30 Days of Night: Light of Day (8 page)

Thunder on the stairs announced newcomers. “Marina! John!” The voice was Monte’s.

“Clear down here!” Marina returned.

Monte, Kat, and Tony O. came off the stairs. “Where’s Jimbo?”

Kat tilted her chin up. “Watching the top of the stairs. We’re fine. Couple hostiles on the upper floor, but they were easy.” She looked at the mess surrounding Marina and Tony H., at Spider John’s body. “You got the worst of it.”

Marina nodded. “He’s … John is …”

“Got you,” R.T. said. He held the muzzle of his
weapon a foot from Spider John’s head and squeezed off a burst. Spider John’s head exploded and burned.

Marines brought back every man, but vampire hunters had to destroy any humans who were compromised. Marina had always understood that, but watching Spider John die was surprisingly hard. She had trained with these people, had hand-picked the team, and they were her charges. She’d had people under her before, but in her new position she felt a greater sense of responsibility for them, and the stress of balancing individual lives with the overall mission.

Compromised soldiers had to be killed, so that the mission itself wouldn’t be compromised.

Marina hoped she didn’t fall into that category.

“Let’s clear the rest of this basement,” she said. “Then get to sterilization, stat.”

The Operation Red-Blooded bus had arrived by the time they got out of the building. They had found no more undeads, but a passage led into unused subway tunnels. They could mount a search operation, although from there the vampires could have gone anywhere. They had found more bodies and body parts, dozens of them in various states of decomp. Every time Marina closed her eyes in the sterilization shower, she saw pink organs and blackened skin, glistening muscle and patches of white bone, and the shower’s spray felt like spit splashing her skin.

They all showered together, and she couldn’t even
bring herself to check out the naked bodies of her coworkers. For a change she didn’t want any hands or mouths on her, or her own on anyone else.

But the part where she had said fuck it and opened fire?

That had been fun.

That was worth repeating.

Marina almost couldn’t wait for the next encounter.

“T
HAT ONE!
” M
ITCH SAID.
“She’s good!”

They were crouched down in a weed-choked vacant lot, a few blocks off Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Tall buildings formed a wall between them and Lake Michigan, but behind them were nothing but two- and three-story structures, mostly residential. The scent of somebody’s earlier barbecue lingered in the air like a memory. Mitch was pointing at a young woman carrying a cloth shopping bag that bulged with her purchases. She had on a red tank top and snug jeans and sneakers and short dark hair poked out from under a ball cap. White wires from an MP3 player in her pocket snaked up to her ears.

“Why her?” Walker asked.

“Why not? She’s alone. She’s close.”

Both good reasons, but Walker didn’t know if they were good enough. He wasn’t feeling it the way he wanted to. “Shouldn’t there be something more?”

“What do you want, someone wearing a sign that says ‘Bite Me’?”

“That would be handy.”

“Dude, she’s gonna get away! Can we stop talking and go get her?”

They had taken their next two victims from the ’burbs of Park Forest and Oak Forest, then decided the pickings would be richer in the city itself. Walker was nervous about all the people surrounding them, but he couldn’t argue with Mitch’s reasoning, and their first Chicago victim, three nights earlier, had been easy to find and to take. Nothing about this woman suggested that she would be a problem—the lot was dark, and he couldn’t see anyone else around, although he knew they were out there, in apartments and condos, driving past, maybe hunkered down in the shadows just like he and Mitch were.

“Okay, fine,” Walker said. “Let’s go.” They cut across the lot, on an angle that would get them to the street corner before she reached it. When they were about ten feet away, Walker said, “Excuse me, miss?”

She stopped and looked at him, then pulled the earbuds from her ears. She chewed gum with her mouth open. “Yeah?”

Walker’s mind raced furiously. He felt dizzy. He had thought he would ask her to help him look for his dog, but then realized that line was so old it couldn’t possibly work. Maybe if she was six. But she wasn’t. She was a full-grown adult, a city dweller, no doubt wise to anything he could come up with.

“I thought I could get to Loomis this way,” he said, reaching for the first halfway-convincing line he thought of. “Do you know where it is?”

“Sure,” she said. She swung around and gestured
behind her. “Couple blocks that way, just keep going the way you are.”

As she spoke, he kept closing the distance between them. “Okay, thanks,” he said.

“No prob.”

Walker was wearing a dark nylon Windbreaker, a T-shirt, and khaki pants, with a backpack strapped over the jacket. In the pocket of the Windbreaker he kept a straight razor. He whisked it out and open with a single smooth move, which he had been practicing almost nonstop for days. He took two more steps toward her, and as she returned the earbuds to her ears (he could hear, as if from a great distance, a Slipknot tune he recognized) his arm snaked toward her, blade out. She saw it at the last second and tried to block it, but too late, he was already there, and the blade was very sharp.

So sharp, in fact, that for a second he wasn’t sure he had actually cut her. Then she opened her mouth and tried to scream, and that was all it took. The wound gaped open and blood jetted out. She clamped her hands over it, her shopping bag falling to the sidewalk. Blood flowed between her fingers like a creek running over rocks. As her knees buckled, Walker scooped her up in his arms.

She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds, but Walker grunted with the effort, breathing through his mouth, unable to form words. With Mitch guiding him, Walker carried her to the lot’s lowest point. Precious blood trickled to the ground as they
went; he felt it soaking his pants and was glad he’d brought a change of clothes in a backpack.

At the low point, he put her down on a broken concrete slab. He had given up trying to use a glass. She was still moving, squirming and twisting and pawing in vain at the sidewalk when he knelt beside her. He had rigged a suction device using a breast pump and some rubber tubing, and he had a collapsible two-gallon jug. He pressed the pump against the wound and started working it. Blood ran through the hose, expanding the sides of the plastic jug. It would take a few minutes, and during this part of the process he felt the most vulnerable to being seen and caught. But he and Mitch figured a real vampire wouldn’t leave any blood in the body, or not much, at any rate, so they had to draw out as much as they could.

While the pump worked, he opened the backpack. He got out some individually wrapped towelettes to wipe their hands with, and their clean clothes. He shoved the bloody ones into zippered plastic bags and put them into the backpack. “Is it clear?” he asked.

“Looks like it,” Mitch said.

“Let’s get out of here, then.” The blood in the tube had slowed to a trickle, so Walker disconnected the pump and sealed the big jug. He sucked out what was left in the tube, getting a good drink of salty-sweet blood. He was getting used to it.

More than that, he was starting to like it.

They were still a couple of blocks from the car when they saw someone walking toward them. He was a big guy, a block away and across the street, but nearing. He passed into the glow from a street lamp, but he was wearing a black hoodie, with hood up, and his face was lost in shadow. They couldn’t tell if he was white or black, young or old.

“You think he saw what we did?” Walker asked. He was nervous, the jug suddenly almost too heavy to hang onto. He realized that cold sweat was running down his sides and into his jeans.

“I don’t know. No way to tell from here.”

The guy crossed the street. He kept coming their way, as if he had a destination firmly in mind and they were it. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his hoodie. He was at least a head taller than either of them, and he moved with an athlete’s sinewy grace.

“Let’s just get to the car,” Walker said. “Get out of here.” Walker and Mitch tried to ignore the guy, but it was hard. He was headed toward them, as certainly as if he was locked on by some sort of targeting system. Walker thought he heard the guy whistling, but the wind was blowing and he couldn’t tell for sure.

Then another idea struck him. “Dude, what if he’s one of them?”

“One of who?”

“A vampire!”

“You think we’re going to meet one so soon?”

“I don’t know. They could be all over the place
around here. Maybe he’s been following us for a while, and was just watching to see what we did.”

“So what?” Mitch said. “You want to go introduce ourselves?”

“Not if he isn’t one.”

“You think there’s a way to tell before he’s close enough to shove a gun in your ribs?”

“A gun?” Walker repeated.

“What if he wants to rob us?”

“You’re right,” Walker said. “I guess we shouldn’t take the chance.”

“He’s coming fast, man.”

Walker looked back over his shoulder. The jug almost slipped from his sweaty hands. That would be just perfect, to dump all their blood on the street after what they had gone through to get it. But Mitch was right, the guy was gaining fast. Walker still couldn’t see his face, but he was more sure than ever that he was whistling as he came.

Did vampires whistle? Could they, with all those teeth crowded into their mouths? He didn’t know. “Come on,” Mitch said. “Run!”

Walker tried to run himself. He was out of shape and he knew it, and the jug was so awkward and getting heavier by the second. His gait was somewhere between a trot and a fast waddle, he figured, and he was sure the guy in the hood was right behind him, maybe just inches away. He couldn’t hear anything over the rasp of his own labored breathing. If the guy was a vampire
then everything would be okay, Walker could explain what they were up to, offer up the blood as a gift, work things out. But if he wasn’t, if he was some garden-variety Chicago street thug, then they were in trouble.

The car was right there, though, parked on a dark, still street, neighborhood businesses closed up tight. They had left it unlocked, in case a quick getaway was needed. But Walker had the keys in his pants pocket, and he had the blood in his hands. “Damn it!” he said. “Damn it, damn it!” He got to the car, afraid to look back again, to see how close the guy was. He pawed at the driver’s door, got a finger under the handle, yanked it open, and tossed the jug into the backseat. It hit the seat with a heavy thump, but stayed there and didn’t split open.

He shoved in behind the wheel and slammed his door. On his third try, he managed to get the key into the ignition. Silently pleading, he turned it. The car started. Walker shoved it into gear and it bucked away from the curb. His face was slick with sweat, his shirt plastered to him. He was breathing through his mouth, his lungs on fire, and he thought his heart was trying to break out through his ribs.

Walker yanked hard on the wheel, wanting to get turned around even though it meant going past the hooded man. As he did, he remembered Andy Gray’s video from Barrow, Alaska, in which a vampire had jumped up onto a hovering helicopter and smashed through the windshield.
Maybe turning had been a stupid idea. He should have gone the long way, around the block. He should just get out of here any way he possibly could. He no longer cared if the guy was alive or undead—he was terrified and simply wanted to be gone, to get home to his comfortable little house in the suburbs as fast as the car would take him.

His headlights caught the guy, who stood on the opposite sidewalk. A white guy, in his early twenties maybe, with a scraggly red goatee and narrow slits for eyes. He grinned at them from under that hood, showing a gold tooth right in front—but they were normal teeth, human teeth, not vampire. Pulling his right hand from the pocket, he made it into the shape of a gun and snapped it at Walker, once, then pretended to blow smoke from the barrel.

The headlights moved off him, and he was lost in the shadows again. Walker floored the accelerator and the car raced down the street.

“That dude is no vampire,” Mitch said.

“Don’t you think I know that?”

“Why are you going so fast, then?”

“Mitch, if he was a vampire there wouldn’t be a problem, right?”

“You think?”

“That’s the whole reason we’re doing this, isn’t it? To meet vampires? I’m only afraid of people who aren’t, at this point.”

“You were running pretty hard there.”

“Like you weren’t?”

“I just want to know you’re going to go through with this. You’re not going to wimp out when things get too real.”

“No way,” Walker said. “I am in this, Mitch. All the way.”

“Just making sure,” Mitch said. “Maybe you should slow down, man. It’d suck to be stopped for speeding with a bottle full of blood in the seat.”