30 Days of Night: Light of Day (2 page)

He remembered screaming, batting at the person— the young woman—who held him. Her claws had dug into his ankle and his thigh and she had pressed him down onto the couch, slithered into his lap like a lover, her breath fetid and hot, and she had slapped him once across the face, stinging him and silencing his cries, and then she had pressed her mouth against his neck, almost tenderly at first, again like a lover. He remembered swelling inside his soaked pants, the moment more erotically charged than any he had experienced in years, since college really (with Verna McFall, who had been the reason he’d tried to break the socks habit), and thrusting up against her. And then white-hot pain, blinding, and he must have passed out because there were no memories after that, nothing until he woke up, once again behind the couch.

Touching his neck, he found the slash there, the skin dried out, tissuelike, but he could shove the end of his index finger into the hole and wiggle it around.

Larry made it to the secure room and punched in the code on the keypad mounted beside the door. Beeping noises sounded and the lock ground open and he pushed the door in. A light inside blasted like full sun,
so he slapped the wall switch, shutting it off. He didn’t need it.

He could see just fine in the dark.

He went to the nearest body. Andrea Harmon, he remembered. Midfifties, thick around the middle, as smart as any human being he had ever met. She had published four books, three of them obscure scientific texts, but the fourth a popular science book about the biological similarities and differences of immediate family members, and how those things might influence family dynamics. She had even appeared on one of the morning news shows, a network, though he couldn’t recall which one. He had always felt somehow inferior to her and to other, more well-known scientists he met. He wanted to make a difference in the world, to be recognized for his intellectual accomplishments.

Andrea Harmon wouldn’t be writing any more books, though. She was dead, bled out through gaping wounds in her chest and neck. He put his hand in the tacky pool on the floor beside her, then brought it to his face, sniffed it, licked it.

The hunger raged harder, consuming him. He lapped every drop off his palm and fingers, then dropped his face to her body, to one of the biggest wounds, tearing it wider with his many teeth. He shoved his tongue into the opening. No use—she had lived long enough with her wounds to lose most of her blood onto the floor, and he could find only traces, enough to make him feel starved.

He grunted and shoved her aside.

“Who’s there?” a weak voice asked.

He peered through the gloom. More corpses littered the floor, but behind them, tucked into a niche between a big stainless steel freezer and a shelving unit that held emergency blankets, first aid kits, and other supplies, a wounded man huddled, blinking against the darkness. “It’s me.”

“Larry?”

“That’s right. Come on out, Ron.”

Ronald Tapper, that was his name. He and Larry had not been friends, but they knew each other, all the scientists at the facility knew each other. He and Ron had often competed for attention, for the best assistants, the better lab space.

“I’m afraid, Larry. You’re …”

“It’s nothing, Ron. You’re suffering from shock.” His voice didn’t sound the same anymore, the new shapes of mouth and tongue and throat altering it. But it must have sounded similar enough for Ron to recognize. “We need to get you some medical help.”

He stepped over the corpses on the ground. Ron stayed in his niche, thrusting out a hand to ward Larry off.

Larry grabbed Ron’s wrist and pulled (remembering the sensation of being tugged by the ankle, the terror that powerful grip had inspired). Ron burst from the niche into his arms. He opened his mouth and wailed.

And Larry hauled him to his feet, shoved his head
back into the wall hard enough to break plaster, and raked his fingertips (no, his claws, he realized, more than an inch long, jagged and strong) across Ron’s exposed throat.

Blood sprayed from the wound. Larry clamped his mouth over the opening and drank deep.

At last, his hunger could be sated.

This, he knew, was the stuff he craved.

Larry Greenbarger had become
nosferatu
. A vampire. Undead.

Other people might have doubted their senses, questioned that conclusion. But Larry had known plenty of vampires, had studied them, undead and completely dead. He and the other scientists working at this former military base in northern Nevada’s Great Basin country did so on behalf of Operation Red-Blooded, a top-secret government operation dedicated to the eradication of that awful species. He had been probing them for weaknesses, trying to find new ways to exploit their vulnerability to sunlight. Other weapons, crucifixes for example, had long since been proven ineffective, their power to harm vampires relegated to the stuff of mythology. He had been trying to understand what had come to be known as the “Immortal Cell,” with hopes of turning that understanding against them.

Larry knew what he had become, and that realization told him something else: the attackers who had
stormed the base had been
vampires
. Scouring the grounds, it didn’t take long to discover that they had won, for the most part. They had destroyed most of the main lab. Red-Blooded Director Dan Bradstreet had been pleading for death, drenched in blood. Darrel Keating and some of the other top scientists on staff were dead, along with most of the soldiers tasked with force protection. They had blown up the power plant. They had almost totally crushed one of the American government’s most secret facilities.

What they might not have known was that RedBlooded’s tendrils stretched far and wide. They had destroyed the on-site computers, but all the data from those computers was captured on servers buried deep beneath Virginia hillsides, in caverns that could withstand a strategic nuclear strike, and mirrored in still other sites. They had killed scientists, but they had not eliminated data, or science. Red-Blooded paid well and would have no trouble finding new researchers.

Larry loved science. And like many scientists, he was a realist, not a romantic. So then: he had become a vampire, and there was nothing he could do to change that. The temptation to lash himself to some immovable object that would greet the rising sun came and went with barely a moment’s consideration. The urge to survive ran strong in him.

At the same time, he knew that he had access to something most other vampires couldn’t imagine. All the knowledge that Red-Blooded had about his
kind—his new kind—was here, at his fingertips. His allegiance was to science, to knowledge, not to humanity. Human beings had never been particularly nice to him when he was alive—they had tolerated him, they had valued the things his intelligence could do for them. But most people didn’t understand science or scientists, thought of them as some sort of useful subspecies if they thought of them at all.

He couldn’t stay for long. By now there would be choppers en route, fighters scrambling, convoys rolling across desert highways. Sunrise would find clean-up teams already scrubbing the place.

Larry found some laptops and started downloading. Someone in Virginia or elsewhere might clue in to the fact that classified data was being snatched. But that someone might not have heard about the attack, and even if he or she raised an alarm, soldiers could only get here as fast as they could get here. Since they were already on the way, he wouldn’t be changing that. As long as they didn’t shut him out of the system, he would get the data he wanted, spread across several laptops because no single one had enough memory to capture it all.

When he finally left the facility in a stolen truck, Larry still had just over an hour of darkness. Not a lot, but enough to get him safely away. He could hole up for the day, and keep traveling when the sun fell again.

Larry Greenbarger’s world had been reversed in an instant; he had become that which he had worked
against, his days had become nights, and hungers once repulsive to him were suddenly as familiar and mundane as a young boy’s attraction to peanut butter and jelly.

He was nothing if not adaptable. It was all about survival.

With a couple of fresh corpses rolled in a tarp in the back of the truck, laptops safely in the foot well of the passenger seat, he pressed the accelerator to the floor and drove.

“D
UDE, VAMPIRES ARE
REAL
.
”

Mitch stared at Walker as if he had just emerged, wearing a bikini, from inside a giant cake. Walker shuddered. He had seen himself naked since birth, but that was an image even he didn’t want trapped inside his brain. “Yeah,” Mitch said. “And the sun sets in the west and ninety-nine percent of the music played on the radio is utter crap. What else is new?”

Walker took his seat in front of a big computer monitor. The bank of equipment arrayed on the desk had cost more than everything else he owned combined, but he and Mitch made their living online, so being able to rely on their gear was paramount. “No, I mean yeah, we’ve always believed in them. But I mean
really
real.” He slammed his palm down on the wooden desktop. “As real as this.”

“You doubted?”

“Believing in something is different from
knowing
something, dude. That’s why they have two different words.”

“So you believed, but now you know.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“Because of the stuff Andy sent?”

“Duh.”

“It
was
pretty trippy, no shit.”

It was more than that, but Walker let the understatement slide as he settled in front of the desk and started checking on the status of several auctions. He was distracted, though, thinking about the data Andy had sent out.

For months, Walker Swanson (and Mitch Morton, although less enthusiastically, but they were partners in business and best friends, so he went along) had been part of Andy’s network. Walker had posted information Andy sent, monitored online chat rooms and message boards, watched the news for signs, and generally did whatever Andy asked, all in the service of informing the world about the reality of vampires. But until the massive data packet he had received three days before, he hadn’t known that Andy was really Andy Gray, former FBI agent. He hadn’t seen actual video of the vampire invasion of Barrow, Alaska, several years ago, or read
30 Days of Night,
the true account of that invasion written by Stella Olemaun, one of the area’s sheriffs, who had been one of the few survivors. He hadn’t been exposed to still photographs of the victims of vampire attacks, or of vampires themselves. Some of the pictures Andy had sent showed close-ups of vampire skeletons, horribly mutated skulls, jaws that swung open wider than any human’s could, jammed with awful teeth.

The distinction he had made for Mitch had been accurate. He had believed what Andy had said about vampires because he had wanted to, and because Andy made a convincing case. But that belief had been centered in his brain, in his imagination, not in his gut. That’s where it was now that he had seen the pictures and video, read a PDF of the book. Those things had changed belief into certainty, and certainty meant reconsidering everything he had ever thought about the world.

Walker hadn’t slept much over the past few days and nights. He had spent a lot of time thinking. He took a Snickers bar from his shirt pocket and peeled the wrapper back, took a bite.

“Breakfast of champions,” Mitch said. “Eat me.”

He suppressed a shudder—he would have to be more careful about saying things like that in the future.

“How’s the utility belt doing?”

“I’m checking!”

“Okay, chill. Geez.”

“Sorry, dude. Guess I’m just a little tense.”

“I guess.”

Walker took another bite of the Snickers, washing it down with a swig of Diet Coke. He recognized the hypocrisy: diet sodas wouldn’t help him lose weight that he packed on with terrible eating habits. Every now and then he felt like he should do something about his physique, which was more or less that of a snowman
with legs. That feeling usually passed quickly, swept away by bingeing on pizza or burritos or burgers and fries. He was twenty-five, and figured he would be lucky to reach fifty. On the other hand, life was essentially a long, boring chain of disappointment and heartache, broken occasionally by minor tragedies, so he didn’t really see much value in extending it through healthy living.

“Utility belt is at two thousand bucks. Little over. Seven hours to go.”

“Sweet,” Mitch said. “Yeah.”

The belt had been made by IDEAL! and sold in 1966 to cash in on the Adam West TV series. The one they had on eBay was in its original packaging and included a batarang, batcuffs, batrope, bat message-sender dart, bat flashlight, bat grappling hook, and for unknown reasons, a gun. Batman never used a gun on the TV show, so Walker didn’t understand why it was there. It was supposed to shoot the message-sender dart, but it was still a gun. Maybe IDEAL! hadn’t trusted kids to buy any play set that didn’t involve firearms. Bidding would get furious in the last hour or so, he expected, and the belt would likely fetch more than five grand.

“So what’s the matter?”

“What makes you think something’s the matter?”

“Walker, look at you. You’re acting like your mom died again.”

“That’s nice.”

“I’m just saying.”

Walker let out a sigh. “It’s the stuff from Andy.”

“The stuff you were supposed to send out immediately.”

“Yeah.”

“Three days ago.”

“Dude, I know, okay?”

“So what’s up?”

“I don’t know if I can do it.”

“Didn’t you always do whatever Andy told you to?”

“Yeah …”

“So what makes this different?”

“It’s … like I said, now I know they’re real.”

“And?”

“There really are vampires. It’s not a myth anymore. It’s for real, and … and they’re bloodthirsty monsters. They kill, they feed, they show no mercy. They’re killing machines, superior to humans in almost every way.”

“Yeah?”