“Luckily?” Clara said, surprised.
“If I hadn’t been so receptive to her advances, she would have attempted to seduce someone else. Any of the administrative staff or even some of the more senior COs would have served her purpose. If it hadn’t been me that she chose, I would have been killed first when she took over the prison. This cancer inside of me, which I have been afraid of for so long, turned out to be my ticket to eternal life.”
“She offered to make you a vampire? And you want that? It’s not a medical treatment option. It’s a curse. You’ll live forever, alright—-just like her.”
Together they looked at Malvern, who was deep in conversation with a half-dead standing just outside the door of the warden’s office. Her shoulders stuck out like knife blades and her skin looked like cheap paper.
“In a few hours she’ll look a whole lot better,” the warden said. “Besides. It took her three hundred years to look like that. For the first century, she tells me, she was beautiful. Powerful beyond anything a human body can hope for. I’ll have my time like that as well, for however long it lasts. Even if I only get another fifty years of health and strength, it’ll be worth it. I’ll be stronger than I am now. I’ll have sharper senses. I don’t see a lot of downsides.”
Clara scowled. “You just have to give up your humanity.”
The warden laughed. “You cops. You always amaze me when you think you’re making a difference. The streets are full of drugs and guns, and the people on drugs have the most guns— when everything goes bad, which it always does, the results end up here with me. I get to babysit the human messes you couldn’t prevent. I’ve seen women come through this office who choked their grandmothers to death for enough money to buy just one more rock. I’ve met pretty little girls whose teeth are rotted out of their heads because they can’t stop smoking meth. Teenagers who killed their own babies because they wouldn’t stop crying. You want humanity? You can keep it.”
Clara was shocked. “How did you ever end up in this job? If you feel that way, then why would you even want it? I would think if you devoted your life to caring for prisoners, you would at least try to believe in them.”
Bellows rolled her eyes. “I was young once, like you. I thought big, grand thoughts like that. Then I saw the reality. It’s been years since I thought of myself as a caretaker. And that’s not even the job anymore. We used to talk about rehabilitating prisoners. That was the term we used, the justification for why we lock them up in such brutal conditions. Now—the term we use is warehousing. This prison, all the prisons like this all over the world, they aren’t places of healing. They’re places where you store people, like you would store toxic waste.”
“That’s horrible. I can’t accept that,” Clara said.
The warden shrugged. “Accept it or don’t, I’m just stating fact. I don’t care—society doesn’t care—if Malvern eats every single piece of human wreckage in Marcy The women in here don’t care about each other, even. They fight constantly. They kill each other over the most pathetic of slights. They certainly don’t care about me. I can’t walk around this place without wearing a stab-proof vest. So why should I care about them? What I do care about is myself. My continued existence. I wasted my life, I see that now. I just want a second chance to get it right, and if I have to drink blood to get it—if I have to rot away slowly, fine. It’s better than the alternative, which is death. Life is always worth more than death.”