30 Days of Night: Light of Day (15 page)

“Roger that,” someone said. Marina barely heard. The scuffing sounds were coming more frequently now, from various points around the house. The porch faced rolling dunes and then the Atlantic Ocean, but she was certain that the house was surrounded, with bloodsuckers coming from every side.

The idea had been that with someone stationed in each of several different houses, when the call came that the bloodsuckers had targeted one house, the other members of the team could swarm that house and catch the vampires in the crossfire.

It didn’t appear to be working out that way, and
suddenly the porch didn’t seem like the best place to be. Bloodsuckers could already be inside the house, working toward her, trapping her instead of the other way around.

As Marina snatched up the night vision goggles and pushed through the front door, she caught a flash of movement between her and the ocean, briefly blotting out the strip of moonlight frothing in the surf. She whirled around, raking her gaze across the inside of the house. Shadows darted this way and that, just beyond the rear windows.

No time to put on the goggles. Marina dropped them and clicked on the TRU-UV light clipped to her gun.

From down the beach she heard the stutter of automatic weapons.

Her heart hammered in her chest. She loved action, so why was she so afraid? What had changed?

Her UV light bounced off the windows at the back of the house, blinding her to anyone outside. Bad idea. She lowered the light, blinking to clear her vision.

And something crashed through one of the windows.

M
ARINA SWUNG HER WEAPON
up again, UV light lancing through the room. She squeezed the trigger as she did and phosphorous rounds burst from the barrel, tearing through the toothy face before her. The Rouleaus would regret turning their house over to the Feds, although not spending the night in a hotel.

The roar from her gun drowned out any sounds of battle from other homes, and a ragged cloud of smoke bit at her nostrils. Behind her, footsteps pounded up the front stairs and the porch door banged open. She spun, holding down the trigger, laying down a line of fire that would destroy yet more of the house. Some of the rounds plowed into a bloodsucker charging through the front door, driving it backward.

At the crashing of another window, Marina twitched the gun that way and fired another burst. A bloodsucker hissed and snarled as the rounds chewed into him. Forward momentum carried him into Marina. She bashed the weapon’s stock into his face, knocking him away.

And then the house was quiet.

Up and down the beach, though, firing continued. Flashes ignited the dark sky. Marina found the goggles
and pulled them on, scanning the room for any vampires she might have missed. Phosphorous rounds sizzled in some of the walls. She should call the fire department, but not yet, not until the area was secured.

She raced from the house, vaulting the front steps and landing in sand. A brisk breeze blew off the water, rustling the tall grasses. Marina threaded between dunes heading for the nearest house. Jimbo was there, but now she couldn’t remember if he had reported vampires or not.

The burst of action had distracted her, but on foot, running across glowing green sand, the fear was coming back. She had brought these people here, had developed the plan. If it backfired, that would be more lives on her conscience.

A stretch of fence stood before her, half-buried by a drifting dune. She jumped over it, but something slammed into her at the peak of her jump. They both went down, Marina on the bottom. She landed on her back with her left arm flung out, and something else latched onto it, encircling her wrist with a clawed hand. The goggles had shifted in the fall; instead of helping her see they blocked her field of view and she couldn’t get a hand up to move them.

She still had the weapon in her right hand, finger inside the trigger guard. She squeezed and the gun barked and bucked into the sand. Marina writhed in the grip of two bloodsuckers, trying to twist away. She kicked out, felt the satisfying give of flesh and bone beneath her
booted foot. Teeth gnashed at her shoulder but she was able to draw back her arm and smash her elbow into the thing’s face. It gave a pained grunt. Suddenly she was free. She adjusted the goggles and rolled to her feet, grabbing the weapon as she did. She pinned the nearest vampire with the TRU-UV beam and watched it try to curl away, its flesh beginning to smoke.

When it fell, she put a couple of rounds into it and continued toward the nearest house. The second vampire that had attacked her was out of sight, but she didn’t think it had gone far.

Marina reached the house, where the front room blazed with light. Jimbo stood inside blasting away at his attackers. Marina could see them around him, moving fast. One had picked up a floor lamp and swung it like a club, but Jimbo sensed it coming and dodged the blow. Another took advantage of his being momentarily off balance. Marina aimed through the window and unleashed a burst into the house. The wailing of dying bloodsuckers was like sweet music, helping elevate her mood.

She and Jimbo cleared that house and moved on to the next one. By this point, people were on the radio again and she had a better sense of who was where. She couldn’t raise R.T., but there were two more houses before they reached his.

The original plan started coming together. At the next house, they caught the bloodsuckers between Marina and Jimbo outside and Kat inside. Once that was
cleared they shifted up the beach to the next, taking out a handful of vampires on the way. This must have been a big den, Marina thought, before a more disturbing idea came to her—what if it wasn’t a single den, but multiple ones joining forces? Since Andy Gray’s manifesto had made the news, vampires across the country seemed intent on making sure people knew they were real, and a major assault on a well-to-do area could only help their cause. The attack on the Red-Blooded facility in Nevada had been easy to hush up, because of its remote location, but one on a prosperous beach community on the East Coast would be noticed.

By the time all the members of the team had been accounted for, she figured there had been more than twenty vampires destroyed. A good night’s work.

But R.T. and Tony H. had been bitten.

Marina took the responsibility onto her own shoulders for ending them, blowing their brains to bits with phosphorous rounds. When she did it, tears stung her eyes; an unfamiliar sensation, and one she didn’t like. On top of the strange sadness over Barry Wolnitz that she couldn’t seem to shake, she wondered if she was going soft. Did everyone have a boundary of some sort, a number of killings beyond which it was impossible to function? Marina had never expected to reach any such line. She had never thought of herself as a murderer, because her killings were always done in the service of the greater good.

Keeping R.T. and Tony H. from coming back as
vampires was also in the greater good, she knew. And they had been valuable members of the team, when they lived, each one putting down numerous bloodsuckers. So their lives hadn’t been wasted.

Somehow, at the moment, that knowledge didn’t help much.

Operation Red-Blooded’s budget would cover the damage to the houses, and the residents, law enforcement, and the media would all be pressured to tell the story as one of a serial murderer targeting local families, killed by the task force as he tried to gain entry to one of the homes. Evidence supporting this tale was already being manufactured—Operation Red-Blooded had a special “community relations” unit dedicated to misinformation of just that sort.

Marina knew the truth, though. She knew that she had cost two good agents their lives, that her plan had been flawed, that she never should have stationed any of her people alone. She had underestimated the enemy. She had wanted too much to destroy bloodsuckers, above and beyond any other considerations.

Was it maturity? Or just the recognition of loss, the understanding that she couldn’t win every battle? She wasn’t sure, but there was an aching in her gut that was as new to her as the tears she had shed.

War was hard, with a cost almost too high to bear. It had never hit her before, not in quite the way it recently had. She wasn’t simply a soldier anymore; she was calling the shots.

Now the weight of lost lives pressed down on her, a responsibility she hadn’t known would be so hard to handle. She could only hope it didn’t slow her down, because the war was far from over. More lives would be lost, she was certain.

And for the first time in her professional life, she wondered if she would be able to see it through to the end.

W
ITHOUT A VAMPIRE MENTOR
, Larry Greenbarger had to rely on bits and pieces of data he had picked up as an Operation Red-Blooded researcher to know what his limits and capabilities were. It had taken hours of practice before a mirror to perfect the ability to appear human, even though he had known for some time that vampires could do so. Now that he’d been at it for a while, he could do it more quickly, but holding it for very long was still a strain, and he wondered if there was some trick to it he didn’t know.

But he needed access to a library, to read some journals that hadn’t yet been posted online. So he wore his human disguise as best he could and went into the night, to the McGoogan Library at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he was able to find what he was looking for. It was hard to concentrate, surrounded by humans. He tried to shut out the sound of the blood coursing through them, the smell of it tempting him, and he had to keep dabbing saliva from the corners of his mouth as he read.

What he learned encouraged him. Vitamin D had been thought of for ages as crucial to bone growth and
development, but new research showed that it worked throughout the entire body, not just on bones. It played an active role in preventing cancers and certain infectious diseases, in regulating autoimmune systems, and in strengthening cell defenses. At one time, it had been the only known therapy for tuberculosis, and was also effective against rickets. The more scientists studied it, though, the farther reaching its effects were found to be.

The thing about vitamin D was that it wasn’t an actual vitamin at all. Although it could be obtained by eating fish, it could also be manufactured by the body through exposure to ultraviolet B light.

Sunlight.

This was the link Larry needed. He read feverishly, jotting notes on scraps of paper. Since becoming undead, some changes were completely unexpected—his fine motor skills, for instance, had diminished slightly, so his handwriting had become scrawled and scratchy, even though his strength was much greater.

Through the action of vitamin D, in ways expected and not, sunlight influenced the development and defense of cells throughout the body. Larry had to believe that the vampiric response to sunlight had to do with the effects of vitamin D, and if he knew that then he could figure out how to finesse that response to get the reaction he wanted.

Larry tapped his chin absently as he read, and at one point noticed that his facade had fallen. He summoned the will to reclaim his human appearance, but
he had to get out of there. It was too hard to keep it up so long, and in a place like this, full of people and security cameras, being observed could cause unwanted problems.

On his way out the door, he passed two young women with their arms full of checked-out books. One didn’t become a scientist without passing plenty of time on university campuses, and while he had never been to this one before, it shared certain familiar characteristics with others. Spirited conversation, lithe young bodies, trees and walls plastered with flyers and signs promoting an incredible variety of causes and events, and people with a thirst for knowledge were everywhere. So were people just looking for a good time, and others intent on career preparation, thinking only about earning those paychecks once they graduated, hungering for the cash.

Larry Greenbarger’s hunger these days was of an entirely different sort. He sought knowledge, albeit of a very specific type. But looking at women he once would have wanted to date—although he doubted he’d have had a chance, not with these beauties—all he wanted now was to bend over them and tear through flesh and expose arteries.

He hurried from the library, back to a truck he had stolen in North Platte, on the way out from Colorado. By the time he reached it, his vampire countenance had returned, and he ducked his head and avoided people until he was driving away through the night.

Since his stint at the old man’s house outside Denver, Larry had taken to moving around a lot. He changed cars more often, and he stayed in motels when he couldn’t find victims who lived alone and in sufficiently private surroundings. The hard part was carrying out his scientific research while changing residences frequently, but something he could only classify as a finely tuned survival instinct had kicked in, telling him never to rest for long.

When he came to a new town, in addition to hunting for food, he hunted for vampires. He guessed that they would be drawn to the same quarters he was: places where people were out late, where streets weren’t crowded but not sleepy, as the farming communities and suburbs were. People leaving bars were good options, or prostitutes working lonely street corners, or their customers. Sometimes he came across an insomniac walking around a suburban block late at night, but he couldn’t count on that. Most of the lost souls who inhabited the night lived in the cities.