The only thing that Caxton could think to do was make Gert vomit. If some of the pills were still in her stomach it would at least keep the problem from getting worse. Of course, she also knew that in some cases of poisoning, inducing vomiting was the last thing you wanted to do—but she would have to take her chances. She had no other ideas. She tried grabbing Gert around the waist and squeezing her, but Gert just pushed her away, with surprising strength given how exhausted she seemed. Caxton sighed and tried another way. She yanked Gert’s mouth open and shoved her index finger down her celly’s throat.
Gert’s eyes went wide and Caxton worried she would clamp down and bite the intruding finger clean off. Instead she jerked backward and then vomited explosively all over the desk, the floor, and her own jumpsuit. She coughed and gagged and spat up long ropes of drool. Caxton lowered her to the floor, well away from the puddles of sick, and got her on her side. She knew that much—if someone was throwing up and passing out at the same time, you put them on their side so they couldn’t choke on their own puke. Then Caxton wiped her finger on her own jumpsuit and sat back on her haunches, wishing she had any idea of what to do next.
Other lives depended on her. She couldn’t just sit with Gert until the girl woke up and felt better. By then Clara could be dead—and half the prison’s inmates, as well. Twilight was coming at six o’clock, and when the sun set Malvern would wake up and be ready for another night’s rampage.
And yet… if she just left Gert, if she walked away while the girl was still moaning and wheezing on the floor… how was that different from watching the warden shoot herself and doing nothing to stop it?
While she was trying to decide what to do, Gert’s chest started to shake. Caxton thought she might be having a seizure, but when she checked she found that instead Gert was just sobbing, letting out huge, noisy gusts of tears.
“It’s not fair,” she cried. “It isn’t fair. It was an accident!”
“Shh,” Caxton said, and rubbed her celly’s shoulder. “Shh. Try to lie still.”
“I never meant to do it. Nobody would ever want to do that! How can they lock you up for something you didn’t even want to do? Something you can barely remember doing at all?”
Caxton’s hand stopped moving on Gert’s arm.
She had never asked Gert what it was she had done to get herself in prison, or why she was under protective custody in the SHU. At first, when she’d been locked up with Gert, she’d figured she didn’t want to know. That asking would just get Gert talking, when what she’d wanted at that point was for her celly to shut up. Later there hadn’t been time.
She still wasn’t sure she wanted to know. The warden had seemed to think it was something bad, something that would make Caxton regret partnering with Gert even if the option was going it alone.
“They wouldn’t stop crying,” Gert said. She wiped at her nose with one sleeve and it came away slick with snot. “I couldn’t seem to fix them. I would feed them, I would change their fucking diapers, and they never… they never stopped. And then my mom said I had to move out, and I was packing up but still, still they were crying…”
“Gert, stop,” Caxton said. “Please don’t say any more.”
“Little Charity, she was sick, she had colic, and it made her crazy, and Blaine, her brother—he would hear her crying, and it would wake him up, and nothing would make him go back to sleep. I just needed Charity to be quiet, just for a little while, so I could think. Think about where we were going to go. And she wouldn’t. She just… wouldn’t. I’m a good person. I know I did something horrible, but in my heart, where it counts, I’m still good…”
“Enough!” Caxton said. She didn’t want to know any of this. She didn’t want to think about what came next in this stupid, sordid little story. She didn’t want to remember why Gert’s name had been familiar the first time she’d heard it. Why Gert had said she was a little famous, and why she’d told Caxton not to believe everything she’d heard.
Half the women in the prison were mothers, mothers of children they got to see for an hour a week at most. Children they couldn’t play with, or help with their homework, or feed, or put to bed—children being raised now by other people. Those prisoners would do just about anything to prove they weren’t bad mothers. And for a certain kind of person, a person prone already to violence, to not thinking things through carefully, it made sense, that to prove you were a good mother, you had to hurt someone who’d already proved she was the worst kind of mother of all.
A baby killer.
Gert had been locked up for her own safety. Because half the women in the prison wanted to see her dead.
“Enough,” Caxton said again. “I don’t care,” she told Gert. “I don’t care what you did, that doesn’t matter—I mean, of course it matters, but—but you helped me, you were there for me when I needed you, maybe not in the ways I wanted you to be there, but—but—”
Gert started to snore then.
Caxton closed her eyes. She saw Clara, in her head, as plain as if she was standing right in front of her. She knew what she needed to do.
Leaving Gert to sleep it off, she headed down the stairs toward the Hub.
She took the hunting knife with her. And Gert’s shoes, as well.
44.
There was another votive candle waiting on the landing of the stairs leading down to the Hub. Its flickering light illuminated the doorway that led out into the bottom floor of the central tower, a very simple door painted white with a brushed aluminum knob. All Caxton had to do was turn that knob and walk through.
She didn’t like walking into a bad situation without knowing what she was about to face. That wasn’t how you lived through moments like this. She had no choice, however. Not if she wanted to save Clara. Not if she wanted to finally kill Malvern, and be done with vampires forever. She checked her shotgun one more time, making sure it was ready to fire, making sure she had one of her few remaining plastic bullets loaded in the chamber. Then she reached out and touched the knob.
She hesitated.
The bulk of the warden’s half-deads were in there, she knew. So far she’d been very lucky. She’d only faced a few at a time, she’d been able to surprise them, mostly, and she’d had Gert watching her back.
Laura Caxton wasn’t immortal, and she certainly wasn’t invulnerable. She’d been wounded many times in fights with vampires and half-deads. She knew it only took one knife wound to kill a human being, and she knew that if she marched out into the Hub, into a small army of the faceless abominations, she would be asking to die. She had her limits, and she’d finally reached them.
She reached for the knob again.
And then she turned it, opened the door, and stepped through.
The first thing she saw in the Hub was a half-dead staring at her, surprised to see anyone come through that door. It was dressed in a prisoner’s orange jumpsuit and it was clutching a long-bladed kitchen knife close to its chest. Its face hung in tatters from its cheeks and chin like a dry, papery beard. She brought her shotgun up fast and put a plastic bullet into its chest, high up near its throat.
It dropped its knife and sank to its knees, clutching at the wound. It shrieked, a horrible, high-pitched keening that hurt her ears.
The second thing she saw in the Hub was the group of six more half-deads standing in the center of the room, huddled around a metal trash can full of burning paper. They all looked up when they heard the scream, and turned to see what was happening.
They all had knives. These weren’t kitchen staff armed with ladles and rolling pins. These were soldiers in Malvern’s undead army. They were fresh, their bodies still mostly intact, and some of their faces were still partly
