There was an odd sound just at the edge of her hearing. At first she thought it might be a siren . . . and then she knew it wasn’t.
It was screaming.
Treatments.
Claire felt her knees go weak. She sank down on the bed, wincing at the shrill squeak of the springs, and took a deep breath. I have to get out of here.
She felt around the back of her pants to where she’d stashed the paper clip.
It was still there, tangled up in thin acid-washed threads. It took time and patience and cramping fingers to work the paper clip free; after she’d finally succeeded, she took a break, working her sore, still-pinned hands and trying to get some feeling back into them. The guards who’d taken her in had, not unexpectedly, put the cuffs on too tightly, and she had throbbing pain around her wrists. Her hands felt bloated and tingly, and for lack of anything better to do at the moment, she stretched out prone on the bed and held her hands up at a painful angle to reduce the blood flow. The tingling faded in a couple of minutes, and the fingers felt better. Still clumsy, but better.
She sat up again, took a deep breath, and started working with the paper clip. It took a long time to pick the lock on the handcuffs. Myrnin had drilled her, at one time, in the finer points of the art; he’d felt it was a necessary skill to have, in Morganville, and it turned out he was almost certainly right. Still, she was rusty, and it took too long to bend the tough, thick clip into the right shapes, and to maneuver it into position. Then she had to fight her own burning, cramping muscles to delicately trip all the little triggers inside the lock, but finally she felt the first of the cuffs slip free. The second took only about a third as much time, now that she had the right angle on the problem.
Freed, she took a few seconds to breathe and silently celebrate. Then she checked the drawers of her little room. As expected, there were ugly cotton undies, in a variety of sizes, and some equally ugly sports bras (though she quickly switched out what she’d been given back at the Vampire Mall, since even this stuff was an upgrade). Then she pulled on the drawer and found it slid smoothly, in and out.
Good news.
Claire padded the area beneath the drawer with the pillow from the bed, emptied out what was inside, and yanked hard on the mechanism. It caught firmly, refusing to slide out. She worked it up and down, side to side, until one of the small wheels inside slipped free of the guides, and then the left side popped free. From there it was simple enough to wrench it loose from the right, but the drawer was heavy and awkward, and she was glad she’d put the pillow in place to catch it as it fell or the noise would have echoed down that hall—quiet, now that the screaming had faded away.
Once the drawer was out, she saw the metal guides screwed into its sides. Perfect.
Claire worked on her paper clip until it was twisted into a makeshift screwdriver that slotted into the heads of the screws. Working with it took muscle power, sweat, patience, and more strained muscles, but she managed to loosen two out of three fasteners on one side, and the third didn’t matter; she torqued the metal until it ripped loose.
She’d started handcuffed, armed with a paper clip. Now she had a ten-inch strip of metal with sharp edges, handcuffs, and a paper clip. Her odds were improving all the time.
There wouldn’t be time to fashion the metal properly, but she found that using the heavy edges of the wooden drawer, she could press on the metal and fold it into a sharp point. An extra pair of undies wrapped nicely around the other end, to provide a decent grip.
Instant knife.
She worked on the other guide and got it free, and bent it into a springy U-shape. With the carefully wrapped addition of a sports bra, she had a passable slingshot. The screws she’d loosened provided ammunition. So did pieces she managed to tease out of the bed’s frame.
The drawer went back in, filled with the clothing, and the pillow back on the bed. At first glance, everything looked perfectly normal.
Claire made a sheath for her knife out of cardboard (they’d left some with crayons, for drawing, in a drawer) and fastened it with a loop of torn elastic to the belt loop of her jeans. Then she put the sheath down the side of her leg, inside the jeans, and slid the knife in. It did show, but not as much as it would have if the jeans had been tighter. Good enough.
The ammunition for the makeshift slingshot went into her pockets. On impulse, she broke up the crayons and added those, too. And the button off her blue jeans.
She was contemplating what to do with the handcuffs when the door rattled, and after a second’s thought, she jammed the slingshot down the small of her back, and put the cuffs back around her wrists, but just barely clicked on . . . loose enough that she could get her hands free with a brisk shake.
She was standing in the middle of the room looking crestfallen when Dr. Anderson swung the door open again. “Can you please take these off now?” she asked, and tried to sound chastened. “They hurt.”
“In a while,” Anderson said, which was exactly what Claire had expected her to say. She gestured for Claire to come out, and she did. The metal slingshot jammed against her back felt raw and awkward, and she knew it would be visible from behind, poking out against her thin shirt, but Anderson didn’t go behind her; she took her elbow and walked next to her quickly down the hallway toward the end. No one passed them, and when Claire risked a look behind, she didn’t see anyone following, either.
“Not much of a staff,” she said.
“We’re just hiring,” Anderson said. “You and your friend are our very first patients. I’m sure you’re honored.”
That wasn’t how Claire would have put it, but she didn’t have a chance to fire off a sarcastic rejoinder, either, because they turned the corner to the left and arrived at another metal door. This one had a sign that read: TREATMENT ROOM. NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT PRIOR AUTHORIZATION. Anderson pulled a thick set of keys from her belt to open it up.
The screaming had started again—muffled, but clearly coming from the other side of this door.
It swung open, and Claire saw Eve. Her friend was strapped into a chair, completely locked down, and she was being bitten by a vampire. It wasn’t Michael. It was some filthy, wild-eyed hobo with fangs, with his mouth on her throat. A tiny thread of blood dripped down her pale skin showed that he’d hit the vein.
“No!” Claire screamed, and lunged forward—into a plate-glass window that stood between them. “Stop it! Leave her alone!”
“She’s the one who chose this,” Anderson said. “She chose to degrade herself like this, offering herself to the vampires.”
“No, she didn’t! She and Michael—”
“Michael’s a vampire.”
“Stop this!”
“I want you both to see just what they are, these vampires. They’re predators. Parasites. They don’t care about you, except as food, and they never will. Look at him, Claire. Look.”
Anderson forced her to stay still for a torturously long few seconds, and then reached past her to press a button set into the wall next to her. “That’s enough,” she said to someone at the other end of the speaker. “It’s time for the next phase.”
Eve was barely conscious now; she’d stopped screaming, and her skin had an awful bluish cast to it. Two white-coated staffers came into the room through another door behind Eve; one had a Taser, and the other had a silver-coated collar on the end of a long pole. The Taser shocked the feeding vampire away from Eve, and as he snarled and showed bloodied fangs, the second attendant slipped the metal collar over his head and pulled it tight with a trigger mechanism on the side. The vampire choked and tried to pull free, but the attendant pushed it out the door and into a cage beyond.