara knew. Wanting more information, even when it wasn’t exactly convenient. The handheld was switched off and then disappeared from view.
“I’m warning you,” Clara said, drawing her pistol. “I’m a federal agent. Assaulting me could get you in real trouble, you could—”
“What?” someone asked. She thought it was the one who had laughed before. “We might go to jail?” A face loomed out of the darkness. It was grinning from ear to ear. At first Clara thought it belonged to a half-dead after all; the skin on the face was raw and irritated. Then she realized it was just burn scarring. The woman wore a pair of earrings in the shape of swastikas—no, Clara saw, those weren’t earrings. They were tattoos. Gaping in horror,
