“This is going to feel pretty good in a couple of seconds,” Caxton explained as she rubbed the detergent into Gert’s eyelids and then used a scrunched-up paper towel to scrape at the girl’s cheeks and mouth. Gert kept trying to push her away, but Caxton held on tight. The pepperballs had left a thick pasty residue all over Gert’s face that was burning her skin. It had to come off, one way or another.
When she’d scrubbed her celly’s face enough she let Gert lie back on the cot and sat down herself in a folding chair. She was exhausted. She used to be able to go without sleep for days at a time, but in the SHU her body had gone flabby and her muscles had started to atrophy. Just fifteen hours to go, she thought. At the end of Malvern’s deadline, either she or the vampire would be dead. Either way, she could rest then. In the meantime she had plenty of work to do.
“What the fuck,” Gert said, rolling over on the cot. It had taken Caxton far too long to revive the girl and get the PAVA residue off her face, but it had to be done. “What happened? What did you just do to me? My mouth tastes like ass.” She smacked her lips. “Soapy ass.”
“You were hit in the face with a couple pepperballs from that robot gun,” Caxton explained. “I got you out of there, but you were suffering from respiratory distress. You weren’t breathing very well. So I found the prison’s infirmary and brought you inside. I had a hell of a time getting the door open. Then I had to clean you up to get the pepper out of your system. The soap you’re tasting is dishwashing detergent. You can’t just wash capsaicin off with water—that makes it worse. You need to scrub it off with soap. Milk works, too, but I couldn’t find any. They keep a ton of detergent on hand here, probably because there’s so much pepper spray in the prison that accidents happen all the time. I tried to be gentle.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Gert said. She tried to open her eyes and grunted in pain. She brought her hands up to rub at her eyes, and Caxton grabbed them and pushed them back down to her sides.
“You’ll just grind it in. Trust me—it’s nasty stuff, but I’ve worked with it before.”
“Back when you were a cop.”
Caxton nodded. Then she realized Gert couldn’t see her, so she said, “Yeah. I’ve used pepper spray on people, a couple of times, when I needed to stop them from running away. It’s supposed to be more humane than shooting them in the legs.”
“I think next time I’ll try my luck with a bullet.” Gert managed to open one eye and stare up at the dark ceiling.
Caxton handed her an ice pack. The infirmary’s refrigerator had gone down when the power was cut, of course, but it was well enough insulated that things in the freezer were still frozen when she opened it. “This’ll help, too. It’ll take some of the swelling down.”
Gert’s face was a mess, puffy and bruised. There was no permanent damage, though. That was the point of pepperballs, of course. They belonged in the middle of what police called the continuum of lethality—a rainbow of options for controlling subjects that went from demanding in a firm voice that they stop all the way up to gunning them down with automatic weapons. Pepperballs were closer to the latter, but you could live through a direct hit and eventually be fine. Well, most of the time. Caxton had read about Victoria Snelgrove, a journalism student who had been caught in the middle of a riot in Boston where the cops had used pepperballs to control the crowd. The cop who shot Snelgrove hadn’t even been aiming for her, but he managed to put one through her eye. It had broken through the bone behind her eye socket and caused massive bleeding in her brain. Ambulances couldn’t reach the scene fast enough because the panicked crowd wouldn’t let them through. The cop who fired that pepperball had received a forty-five-day suspension without pay.
Gert had been lucky. One of the pepperballs had hit the ridge of her eyebrow. An inch lower and it could have killed her.
“You didn’t just leave me there,” Gert said, sounding surprised. “You went out of your way to help me out.”
Caxton shrugged. “You were helping me when you got hit. It seems fair.”