30 Days of Night: Light of Day (10 page)

He would have to try the stuff on himself.

He figured he didn’t have much to lose. If it killed him—well, he was already dead. If he stopped walking around, that would just mean one less vampire in the world. No great loss. He liked being upright and sentient, if not alive, and he enjoyed his own company, but his guess was that if he finally died completely, he wouldn’t be in any position to miss himself. He didn’t have any faith in the idea of an afterlife. If heaven or hell did exist, their keepers wouldn’t let vampires circumvent the system; therefore he didn’t have to worry that by destroying himself he would subject himself to
eternal torment. Still, as morning neared, he grew anxious, and when the sun crested the horizon his hands were trembling a little.

Larry had to reuse the syringe he had used on the rat, since he hadn’t yet acquired a steady supply of those. He drew some of his formula up into the tube, pushed it down until it squirted, tapped the needle (which he had sterilized with flame). Then he tied off his bicep with a kitchen towel, squeezed his fist until the veins in his forearm popped, and stuck himself.

A moment’s prick, and then a warm feeling spread through his arm. He began to sweat. The fire inside him heated up, turning his arm red and prickly.
Mistake? Maybe. Too soon to tell. Give it time.

He felt his face flushing, and his chest. The fire moved through his body, but as it did it cooled off again. His arm started to go pale, and in another minute he was back to normal.

It hadn’t killed him, at least not yet.

But he didn’t know if it had done anything for him, either.

Only one way to find out. Larry yanked the back door open and stepped out into the yard, into the morning sunlight, before he could come up with some rationalization why he shouldn’t. His steps were hesitant, faltering, but he was committed. He stood on the lawn, arms out, letting the sun take him.

He didn’t remember it being so bright before. It hurt his eyes. He squinted, blinking back tears.

But his flesh didn’t smolder, didn’t smoke or burst into flames.

He touched his teeth, his face, to make sure he hadn’t accidentally reverted to humanity. Nothing had changed.

He was
nosferatu,
but he could walk in the light of day.

And he hungered.

He had fed, just before sunrise, because he wanted to be at his strongest. It didn’t matter. He was starving.

Nobody was outside, that he could see, but he knew there were houses not too very far away, and that they were occupied. People lived in them, bodies full of veins pulsing with rich, fresh blood. The blood that he needed, more than he had ever needed anything. He caught its scent on the air.

He ran toward the back fence, not bothering to open the gate. He jumped, and his leap carried him high over the fence, with feet to spare. He landed lightly on the other side and kept running. Across a stream, through a patch of forested land (he swatted at a small tree in his way; the trunk splintered and the treetop crashed down). Another fence, this one taller and wrought iron, stood in his way. He didn’t know if he would be able to leap this one so he grabbed one of the iron bars in both hands and shoved it to the side, then did the same to the bar next to it, making a hole big enough to squeeze through. By the time he got to the house he heard people inside shrieking at him, or
at each other. He wasn’t listening; the world was a cacophony of sounds, bird noises, voices, distant cars, and everywhere the constant liquid rush of blood moving through veins and arteries.

Larry approached the back door and pounded on it once with both fists. It was solid wood but it cracked and groaned and the hinges snapped and the whole thing fell inward with a deafening boom. He stepped on the door and found himself inside. A white-haired man faced him with a shotgun in his quaking hands; behind him were a woman about his age, and a younger woman, maybe just a teenager or not much older. Tears glistened on their faces.

The man spoke, and Larry thought he said “Get out!” But Larry hungered, and there were meals here for the taking. He kept advancing. The man pulled the trigger and the gun roared and Larry was knocked almost off his feet by lead shot, his right arm, held out in front of him, nearly torn off. He ignored the pain and kept going. He noted, almost offhandedly, that the wounds he had suffered were already beginning to close, to heal.

Larry snatched the shotgun from the man’s hands and hurled it to one side. It smashed through plaster and lodged in the wall, barrel first. The man screamed something else and threw a punch. Larry caught his wrist, yanked on it. The arm separated from the shoulder, flesh tearing, muscle and tendon holding an instant longer but then giving way. Blood showered the
floor, delicious blood. Larry didn’t stop to feed, though. As the man fainted and collapsed, Larry brushed him aside and went for the women. They were screaming and battering him with small fists, their blows as meaningless to him as the footfalls of fruit flies. He backhanded the older one, nearly severing her head, then grabbed the younger one and pulled her to him and bit her neck where it met the curve of her shoulder, and he drank deep.

W
HILE HE SAT INSIDE
the neighboring home, filling himself and more on his three victims, the rage that had swept over Larry subsided. He realized he was eating himself sick, forcing more and more blood down his throat even though he was fully sated. He pushed the last body, that of the old man, aside, forced himself to his feet, and went to the window.

Broad daylight outside now, leaves and grass sparkling with dew that caught the morning sun. He had been in this house for most of an hour. The time had passed in a blur, not unlike the frenzy that had brought him here in the first place.

From the doorway, he surveyed the damage he had caused. The door was utterly destroyed; he was standing on it. The bars of the wrought iron fence bowed out like parentheses. He had cleared an eight-foot fence behind his borrowed house as easily as a track star taking a hurdle. The kitchen of this small house was covered in blood, ceiling, walls, and floor, from the unspeakable damage he had done to the people he’d encountered here.

Since becoming undead, his physical power had been remarkable. In life he had never been athletic or strong,
so he had marveled at the things he could do after his transformation. But even then, he had never been this powerful. Not even close.

Larry took a couple steps out the doorway, into the sun. He felt its warmth on his bare arms, turned his blood-slicked face to it.

And he remembered the way his experimental rat had attacked and overpowered a much larger dog, before breaking its tether and racing away.

Even now, standing for just moments in direct sun, he felt a fury building up in him, a need to crush, to destroy, to maim and murder. Recognizing it, he darted back into the house. There he drove his fists through the wooden doors of a kitchen cabinet, grabbed the supporting posts, and ripped the whole thing from the wall. Dishes and glassware crashed to the bloody floor. He turned to the refrigerator, lifted it from its position next to another cabinet, and hurled it through the back wall and out into the yard.

His rage abated, Larry stayed in the house and out of the sun for another few minutes, trying to think.

The formula he had taken was a slightly altered version of what he had given the rat. Both had responded to sunlight with uncontrolled ferocity and impossible strength. But it hadn’t incinerated either of them.

He knelt on the tacky floor next to the old man and was able to suck a little more blood from the corpse. Was everybody old in this neighborhood? He had thought Colorado full of young and vibrant people,
skiers and mountain climbers and bikers, but in this area everyone he encountered had white hair and bodies that had long since given way to age and gravity.

The blood calmed him more, but he knew he had a problem. He had to get back to the house he had borrowed, had to load up what stolen equipment he could and get out of the area. He had thrown a refrigerator through the wall of this house. If the authorities hadn’t been notified yet, they soon would be. Neighbors didn’t live right on top of each other here, but some things wouldn’t go unnoticed for long. His fit of demolition would draw the police, and they would find the bodies, and a massive hunt would ensue. He wanted to be on his way before it started.

But if he went back out into the sun, he risked losing control again.

He went deeper into the house, tugged a bedspread off a bed, and draped it over himself. So shielded, he rushed out into the sun again, through the gap in the fence (he could barely squeeze through it this time, making him wonder how he had done it so easily before), and dashed back to the house he had occupied.

When the police found what was left of the bodies, they would go over the house with the proverbial finetoothed comb. He would have to burn the place to the ground to hide all traces of his occupation, and even that would be no guarantee. So he would have to count on the fact that he had left the old Larry Greenbarger behind in Nevada, that even finding his fingerprints or
hair follicles or whatever else he might have left behind wouldn’t point to where he was going. All those clues would point to was someone presumed to be dead, or at least missing.

Where he was going, even he didn’t know yet. Away from Colorado, that was all he could say for certain.

He would need to find himself a new safe place, and soon. Someplace he could continue to study and experiment. He still had a lot of work to do, although he had made undeniable progress.

In all of history, as far as he knew, no one had come up with a means of enabling the undead to walk in the daylight. He now had done so, but his method was not yet perfect. There had to be a way to tamp down the sudden, out-of-control rage, while still accessing the incredible strength that came with it.

When he found the way and spread the word to the bloodsucker community, the nature of vampirism would be forever altered.

Larry had not become part of Operation Red-Blooded out of any special hatred of the undead. He had been skeptical well into the first year of his employment there, until he started interacting with vampires in person. Confronted with the undeniable evidence of their existence, he willingly altered his beliefs. He was a scientist, and Red-Blooded paid him— paid him well—to do science. They assigned a task and then got out of the way and let him work. Few professional scientists he’d known had a better situation.

So becoming one of them himself had not been as personally repugnant to him as it might have seemed. After all, even as
nosferatu,
he continued to do science, the kind he liked, with practical real-world applications. It was only the potential beneficiaries of his work who had changed.

Vampires had always been held back because the sun’s rays could destroy them. That weakness kept them from ever making a real stand against humanity, from using their greater strength and ruthlessness to completely overwhelm their prey.

Without that limitation, though … anything was possible. Vampires who could survive the sun—who were, in fact, strengthened by its rays, who could tap into the ferocity it gave them without being so overwhelmed that they lost all control—would be unstoppable. Perfect killing machines.

Deep in their heart of hearts, every scientist wanted to make a difference.

Larry Greenbarger knew, finally, that he would.

In life, he had been one scientist among thousands, if not more. He would never have been an Albert Einstein, a Christiaan Barnard, a Marie Curie. In undeath, however, with his specific background in vampire physiology, he was unique, more significant than he ever had been in life. He would make a big difference indeed. The impact of his work would shake the world, and in very short order. He started loading up the car. As soon as darkness fell, he had to hit the road.

“Y
OU CAN’T GIVE THEM
anything, Marina,” Zachary Kleefeld said.

“I know that.”

“I mean nothing at all. Volunteer nothing. If they ask you what day it is, you have to ask them to state what days it might be so you can choose one of theirs.”

“Don’t worry, Zach,” Marina said. “I know the score.”

“But you’ve never done it before. You don’t know what it’s like until you’re sitting in that chair with all those old white men staring at you.”

“Zach, a vampire tried to tongue-kiss me the other day. I’m just lucky it didn’t actually drool in my mouth. I think I—”

He waved a hand dismissively. “That’s nothing. Not compared to this. I’ve seen people—hard, experienced people who have been around the block—completely fall apart in that chair.”

The Acting Director was trying to prepare her for testimony before a Senate subcommittee. The committee’s focus was on homeland security, and they wanted to get to the bottom of the vampire story, once and for all, or so they said. Kleefeld had tried to get himself
substituted as a witness, but they had insisted that they wanted to interview a field agent.

The problem was, Operation Red-Blooded’s official line was that vampires didn’t exist. The agency’s main thrust in recent weeks had been pushing back against the media onslaught, trying to discredit Andy Gray and to drive stories about vampires off the front pages and back into the supermarket tabloids where they belonged.

If the public came to believe in vampires, not only would mass panic likely come about, but every law enforcement and intelligence operation in the country would want a piece of the battle. Maybe even the military. As long as no one knew they were a threat, Red-Blooded was free to function as it wished. Its funding was black bag, off the books, and they liked it that way. The agency’s existence was so classified that there were people working in the Director of National Security’s office who had never heard of it.

The subcommittee members were sworn to secrecy, of course. Senators sitting on that panel had security clearance to be there. Every senator could keep a secret, otherwise not one of them would ever be re-elected. But those secrets had a tendency to come out sooner or later, once an administration changed or a senator lost a seat or wrote a tell-all book.