She was in the kitchen, the same kitchen where she’d met Guilty Jen and her set. Back then it had been staffed by human prisoners cooking up meals for the other inmates for a few pennies an hour.
Now it was full of half-deads.
They were standing at counters chopping up vegetables or stirring huge pots on industrial stoves or carrying trays of food. One of them, who stood in the middle of the room with its hands on its hips, was wearing a white chef’s toque.
Every single one of them was staring at her. They were as surprised to see her as she was to see them, and they had frozen in place, unsure of what to do next.
That wouldn’t last.
Caxton had no idea what Malvern had ordered her slaves to do if they found her lying facedown on the floor, all but defenseless. She could guess, however, that it involved a lot of knives and a very brief but furious attempt to hurt her as much as possible without actually killing her.
She didn’t have to think very hard about what she needed to do. She grabbed the shotgun from under her shoulder and fired her plastic bullet into the neck of the one in the chef’s hat. The first rule of fighting dirty was that your first target was whoever appeared to be in charge.
Fighting dirty was her only option. She watched as the chef’s head flopped backward on a nearly severed neck and then rolled to the side, behind a stainless-steel table covered in chopped carrots. She could hear the half-deads screaming in their obscene falsetto voices, asking each other what to do, shouting that they needed to call for backup, or just howling for her blood.
Caxton broke open the shotgun and started loading another slug. Before she could even get it out of her makeshift bandolier, carrot peelings showered down on her head and she looked up to see a half-dead diving over the table to get at her. It had a steel mortar in its hand, the kind used to crush herbs in a pestle, and it was holding it like a club, ready to dash in her brains.
She yanked the pepper spray out of her bra and squirted the thing in its bloodshot eyes. It screamed and rolled to the side, tearing and gouging at its own eyeballs. Half-deads might not feel pain the same way living humans did, but nobody enjoyed getting a full load of capsaicin right in the mucous membranes.
She finished loading the shotgun just as a pair of half-deads came around the side of the table toward her. They were both armed with kitchen knives, wicked and sharp and glowing in the brilliant light of the kitchen. She had time to notice that one of the knives was still flecked with bits of chopped parsley.
She fired a plastic bullet into the chest of one half-dead, then flipped the shotgun around and caved in the other one’s face with the weapon’s stock.
The two of them went down. Whether they were fully dead or just wounded enough not to bother her didn’t matter. The point was that they had to stay down. She was much more concerned, anyway, with the six half-deads right behind them, who were all coming straight for her.
She grabbed her baton. It wasn’t much of a weapon, just a hollow length of aluminum weighted at one end and with a rubberized grip at the other. Back when she’d been a cop, though, she had trained in how to use it.
The course she’d taken had focused on how to avoid breaking bones with the baton, and how to make sure you never, ever killed anyone with it. Like everyone else in the class, she had made a note of all the things she wasn’t supposed to do in case she needed to do them one day.
A half-dead armed with nothing but a steel ladle reached her first. It tried to duck under her arm, probably intending on grabbing her around the waist and knocking her over. She brought the baton around, grip end first, and jammed it in the soft spot just behind where its jaw attached to its skull. The half-dead screamed and dropped to the floor, where she stomped on it with both bare feet.