“Jesus. Oh my God. Is that you, Glauer?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m so glad—you’re okay, right? You’re alive in there? Oh, boy am I glad to hear it. Fetlock and I have been sitting out here in the trees for hours now, wondering what the hell was going on inside.”
“You’ve been there for hours? Didn’t you hear me telling you it was time to move in?” Clara demanded.
“We did, but Fetlock—”
“You son of a bitch! People have died in here because you didn’t listen to me. You were supposed to storm the place. You were supposed to come in here and save me! I am not a field agent. I am not equipped for what I just went through, do you understand? It is not acceptable to ask me to deal with this shit!”
“You’re alive. Is Caxton alive?”
Clara squeezed her temples. “Yes. For now.”
“Then I guess you did okay. Listen, I wanted to attack as soon as we got here. I promise. But Fetlock held me back. He’s got every SWAT team from every town from here to Baltimore assembled out here. Right now we’re just scooping up the prisoners as they try to escape.”
Well, at least that was something. Something to assuage her guilty conscience.
But not enough. “I could already be dead and you wouldn’t even know it!”
Glauer sounded like he was in physical pain when he responded. “I wanted to go in there alone. Just me and a gun to get you and Caxton out. But he wouldn’t let me. He gave me his big speech again. About how the SSU can’t afford public scrutiny how we can’t make any mistakes. You know that speech.”
“Yeah,” Clara said.
“I listened patiently and then I waited for him to turn around and then I tried making a run for it. I was going to come in anyway. He had me arrested. I guess technically nobody’s got me in handcuffs right now. But he’s made it clear that if I make a move without his authorization, I’ll be going to jail. And we’ve seen what he does with his agents when they break the law.”
“Christ. You did what you could, I guess—”
Glauer was still talking. It sounded like a confession now. “I wasn’t the only one. The SWAT teams wanted to move in hours ago. So did the local cops. But Fetlock called the governor’s office to make sure he had proper approval first. Big mistake. The governor sent down word that nobody was to make a move. That this was a hostage crisis, and that he was going to get the FBI to send trained negotiators down here. If anybody moved before the negotiators arrived, they’d lose their jobs. What I’m trying to tell you, Clara—”
“Is that Fetlock screwed us over good.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Yeah. But listen, that’s all changed now—the hostage negotiators got here a couple of minutes ago. They took one look at the situation and gave up. Said they should never have been called in—that things are too far gone for them to help.”
“Fetlock. That stupid dick,” she said. “He’s afraid of his own shadow, and they put him in charge of vampire cases.” She was angry. She was, to be honest, righteously pissed. But even so, she could recognize the logic. Fetlock’s orders always made sense, in an abstract fashion. They usually ended up in people getting killed, but they made perfect logical sense.
“I need you to tell me anything that can help us raid this place,” Glauer said.
“Alright. Alright! Fine! Listen. We’re down to two vampires in here. The half-deads are all, well, full-deads now. Laura’s alive but unarmed, and Malvern is going to kill her on sight.” She went on for a while providing a full situation report, telling him everything she knew about the gang wars and what was happening in the cafeteria. When she finished she took a deep breath. “How does Fetlock want to proceed?”
“We’re moving in en masse, as fast as we can. We’ll take the yard first, then secure the facility wing by wing. You stay put. We’ll extract you as soon as it’s safe.”
“Okay,” Clara said. “Thanks.”
“Listen. We’re going to get her,” Glauer said.
“Who? Malvern?”
“Yeah. And the other one. And do you know what that means? After tonight, there won’t be any more vampires. They’ll be extinct.”
Clara closed her eyes and started to weep. That couldn’t be right, could it? There would always be more vampires—except. Except the only two vampires left in the world were inside the prison walls. “After all this time,” she said. “After so many people died—it’ll be over,” she said, trying the words out to see if they sounded real when said aloud.
“Yeah,” Glauer said. “We did it.”
58.
Laura, the feds are—”
Caxton couldn’t hear the rest of what Clara had to say over the intercom. The women of C Dorm were making so much noise that they drowned her out. She pushed her way through the crowd as best she could without being trampled and finally made her way over to the cart where Gert was crouched, barely keeping her balance.
The crowd was starting to thin out a little. Most of the women had run out the fire exit. Those who remained were mostly in a heap on top of the half-naked vampire. Caxton could only see the occasional flash of milk-white skin underneath the pile.
“Let’s move,” Caxton said, and Gert nodded eagerly.
They made their way slowly back toward the gate that led to the Hub. There was a thick crowd around the warden’s body back there—it seemed more than a few prisoners had enough of a grudge against Augie Bellows to want to defile her corpse. The very thought sickened Caxton, but she knew there was no way she could stop so many of them. She also had more important things to do.
“Did you see Malvern leave?” she asked Gert. “Do you know which way she went?”
Gert shook her head. “I was too busy trying not to get killed.”
Caxton sighed and pointed at the ceiling. “Clara was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear her. Let’s get someplace quieter so she can try again.” The two of them headed deeper into the prison, toward the Hub. Rioting prisoners filled the hallway, but they didn’t seem organized or dangerous. Some of them actually looked like they were having a good time.
Then Caxton saw the flames, and she knew there was going to be trouble. Up in the Hub someone had found a bunch of filing cabinets and dragged them into the center of the room. Caxton had no idea what the cabinets contained, but she knew any facility like SCI-Marcy had to be stuffed full of paperwork. Prisoners were pulling out files and setting them alight, maybe with the intention of burning down the prison—maybe because they just wanted to see them burn. They’d built up a couple of pretty good bonfires already. Craning her head around to peer through the massed bodies there, she saw others filing in and out of the armory. They must have been disappointed to find the guns all destroyed, but they were arming themselves anyway with batons, with pepper spray, and with stun guns. More women were streaming into the Hub all the time, coming from the other dorms, and despite the smoke from the fires the central room was rapidly filling up. It would be next to impossible to get through there.
“Come on,” she told Gert. “We’ll try another way.”
She turned—and then stopped. Because there was a woman, a huge woman with a butch haircut, looking right at her. One of her former cellmates from when she’d been housed with the general population.
“Hey, I know you—you’re that ex-cop,” the woman said. She didn’t sound particularly unfriendly. She and Caxton had never bothered each other much. Caxton nodded, tried to smile pleasantly, and pushed past.
She was not surprised, though, when the crowd noise died around her, or when some of the women in the hallway started moving toward her, very nonchalantly, with no obvious violent intent.
Every woman in the prison had a reason to hate the police. They’d all been arrested, after all, by cops. A
