30 Days of Night: Light of Day (6 page)

Any cell could be altered, though; modern medical science had shown that. It could be taken apart, understood, controlled. Once altered, if introduced into a new host body, that body’s changes would not match the traditional vampire physiology. It would become something new, something altogether different.

If he could eliminate the harshly negative reaction to sunlight, it would be something virtually without limitations.

To accomplish that, however, he needed a better lab. He had already reached the limit of what he could do with makeshift equipment.

It was time to go hunting again … but not for a meal this time.

What he did next, he would do not simply for himself, but for all of his new species.

A
LITTLE ONLINE SLEUTHING
confirmed that the University of Colorado at Denver had a medical school. The Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora would doubtless have the items Larry needed.

He went on a Sunday night, figuring that the campus would be at its most empty then. He parked in the Georgetown visitor parking lot, which had a couple of vehicles in it. It was unlikely that campus police would notice one more, and it wouldn’t matter that he didn’t have a permit. Anyway, he didn’t plan to stay for long. The lot was adjacent to the Bioscience Park Center, a rose colored modern building with plenty of glass. He left the trunk ajar and stole across a grassy lawn to a locked glass door.

The hard part would be the alarms. He was a biologist, not an electrician, and had not the slightest idea how to circumvent them. The door wouldn’t pose a problem—Larry had yet to encounter a circumstance that pure muscle could solve that he wasn’t strong enough to master—but he was sure that as soon as he broke in, an alarm would sound, or a silent alarm would go off in campus police headquarters. Probably both.

He could go around the building looking for an open door. But that would increase his chances of being spotted. In a building like this, which contained administrative offices as well as lab space, there might be a guard on duty in the lobby all the time.

Maybe this hadn’t been such a great idea after all. He could almost sense the equipment inside, calling out to his experienced hands. He needed a scanning electron microscope, a centrifuge, more, and the computers to run it all. He couldn’t carry it all to the Buick in one trip, even if he could fit it all in. He was certain, though, that it was all sitting around, just inside.

Larry stood outside the door, undecided. Go in? Or give up for now while he tried to formulate a better plan? Maybe he could buy the stuff online, have it shipped to the old man’s address. He couldn’t use the house indefinitely, though—sooner or later a neighbor would come by or a package would be delivered by someone who knew the old widower, and Larry’s hideout would be compromised.

No, he had to take whatever he could tonight. If he needed more he would come back, or find a different lab and raid that. Larry would rely on his phenomenal strength and speed to get him in and out safely.

He grabbed the double door’s two handles and pushed. The lock held for a moment, then gave, breaking with a loud pop, and the doors swung inward. An alarm began to whoop almost instantly, the noise nearly deafening to his newly sensitive ears.

Wasting no time, Larry ran inside and started kicking in doors. All the rooms on this floor were offices, it seemed. He took the first staircase he came to, running up to the second floor, then passing that and going to the third and top floor. He could smell chemistry being practiced on this floor, the faint, familiar odors as strong to him now as the smell of roaring flames would have been to a human being. Again, he kicked in doors.

Behind the third door, a rangy young man in a lab coat waited with a steel rod in his fist, held back like a billy club. “What the hell, man?” he asked.

Larry looked past the man. His gaze landed on exactly the things he sought. “I’m just looking for this place,” he said.

“You’re … not a student here.”

“In a way.”

The man fumbled in his pocket for a cell phone. “I’m calling the cops.”

“You don’t think they heard the alarm?” Larry asked. Instead of waiting for an answer, he charged the man. The steel rod swung toward him, but Larry batted the man’s arm aside, crushing the bones in his forearm, and the rod flew into a glass-fronted case containing supplies. The man screeched in pain. Larry silenced him by jabbing his palm into the man’s chin. The man’s head snapped back, flesh tearing, spine snapping, and he dropped to the floor with a wet thump.

The scent of blood filled the air instantly. Larry’s
stomach tightened. He needed to feed, but not here, not yet.

He grabbed what equipment he could carry in two strong arms, and without further thought, jumped through the window, landing awkwardly amid a rain of glass on the lawn outside. Sirens wailed in the near distance. He ran to the Buick, loaded the stuff into the trunk, and ran back. There might have been security cameras in the parking lot, but the campus police were already distracted and probably not paying much attention to that.

This time, a campus cop waited for him in the hall, an automatic pistol gripped in an unsteady fist.

“Stop right there!” the cop commanded. The hand holding the weapon quivered with fear.

“No,” Larry said. “No, not gonna do that, sorry.” He kept going toward the cop. The man didn’t know how to react. Larry could see indecision in his eyes, a trembling of his lower lip.

“Freeze!” the cop said.

Larry kept going, speeding up, from a walk to a jog to a sprint.

The cop fired.

Larry braced himself. This, he had not experienced before.

The bullet tore into him, passing between the second and third ribs. It no doubt ripped open his left lung. It hurtled through his back and continued down the hall.

The pain was intense, as severe as being stabbed with a hot poker might have been a couple of weeks ago. Larry winced, cried out.

But it didn’t stop him, barely even slowed him down. By the time the cop had recovered from the gun’s recoil and brought the barrel down again, Larry was on him, sweeping him aside with a powerful right arm. He drove the cop’s head against the wall, where it collapsed like a melon hit with a hammer. Larry was halfway up the stairs before the cop finished sliding to the floor, the faint jingle of his keys mostly obscured by the alarm and approaching sirens.

Larry made it back to the car with another armful of gear, and then had to give up. The campus was coming to life. People hustled toward the building, emergency vehicles racing across pathways and lawns with their lights flashing. Larry guessed that less than two minutes had passed since he first broke through the doors. No one paid any attention to the bland Buick in the parking lot as it started up and pulled from its space. All eyes were on the building, and no doubt on the grisly scenes waiting inside.

The expedition was not a complete success. Larry could have used at least one more trip into the lab. But what he was able to patch together at the old man’s house was a thousand times better than what he’d had before.

Encouraged by his progress, he redoubled his efforts over the next several days, sleeping only when he
absolutely had to, leaving the house just long enough to grab a quick, convenient meal wherever he found one. He worried less about witnesses, knowing he could escape quickly enough even if he was observed.

He had stolen a small ultraviolet light, and although it pained him to do it, he experimented with it on isolated cells taken from his own blood. At first, the cells shrank from the light, dying quickly when exposed to the UV. But he manipulated them, carefully recording his efforts, and finally he managed to create some that didn’t shy away from the light. Time was passing, and he knew he would have to move on soon … but not yet, not while he was locked in the white heat of scientific discovery.

He needed a living test subject, though. Until he tried it on a sentient being, it was all just theory, nothing more than informed guesswork.

Larry found a small wooden box in the old man’s bedroom closet and took it out into the nighttime city. Standing in an alley behind some restaurants, he listened until he heard the distinctive scurrying sounds of rodents, the clicking of tiny claws on pavement. He peered through darkness that would have been almost absolute to his human eyes, and when he saw one of the creatures, he swooped.

An hour after leaving his temporary home, he was back with three captive rats.

He caged two of them and held the other in his left hand, close enough to the head that it couldn’t
bite him. He didn’t know what damage it could really do—he doubted that vampires could be brought down by rodent-borne disease, even if it carried rabies or bubonic plague, but why take that chance? He had already prepared a syringe with his specially manipulated cells inside it, in a glucose solution that was as pure as he could make it.

Larry injected the little beast, put it back into the wooden box, and waited.

The rat raced around in circles for a few minutes, but it grew steadily weaker. Finally, it lay down, evacuated its bowels, and stopped breathing.

Larry sat in the old man’s easy chair and closed his eyes. In minutes, he was asleep.

He woke again when he heard a furious skittering coming from the wooden box. When he opened it, the rat was busily gnawing and clawing through the wall.

Its teeth were almost an eighth of an inch longer than they had been before, its snout reshaped by jaws that no longer fit where they once had.

By injecting it with the Immortal Cell, Larry had created a vampire rat.

Larry had to find out what happened to it in UV light. He exposed it to his small ultraviolet, which didn’t seem to disturb the creature in the least. He played the light across his own hand, to make sure the spectrum hadn’t changed somehow, and had to yank his hand away when the skin started to burn.

His achievement brought a smile to his face. He
loved science, loved the process of experimentation and discovery. Losing his humanity hadn’t taken away that pleasure.

He now waited for the day to break. In one of the old man’s kitchen drawers, he found a ball of rough brown twine, and he tied a loop in the end, fed the rat through the loop, and tightened it around the creature’s middle. With the string on it, he could feed the rat enough to walk out into the sun, and could reel it back in if it tried to go where he couldn’t keep an eye on it.

Opening the back door, he stood back from the encroaching sunlight and let the little guy go.

The rat darted out so fast Larry almost lost the ball of twine. He fumbled with it, hung on to it, and slowed the rat’s progress by feeding string out at a more measured pace.

The rat twitched its whiskers, glanced up as if checking to be sure the sun was high enough in the sky, and kept going. Its fur didn’t burst into flames, or even smolder. Larry could feel the grin spread across his face as he watched the rat go farther and farther into the light.

Then the rat froze with its front paws elevated just off the ground. An instant later, Larry heard the reason why. A dog, snarling and barking, bounded toward it with teeth bared. The rat held its ground as the dog neared, and at the last second, when it looked as if the dog would chomp into him, the dog hesitated. Larry
had the twine taut, ready to yank the rat back if need be, but he was curious now. What had given the dog pause? The fact that the rat hadn’t tried to retreat?

Larry gave the rat a little slack, and the rodent charged the dog, a spaniel easily three or four times its size. The dog yelped and then launched into a snarling, crooning wail, shaking and pawing at the rat, but the rat had a grip on its throat and wouldn’t let go. Larry fed it as much twine as it needed.

A minute later, the dog was still, lying on its side in the grass. Larry gave a gentle tug on the twine, to bring the rat back so he could look it over.

The rat pulled back. Larry tugged harder, but the rat jerked the other way with enough force to snap the twine. Suddenly free, it tore off faster than Larry’s eye could even follow.

You’ve earned your freedom, buddy,
he thought.
Go and prosper.

You may be the first of your kind, but I’m guessing you won’t be the last.

T
HE NEXT MEDIA PERSONALITY
to die was Marlene Beljac, an editorial writer for
The New York Times
who had, the day after James Callahan’s death, published a piece entitled “If They Walk Among Us, Why Don’t We Know It?” She argued that the uproar about vampires was almost certainly manufactured by some human faction—subtly suggesting, although not outright claiming, that Islamic terrorists were to blame. Had vampires existed all along, she reasoned, they couldn’t have remained hidden from the world’s mainstream population. Therefore they weren’t real and the only thing to get worked up about was finding out what set of thugs had actually murdered the TV pundit.

Beljac’s husband, who slept in a separate bedroom, found her when she didn’t get up at her usual time in the morning. Her legs and hips were on her bed, torso and arms hanging off. Her head had been savagely torn from her body. The room should have been flooded with blood but there was hardly any there.

After that came Madison Keller, a liberal news show host who had invited four vampire “experts” on her show, but then shouted down the right-wing guest who
called vampires “Dempires” and claimed they were led by undead members of the Kennedy clan. In return, Keller suggested that someone exhume Prescott Bush and make sure he was still in his grave. Keller’s drained body was left in the walk-in cooler of an all-night grocery in SoHo, discovered by a clerk who had fallen asleep at the front counter during his graveyard shift and then wondered why the cooler door was ajar when he woke up.

A late-night radio jock made a crack about vampires sucking, and barely made it a quarter mile from the studio after his shift before persons unknown opened up his body and removed all the blood, leaving him draped across a couple of newspaper boxes on a street corner. A popular blogger who riffed on the topic was found dangling upside down from his third-floor balcony.