30 Days of Night: Light of Day (3 page)

“So that fucking rocks!”

Mitch just looked at him, silently.

“I mean, don’t you want in?”

“Meaning what?”

“Dude, don’t you want to
be
a vampire? Wouldn’t that be better than sitting around this house selling old toys on the internet and eating candy bars?”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so.”

“What do you want me to say?”

Walker couldn’t believe he had to ask. “Prowling the dark streets, hunting for our meals. Knowing that people cower in fear of us. Seeing that look of terrible recognition in their eyes when they know their lives can be measured in seconds. How could you not want to be part of that?”

“I guess it sounds pretty cool, when you put it that way.”

“Of course it does.” He had known Mitch would come around. He always did.

“So in all that info Andy sent, did he tell you how to find any vampires who could turn us?”

Andy turned to another auction, a 1965 Gilbert Oddjob action figure, from the James Bond movie
Goldfinger
. Most of the best stuff had been released before he was born, but that didn’t keep him from buying and selling it. This one still had a couple of days to go, and had just passed four hundred bucks. “No,” he said. “Plenty of advice on how to protect yourself against them, but nothing about how to find them.”

“There are still those message boards and all. I mean, if you’re serious.”

“Yeah,” Walker said. “Always hard to tell if there are any real vampires on those, or just wannabes. But I’ll keep an eye on them.”

“You got any other ideas?”

This question, more than any other, was what had prevented Walker from sleeping during the night. He had rolled around in bed, going over and over the
options, trying to tease out the pluses and minuses of the plan that had occurred to him. “I have one,” he said.

“What?”

“If we want to become vampires, we have to bring vampires to us.”

“And how do we do that?”

“We attract them,” Walker said, “by acting like vampires. Starting right now.”

I
N HIGH SCHOOL
, Walker had asked Missy Darrington to two dances. The first time, during sophomore year, she had turned him down and gone with Chad Benson, who was on the football and track teams and who had, three years after graduating, taken a dozen Ambien tablets, downed a fifth of Jim Beam, and gone for a drive in his father’s restored vintage Thunderbird. Even if the pills-and-alcohol combination had not done him in, the collision with the utility pole did the trick. The second time Walker asked Missy out (and that had been excruciatingly difficult; although it was senior year and he had enjoyed a couple of dates with other girls by then, he still remembered her earlier rejection like it had happened only days before), she not only spurned him, but she talked about it online.

She still lived in her parents’ old house, off 155th in Harvey, Illinois, where they had both grown up. She was still one of the most beautiful girls Walker had ever seen outside a porn site. Her shiny dark brown hair hung past her shoulders and curled up gracefully at the ends, which were healthy enough to be used in shampoo ads. Her eyes were big and brown, her lips pink
and perfectly shaped, her cheekbones just right, her nose small but exceptional, all of it contained in a face that was almost perfectly oval. Her body had inspired many an emission, nocturnal and otherwise, beginning during his fifteenth year.

At the moment, she was tied up in the basement of Walker’s house.

He and Mitch had gone back and forth about it for a couple of days. Walker had been trying to figure out the best approach, but Mitch still needed convincing on the idea as a whole. Walker had pressed, knowing all the while that Mitch would give in.

“We aren’t vampires yet,” Walker had said. “Which leaves us with some disadvantages. So we’ll just have to go with our strengths. We can walk in daylight. We can blend in with other people. Nobody can tell by looking at us that there’s anything different about us.”

“Because there’s not.”

“You don’t feel it yet, dude? I do.”

“Feel what?”

“I feel stronger already. Determined. Like I’ve finally found my purpose, after all these years. I know what I was meant to do.”

“I guess I’m not there yet.”

“You will be. Trust me.”

Rather than seek out a random, nameless victim, which might have exposed them to law enforcement or observation by witnesses, they decided to start with someone they knew. Missy Darrington had come
immediately to mind, since Walker knew where she lived and had spent many hours sitting in his car outside her house over the years, watching for any glimpse of her through the windows. He knew who all her neighbors were, and that the old busybody living on her left went to bed early.

Plus, he was still mad at her.

They had gone to her place at ten o’clock the night before. She would still be up, but most of her neighbors would be asleep. Walker sent Mitch around to watch the back door while he knocked on the front. She came to the door, suspicious at first, but opened it when she recognized Walker. She even managed a hesitant smile.

“Walker? This is a surprise,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“Hi, Missy,” Walker said.

“It’s pretty late, Walker. But—”

“I know. Can I come in, just for a minute? I wanted to apologize, but I feel kind of exposed standing out here.”

“For a minute,” she said. She had already dressed for bed, in loose gray sweats with nothing on underneath, and fuzzy red socks. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She backed away from the door and let Walker in. Walker’s breath caught as he passed close to her, inhaling the fresh scent of her soap and toothpaste. “Apologize for what?”

He pushed the door closed with his foot and reached under his coat. The gun he drew out was fake, but it
was a replica snub-nosed .38 Police Special from 1975, and the casual observer would never know it wasn’t the real deal. Especially staring into the barrel. “For this.”

Missy gave a little shriek and brought her right hand to her mouth. “Oh my God, Walker, what are you doing with that? What …”

“Just stay quiet, Missy. I don’t want to shoot you.”

“Then put that away.”

“I can’t. Not yet.”

“Is it real?”

“What do you think?”

Tears brimmed her eyes and started down those perfect cheeks. “But … why … ?”

“Turn around. Hands behind your back.”

She swallowed but complied, shuffling around on legs that threatened to give way beneath her. Trembling hands offered themselves behind her back. Walker couldn’t help enjoying her terror, her sense of helplessness, as he snapped handcuffs around her wrists. They had come from a sex shop in the city, but they were the real thing.

Beside her door there was a short section of wall, blocking the view of the dining room from the doorway. Three sections of textured mirror were hung on it, her parents’ idea of style, Walker supposed. But Missy hadn’t taken them down when her mom had finally moved into a nursing home, so she was just as much to blame. He pressed her up against the wall, leaning into her with all his weight.

“Walker, I’m going to scream if you don’t cut this out.”

Holding her in place with his bulk, he opened the glass bottle of chloroform that he had made following directions he’d found on the internet, and he doused a rag with it. Then he shoved the gun back into his pocket and clamped the wet rag over her nose and mouth. She bucked against him, making spitting and gagging noises, but he held it in place. It seemed to take a very long time, but finally her knees buckled and she went limp in his arms. He lowered her to the floor, checked for a pulse by pressing his hand against her left breast, which he knew wasn’t the best way to find one but which satisfied a long-held desire. She was alive, breathing softly, but unconscious.

Walker let Mitch in. They got her out to the car and drove her back to Walker’s house. Walker had a garage there with an automatic opener and a doorway to the inside, so nobody watching would have seen them take her from the car and carry her in. Then it was down to the basement, where she was securely bound and gagged.

“What are you waiting for, Walker?”

It was about the fiftieth time Mitch had asked that question. Missy had awakened downstairs—they could hear her struggling, kicking and writhing in her bonds. Walker’s answer wasn’t any better than it had been. “I don’t know! I just don’t know if this is the right thing to do.”

“You said if we act like vampires, we’ll attract them.”

“I know what I said. But how will this attract them to us? We made sure nobody saw us, nobody knew what we did. How will they know what we did, or where to find us? If they’re even real, that is.”

“If? Man, I thought you were sure!”

“I was!”

During the time they had been considering their plan, the media had run with the vampire story. Walker knew from the online forums and vampire blogs that he wasn’t the only one to receive the data packet. It had been big news, but mostly in a mocking way. Cable news channels and tabloid papers covered it nonstop, but nobody seemed to take it seriously. Law enforcement and other government officials had pushed back hard, saying that Andy Gray was a rogue agent who had suffered a mental breakdown, murdered his own family, and then used his computer skills to play out his sick fantasies on a big stage. Rumors had spread that the whole thing was a viral marketing campaign for a low-budget vampire flick, shot
Blair Witch
–style, and the video that had seemed so convincing was just bits of the movie.

All of it had since shaken Walker’s confidence. Not enough to get him to call off the plan, because once he had settled on Missy Darrington as their first victim, nothing could have dissuaded him. Now, though, faced with the reality of what he had done, and what he had yet to do, his certainty had turned to ice water in his guts.

“Well, you can’t ever let her out of this house,” Mitch reminded him. “She knows you.”

“I know that!”

“So one way or another, you have to get it done. You might as well go through with the original plan.”

“I will, dude. Just … give me a few minutes.”

“You want to still be at it when the sun comes up?”

“No …”

“Then you’re running out of time. Let’s get this done. The first step on a great journey, that’s what you said before.”

“Yeah.”

“Claiming our heritage, you said. Right?”

“That’s right.”

“So let’s do it.”

“Okay,” Walker said.

“For reals?”

“For reals.”

His mind made up again, Walker went into the kitchen and got the sharp knife he had had in mind the whole time. He wanted to act while the desire still raged inside him, before he had a chance to think too much again. Knife in one hand and empty glass in the other, he rushed down the stairs so fast he nearly lost his balance. But he reached the bottom. Missy was there, hands behind her back, heavy ropes lashing her to wooden support beams in the unfinished room. She was still in her gray sweats, almost the same color as the concrete floor. A rag had been stuffed into her
mouth, held there with duct tape, but the fear in her eyes spoke loud and clear. She was sexy, like the hot girl victim in a horror movie, breasts prominent against the sweatshirt, sweat adding a sensual glow to her skin.

Her fear gave Walker strength. She had refused him, humiliated him, taunted him. She would never do that to anyone else.

She bucked and twisted as he approached her. She couldn’t get away, though, couldn’t break the ropes or the beam. “Don’t worry, Missy,” he said. “It won’t hurt for long. And you’ll be making history. That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”

“Just cut her,” Mitch urged.

Walker moved quickly to her side and just cut her.

It was harder than he had expected. Slicing through the skin was no problem, but muscle offered more resistance. And what else, he wasn’t sure, cartilage or bone or whatever. He worked at it, though, and in moments he had opened up her throat. Blood spewed from her like water from a burst pipe. Her eyelids fluttered and her eyes rolled back in her head, and a series of racking shudders coursed through her body.

Walker held the empty glass under her neck. Blood splashed his hands, his clothes, spattered on the floor. But it went into the glass, too. He kept it there until it was half full.

Missy slumped forward in her bonds, small aftershocks still twitching her body. Her feet, tied at the ankles, beat out a tap dance on the floor.

When she finally went still, Walker held the glass up toward Mitch. “Cheers,” he said.

“Bottoms up, man,” Mitch said. “Do it!”

Walker sloshed the liquid around in the glass, willing it to taste like strawberry-flavored milk. He held the rim to his lips and tilted. His mouth filled with thick, warm blood.

He swallowed.

First, he gagged, spraying blood all over Missy’s already blood-soaked body. Trying to fight it back, he dropped the glass, which shattered on the floor and drenched his shoes. He clapped a hand over his mouth.

But his stomach heaved and he bent forward, vomiting on the woman he had just killed. He dropped to his knees and kept it up until his guts were empty and nothing but bitter strings of bile would come out.

“That’s attractive, man,” Mitch said. “Nice going.”

“Fuck you!” Walker cried. He wiped his mouth, his runny nose. “I didn’t know it would be like that.”

“It’s not that bad,” Mitch said.

“Did you even have any?”

“While you were busy puking on her, yeah. I had what I could get that didn’t have your chunks in it.”

“Well, aren’t you badass?”

“Hey, Walker, ease up. It’s just the first time. It’ll get better.”

Walker swallowed. “You think so?”

“I know it. Come on, we’ve got to empty her out.”

The concrete floor had a drain in the center, and they had already brought a hose down from the front yard. The idea was to empty as much blood as they could from her body, wash it into the sewer system, then dump her someplace where she would be easily found. The appearance of a bloodless corpse, while the vampire controversy still raged in the media, would be certain to draw attention. They would keep it up until the real bloodsuckers found them, and then they would ask to be turned.