30 Days of Night: Light of Day (29 page)

“Thanks, man,” Greg said, finally regaining his feet. “I thought she had me.”

“Get your gun,” Alex said. He didn’t want the man’s thanks, didn’t want to be reminded that he had saved Greg’s life at all. He turned back to Larissa, who had watched the whole thing in something like shock, her own weapon held loosely at her side. “You okay, Larissa?” he asked.

She started to move. He thought she was nodding, or shaking her head, but then her body shuddered and started to fall, revealing the vampire behind her, a skinny kid who looked about fourteen, and his hand was drenched in blood, holding a still-beating heart, and as she flopped down Alex saw the hole in her back where the kid had punched in and taken it, taken the
heart that was the only thing in the world Alex had truly wanted to possess.

Rocco looked up from the bloody throat of a government agent and saw the small one, the woman, holding a dripping knife in one hand and Shiloh’s hair in the other, about to sever her head.

He was twenty feet away. Twenty-five. The battle raged between him and them. He had been so certain Shiloh would take her he hadn’t bothered to watch their struggle. “Shiloh!” he cried, his voice thick with anguish and rage.

He poised to leap the distance. But Kenton got there first, driving his shoulder into the woman and knocking her a dozen feet away. Shiloh slumped to the blacktop. Rocco reached her in an instant. He scooped her into his arm, tucking her against his shoulder, holding her head steady on her savaged neck with his other hand. “Help me!” he called. “Someone help!”

Winston appeared at his side, then Nightmare and Goldie. “Start the RV! We need to get her out of here!”

“On it,” Nightmare said. He dashed off toward the RV, ignoring the bullets that struck him. The attackers, Red-Blooded and local police, were fewer in number now, and mostly tending to their own wounded, but a few kept trying to shoot the
nosferatu,
either not realizing or not caring that their efforts were largely fruitless.

“Protect her!” Rocco commanded. He rose to his feet, hoisting her with him. A bullet struck him in the
lower back and he staggered but held on to her and kept his balance. Then his den closed ranks around them and they rushed to the RV’s open door.

The sides were bullet riddled, and one tire was shredded. No doubt the authorities would be able to find it again, even track it with one of the helicopters Rocco heard chattering through the sky toward them. He didn’t care about any of that. All that concerned him at the moment was giving Shiloh a safe place to lie still and recover. Their kind healed quickly, but a wound this bad would still take time. He could fashion a bandage of some sort in the vehicle. He just needed some breathing space.

Inside, he took her to the bed in the main cabin, laying her down carefully, then sat beside her to hold her head in place. “Drive!” he screamed. “Get us out of here!”

Nightmare, behind the wheel, shouted an affirmation, and the RV’s big engine rumbled as he shifted gears. They started rolling, bumping over the curb and onto the street. More bullets thwacked into the body, and a window shattered. The damaged tire flapped, then came off and the thing tilted left, scraping on that side. They couldn’t go for long like this, but if they could escape from the immediate battle scene, Rocco would be happy with that. He would improvise from there. Play things by ear.

That had worked for him so far, and for a long time. He and his den had dodged police, Elder Death Squads
determined to thin the vampire herd, and except for that one disastrous raid, the agents of Operation Red-Blooded. It would work again. He wouldn’t lose Shiloh.

He couldn’t say if he loved her or not. He only knew that he didn’t want to be without her.

When he imagined walking in the sun, it was always with her. Hand in hand under a sparkling blue sky, feeling the warmth denied them for so long.

It was a dream, a beautiful, improbable dream, but he wasn’t about to give up on it now.

He held Shiloh’s head on her neck and felt the unsteady rocking of the RV as it raced away.

O
NE OF THE VAMPIRES
started screaming, clutching another one to his chest like a father carrying a daughter with a twisted ankle. Alex’s awareness of this was only incidental; he stood in frozen silence watching the beast who had killed Larissa hold her heart to his lips like a juicy orange and drink from it.

This vampire turned toward the other one’s screams, and that shook Alex free from paralysis. He raised the .38 and as the vampire started to run toward its fellows, he unloaded the magazine into its skull. The thing dropped, Larissa’s heart rolling from its grip onto the pavement. Bits of grit and asphalt stuck to it, coating it with gray.

The rest had taken refuge inside the big RV. Alex aimed at it, pulled the trigger, and remembered that he had just emptied the gun. He was running a couple of steps behind himself. He found another magazine in his pocket, ejected the first one and rammed the second home. The RV was on the street now, sparks flying up from where it ran on one rim. Alex fired at it, aware that he couldn’t stop it from here. But the effort, the boom of his gun and the
thock
of bullets striking the
vehicle’s shell, made him feel like he was at least making an effort.

Greg Fielding knelt beside Larissa, tears coating his face, holding her hand in his and patting it gently.
He has to know she’s dead, doesn’t he?
Alex wondered.
Of course he does, that’s what the tears are for.

She couldn’t feel his touch on her hand, then.

But he could.

In the end, Alex guessed, that was all that mattered.

Marina scraped herself off the pavement. If that vampire hadn’t summoned the others to help him with the one she had almost decapitated, she would have been done for. As it was, she was bruised and battered, but alive. She couldn’t say as much for her team. Kat had made it, and Monte. Tony O. had been bitten and needed to be put down before he could turn. Jimbo was dead.

She found Monte sitting on the ground pummeling a fallen bloodsucker, smashing its skull and brains into jelly with his big, knobby fists. She had to shake him hard to get his attention, and when he looked up at her, there was hatred in his eyes, like a film preventing him from seeing past it. Marina kept shaking him, saying his name, until he blinked her into focus and his face softened.

“It’s over, Monte,” she said. “The vampires are gone.”

“We didn’t get all of ’em?”

“Not all. Some. Most, maybe. But they hurt us, too.

They got Tony and Jimbo. Kat has a broken arm, but I don’t think she’s compromised. We’ll get her into medical. They fucked up the Chicago PD, too. The bloodsuckers are in an RV that’s short one tire—I don’t think they’ll get far, and I’ll get eyes on it ASAP. But we’re going to have to let it go for now, get someone else working on it.”

Kat joined them, crouching down and propping the knuckles of her right hand on the ground. Her left arm rested against her legs. Pain showed in the creases around her eyes and the lines at her mouth. “They were out in the sun,” she said. “Our UV didn’t do squat.”

“Out in the sun, and stronger for it,” Marina added. “We’d have taken them otherwise.”

“You think?” Monte asked.

“I know it.”

“But … this is bad,” Kat said. “Vampires who aren’t afraid of the sun? How do we … ?”

“I don’t know,” Marina said. “But we’ll figure something out. We have to, right?”

“I guess,” Kat said.

“Sister, we need payback. They can’t do that to Jimbo and the Tonys, to R.T., Spider John. They can’t do that and just walk away.”

“I’m ready,” Monte said. “I had to watch Jimbo die and I couldn’t do shit about it, and if I had one of ’em here I’d … I’d …”

He looked down at his hands, the knuckles bruised
and swollen. Marina hoped he hadn’t cut them open, because if he’d got vampire blood in the cuts then she would have to shoot him, too. She had been drenched in blood as well, but mostly on her uniform—she had avoided getting any in her mouth or eyes.

She was sick of killing her own. Sick of the whole thing, the struggle between alive and undead. It never ended, probably never
could
end. Progress was made and lost in the space of a heartbeat. It was a quagmire, Vietnam style, from which there could be no extrication because the enemy could be temporarily defeated, but never vanquished.

The parking lot glistened with blood, its metallic smell hanging heavy in the air. This was all about blood. Who had it, who wanted it. It could have been land, or gold, or oil—it was the wanting that was trouble, not the thing itself.

Marina didn’t know what else she could do. Nothing, probably. She was no longer suited to civilian life, and if she tried it, she would no doubt find that she missed the action. Besides, as the cliché went, by now she knew too much.

She was trapped, as locked into her place in the war as the vampires themselves were. There would be another battle, and another, and more after that. She would walk again on ground sticky with spilled blood, smell the pungent odors of injury and death, hear the whimpered cries of the barely living. This wouldn’t be the last time she looked upon a scene of chaos and
carnage. If she closed her eyes, she found, she could imagine the next one.

The only saving grace was that the next battle would give her another chance to kill vampires. And if that was all she had left in the world, then she would take it. Cling to it.

It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

A
LEX
Z
ICCARIA WALKED UP
the sidewalk, arms swinging loose at his sides. Cars and trucks rushed up and down the street, their wakes buffeting him, the growl and roar and rumble of internal combustion engines all but ignored. Sunlight splashed upon his face. He squinted against it but otherwise paid it no mind.

Around him were the ghosts.

Everywhere he looked, ghosts. Those he had tried to save and couldn’t. Those he didn’t know of until after they had died. Those who had died before he was even a cop, before he was born. The victims of human beings who were willing to kill other humans.

He didn’t know where vampires fit in. He didn’t know enough about them to make that judgment. But even if they weren’t human, they had been once. They left behind ghosts, too. Diaphanous figures moving through the sunlight even as the light moved through them. No spark in their hollow eyes, just a lost, lonely stare from which Alex couldn’t look away.

He would have to write up a report at some point, but not now. Not today. He didn’t know what it would say. That something was loose on the streets of
America, something terrible? He had no idea what they really were or how to stop them.

So he walked, slowly, unsteady on his feet, an old man’s walk. And he watched the ghosts, flickering in the sun like characters from one of his precious silent movies. He checked each face in case it was hers. And it never was.

He could, however, walk for a long, long time. He could walk forever. Or so it seemed.

So it seemed.

JEFF MARIOTTE is the award-winning author of the supernatural thrillers
Cold Black Hearts, River Runs Red,
and
Missing White Girl
(all as Jeffrey J. Mariotte); horror epic
The Slab;
teen horror quartet
Witch Season;
and many other novels, including three previous
30 Days of Night
novels written with Steve Niles. His comic book work includes
Desperadoes, Graveslinger, Zombie Cop,
and much more. A co-owner of specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy, he lives on the Flying M Ranch in southeastern Arizona.