“Don’t be such a *,” Gert said, pushing past Caxton to head down the darkened hallway. “I thought you were the big tough vampire killer, who never waited for backup, who went into vampire lairs with guns blazing—”
“That’s when I had decent guns,” Caxton explained. “You know, assault rifles with cross-point bullets. One stupid move right now and both of us are dead. And you might have just made a stupid move.”
Gert looked down at her feet as if expecting to find the floor littered with bear traps. “Nope, don’t look like it.” She marched over to the nearest door and, before Caxton could stop her, turned the knob and stepped through.
“Wait, just—” Caxton called.
“This one’s clear,” Gert said. “Just a bunch of boxes and shit.”
Caxton stepped over to the door and brought up her shotgun. She stepped inside and swung the weapon from side to side, daring any half-dead to come jumping out of its hiding place. When that didn’t happen she went over to the pile of boxes and tore one open. It was full of cans of peaches in heavy syrup.
“This must be a storage area,” Caxton said. She went to the next door down the hall and repeated her drill of sweeping the room with her shotgun before approaching the boxes inside. She broke open several of them and studied the contents. Powdered milk. Sliced beets. Sweet peas. The next room down was full of plastic-wrapped pallets of the plastic trays the cafeteria used.
“We must be close to the kitchens—you store food near where you’re going to prepare it,” Caxton announced.
Gert used her hunting knife to cut open a can of pineapple. She slurped a couple slices into her mouth and chewed noisily. “This is good stuff. How do they take good stuff like this and turn it into that shit they serve us at mealtimes?” Gert asked.
“Maybe—maybe this is a positive thing,” Caxton went on, ignoring her celly “If this is a storage area, then there has to be a way for people to bring boxes in and out. They must off-load delivery trucks close to here—there might be a loading dock right here. Maybe that’s a way out.”
Gert shrugged. “Kinda. The trucks come in through the main gate, then drive around the side of E Dorm. They gotta go through two gates on the way, and there’s a place where the hogs can blow out their tires if there’s a problem.”
Caxton stared at her cell mate.
“What?” Gert asked. “I been here a couple years. You think me and my old celly never talked about how we would break out? People see things, yeah, and they talk about them. Everybody wants to know how this place works. And how to get out.”
Caxton laughed. She hadn’t considered that at all. “Okay,” she said. “So how would you do it?”
Gert shrugged. “Well, first you have to fuck a guard. Some of ’em will do that, you know. They’ll come in the cell saying they’re gonna do a shank search, and then you just take your clothes off if you want to do it. You do that often enough, they start bringing you little things.”
Caxton’s eyebrows went up. “Like what? Chocolate? Lipsticks?”