It wasn’t much farther to the Hub. They passed around the side of a softball diamond and then entered a covered walkway that led back to the central tower. Long before they reached it Clara started hearing a noise. A repetitive, metallic, hammering kind of noise, as if someone were dropping rocks off a high place onto a corrugated tin roof. She wasn’t the only one who heard it, either.
“Sounds like some artillery in there,” Queenie said. “Sounds automatic. Big caliber, too.”
Guilty Jen nodded. “It might be Caxton. Maybe she got into the hogs’ toy box.”
“We ain’t got any guns,” Maricón pointed out. “I ain’t sure about this—”
One look from Jen shut the woman up.
“We’re going in,” Guilty Jen said. “You know the drill.”
47.
Caxton pulled her knees in closer and made sure the top of her head wasn’t exposed. She wanted to take a peek to see what was going on, but she didn’t dare. Every time the smallest part of her body was exposed, the machine gun started firing again.
She hadn’t been prepared for this. Half-deads never used guns. They lacked the coordination to aim properly, and the recoil from anything heavier than a derringer could rip a half-dead’s rotten arm right off. Apparently the half-dead in the machine-gun nest had figured out the answer. A mounted gun didn’t transfer its recoil to its operator, and with something that big and fast you didn’t need to aim. You could spray down the whole room as if you were using a garden hose. Some of the other half-deads had been killed in the process, but they weren’t known for looking after one another’s well-being. The thing in the nest wanted only one thing, which was to kill her as quickly as possible.
Caxton had barely survived the first volley of the machine gun, diving behind the only cover available. It wasn’t even particularly good cover. There was a small kiosk built into one wall of the Hub, a counter where COs signed in and out every time they moved a prisoner from one wing of the facility to another. Behind the counter was a tiny booth just big enough for a chair. Caxton had dived over the counter when the machine gun started firing and now had a concrete wall between her and certain death, but she was pinned down. The other half-deads, cowards to the last, had fled the Hub when the shooting started. If they came back she would be a sitting duck. She couldn’t stay there forever, and she couldn’t leave her hiding hole, either. If they came back—but then, they didn’t have to, did they? Sundown was very close now. Caxton didn’t have a watch to time it, but she’d been fighting vampires long enough to have an uncanny sense of where the sun was in the sky, even when she couldn’t see it. When you hunted vampires, knowing when it was day and when it was night was something that kept you alive.
The moment the sun was down Malvern would be coming for her, Caxton knew. She didn’t need to send in waves of half-deads. She could just come to the Hub herself, and drag Caxton out of her hiding place with her own two hands.
Caxton needed to get out of this trap before that happened. But how? Her weapons were useless to her. She had dropped her shotgun, thinking she wouldn’t have time to reload. It was still sitting on the floor outside the kiosk. It might as well be on the far side of the moon. She had a stun gun, a hunting knife, and a collapsible baton. They were worth nothing against the bad end of the continuum of lethality.