Just after midnight they brought the first batch of blood to Malvern in plastic bags, the kind hospitals used to store whole blood for transfusions. The prison had a full medical ward, and the necessary supplies were all in stores. A half-dead in a CO uniform pushed a wheeled cart into the warden’s office and unloaded the blood onto what had become Malvern’s desk. Six bags of it, each of them swollen to capacity. Clara knew this would be the first batch of many.
Malvern grabbed one up at random and pressed it to her mouth. She was able to shred the bag and suck the blood out without spilling a drop on her tattered nightdress. When it was gone she sighed, a strangely human sound. She closed her one eye. There were holes in the eyelid through which Clara could see that Malvern’s eye had rolled back into her head. As she watched, the holes shrank, the skin there healing visibly.
It wouldn’t be long, she knew, until Malvern was whole and healthy again, at full strength and more than a match even for Laura. Of course, that strength wouldn’t last—Malvern would start rotting away again almost immediately. But there was more blood where this came from, so much more.
And meanwhile the outside world had no idea she was here. No idea that the prison had been turned into one enormous blood drive. No idea that every prisoner in the facility was at enormous risk.
Clara had watched the first few donations. Hungry women had shoved their arms through the bars of their cells, more than willing to make a small sacrifice if it meant they didn’t have to go to sleep on an empty stomach. There had been far more volunteers than there were half-deads to take the blood. Nobody had refused—they knew what would happen if they did. The half-deads had moved down the dorm one cell after the other, moving quickly, stabbing needles into arms almost at random. The work clearly delighted them. They had not bothered to replace their needles between donations, or even to clean them off. Clara had protested—she knew little about phlebotomy, but she knew you could get any number of things from a dirty needle. How many of the prisoners had been IV drug users on the outside? How many of them had hepatitis? Or HIV, for that matter? Or who knew what else?
Her pleas had fallen, of course, on deaf ears. Neither the warden nor Malvern seemed to think that the spread of blood-borne illness was a significant problem. Which told Clara something. It told her they didn’t expect the prisoners to live long enough to get sick.
There had been few volunteers for option three. Maybe Malvern and the warden expected that to change. Or maybe they just knew that the prison was a short-term solution to Malvern’s long-term need for blood. Maybe they understood they couldn’t get away with this forever, and that meant they must have a contingency plan for what happened when SWAT teams stormed the prison, as they eventually must.
Clara wondered if she, herself, would live long enough to find out what the contingency plan was.
While she was considering that particular dark thought, a half-dead came into the office and rushed over to Malvern. He whispered in her ear and she smiled.
The warden looked up from her BlackBerry and raised one eyebrow.
“There’s been an escape,” Malvern said, her eye twinkling. She reached for another blood bag.
“Care to share with me?” the warden asked. “It is still, technically, my prison. It sounds like the kind of thing I ought to be aware of.”
“It is a small thing, I assure ye. I sent a company of my slaves to your Special Housing Unit, there to recover the famous killer, Laura Caxton. They failed at this, and she has escaped.”
“What?” the warden asked, jumping up.
Clara’s heart lifted in her chest. Only to fall back again when she heard what Malvern said next.
“It was no more than I expected of her. She has at her advantage resources and craft others cannot match. No lock nor prison gate could hold her long. No half-dead is fair sport for her. I knew she would escape. I planned for her to escape, all this time. ’Tis why we needed her,” she said, and jabbed one bony finger in Clara’s direction. “Be not afraid.”