23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

them. Why leave them lying around? Just in case anybody wandered in here. Say, someone like Guilty Jen.”

Laura shook her head. “No. No! This wasn’t just about hedging bets. Malvern knew I would come here. She’s been leading me around like a bull with a ring in its nose. She let me get this far. Her pal the warden even gave me directions! She wanted me to see this.”

Clara sighed. “Does it matter?”

Laura didn’t answer. Instead she grabbed Clara’s arm and pulled her out of the armory and back to the stairs. Together they headed up to the top level, to the central command center. Gert came trailing after.

Laura kicked open the door and stepped through. There was one half-dead in the room, sitting in a chair watching a bank of monitors. It had its back to them. Before it could turn around Laura ran up behind it and bashed its head forward against the HVAC control board. It didn’t fight back.

“You stay here,” Laura said. “You can watch me on the monitors. You know how to work all this stuff?”

“I can figure it out,” Clara said, “but—”

“If you see me walking into trouble, use the intercom. I’ll be able to hear you just about anywhere. If you find Malvern, let me know where she is.”

“Or,” Clara began.

Laura gave her a cautious look.

“Or,” Clara continued, “you could stay here with me. We can call Fetlock. Let him storm this place and take care of Malvern. That way we’ll both live.” She gave the cautious look right back. “You know perfectly well that without a gun you don’t have a chance against her. You’re going down there to kill yourself.”

“No,” Laura protested. “I’m going down there to kill Malvern or die trying. I thought that was clear.”

“I thought—” Clara said. But she knew she couldn’t change Laura’s mind. “It doesn’t matter what I thought.” I thought you were the same woman I fell in love with, she was thinking. I thought the last couple of years didn’t matter anymore, that this could all be over, that we could try to work things out, to be a couple again. That I wouldn’t have to break up with you.

The look in Laura’s eyes said different. When Clara had first met Laura she was already fighting vampires. She hadn’t stopped since, not even long enough to be a proper girlfriend. To be in love, even for just one day.

“Go,” Clara said. For the same reason she always had. Because it was selfish and stupid to ask someone to stop saving the world just because you thought they were sexy. “Go! You need to do this. It’s who you are. I’ve got your back.”

Laura nodded. It was a serious nod. A businesslike nod. It broke Clara’s heart, but she would never admit it out loud.

The second she left central command, Clara locked the door and pushed a chair up under the knob. That should hold against any half-deads who came up to get a look at the monitors. She had no doubt a vampire could get through the barricade without lifting more than a finger or two, but it was something. She shoved the half-dead out of its chair and started working the boards. She needed to call Fetlock. She needed to figure out how the video board worked.

“You can help me,” she said to Gert, and turned to look for Laura’s cellmate. But the red-haired girl was gone, too. She had taken apart the pathetic barricade and left the room without a word, leaving Clara all alone. She felt absurdly familiar with the situation. Laura was out chasing vampires and Clara was stuck alone watching TV

55.

Laura—I’ve got her. Malvern’s in C Dorm, along with a couple of half-deads. They’re taking donations.” Clara’s voice wasn’t as loud as Caxton had expected it to be. “I’ve figured out how to use individual intercoms without turning on the entire system at once—so they didn’t just hear me say that.”

“That’s a plus,” Caxton said. She stopped for a second and looked up at the camera in the stairwell’s ceiling. “Did you just hear me?”

Clara didn’t respond. So the intercoms didn’t work both ways. She would be able to hear Clara but not talk to her. It was still better than going it alone.

“No sign of the other two vampires,” Clara said. “I don’t think they know we’re free yet, but I’m thinking that someone will go and check on us eventually. I don’t know how much time you’ll have.”

She was halfway down the stairs to the Hub when she heard a clattering behind her and saw Gert coming down the steps.

“Go back,” Caxton said. “Go back and guard Clara.”

Gert shook her head. “I came this far with you. I’m not backing off now. Are you really going to tell me you don’t want an extra pair of hands right now, when you only got one that works?”

“Fine. Just don’t get yourself killed.” Caxton reached the door to the Hub and glanced up at the nearest camera.

“All clear,” Clara told her. “Nothing moving in there, anyway.”

Caxton pushed open the door and stepped inside the circular room at the heart of the prison. She scooped her shotgun off the floor—no one had bothered to remove it—and went straight to the armory and found a box of shotgun shells. They were loaded with plastic bullets, of course, and therefore absolutely useless against vampires. But maybe she could do something about that.

“Here,” she told Gert, handing her a box of .22-caliber bullets. “Pry six of these out of their casings.” There was a pretty good set of machine tools in the armory, useful for adjusting and refitting the now ruined guns. With a pair of pliers she pulled the plastic bullet free of its casing and threw it away. It wasn’t easy doing it with one good arm, but she gritted her teeth and got through the pain. As Gert handed her the bullets she loaded them into the shell casing as if they were buckshot. They weren’t perfect. They weren’t spherical, so they would tumble when the shell’s gunpowder went off, making them even less accurate that normal shot. They were too big, as well, and the shell had half the load of powder a normal shotgun shell used—the plastic bullet didn’t need to travel as fast as a lethal round. But if she got up close, very close, and fired point blank into Malvern’s chest—maybe. Maybe the makeshift shot would punch a hole right through the vampire’s chest cavity. Maybe it would be enough to destroy her only vulnerable spot, her heart.

She would be well fed, which meant she would be able to resist an awful lot of damage. Caxton would never get in more than one shot, not even if she took Malvern completely by surprise. But it was better than the alternative, which was to try to shiv the vampire with a sharpened spoon. She knew that would never work.

When she’d finished loading her hand-built shell, she checked the shotgun a couple of times to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with. She shoved it into the armpit of her good right arm. Then she nodded to Gert and stepped out of the armory.

Now. Which way?

There were exits leading out of the Hub in every direction, some of them darker than others, some of them behind heavy barred gates, some wide open. “Third exit on your right,” Clara said. C Dorm was behind a locked gate, but as Caxton approached a buzzer sounded and the gate clanked open on its hinges automatically. “I can open any door in the prison from here,” Clara said.

Caxton looked up at a camera and mimed turning a key.

“You’re asking—oh, you’re asking if I can lock them, too? No, unfortunately. The controls up here are just for emergency use, if there’s a fire or something. They have to be locked by hand with an actual key.”

“At least we can go wherever we want,” Gert said.

Caxton didn’t bother replying. She headed through the open gate and into a long hallway that led straight to the dorm.

It was lined on either side with checkpoints and defensive kiosks, but Caxton ignored those.

Except—there was a weird smell in the air. Caxton had learned a long time ago that when weird things