23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

Jen led them down a side corridor and through a pair of swinging doors. For a minute they were outside, walking under a covered walkway. Barely a hundred yards away was the wall, separated from them by first fenced- in exercise yards, then three layers of razor wire. Clara looked up at a watchtower, hoping there would be someone there, someone she could signal to, but even if there was someone up there it would probably be a half-dead, and she didn’t want them to know where she was.

Back into the prison, then, back into darkness. They climbed a flight of stairs without any light at all, Clara banging her shins again and again but not daring to even gasp in pain. At the top of the stairs they passed through a short corridor and into the promised interrogation room. It wasn’t much to look at. There was a simple wooden table and two chairs. One chair had nylon restraints dangling from its arms and coiled around its legs. The walls were covered in a flocked wallpaper that would eat up any sound. Light came from a pair of very narrow windows in one wall. The glass inside the windows was reinforced with chicken wire, even though the windows were too thin for even a child’s hand to pass through.

There was a stain on the table that could have been a very old coffee spill or dried blood. Guilty Jen hopped up on the table and pulled her legs into an easy lotus position.

“Who are you?” Clara asked, when the door had been closed. “I mean—how does someone like you end up doing all this?”

Guilty Jen just smiled. “Featherwood, Queenie, you get lunch going. I’m starved. Maricon, you’re on guard duty.”

The woman called Maricon was a Latina wearing pronounced lipstick and mascara—at least on her good eye. The other one was covered in a thick bandage.

“Okay,” Clara said. “Can you tell me why you call her that? I know that word, it’s Mexican slang for a… for a male homosexual.”

“I call her Maricon because she wears so much makeup, she looks like a drag queen.” Guilty Jen’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t get any ideas, though. She plays for the straight team. So do we all. If you try to cop a feel or kiss one of us—”

Clara held up her hands in surrender. “Don’t worry. I’m not exactly turned on at the moment. What about Featherwood, how did she get her name?”

“That’s what the Aryan Brotherhood call their women. It’s a nicer version of what they call each other— Peckerwoods.”

“Charming.”

“Queenie gets her name the same way. In the black gangs they call their women queens. That’s a little more like it, right?” Guilty Jen smiled. Her hands rested palm up on her folded knees. It looked like a posture she’d spent a lot of time in.

“Will you tell me how it is that you and your set aren’t locked up right now? I didn’t think the warden was the type to just leave one of the cells unlocked.”

The male CO looked up as if his name had been called.

“Marty here helped us out. Didn’t you, Mart-o? He brings in the drugs, I sell ’em, we split the money. Until now. Now I’m on top. Yesterday, when everything went bad, right? Marty came and saw me. He asked me for protection. Can you believe that? He knew that COs were going missing all over the place. He tried using his radio for help, but he just got the sound of some asshole giggling in his ear. He knew I was his best bet. So he came to our cell—me and my set, we all got jungled up together in one cell, sweet, right? That took some cash money to arrange. Marty came to our cell and we invited him in. He locked himself in there with us and sat tight. Some dude with his face hanging off came by looking for him, but we hid him under some bedding and eventually the dude went away. Then, when the coast was clear, we used Marty’s keys to get out of the cell. Now he’s one of us, one of the set. Of course, we had to beat him in, a little, and one or two of the girls had some fun with him, but he’s my property and I’ll keep him safe. You just think of me as your mommy, Mart-o. Mommy’s gonna keep you all safe and clean, won’t let anything happen to you, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Marty said, enthusiastically.

“Yes, what, bitch?”

The CO glanced at Clara, but only for a split second. “Yes, Mommy.”

Guilty Jen laughed. “Marty’s down. Marty’s my Tiny Gangster, gonna come work for me outside when this is over. He sure as hell can’t ever work as a screw again, not after what he’s done the last twenty-four hours.”

Queenie and Featherwood had been hard at work preparing a meal while Jen was talking. None of them had eaten since Malvern took over the prison, and they needed their strength if they were going to keep moving. They had produced from somewhere a carefully prepared tin can and a couple of packets of ramen noodles. One of the cans had been wrapped around and around with toilet paper, maybe a whole roll, meticulously pulled tighter and tighter until it looked as dense as wood. When it was lit on fire it burned slowly but with a good orange flame that didn’t give off too much smoke. Soon water inside the can was boiling and the women dumped in the noodles, adding bits of hot dog and a couple dozen packets of ketchup. The result was a nasty, gooey mess that bore some distant resemblance to spaghetti and meatballs. The amount of time and energy it must have taken to get the meal together astonished Clara, but then she supposed when you were serving a long prison sentence there wasn’t much to do except wrap toilet paper around cans and steal extra ketchup from the cafeteria.

“You want some of this?” Jen asked, after she’d had the first serving.

Clara had to admit she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten anything since before her visit with Laura the day before. “Yes,” she said. “Please.”

“Too fucking bad,” Jen said, and laughed, spraying bits of wet noodle in Clara’s face. “There ain’t enough to go around.”

Clara had been wondering who this woman was, who had the discipline and willpower to master a martial art and the natural leadership abilities to form a gang out of women of different races and backgrounds, and yet still had been desperate enough to resort to criminal activity for her livelihood. Now she was beginning to see.

Guilty Jen was a sociopath.

38.

Gert’s finger strayed along a row of boxes on a high shelf. She had a playful, quite innocent expression on her face.

It was not lost on Caxton that they were holed up in the prison’s pharmaceutical dispensary nor that Gert had a history of substance abuse. Caxton was a cop and she knew all about people with drug problems. “Don’t,” she told her celly and got back to work.

Gert shrugged. Whistled a few notes. And then went back to browsing the shelf. “There’s some good stuff in here.”

“I’m sure it’s fantastic. You don’t need it. Why don’t you come over here and help me? It’ll make it easier not to get distracted.”

Gert thrummed her lower lip. Then, as if she were just playing with it, she picked a box off the shelf and closed her hand around it.

“Did you think I didn’t see that? What have you got?”

Gert pouted. “Like I said, good stuff. As in, good for you. It’s just Excedrin, okay? That’s like aspirin, and I have a really bad headache.”

“There’s real aspirin over on this side,” Caxton said. “Excedrin is full of caffeine. Anyway, if you do have a headache it’s just because you haven’t eaten in a long time. Have some of this.” Caxton had found a brown bag in the bottom of the dispensary freezer, under all the bottles of insulin. At first she’d been wary to open it, but when she had she’d found inside a green salad, a soggy hamburger, and a beautifully ripe, non-rotten apple. One of the doctors or nurses who worked in the dispensary had apparently brought their lunch to work and never had a chance