30 Days of Night: Light of Day (18 page)

His father tried to put up a brave front. He argued with the men, and then he spat the cigarette out, tip glowing in the dusk, and it bounced off the crisp pants leg of one of the men, sparks flying, and landed in the gutter.

The man brought up a shotgun, looking, in Rocco’s memory, like a giant steel phallus rising suddenly from underneath the raincoat. Rocco’s father dropped the paper bag. Bottles smashed on the sidewalk and booze burbled over the curb. Sal DelVecchio started to turn, to run away for what must have been the first time in his life, but the shotgun, held waist-high, ejaculated flame and smoke and Rocco’s father was cut almost in half, blood and flesh pelting the brownstone behind him like a heavy spring rain.

Rocco had not known that his father was involved with gangsters, or that the man knew the meaning of fear. He had not known, either, until weeks later that his mother had been seeing Mr. Canilo from two blocks over, even during the time that his father was alive. But he learned fast.

The next time that everything he knew and believed was snatched away from Rocco was thirteen years later. He had worked for Mr. Caputo for a couple of years by then. Caputo was getting old, but he still ran the neighborhood, and he pretended he didn’t know what had happened to Rocco’s father, so Rocco pretended the same thing. He was working his way up in the organization, biding his time, waiting for a chance to remind Caputo of what he had seen.

Then one night Rocco was out with friends, other guys on the come, and they had a few drinks in a bar and then a couple more. While they were sitting at a table, laughing and telling dirty stories, a couple of women in a booth, who were nursing Bloody Marys like they had cost a hundred bucks each, started giving Rocco and Benjy the eye. Rocco sent over another pair of Marys, although they still hadn’t finished the first two, and when they acknowledged the gift, he touched his fingertip to his brow in a casual salute. One of the women, the one with straight black hair and a red satin blouse, touched her fingers to her lips. Rocco knew which one he was going home with.

Outside, they started to get acquainted. Her name
was Maria and she lived with her roommate, but they had separate bedrooms. She didn’t follow baseball but thought the Yankees were all right, and she liked to go to the races. She liked everything fast, she said, the faster the better. Rocco laughed and took her in his arms and squeezed her, and she let one of her hands slide down and cup his ass. “There’s an alley right over there,” she whispered, her voice pleasantly husky.

He led the way, not about to let a woman make all the moves. When they got into the alley he kissed her, forcing his tongue between her lips. It met her tongue, and there seemed to be a lot of it, swirling against his, and then she held his arms in her hands, her grip impossibly strong, and then took her mouth away from his and kissed his cheek and then his neck and then she tore into him like a starving dog that had happened across a roadkill squirrel.

And so Rocco learned his lesson again. At any time, it can all go away.

The Feds had taught him the same thing again most recently. He had known it could happen, of course. The whole point of a safe house was that it was safe, but also that it could be walked away from with no notice whatsoever. You didn’t keep anything in it you didn’t mind losing, because if you came back and found it compromised, you weren’t even going inside. He had thought it was secure, though, had been using it for a couple of years now without any problems. Even other vampires, in the United States from overseas to try to
reduce the sheer number of
nosferatu
, hadn’t managed to find them there. It was on the kind of block where people kept to themselves, where no one wanted to ask questions because they wouldn’t want to answer any that were asked of them.

Probably, in retrospect, they had stayed too long, let it become too comfortable. Because somehow the Feds figured out where they were and they rushed the place with their guns and their UV lights. Rocco and the others had various escape plans in place, of course, each of which involved the willing sacrifice of certain members of the den. Still, they had lost Valentine and Lothar, Ivy and Caleb and Moe. That left only Rocco, Shiloh, Goldie, Winston, and Brick. The whole thing had been a disaster. Half the den, gone.

In an instant. Fuck.

They had spent that day in the basement of a building in New York’s midtown, tucked in cages along with the personal possessions of the tenants, the rolled-up carpets and old TVs and boxes of baby photos that didn’t fit in the apartments but that the owners couldn’t bear to part with. When night came they moved on, but it took four more nights before they found a suitable haven. Barely suitable, at that. The building had been a market, so close to the East River they could smell it. A supermarket had come into the neighborhood and the market had died a slow but certain death, and since then no one had leased the space. The outside was covered with graffiti now, overlapping
so thickly that almost nothing could be read, including the real estate broker’s sign. The fact that the broker hadn’t bothered replacing the sign was testament to the hopelessness of the place.

A few bums had been squatting there, but the
nosferatu
made a meal of them, and even turned one, a strapping Puerto Rican guy named Angel. They needed to start reconstituting the den, and it wouldn’t hurt to include someone who knew the ins and outs of the neighborhood. Besides, his name made Rocco laugh.

They were sitting in the new place, in the back where there had been storage shelves and a couple of wooden desks, enjoying the last of Angel’s former friends. Rocco had been deep in thought, but Shiloh leaned her head against his leg. A trail of drying blood ran down her chin and the curve of her left breast, disappearing beneath her loose blouse. “Everything okay, babe?” she asked.

He almost gave the glib answer, but he stopped himself. “No,” he said. “Everything is far from okay.”

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

He shook long dark hair off his face. “What we have here … we could lose it again. We exist from day to day, from minute to minute, always at their mercy. They’re cattle, but they’re cattle with claws and they want our utter extinction, nothing less. Not coexistence, not truce, but extinction.”

“Tell us something we don’t know,” Goldie said. “Always been that way, always will.”

“No!” Rocco burned with a righteous wrath. He had to let it out or it would burn him from the inside out. “No, it will
not
always be that way. We can’t go on like this, surviving at the whim of a society that despises us when it even acknowledges our existence. More than ever, I know we’re on the right path. They can operate freely, by night or day, while we’ve stayed hidden away so they wouldn’t know we’re here. We’ve already taken the first steps toward changing that—targeting public figures and making it clear who did it. Some in the press try to claim that we’re only pretend vampires, brain-damaged humans who want to make it seem like we’re
nosferatu,
but the word is getting through that filter, little by little.”

“That’s because you’re a genius, babe,” Shiloh said.

“Possibly,” Rocco said. “Anyway, we’re on the right track. And we’ve been badly damaged, lost some good friends. We can’t let that slow us or dissuade us, though. We need to keep up the pressure, strike whenever we can, leave bodies in the streets empty of blood so everyone will know that we’re out here. We need a way to make an even bigger splash next time.”

“Isn’t that how they found us before?” Winston asked. “Because we didn’t try to hide our meals?”

“Possibly. That doesn’t matter. Our individual existences don’t matter. What matters is the statement. I almost feel like I’m being self-aggrandizing here, but what matters to me isn’t my undeath, it’s what we’re fighting for. That’s bigger than any of us. It’s more
important than survival. We’re talking about an entire species, a superior species. We can’t let them rule our world any longer. The time has come to take it back, and I for one won’t rest until we do.”

The
nosferatu
murmured assent, and Shiloh clapped her hands together, palms flat and fingers splayed out, like a four-year-old.

Rocco wished there had been more of them around to hear his speech. A dozen, a hundred, even a thousand. One night, there would be. One night, he would stand before legions, and he would whip them to a frenzy, and they would go forth and conquer the bloodbags.

It would take a while to reach that stage, though, and in the meantime he was hungry. “Angel?” he asked, “is there anything left in that woman you’re sitting on?”

W
ALKER SAT IN FRONT
of the computer with a tall glass of blood close at hand. He had developed a real taste for the stuff. It was the right combination of salty and sweet, like popping a potato chip and a Hershey Kiss in his mouth at the same time. It was rich and thick, not quite milkshake consistency but more substantial than water or soda. He could taste slight variations from one person to another, which he guessed had to do with diet more than anything else. So far he hadn’t been able to predict whether or not one person’s would taste better than another’s, but he figured that would come when he had more data.

He had finished checking his auctions for the day. An original 1950s Roy Rogers kids’ guitar looked like it would bring a couple grand. There were lots of replicas on the market, but the real thing didn’t come along very often.

As always in the early evenings, before it was dark enough to go hunting, Walker spent some time skipping around the profusion of vampire sites. He had correspondences going with various people on them, some he had known when he was doing Andy Gray’s bidding,
others he had met since Andy’s disappearance. Most of them claimed to be vampires, but he didn’t believe any of them. Sleeping during the day, wearing black, and drinking a lot of tomato juice didn’t make someone a vampire. He and Mitch weren’t even vampires, and they were killing real people and drinking real blood.

But he was starting to wonder if there was something about vampirism that made them fear the internet, or interfered with their ability to use a keyboard. Sure, the net had always been about nine-tenths fakes and poseurs anyway. But that percentage got even worse when it came to the undead. Vampire fans talking about being vampires with other vampire fans seemed like a particularly strange means of masturbation, and it wasn’t getting him anywhere.

He took a swig while yet another message board was loading. He set the glass down with a clunk and watched the topics appear on the screen. Same old, same old … wait a second. This one was new. He clicked on the subject and went to the message.

“Listen to this, Mitch,” he said.

“What?” Mitch was across the room, lying on a couch. He had a glass of good old type AB nearby too, along with a bag of Cheetos.

“ ‘Do you yearn to walk in the Light of Day?’ ” Walker read. “ ‘To feel the sun without peril? It can happen. I can help you come out of the night.’ ”

“Sounds like some sort of feminine hygiene product.”

“Bullshit,” Walker said. “It’s a post on here.”

“On a vampire site?”

“Yes, on a vampire site, what do you think? Dude, sometimes you’re just thick.”

Mitch rustled the bag. “I keep eating these, I will be.”

In truth, they were both in somewhat better shape than they had been in years. The nights of hunting, the physical exertion they put into the task, had been good for them. “So what do you think?”

“Of what?”

“Of the post I just read you, duh. Sounds interesting to me.”

“I guess.”

“I mean … all the fakes and wannabes on here don’t have to really worry about sunlight, do they? Only the real deal has that concern.”

“I don’t know,” Mitch said. “Some of those pale Gothy types might stroke pretty bad if they went in the sun.”

“That’s not the same thing. It won’t kill them.”

“True.”

“You think it’s legit?”

“I have no idea, man.”

“I mean, it sounds like kind of a come-on. Like this person is selling something. It’s like those ‘make your dick bigger’ ads or something. But there’s no mention of money. And even if it is … nobody’s going to buy unless they’re for real, right?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“I’m going to answer it,” Walker said. “Let’s see what this is all about.”

“Knock yourself out, Walker.”

“Bite me. Okay, here goes.”

Walker drained his glass, then began typing, reading aloud to Mitch as he did so. “ ‘I’m intrigued by your post, to say the least. Can you really help with the sunlight concern? I’m so tired of giving daylight to the cattle. I would like more information, please.’ ”

“Fine, whatever,” Mitch said.

“Or, wait … it’s not just me, it’s
us
. And if they think we’re a whole group of vampires, we’ll probably get a quicker reply.” He corrected the email, using the plural, and adding, “ ‘We’re all very excited by the prospect of hearing from you.’ ” Once again, he read it to Mitch.

“That’s better,” Mitch said.

“Yeah. That ought to make us sound interesting. If this was posted by a vampire, maybe we can set up a meeting.”

“That’s what this has all been about, right? I’m tired of waiting. I want to be undead, and the sooner the better.”

“Working on it, dude,” Walker said. “Working on it.”

T
HERE WAS A SAMENESS
to the crime scenes that Alex Ziccarria found depressing.

It had been more than a week since there was a new one in the city. But some had cropped up in the suburbs, out of the Chicago PD’s jurisdiction. The MO had sounded so similar, however, that he and Larissa Dixson had appealed to the Clark County sheriffs for help tracking any possibly related cases throughout the county, and when the most recent body was found, they got the word almost as quickly as the locals did.

This one was in Tinley Park. Like most of the others, this victim was an unmarried woman. One victim had been married, but her husband was on his third deployment in Iraq, so she lived essentially alone. Their ages varied, but they were usually between their mid-twenties to midfifties, and most in their thirties. The majority were firmly middle class, although a couple in the city had been poor, one a prostitute and one working full-time but below the poverty level. None had been wealthy. With wealth came bigger houses, better security, more people around. Whoever was preying on these women liked to target those who didn’t have a lot
of people in their lives, who were lonely, who worked late hours and came home well after dark. The usual routine seemed to be to follow them home, or possibly to choose them and then wait near their homes, to force their way inside when the victim arrived, to cut the throat and drain the body.