Gert rolled her eyes. She threw her can of pineapples into a corner, then headed for the next door down the hall and threw it open. “No, dummy,” she called, stepping inside. “Like rock. Crystal. You know, drugs. That’s how a lot of girls in here get high. But if they really like you, you can ask them for things. It can’t be anything too obvious. But there’s one kind of toothbrush you can snap off the head and it makes a real nasty shank. Or a good hairbrush, the kind that’s metal inside, you can do a lot with a piece of metal if you’ve got time to work it. Make lock picks, say. So either you take a screw hostage, which shouldn’t be too hard if his pants are around his ankles and his dick is hanging out—or you pick a couple locks outside the infirmary and that gets you as far as the wall. Then you just have to get over the wall. We never did figure that part out.”
Caxton frowned and followed Gert into a room full of chairs. Hundreds of them had been stacked up inside, and in the dark the stacks made weird, spiky shadows. “I can see a couple of problems with us implementing that plan. For one thing, half-deads aren’t interested in sex.”
“Yeah, well—hey. You know, it’s seriously dark back here,” Gert said. “Like, deep end of a coal mine dark.”
“Not quite that dark,” Caxton said. She’d been in a few coal mines in her time.
Gert tripped on something and caught herself against a stack of chairs. They rattled and squeaked loud enough to wake the dead. Caxton tensed herself, just by reflex, and grabbed the stun gun off her belt.
When she felt a knife pass through the air inches from her face, she knew there was a reason she had grown so paranoid. She could just see the blade glittering in the low light. She estimated where the blow had come from and jabbed at it with the stun gun, then squeezed the trigger.
There was a loud snapping sound of arcing electricity, and a high-pitched scream. Then the half-dead hit her hard with a fist to the stomach and knocked her down going past. She saw it silhouetted briefly against the doorway, and then it was gone.
“Shit,” Caxton said. “I was hoping the stun gun would work on them like it does on living people, but no dice. Now we’re screwed.”
Gert clucked her tongue. “No we’re not. It ran away, girl.” Caxton sighed in frustration. “You don’t know about these things. They’re weak, and cowardly, and they can’t shoot the side of a barn. But the problem is, they never work alone. That one wasn’t running away. It was running for help.”
23.
Caxton sped out of the storeroom and slid to a stop in the hall. If she could catch the half-dead before it reached others of its kind she could save herself a lot of trouble. She wasted a half-second peering through the gloom back the way she’d come before she heard running footfalls and realized that the half-dead was running farther down the corridor, past the storerooms and into the deep shadows at the far end. Cursing, she chased after the retreating sound—knowing that what she was doing was stupid. She couldn’t see a thing. She could trip over something on the floor and break an ankle. She could miss a turn in the corridor and run smack into a wall and break her nose or worse.
She didn’t have much choice. She’d been very lucky back in the SHU. The package of sticky foam had provided her with a few extra hours of life, but there’d only been one of them, and she didn’t have any more tricks to play.
Gasping for breath, she tore down the hallway anyway, spurred on by the same reckless instincts that had kept her alive for the last few years, kept her alive when so many vampires couldn’t say the same. She held her hands out in front of her, which would give her a split second’s warning if she was about to run into anything. Not enough time to stop herself, but maybe enough to prevent giving herself a concussion. She almost cried out in triumph as her fingertips brushed cloth and she realized that she was about to catch the half-dead. It collided hard with something in front of it, something softer than a brick wall anyway, and she threw herself onto it, grabbing for anything she could get a handle on, an article of clothing, a stray limb, hair.
The half-dead had run into a door. It turned the knob just as she hit it from behind, and together they went sprawling through, into light so bright it dazzled Caxton’s eyes and momentarily blinded her.
The half-dead went down, its face hitting a cement floor with an ugly crunch. Caxton’s fall was softened by its body, but still she felt the impact like a punch in the gut. She sucked air into her lungs and looked up, blinking away the glare in her eyes.