“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.
8
THE 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.
Naturally, the blogosphere was melting down over speculation, half-truths, and conspiracy theories. Andy Gray’s data pack had made waves everywhere. His videos were posted to YouTube and distributed at file-sharing sites, and as fast as they were pulled down, someone else put them up. If someone was killing media personalities to quiet the chatter, it wasn’t working.
But that didn’t mean they didn’t have to be stopped. Operation Red-Blooded had access to the world’s best forensic science labs, and bits of trace evidence, hairs and fibers and some soil with a particular sort of mold mixed in, led Marina’s team to a row of abandoned houses on the Lower East Side, just blocks from the river.
Marina had the NYPD close off the block at both ends at high noon, figuring the bloodsuckers would all be inside at that hour. Zachary Kleefeld had arranged things with the mayor and the NYPD brass, making sure they wouldn’t try to interfere no matter what they saw. She and her team drove to the site in a converted cargo van, its walls lined with high-tech weaponry. More of the same filled the containers beneath the bench seats. It wasn’t made for comfort but for utility, and could carry an eight-person team and enough gear to win a small war. They would go in carrying specially configured Barrett Arms M82A1s mounted with TRUUV lights and loaded with special .50 caliber phosphorous rounds designed and built in Red-Blooded’s armament labs, grenades, and long-bladed knives.
She sat in the back, wedged between Spider John, who she called that because of the spider web tattoo covering most of his body (all the spiders living on the web tattoo currently hidden by his black tactical clothing, but there were many), and R.T., a massive bald man with skin so dark it looked like a starless night sky. Spider John was the man who she believed had no interest in sex whatsoever, but who had directed those energies instead into all manner of mayhem. On R.T.’s other side was Monte, a rangy guy from east Texas whose criminal record Operation Red-Blooded was willing to overlook because his talents were so suited to the work.
He was the one who wouldn’t come out of the closet, and the one Marina had the highest hopes for.
On a bench across from them were Kat, the team’s other woman, a onetime Olympic powerlifting contender, and Tony O., an Army Ranger who had been recruited into the FBI, and from there into Red-Blooded service. Up front were Tony H., behind the wheel—his background was law enforcement, and he had spent years on L.A.’s SWAT team—and Jimbo, the out gay man, a veteran of two wars in the Persian Gulf and several years of mercenary work around them. Tony O. thought he had a future with Kat, and maybe he did as long as it didn’t interfere with his duty to Red-Blooded.
“… so I always did. From the time I was little,” Kat was saying. Marina had been trying to ease the tension, while keeping them focused on the mission, so she had asked the others when they had started believing in vampires. Kat’s had been an extreme case, brought on by watching the vampire movie The Hunger on TV when her parents thought she was asleep.
“My old man was a Master Sergeant in the United States Army,” Monte chimed in. His accent was Southern, but not the mellifluous sophisticated Southern that Marina found charming. More redneck than Kentucky colonel. He wasn’t stupid, but sometimes, she thought, he came off that way verbally. “I was raised to believe in three things: rules, him, and the flag. In that order. If I had believed in anything like vampires he woulda broke my fuckin’ nose. In fact, I think that was one of his rules—no believin’ in shit you can’t see, touch, or kick the crap out of.”
Before anyone else could reminisce, the van came to a halt. Tony H. killed the engine, but nobody budged. “We’re there,” he said. “As far as we can drive, anyway.”
“Okay,” Marina said. “We don’t know which house it is—it’s one of the first three on the north side of the street. So we’ll enter all three at once. Teams of two, as we discussed, with me and Monte hanging back to support whichever team hits the jackpot.”
“Right on,” R.T. said. “Hope it’s my team.”
“These bloodsuckers have a rep,” Marina reminded them. “They’ve been active and they’re not afraid of publicity. So expect resistance. This could get as hairy as that battle in downtown L.A.”
“Hoping for that, too,” R.T. said.
“Who isn’t?” Tony O. said.
“Let’s do this,” Marina said. She rose from her seat and opened the van’s rear doors. They all piled out except Tony O., who stayed inside long enough to pass out weapons and ammo. Then he jumped to the ground and closed the doors.
The NYPD officers stared anxiously at them. They hadn’t been told much about the mission, but knew they weren’t supposed to get in the way. That was all Marina wanted from them.
There were six houses on the north side of the block, but the three on the far end had been ruled out by surveillance. The three on the near end were all seemingly abandoned, but structurally sound and yet free of the usual squatters, gangbangers, drug dealers, and whores who would otherwise have made use of them. Those people stayed clear for a reason, and Marina figured the most logical reason was that those who were using those houses were too bad to mess with. She also guessed the vampires were primarily in the center house, leaving the other two unoccupied as buffer zones. But they might know that someone would figure that out, and so use one of the others as their den. Thermal imaging wouldn’t be much use in this situation, since the bloodsuckers and their prey were all on the cool side.
The team fanned out, watching the windows in each of the houses (the police had evacuated everyone from the houses on the south side; anyone hiding out in the empties at the end of the block was on their own). Nobody moved inside. R.T., Tony H., and Spider John carried handheld battering rams and had their automatic rifles strapped to their backs; the others were ready to open fire at the slightest provocation. Marina and Monte stood a dozen feet back from the center house’s door, watching Tony H. and Jimbo and hoping her guess was
correct.
When everyone was in place, Marina took a deep breath and shouted, “Go!”
Simultaneously, rams crashed into three doors.
The door of the center house didn’t buckle under the assault like the others.
“It’s this one!” Marina cried.
Tony H. swung the ram twice more, putting his shoulders and back into it, and the doorjamb split. The door buckled open into the darkness.
By the time she and Monte reached the four steps up to the door, the agents from the other houses had joined them. The cops would watch the surrounding houses, but she really believed they were out of play. This center one was where the action would be.
It didn’t take long to get started.
Tony H. dropped the battering ram and brought his weapon around as he took his first two steps into the house. Before he had the gun in place, though, a dark form dropped on him from above. Jimbo had gone farther into the house already—if he turned and fired, not only would he risk hitting Tony H., but his rounds would threaten the other Red-Blooded operatives charging the door.
“We’re engaged!” Marina shouted. She clicked on the TRU-UV lamp mounted on top of her weapon as she rushed up the stairs.
The vampire hunkered on Tony H.’s back. It made a horrible hissing noise and gnashed its teeth, from which pink-tinged spittle flew. Marina caught it in the beam and it screeched. Jimbo got his TRU-UV on. Pinned between the two, the vampire dropped off Tony H. and curled on the floor like a bug on fire.
Tony H. aimed down and fired two phosphorous rounds into the creature’s head. The phosphorus burned, bright and white-hot in the dark house, and the vampire writhed for only an instant before its brain was destroyed.
The phosphorus emitted a lot of smoke, but before the room filled up, its white glow revealed the real nature of the hell they had entered. The floors and walls were brown, caked in old blood. There were skeletons, bones, and body parts strewn here and there, with no real pattern or order. The bitter smoke couldn’t cancel out the stink of death.
30 Days of Night: Light of Day Page 5