Out in the yard fights were breaking out everywhere she looked. People were being trampled. People were dying. Because she pushed a button.
In C Dorm, at least, she saw Laura and Gert both still alive. Both okay. Some of the worst violence in the prison happened in C Dorm, but it wasn’t directed at the ex-cop or her old cellmate. Instead the prisoners had turned on the vampires. It made sense, of course. When the doors opened, the vampires had been in the middle of draining the inmates dry. Malvern had never meant for any of these women to live more than a couple of days—either they would become part of her new brood of vampires, or they would become food—and they seemed to understand what that meant. They knew what they had to do.
In the Middle Ages, Clara knew, vampires had been like a plague on Europe. Every little fiefdom had its bloodsucker, sometimes whole lineages of them. But the people had learned ways to fight back, even with the most primitive of weapons. They had made up for their lack of firepower with superior numbers. If enough people jumped on top of a vampire, they would eventually weigh so much the vampire couldn’t shrug them off. If enough desperate warriors threw themselves at a vampire’s ravenous maw, eventually one of them would get close enough for the killing blow.
The women of C Dorm were trying their own version of the tactic. The half-naked vampire was down on the ground, fighting desperately to get up. Prisoners were clinging to her arms and legs and pushing her back down, dozens of them for just the one vampire. They had nothing but shanks and razor blades and homicidal frenzy.
Meanwhile Forbin and Malvern were moving. They’d been smart enough to realize they couldn’t contain the situation and had made a break for it very early on, heading out through the open fire exit and across the sheltering shadows of the yard. So far Clara hadn’t picked them up again on any of the monitors. She hoped, frankly, that they would keep running. That they would run right out of the prison and never come back. That was one way Laura could survive.
But she knew it wouldn’t happen that way. It couldn’t.
The phone kept ringing next to her left elbow. “Shut up!” she howled, but that was pointless. Finally she picked up the handset and lifted it to her ear. “Hsu here,” she said, thinking that was a stupid way to answer the call. The fire department wouldn’t know who she was—
“Clara?”
“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.”