They found their first half-dead at the end of a short corridor. It poked its head out of a door as if looking to see what was making all that noise. The answer was Gert, who roared as she stabbed and cut her way through the door, leaving the half-dead in pieces. On the other side of the door was a broad room filled with old ratty couches and darkened vending machines. A staff lounge for COs, perhaps, in better times. The only light came through the door behind the two women, but it was enough to show them the three half-deads crouched around a dead television monitor.
“Get clear,” Caxton yelled, as she brought her shotgun around to blow away the one nearest to her. Gert ignored her and jumped onto the half-dead she’d been aiming at, grabbing its ear and yanking its head sideways to stab at its throat. The other two tried to scramble over the back of the couch, but Caxton was waiting for them. She knocked one’s face in with the butt of her shotgun, then brought the other one down with a shot to the back of its neck. The plastic bullet passed right through its throat and its head slumped over to the left, dangling by a few scraps of skin. It kept running. Caxton followed close on its heels and knocked it to the floor, then smashed in the back of its skull with one quick blow.
There was a stairwell on the other side of the lounge. Gert was already racing down its steps, into deep gloom. Caxton followed more slowly, knowing that Gert could be rushing into certain death. Half-deads were cowardly and not very bright, but they were perfectly capable of setting cunning traps for the unwary.
At the next landing down someone had left a votive candle burning to give a little bit of light. It showed Caxton a door leading into the second floor of the central tower. Gert slammed into the door with her shoulder hard enough to knock it off its hinges. She didn’t need to—it was unlocked, and it slapped open with a loud bang as Gert staggered out into a large open space.
Caxton reloaded her shotgun as she ran after her celly knowing that if Gert’s drugged-up recklessness was going to get them killed, this was the precise moment when it would happen. The room behind the door would be full of half-deads, she thought. Or it would be booby-trapped. A net would fall down over them as they passed through the door, or who knew? Maybe someone had left land mines lying around. Caxton doubted that a modern prison would have many land mines in its inventory, but she wouldn’t put it past SCI-Marcy from what she’d seen so far. She expected to find machine-gun nests inside the big room, or lines of half-deads holding wicked carving knives, or even a cohort of live, human COs holding assault rifles, turned to Malvern’s cause through some trickery.
The last thing she expected was to find the warden working at a desk, apparently all alone.
“Gert, get back,” Caxton said, as Gert started rushing toward the older woman.
Warden Bellows was sitting behind a massive desk that was bathed in yellow light. A generator sat on the floor behind her, chugging away and pouring black smoke up at the ceiling. The light came from a pair of portable metal stands holding miniature searchlights, both of which were focused directly on the desk. The warden’s face was only partly visible, only her mouth and her nose lit up enough to be recognizable. In the darkness beyond the reach of the light one of her eyes twinkled.
Caxton couldn’t see much of the rest of the big room, but she had the impression it was full of cages, full of small prison cells made of nothing but bars and locks.
The warden looked up and must have seen Caxton staring into the shadows. “This used to be the psychiatric ward,” Bellows said. “Now we use the cages as cooling-down rooms. When prisoners get too violent we bring them here and let them sit in a cage for a while. Never more than twenty-four hours. If they can’t calm down after that long, we move them to the SHU.”