She couldn’t go down the hall toward the open doorway. She was certain there would be half-deads down there. So she had only one direction she could head. It saved her from having to make a difficult choice. She pressed on, deeper into the darkness, until she couldn’t even see shadows, just uninterrupted blackness.
She very nearly walked right into a wall at the end of the corridor. Her outstretched hand knocked into it and she had to force herself not to keep walking, to stop in midstep so she didn’t collide with the wall face first. When she’d stopped completely she let out a long sighing breath.
“Dupree,” someone said. “Is that you?” The voice was high and hysterical.
Slowly Clara reached toward her pocket where she’d put the warden’s pistol. It would be suicide to try to shoot now, of course—there was no way she could hit anything in the darkness, and the noise of the shot would draw all kinds of unwanted attention.
“Dupree?” the voice asked again. From closer by.
She could try to slip past the half-dead. Clearly it couldn’t see her—it had only heard the sound of her hand hitting the wall, or maybe her exhalation. If she knew where it was she could just step around it and—
“Gah!” she said, a noise of pure revulsion. A hand had come out of the darkness and touched her left breast.
There was no thought process for what she did then. Clara’s hands moved of their own volition, obeying a reflex as old as time. One hand grabbed at the half-dead’s clothes and pulled it close to her. The other hand went over its mouth. Then she brought up her knee, right into its crotch.
It struggled and tried to bite her hand. Its own hands grabbed at her lapels, at her hair. In pure animal fear Clara grabbed its head in both hands and twisted, trying to break the thing’s neck. She felt bones grinding against each other inside the rotten envelope of its flesh and felt its hands grab ever more desperately at her, but she had the element of surprise and she kept twisting, clamped her hands tighter around the half-dead’s head and twisted and twisted—
And then the head came off in her hands. It felt like she was holding a squishy bowling ball. She heard the half-dead’s body slump against the wall, but she couldn’t see anything.
The head kept trying to bite her fingers where they covered its mouth. Clara threw the head away from herself and heard it smack the floor and go rolling down the hall.
Time to run, she thought. She’d been as quiet as she could, but surely someone had heard her outburst or the half-dead calling for Dupree. Clara pushed forward again and found another doorway. She pulled it open and ran through. The hallway beyond was better lit, though not much—an emergency light box was shedding a fading yellow glow from somewhere far down its length. She couldn’t see any half-deads moving through the murky light, so she ran forward, her sensible shoes clopping loudly on the floor. Up ahead she saw a sign and as she got closer she could just read it in the gloom:
INFIRMARY
Stab-Protective Vests
Must Be Worn Beyond
This Point!
There was a massive barred gate beyond the sign. She was just going to have to find a way to get it open. She couldn’t go back, couldn’t—
She heard two things then, and both of them made ice cubes chatter in her blood. One was a cough, from somewhere in the shadows. The other was the BlackBerry which chose that moment to start ringing in her pocket.
35.
Get the fuck off of me,” Gert moaned, but her heart wasn’t in it. Caxton opened another bottle of dish detergent and squirted it into her celly’s eyes.