“Murphy! The call came through for EIP stations,” Harelip went on. Caxton knew the acronym stood for “escape in progress,” the prison guard’s equivalent of a red alert or all hands on deck. “My two boys ran to comply.”
“Yes, I know,” the thing that had been Murphy said. “I caught them coming the other way. They’re not coming back.” It tittered as if it had just made a little joke. It grabbed the lever on the front of a cell door and yanked it back. It took two tries. Half-deads weren’t well coordinated, or particularly strong. Eventually it got the door open, however. Then it pulled a long hunting knife out of its belt.
Knives. Always with the knives. Half-deads loved knives, hatchets, cleavers, anything sharp. This was a hunting knife, six inches long and painted green—so the white-tailed deer wouldn’t see it glint when you pulled it out in the woods—and had a nasty serrated edge and a wicked curved point. The half-dead brandished it with obvious pleasure and stepped inside the cell.
“Stimson,” Caxton said. “I mean, Gert, please. Do you know the name of the CO in the guard post?”
Gert frowned. “Worth, maybe? Or it could be Wendt.”
Caxton shook her head. “Hey,” she shouted, pounding on the cell door. “Hey, CO! Hey, Screw! You’ve got to stop him!”
Harelip glanced in Caxton’s direction. “Wall up, fucker,” she said, and the speaker in the ceiling popped and whistled.
There was a scream from inside the open cell. A prisoner in an orange jumpsuit came staggering out, blood slicking down one side of her leg.
“Murphy!” Harelip shouted. “Murphy, what are you doing?”
Another scream. Then the half-dead came back out of the cell. There was blood on its knife and all over its stab-proof vest. “That wasn’t Laura. Laura? Where are you, Laura?” it sang. “I’m going to find you if I have to cut my way through every last one of these cells. Miss Malvern wants to see you.”
Harelip finally got what was happening, or at least some of it. She stood up inside the guard post and grabbed a shotgun. Then she hit a button on her control board. A beeping alarm went off and the door of the guard post started to slide open.
Then the alarm stopped, and it started to slide shut again.
Harelip looked as if she hadn’t been expecting that.
The half-dead went to the next cell in line and pulled back on its lever, using both hands this time. The door slid open on its rails. Both of the women inside came rushing out at once, but the half-dead tripped one of them up and knocked her to the floor. It grabbed her hair and pulled her face back. She was a black woman with long cornrows. “You’re not Laura, either,” it said, and then it slit her throat.
In the guard post Harelip hammered at the shatterproof door of what had become just another prison cell. Clearly that door could be opened and closed by remote control—-just like the door locks on the SHU cells. Someone in a central command center was intent on keeping Harelip locked up tight. She beat at the door with the butt of her shotgun, but it was inch-thick Lexan and it would probably stand up to the blast of a hand grenade.
The half-dead went to the door of the next cell.
Two inmates in orange jumpsuits had managed to avoid its rampage. One prisoner was screaming as she ran toward the exit of the SHU. Another, the one who’d been carved up inside her cell but managed to get away, was leaning up hard against the wall, only a few cells down from where Caxton watched in terror. She was breathing heavily and her eyes were closed. She must have lost a lot of blood.
“Hey,” Caxton shouted, and beat on the inside of her cell door. “Hey you. Convict! Let me out of here. I know what to do! I can save everybody.”