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 stop the designers of the vests had meant “Allow a blade to penetrate no more than one-quarter inch.” That was enough to keep one from being killed instantly by a knife wound, but it still allowed for a serious injury.
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?