attached to their skulls. One by one their knives came up, held high as if they were slashers in a horror movie. One by one they peeled off from the trash can and came running at her.
Caxton waded in, knowing that in a knife fight the only good defense was to get inside your opponent’s reach. She dropped the shotgun, empty now and useless, and drew her baton with one hand and Gert’s hunting knife with the other.
A heavy, serrated bread knife whistled through the air toward her face. Caxton stepped under it and sank the hunting knife into the first target she found—the arm that was swinging toward her. The half-dead it belonged to screamed and jumped back.
Another half-dead came at her from her right. Caxton flipped the baton in her hand until she was holding it hilt first. The baton was collapsible and hollow, meant for inflicting pain rather than breaking bones. Its rubberized grip was the only solid part of its construction. She caved in a half-dead’s torn face and then brought her knee up between its legs, knocking it backward.
A knife touched the back of her neck, sliding through her skin, and she gasped in pain. She was moving too fast for them to stab her effectively, but little wounds like that could add up in a hurry—if she started losing blood, if she started letting herself react to the little cuts, she would slow down and they would have her. She brought her head back fast and hard, pushing the knife there back, then whirled around and sank the hunting knife into the ear of the half-dead behind her.
They didn’t die like human beings. They were already dead. You couldn’t knock them down with electric shocks or stun them into submission by hitting them hard on the forehead. They didn’t need to breathe, so tear gas and pepper spray had minimal effect on them. Having already been drained by the vampire who killed them, there was no blood in their bodies to spill. But they were weak, and cowardly, and they felt pain. If you hurt them enough they fell down, or ran away to lick their wounds, or just collapsed in pieces. The pieces kept moving but could safely be ignored.
It was horrible work, it was butcher’s work. Their very existence was wrong, though, an abomination. You were doing them a favor, Caxton told herself, when you cut them to pieces. When you sent them back to dreamless sleep.
Another knife in front of her. Caxton brought the baton around fast and smacked the wrist, knocking the knife free. Then she spun and parried another blow, and cut a half-dead across the eyes, blinding it.
They kept coming. Had she taken out the original six? She’d lost count. She could hear footsteps running toward her. Reinforcements on the way. She needed to at least get her back against a wall, or they were going to mob her. It would all be over if they could effectively surround her. Their blows were slow and unsteady, but she only had two hands and could only counter two attacks at once.
She glanced up and around—but before she could see anything useful, a knife sank right through her stab- proof vest.
The vests were designed specifically for the kind of attacks COs met with in normal prison situations. They were very good at stopping shanks—sharpened toothbrushes, flattened-out spoons, at worst a blunt icepick. They could stop most commercially available knives, too, but by
Caxton gulped air and tried not to throw up. The knifepoint caught the small of her back, just left of her spine, cutting through skin and subcutaneous fat and just piercing the layers of muscle underneath. She felt something in her back give and she sagged to the side.
She didn’t stop to think. Instead she roared and ran backward, pushing the knife in deeper but knocking over the half-dead behind her and wrenching the weapon from its grip. She kept going, fast enough to throw off any other half-deads who were trying to sneak up behind her, kept going until her back collided painfully with a cinder- block wall behind her. She was sweating hard, and panting, but for the moment she was free of the pack of murderous bastards.
They took a moment to regroup and come at her again. She took the pause this gave her to firm up her grips on her two weapons, and to grit her teeth so she didn’t scream from the pain.
Then the half-deads came at her like a brick wall. She didn’t have time to count them. She didn’t have time to look at what they were wearing, or where their weapons were, or what their faces looked like. Sometimes time slowed down at moments like this, when death was so close.
Sometimes it didn’t. Caxton brought her weapons up in front of her chest, ready to push back the first attack. And then a noise like thunder rolling through the room made the half-deads jump and spin.
One ravaged face exploded in a red cloud. An arm flew out of the group and smacked the wall next to where Caxton was crouching. Some of the half-deads just fell down like sacks of broken bricks. A few of them managed to run away.
When they were gone, when the room in front of her was clear, Caxton saw what had happened. She just had time to swear before it happened again.
There was a machine-gun nest built into the hub, a narrow guard post at the very center of the room with gun slits carved into its concrete walls. The smoking muzzle of a machine gun was sticking out of one, pointed right at her. Without any preamble it started roaring and spitting bullets at her, hundreds of them per minute.
45.
Guilty Jen peered out through one of the narrow windows of the interrogation room. “Not long now. Maybe an hour until the sun goes down. Then we get out of here, right, girls?”
Queenie said, “Fuckin’ yeah.” The others seemed to agree with the sentiment.
Clara glanced over at Marty the former CO again, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. She had bought herself a little time, it was true. By convincing Jen to hand her over only to Malvern herself, she had kept herself alive a little longer.
Now it seemed like it wasn’t going to make any difference. Fetlock had to be out there somewhere. He’d had half the day to gather SWAT teams and get in place. And yet she’d heard nothing from him on the BlackBerry, nor had she or any of the others noticed if the prison was being noisily surrounded by cops. What was holding him up?
Maybe she’d been a fool to put her faith in her boss. She knew how slow he was to take action. He thought of it as being cautious. She also knew what Laura thought about people who were overly cautious when dealing with vampires. They might, it was true, survive through the night. But other people just died in their place.
Fetlock had been willing to bide his time when Malvern was at large, murdering people every night. He had wanted to let her have time to make a mistake, to give herself away. Instead he’d just given her time to work the kinks out of her master plan, to make sure of every little detail in her bid to take over the prison. Now—how many lives would he waste, waiting for the perfect time to strike? He had to be out there. He knew what was going on. But he wanted to make sure he, too, had every little thing just in place before he made his move.
Clara knew that the second the sun went beneath the horizon, her life was effectively over. She had long since given up hope that Laura would rescue her. Or maybe… maybe there was one tiny shred of hope left, but it was undernourished and rapidly fading away.
She looked up at the table as the BlackBerry rang once more. She stared at it, then at Guilty Jen. Maybe it was Fetlock, saying he was on his way—
“Hello?” Jen asked, pressing the button to set the handheld to speaker mode.
“Hello, Jen. Your friendly neighborhood warden again, just checking in.”
Guilty Jen slapped the table so hard the phone jumped. “I told you, bitch, we’re not negotiating with you. I want to talk to the cunt in charge, and I’m more than willing to wait until she wakes up.”
The warden chuckled. “Oh, I heard you the first time. I just wanted to bring you up to speed with the latest
