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.