Blood Cell (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

Josh Farewell squeezed his way through the narrow space between the upright tables once again. Behind him, John Norris stood watch over both Josh and the ailing Carlos. Josh pulled himself through the opening, and raised himself halfway upright, sitting on his heels. From this position—vigilant, ready to react—Josh scanned the darkness beyond. The mess hall. It was empty. There had been dozens of corpses before, but they were gone now.

Did they get up and walk away?

Oh shit. Did they?

Impossible. If there were more than a single vampire here, Josh would know it. They’d have been attacked. But they hadn’t been. There was only one vampire, and it was stalking them from somewhere in the shadows.

Josh spotted what he was looking for, and crawled toward his prizes. Picking up the stake and the cross in his hands, he squeezed them tight. Totems. Holy things that would ward off the undead. For the first time in his life, a religious object gave him hope. It made him feel safer.

“I’m coming back,” he told Norris.

Having gathered his weapons, Josh slid his head back under the tables and started the crawl again. This position left him vulnerable, but Norris had saved him once already, and Josh was willing to trust that Norris could keep watch for the five seconds or so it took to crawl under the barricade. He made it through unharmed. As he emerged from under the table, he spotted Santos’s weaponry lying on the floor—another stake and the heavy wooden cross.

“Now let’s go get Sally and get out of here,” said Norris.

“First we need a first aid kit,” Josh said. “Carlos has a bullet in his chest and a concussion.”

“Bleeding stopped,” said Carlos. “I’ll live.”

Josh handed Carlos the smaller wooden cross, which was lighter than the one Carlos had held before. “You’ve only got one arm. We’ll keep the stakes, you use this.”

“Only needed one arm to save your ass,” Carlos said as he took the cross.

Norris showed them to a first aid kit in the guards’ station at the edge of the cell block. Josh poured some alcohol into Carlos’s entry wound, and found that there was no matching wound on his back.

“Bullet’s still in you.”

“I noticed.”

Josh fashioned a sling out of a roll of heavy gauze, and hooked it over Carlos’s bad arm. The last step was to give him a couple of Tylenols to help with the pain.

“If you girls are done playing doctor,” Said an impatient Norris, “I’m trying to find a girl.”

“Straight ahead,” said Josh, pointing through the gloomy cellblock. “She’s thataway.”

The three of them—the new meat, the gangbanger, and the hardened guard, all watched each others’ backs as they advanced through the block.

Norris saw the corpses hanging upright in the cells.

“Jesus!” he yelped, raising his stake.

“Settle down,” said Carlos, “They’re dead.”

Carlos hadn’t noticed the corpse’s hands, which now held the bars tightly. He hadn’t noticed the first corpse untie itself from the bedsheet that held it up, or the second corpse open its eyes to watch them pass.

They walked into the darkness, deeper and deeper, none of them knowing that every single cell held a newly born vampire, hungry for his first meal.

*****

Sally was surprised how much comfort she found in the company of Terminal Thomas. Williams was a nice guy and she had known him for a year, but he didn’t seem like much defence against a monster. But Thomas was as big as a house, and the job he’d done tearing open her cell was damn fine demonstration of his butt-kicking ability.

They had left ad seg through the guards’ corridor, heading to the entrance at the far end. When Sally had come through in the other direction, with Josh, this corridor was empty and safe. Now, every door had been opened and the exit at the far end was barricaded off with a complex network of mess hall tables tied together with weight-machine cables. Sally didn’t know that this was the same spot where the monster had first entered, in the form of a fog that enshrouded Eddie Angel.

She looked out across the mess hall, viewing it from this corridor was an angle she’d never seen. The room seemed surprisingly small now, after seeming so huge during the riot. She would have expected to feel the opposite—empty a room of the men and the tables and it’ll seem bigger—but it just wasn’t. Everything was smaller now, like the walls were closing in. She’d gotten out of that tiny cell in solitary, but now she was realizing that the entire pod was just a slightly larger cage.

Williams and Thomas started to work on the cables. They were all solid, it seemed. No knots or fasteners anywhere. Williams looked deeper into the stacks of tables.

“Must be tied deeper in. Someone’s gonna have to climb in there.”

Sally didn’t respond.

“Somebody small.”

Sally still pretended not to understand Williams’ hint. Williams turned around to face her, and silently rested a hand on her shoulder.

They didn’t to say anything. She gave reassuring nods to both Williams and Thomas, and climbed into the stack of tables. She had to work her way through the gaps between the tabletops and table legs, and wondered how any of the inmates could have squeezed into such a tight space. After a few minutes of feeling in the darkness, she found a knot in the steel cable. It was tight, and she was blind in the darkness. She tried to pry the strands apart.

There was a loud bang from somewhere in the mess hall. Sally froze. Thomas took a deep breath and held it.

There was another bang. Like a gunshot.

Voices talking. She couldn’t put names on the voices, but she recognized them. Gangbangers arguing. These impulsive, immature idiots were still settling scores in the face of certain death.

Williams guided Thomas to crouch down in the darkness of the corridor, out of sight. There was a third gunshot. Someone shouting.

Then quiet.

Sally didn’t know why, but during that pause in the noise, the hair on the back of her neck stood up.

“Can you find the knot?” Williams whispered.

Sally raised a finger to her lips, then realized that it was too dark for Williams to see, so she shushed him. “It’s close.”

Someone screamed across the mess hall. No, not a person. An animal screamed. It was an inhuman sound, but clearly one of pain. It sounded like the time Sally’s childhood dog Buttons had broken his leg. Sally listened to a struggle, and another primal scream of pain. Whatever this thing really was, it was taking a beating. There were more sounds, someone fighting against this thing, and then silence returned.

Silence is a strange thing in such a large place. When the last sound finishes echoing, you can actually hear the silence smother the noise; the acoustic equivalent of throwing a blanket over a fire.

They waited for what felt like an hour, but was probably ten minutes. Sally started to untie the knot again. She was careful, but every now and then the wire would rub on the steel tables and make the quietest screeching sound. Just loud enough to hear. Too loud. She was starting to sweat.

Williams whistled to her quietly. “Be still.”

Sally did her best not to breathe. She could see very little from her position lying inside the barricade. She could see the emergency light halfway down the hallway, and light coming in from the mess hall.

Into this light rose Thomas, getting to his feet. He was shaking, but clenching his fists.

At the edges of the pale yellow light, the darkness swelled. The darkness shifted and coalesced like gossamer fabric caught in a breeze. The vampire didn’t jump out of the dark so much as the dark became the vampire. And then it was there, darkness made solid, blocking the light. Sally could see only a silhouette, but it was enough. It was real. There was a monster out there and she was trapped inside this dead-end crawlspace with no way out. Unless Thomas Turner, a convicted felon she had first spoken to a few hours earlier, could protect her.

Thomas started throwing haymakers at the vampire. He hit it. That thing was stronger than the average man, but so was Thomas. When he struck the vampire’s chest, the creature was knocked back against the wall. Williams jumped up now, brandishing his broomstick stake. He dove stake-first toward the monster. He disappeared momentarily from Sally’s view. And then with a scream, Williams flew backward across the hallway, striking the far wall with his back. A moment later, Thomas slid back into the centre of hallway, falling to one knee.

The vampire stepped back into the light, blocking Sally’s view. She saw the silhouette tilt its head in her direction as it spoke. “I can smell you, woman. And I want dessert.”

Thomas jumped on the vampire’s back, his arms around the creature’s throat. It might have been a choke hold, but Sally didn’t think vampires could breathe. As he did, Williams crawled around to find his stake, and stood up again to try and finish off the creature.

“Sally!” Williams called, “Get out of there. We gotta run!”

*****

At the end of the cellblock, Josh, Norris, and Carlos found the entrance to ad seg. The gates were different from when Josh was last here. When he had gone through before, both gates were close, but now the inner gate was open.

“Someone went in,” he told Norris. “When I left, the doors were both closed.”

Norris looked at Carlos with spite. “I’d open the gate,” he said, “if I still had my keys.”

Carlos smirked at him, and pulled a key ring from his pocket. He handed the keys to Norris. “Spoils of war. You want to hold onto something, don’t lose the fight,” he said.

Norris snatched the keys from Carlos and started to dig through them for the right one.

Josh checked over his shoulder, ever watchful.

“Oh. Shit.”

Norris and Carlos turned around to face the worst-case scenario. There were a couple dozen people gathering behind them. They were inmates, or at least they were before they died. Their eyes glowed silver and they moved slowly. Each of them sported a bloody wound that had stained their uniform—mostly these were bites to the neck, but arms, stomachs, and in a few cases legs were also bloody. The inmates cracked their knuckles and their necks, they shook off stiffness and pain, flexing their arms, rolling their shoulders, and stretching their backs.

Rigor mortis. Walk it off.

Carlos held up his cross. Josh raised the heavy cross and his stake, the two of them taking up positions to block Norris, who was still fumbling for the right key.

“You might want to find the key, like you know, now.”

Norris went back to work. The vampires gathered in a semi-circle, staying cautiously away from Carlos’s cross. At this distance, Carlos could recognize several former friends and enemies.

One of the vampires was Charlie, Carlos’s oldest friend. He was bolder than the rest.

“Come on Carlos,” he said, “Put that thing down. You could be like us. Eighteenth for life. Now it’s Eighteenth forever.”

Charlie took a step in from the semi-circle, toward Carlos. Carlos turned the cross toward his old friend. Charlie hissed, and revealed his fangs.

“Kill it,” Carlos said. Josh squeezed his stake tighter. “Kill it!”

Josh dropped the cross to free up his left hand, grabbed Charlie by the shirt and slammed him against the bars of the gate. He raised the stake over his shoulder and jabbed it into the vampire’s chest, penetrating through the ribs and into the heart. It seemed easier than Josh thought. Like the vampire’s chest was soft, his ribs brittle. Charlie went limp against the bars of the gate.

Charlie’s skin turned a pale grey, the same colour as his eyes. Then he dried up, clothes and all, becoming flaky like burnt newspaper. And all at once, Charlie collapsed through the bars, hitting the floor on the other side as a pile of ash. He was gone. All that remained was the wooden stake that Josh still held in the place where Charlie’s heart had been.

The other vampires gasped at the sight. Josh couldn’t believe he’d had the nerve to do it, or that it had been so easy. He’d just killed a vampire. He turned back to face the rest. And it occurred to Josh that these newborn vampires had no idea of their own strength or lack thereof. All they knew now was that they could be killed easily. They might have had the numbers, the rage, the supernatural powers, and the inhuman strength, but Josh Farewell had the power of persuasion on his side. And that was all he had ever needed.

“Anyone else want to fuck with me?” he challenged them.

Several vampires, only steps away, growled at him. But none came.

“Stake went into your boy like butter. I bet the same thing happens if you touch the cross. Want to try it?”

The vampires snarled at him, but a few of them actually took steps back.

Norris found the right key, and slid the door to the side. “Got it!”

Norris went into the antechamber, followed by Josh. Carlos kept the vampires at bay with his cross, and backed through the gate. Norris shoved the sliding gate shut again.

“Sorry, said Carlos to the crowd of vampires. “Not invited.”