30 Days of Night: Light of Day (16 page)

Larry became increasingly anxious to meet others like him. He needed to know more, to have questions answered that never would have occurred to him as a human researcher. And he needed subjects for his own researches. If he was successful, he would need ways to communicate that success to others.

So during the days, when he couldn’t travel or hunt, he divided his time between research and continuing
his quest online. He haunted websites and message boards he had heard about during his days at Red-Blooded, and he discovered new ones. He read post after post from people who either claimed to be vampires or who idolized them.

Finally, he decided to take a more proactive approach. He spent an hour composing a post, and then more hours spreading it to every vampire-related site he could think of.
“Do you yearn to walk in the Light of Day? To feel the sun without peril? It can happen. I can help you come out of the night.”

He had made it to Joplin, Missouri, before he got a response that seemed legitimate. Most of the responses were clearly from wannabes, and a few from vampires—or poseurs—who thought he was laying some sort of trap.

Which he was, but his bait was the truth.

In a seedy motel on the edge of Joplin, a place where the smell of smoke had soaked into the walls and beds and carpet, and burn marks cut brown divots in the plastic bathroom counter, he checked his in-box and found a response he could barely believe.

“I’ve seen your message,” it said. “And I believe you. I long for daylight, long to no longer feel hemmed in by the dark hours. Hunting during the day … if you can do this, you’re the savior our kind needs. I’m in Louisiana but can travel to you.”

Larry wrote back immediately, informing his correspondent that he was in Missouri but they could meet
in Little Rock, splitting the difference. When he got an affirmative reply, he could barely contain his excitement.

Another vampire, at long last!

And someone upon whom he could test his revised formula.

It was all he could do to wait until dark to hit the road.

T
HE MEET WAS SET
for 2:00
AM
, at Twelfth and Woodrow in downtown Little Rock, not far from the State Capitol. Larry got there a little early and cruised around the neighborhood. There were still a few people out, liquor stores open, bars just shutting down. He saw one police car drive slowly past a clutch of scantily dressed women who scattered at its approach. The car moved away.

Larry drove around for another few minutes, then parked and hiked back to the intersection. He picked a shadowed doorway, a couple of buildings down from the corner, and waited there.

A copper SUV chugged slowly around the corner. Larry stepped from the shadows, just enough so a vampire would know he was there. The darkness wouldn’t interfere with a vampire’s vision, but he wanted the one he’d been corresponding with, who said his name was Cecil, to know where to look.

The SUV had two people in it, white suburban kids from the looks of them, probably looking to score dope. They took one look at Larry and the driver stepped on the gas, leaving rubber on the asphalt as he peeled out. Larry was heading back into the shadows
when a big dark blue Dodge sedan rumbled up to the curb. There were six people inside, three up front and three in back. The one behind the wheel, a wiry, muscular guy with short dark hair, leaned out through his open window.

“You Larry?”

Larry hadn’t been expecting to meet an entire den, just the one named Cecil. The whole thing felt wrong to him. The driver appeared human, as did the car’s other occupants. Larry could appear human, too, but wouldn’t in this sort of situation. This was supposed to be a vampire-to-vampire meeting.

“No,” he said quickly.

“That’s him,” someone in the back said. “Look at him!”

“Get him!”

The doors flew open and all six of them flooded out. They were between nineteen and thirty, Larry guessed. Good old boys, or they would be when they got older. White T-shirts, Western-style snap-button shirts with the sleeves torn off, jeans, heavy boots. Most of them carried wooden stakes, but one had a revolver and one a crossbow.
Too much Buffy,
Larry supposed.

They weren’t
nosferatu,
though. Larry had walked right into a trap, set by what appeared to be half-stupid, redneck vampire hunters. They might have been spurred by the media blitz about vampires, or by the explosion of online discussion about them, or perhaps something more personal. He wasn’t inclined to
sit and chat with them, though. At the moment, he felt pretty stupid himself.

“Freeze, bloodsucker!” one of them called.

Larry smiled. For a moment he had thought they might be a genuine threat. Until he heard that. Then he had to revisit his half-stupid description, rounding up. Two-thirds stupid, maybe. “You’re not serious,” he said.

“As a fuckin’ heart attack.”

“God, you’re like a bad country song. Do you know how to say anything that’s not a hopeless cliché?”

The guy with the revolver aimed it at him. The crossbow was pointed in his general direction, too, but it looked like something from the toy department at an outlet store and he doubted it would do any damage. The four stake-wielders had fanned out around him. No one wanted to close in on him, either afraid of him, their friend’s bullets, or both. “Fuck you,” the gunman said. “Now you die, bloodsucker.”

“Too late,” Larry said. He didn’t wait for the first bullet, but lurched to his right and grabbed the closest guy. He swatted the man’s wrist, snapping it, and the stake flew out of his hand. The guy screamed. Larry lifted him by collar and crotch and threw him into the Dodge hard enough to cave in the roof.

The gunman squeezed his trigger and chips flew from the brick wall behind Larry. Bullets wouldn’t kill him, unless the man was lucky enough to destroy his brain—his encounter with the university guard
had proven that—but that didn’t mean he wanted to deal with the pain should one accidentally strike him. He darted forward, grabbing the throat of another stake-wielder with his left hand and ripping through it, pulling out the man’s Adam’s apple and throwing it, along with gobs of blood and tissue, to the ground. The gunman stared in horror and revulsion, rooted in place, and Larry tackled him next. He broke the man’s arm, jammed his own finger inside the trigger guard, bent the man’s shattered arm up so the gun barrel was inside the man’s mouth. Tears ran from the man’s eyes and he made pathetic whimpering sounds until Larry pulled the trigger.

A crossbow bolt finally sailed from that weapon. It glanced off one of the remaining stake-wielders, who was spinning around to take off at a sprint. He screamed and the crossbow guy started to reload, to what end Larry couldn’t fathom. Did the man imagine that a projectile that couldn’t pass through a T-shirt and a few layers of human skin would hurt him? Larry jumped onto the hood of the Dodge, sprang off it again, and landed on the crossbow guy, knocking him to the ground. Larry tore his throat open with the claws of one hand while shredding his face with the other.

Two remained, and they were running in opposite directions. Larry picked the one who had been hit by the crossbow bolt. He didn’t have much time until people started coming out to see what all the commotion was, he believed, even in this neighborhood. The
guy had covered most of a block at a dead run, and was just starting to glance back over his shoulder, probably thinking he had a good head start, when Larry caught up to him. He slammed his fist into the guy’s back, dropping him onto the sidewalk where he tried to curl into a ball. Larry stepped on his hand.

“Have you found any others?” Larry asked him. “Like me? Any leads?”

The guy was sobbing, almost hysterical. Larry got off his hand, crouched beside him. “Just tell me and I’ll make the pain go away.”

“There’s … m-maybe one … in … Port Gibson…. We’re supposed … to meet him … after you. Tomorrow.”

“Is there anything in the car? A meeting place, a schedule?”

“R-Ronnie has it all … written down. In … the g-g-glove.”

“You mean Cecil?”

“Y-yeah. R-really Ronnie.”

“Thanks.” True to his word, Larry made the pain go away.

Leaving the bloody corpse where it was, he hurried back to the car, yanked open the glove box, found a piece of paper and a map. He pocketed both and ran. Sirens were closing in on the neighborhood, but Larry was far away before they got there.

U
SING THE ARRANGEMENTS MADE
by a half-assed group of vampire hunters against one of his own felt like a kind of betrayal, but Larry told himself that the whole species would benefit from his researches. Risking one to help many was a time-honored tradition in the world of applied biomedical sciences. Anyway, continuing to experiment only on himself could be disastrous, because if he failed to survive any of the tests, then his whole line of research would end with him.

Jesse, the vampire with whom “Cecil” had made arrangements in Port Gibson, Mississippi, was apparently far more trusting than Larry was. He had given an address at which to meet, instead of a street corner. When Larry got there, he found that the address belonged to an abandoned juke joint outside of town, a place with a tin roof and a collapsing screened-in porch and faded signs painted on the outside walls. A dirt road, hemmed in by overhanging trees, led to where it stood by the Bayou Pierre, surrounded by a patchy gravel parking lot. The rusted red-and-white door of a pickup truck leaned against one of the walls. The night was alive with insects—crickets, or cicadas buzzing
incessantly, mosquitoes droning all around. The bass notes of croaking frogs came from the bayou, along with occasional, unidentified splashing sounds. Larry’s sensitive nose caught traces of blood nearly submerged beneath the heavy, fertile scents of bayou water and night-blooming flowers.

Getting out of his truck, he realized how isolated it was here. Was this another trap? Maybe he was just a born sucker. There was no way to approach the place surreptitiously, as he had hoped—either one came down the road or up the bayou. With no other choice, since he was already here, he walked up to the door. “Hello? Anyone here?” He didn’t even know if he was looking for a male or female Jesse.

Male, as it turned out. Jesse was a tall African-American, late twenties in apparent age, with short hair and a long beard. He had been in far better shape than Larry during life, and looked like he would be hard to take in a fight. Maybe this would turn out to have been a really bad idea. But an undercurrent of excitement made Larry’s nerve endings tingle—this was the first real vampire he had met since becoming one himself.

“You Jesse?” Larry asked.

“Yeah … ?” His voice was almost as deep as those bullfrogs out on the bayou.

“Well, I’m not Cecil. My name’s Larry. I just wanted to tell you, Cecil was a fake. He and some friends were just trying to meet our kind so they could get their kicks killing us.”

“That right?”

“Yeah. You … you have internet in here?”

“Got power, internet, whole deal.”

Jesse made no move to invite Larry in. “Look, I’m, uhh … I’m new at this. I mean, I was turned a while ago, but by a vampire who didn’t stick around. I haven’t met any others. So I thought I would keep the appointment that Cecil made, just so I could meet you. But now … well, I don’t know what to do.”

Jesse moved slowly, with what seemed like great deliberation. Larry supposed he had to speed up when he hunted, but so far he didn’t look like a guy to whom fast action was familiar. He shifted his shoulders, raised his head slightly, and extended his right hand.

Larry was surprised. Vampires shook hands? Then again, Jesse had been on the internet, had done something to attract Cecil’s attention, or responded to some outreach by Cecil. Maybe he wasn’t very experienced, either.

He put his hand in Jesse’s, cold skin around his, and they shook. “Have you met many others? Did you have anyone to show you the ropes?”

Jesse shrugged again, a motion that took a while. “Couple.”

Larry needed to find a way to overpower the larger vampire. In the truck he had heavy ropes and thick chains, padlocks, a leather face mask with built-in ball gag from a bondage shop that wouldn’t come close to fitting over Jesse’s huge head. He had prepared for the
transport and storage, but figured he would have to come up with the capture on the fly, once he found out what the lay of the land was. Now that he was here, he was fresh out of ideas.

At Operation Red-Blooded they’d had ways of rendering vampires unconscious, souped-up forms of anesthesia. Larry hadn’t taken any of those with him when he left, and had been too busy working on his sunlight research to try to invent one. Anyway, without vampires to test it on, he wouldn’t know what would knock out and what wouldn’t. He had come to Jesse because he needed a test subject, so he was stuck in a vicious circle.

Jesse watched him with a thoughtful expression.
Probably wondering why I’m here,
Larry thought,
why I don’t say anything.
His mind rushed in every direction at once, never settling on anything helpful. He felt the same way he had in life on those rare occasions when he found himself trying to get acquainted with an attractive woman.

“Listen, Jesse,” he said at last. “This will sound kind of weird, but when I was alive, I was a scientist. Now I’m still doing science, trying to work out a formula that will let us go out in the daylight without being destroyed. I need someone to test it on. Would you be willing to do that?”

Jesse shrugged again, a little more animatedly this time. “Here?”

“I have my equipment set up in a place in Arkansas.
Little Rock. We’d have to go there. And we should leave tonight, while it’s dark.”

Jesse looked at the run-down juke joint. “I got some stuff.”

“We can take it.”

“Okay,” Jesse said.

And just like that, Larry had his guinea pig.

T
HEY DROVE THROUGH THE
night and made it back to the house Larry had found near downtown Little Rock just before dawn. The house’s original owner, a woman in her early fifties with lustrous black hair and skin like café au lait and blood as sweet as any he had ever tasted, was still in her bedroom, starting to go a little sour now. The house was on a corner, with two floors and a side yard surrounded by a high stone wall, which was what had attracted Larry to it in the first place. The indescribable flavor of its owner was merely a fringe benefit.