30 Days of Night: Light of Day

by Jeff Mariotte

  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.”

  “Yeah,” Walker said. He eased off the gas. “You’re right, dude, thanks.”

  As they made their way out of the city, he finally gave voice to a thought that had been nagging at him. “What if we catch something from these city chicks?” he asked. “I think in the suburbs there are fewer diseases.”

  “We talked about that,” Mitch said. “It’s easier to get caught there.”

  “Maybe so, but it seems like I’m always the one doing the dangerous work anyway.”

  “Man, if either of us is busted, we both go down. Even if you held the blade, I’m an accessory, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “For sure. I say we stick to the city. How many vampires you think hang out in the ’burbs? We want them to be able to find us, right? Isn’t that the whole idea?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay then.”

  But driving toward home, doubts surfaced again in Walker’s consciousness. He feared that he was already becoming addicted to the hunt, to the kill, to the burning sensation of blood running down his throat. But if this plan was all wrong, if they weren’t going to draw real vampires to them, then he didn’t want to be hooked on that.

  If there were no real vampires …

  “What if Andy’s wrong?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, the government swears he’s a nutbag. So what if they’re right and he’s wrong? There are no vampires and the whole deal was just some elaborate construction that he put together.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know what to believe. I’m just saying.”

  “If you think that, then I don’t know what to say. I mean, we’ve been doing this because we thought they were real.”

  “Yeah,” Walker said. He slammed his palm against the steering wheel. “Maybe they are! Probably. But what if they’re not? What if Andy played us all for suckers?”

  “Maybe we should pick up the pace,” Mitch said. “Do one every night. Make sure we get noticed.”

  “Or caught.”

  “Chance we gotta take. You don’t win if you don’t play.”

  “I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “Like you’re not already in jail. Sitting in your little house selling other people’s old shit on eBay.”

  “It’s just—”

  “Walker, you want to live, you have to take some chances. Maybe if you want to really live, you have to die first.”

  “I guess.”

  “Tell you what. When we get home, we’ll check on some of those message boards and websites. We’ll keep checking back there, looking for proof one way or the other. If something convinces us that they don’t exist, then we’ll quit what we’re doing. Cold turkey. We’ll go back to our old lives and forget we ever did this.”

  “Right, that’ll be easy.”

  Mitch ignored his sarcasm. “But if we’re convinced they’re real, then we step it up a notch. Back to the city every night. Really try to draw one in.”

  Mitch could be convincing. He could be an asshole, too, punching Walker’s buttons like nobody else. Walker gave up trying to argue. “Okay,” he said. “It’s a plan.”

  11

  THE FIFTH PARTIALLY DRAINED female body turned up in an apartment four blocks from the University of Chicago campus on a morning in mid-May. By the time detectives Alex Ziccaria and Larissa Dixson got to the small apartment complex, the sun was shining and a warm breeze blew in off the lake, bringing with it a faintly briny scent and the squawking cries of gulls.

  Patrol officers had taped off the parking lot and denied access to the building to anyone except residents. News crews and reporters worked the perimeter, vans with satellite uplinks jammed the block. One of the uniformed cops met Alex and Larissa at the yellow tape barrier. “Glad you’re here,” he said. “This is turning into a circus.”

  “Is there any reason to think the parking lot is part of the crime scene?” Larissa asked him.

  “No, but blocking it off was the only way to keep the press out of the building. They’re like sharks.”

  “It’s that whole stupid vampire angle,” Alex said.

  Larissa shot him in the ribs with her elbow. “Don’t say that word out loud.”

  “Yeah, I know, I’m sorry. It just has everybody so worked up.”

  Not only was the mass media obsessed with vampires these days, but when the first corpse had shown up, everybody in the squad room had started calling it the “vampire” case. Alex didn’t believe in vampires or anything else that fell into the general category of the supernatural, hadn’t since his seventh Christmas when he had found an Atari console in his parents’ closet that had shown up beside the tree on the big morning unwrapped, a gift from “Santa.” He was quickly finding that not everybody felt the same way he did. He had heard so-called experts on television talk shows discussing vampires with as much apparent certitude as if they had been talking about the latest economic issue or political maneuver. He glanced around, hoping no one from the press had heard his comment.

  “Let’s just get inside,” Larissa said. She and Alex signed their names on the uniformed officer’s scene log and ducked under the tape.

  The building was a modern monstrosity of poured concrete, steel, and glass, constructed of interlocking rectangles that gave each two-story unit a sense of privacy. Doorways were staggered in different walls so they didn’t face each other.

  “How many units?” Larissa asked the cop.

  “Eight.”

  “On-site manager?”

  “No.” The cop inclined his head toward a portly man with a graying goatee, wearing a white shirt with sweat-ringed armpits and a cheap striped tie. He stood off to one side, mopping his face with a handkerchief. “That’s the owner. He’s thrown up three times already.”

  “He go inside?”

  “No, he hasn’t seen the DB. He’s just a nervous type, I guess.”

  Alex let Larissa question the cop. She had a forthright style of speaking, without a lot of the wasted words that were often typical of cop talk. Alex supposed it came from a desire to be thoroughly understood, especially when writing reports or testifying in court, that led to the use of such redundant phrases as “subject was traveling in a westbound direction at a high rate of speed.” Alex was more of a thinker than a talker, or he liked to fancy himself that way, at any rate. When he did speak it was judiciously, weighing his words, picking his phrases. If he let the moment carry him, it was too easy to make mistakes, as he had with the vampire comment.

  “Don’t let him leave, okay?” he told the cop. “We’ll need to talk to him after we look around.”

  “Got it.”

  The cop led them around to the building’s east side and pointed out an open doorway. The number 6 was tacked on the wall beside the door. “That’s the one. She’s inside.”

  “Thanks,” Larissa said. The cop left them and disappeared around the corner. Larissa started for the door but Alex wai
ted, turning in a slow circle, taking a look at what the apartment’s resident would have seen outside her door. And who might have been looking back.

  As he looked, he smeared Vicks VapoRub on his upper lip, to block the smells he would encounter inside. Larissa wouldn’t use it, saying she wanted to experience the crime scene with every sense, but Alex figured trained crime scene investigators could go in with electronic sniffers if there were particular odors that needed to be isolated. He was all for crime scene preservation, but he wanted to preserve his own sanity as well.

  There wasn’t much to see outside. The complex’s grounds were sparsely landscaped, pebbled walkways flanked here and there by low, carefully trimmed shrubbery. An eight-foot-high concrete wall interspersed with randomly placed frosted glass bricks surrounded the building. Alex tried to see out through one of the bricks but only vague patches of dark and light were visible on the other side, no detail. Over the top of the wall was the windowless brick facade of some other building. When the resident stepped out of her apartment, she would have seen stone and concrete and brick, plane upon plane, but unless a bird happened by she would have felt utterly cut off from sentient life. It seemed like a sterile existence, but then Alex preferred woods and leathers and fabrics, materials that created a sense of life.

  Of course, the apartment’s resident no longer fell into that category herself. Alex swung back around to the door. He couldn’t delay going in any longer.

  Larissa waited in the doorway, helping herself to some last breaths of fresh air. As soon as Alex joined her he caught a whiff of the sour/sweet smell of death and the sharper-edged tang of blood, in spite of the Vicks. “Let’s have a look,” he said.

  The victim’s name was Chantelle Durfey. A single woman, she worked in an administrative office at the university and had a weekend job at a bookstore nearby. From the looks of things, she spent most of her money on renting her nice apartment and not much on furnishing it. Alex would have been willing to accept that she just had a minimalist sense of style that went along with the sterile construction of her building, but the arms of her sofa were worn, the slipcover stained. She had an old TV and a boom box instead of a stereo system, both sitting on cheap composition-board cubes. Another cube, stacked high with hardcover books, served as a coffee table. Curtains blocked off a floor-to-ceiling window that would look out at the same wall he had seen from outside. A leather purse had been tossed to the floor, open, its contents scattered.

  Across a serving bar was a modern kitchen, appliances chrome and black, floor tiled in black and white. Chantelle was crumpled on those tiles with drying blood pooled around her. Her skin was pale, her hair red and curly, her clothing intact but drenched in blood. Alex took latex gloves from his pocket and put them on with a snap. Larissa watched him, then sighed audibly and put on her own.

  “We should make sure the CSIs look around outside,” Alex said. “The way I see it going down, someone waited out there, where no neighbors could see. Maybe just around the corner from her doorway. She came home from a late shift and the perp came up behind her, forced her in, then opened her up in the kitchen. Right?”

  “Maybe,” Larissa said. “You read that new report the government put out? Forensic science has about as much validity as astrology, sounds like. Except for DNA, most new developments don’t actually work, or at least not as advertised. And there’s a huge discrepancy between one lab and another. Maybe if you look in her eyes you’ll see the image of her killer captured there.”

  “I saw a story about the report,” Alex said. He knew Larissa didn’t put much stock in forensic science, and figured she would bring it up as soon as the opportunity arose. “Still, they’ve got those eagle eyes. If someone waited out there they’ll be able to find traces.”

  “And then screw up the evidence before they get to court.”

  “They’re not that bad.”

  “Individuals aren’t that bad. As a class …”

  Alex crouched beside Chantelle Durfey, wanting Larissa to drop the subject. He pressed two fingers against the woman’s cool cheekbone and tilted her head. Like the other “vampire” victims, her throat had been slashed, a single strike with a sharp blade. The blood around her looked like a lot, but such a wound would have bled considerably more had someone not siphoned some of it away.

  Or drank it, he thought. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help it. Every possible scenario had to be considered, even that. Teeth, however, had not made that wound. Teeth tore, and this was a clean slice.

  He moved his fingers away carefully, lowering her head to its original position. She was a pretty woman in her midthirties, he guessed. She wasn’t athletic; her body was curvy, even plump. But she was tall and healthy looking and had probably carried the weight well.

  Alex preferred women like Larissa, who was blond and compact, five-six. She kept her hair short, curling in slightly toward a prominent jawline. In her work clothes, dark pants, light blue shirt open at the collar, with a dark jacket over it, she looked almost masculine, but Alex had seen her in other clothes, played tennis and run laps with her. When she put on a dress, she was as female as could be.

  Screw it. He didn’t just prefer women like Larissa, he preferred Larissa herself. His crush on her had been pronounced since her second day on the squad, and when they’d been assigned as partners, he had thought his dreams had all come true. He was physically attracted to her, he found her smart and interesting, and he liked her no-nonsense approach, even though it was so different from his. Because it was different, maybe—he thought their varied styles of policing made them complementary, so they would be less likely to miss anything.

  But she, as it turned out, considered him overly cerebral. He had considered intentionally losing control once in a while, maybe clocking a suspect on a whim, spoiling evidence by clambering around a crime scene exclaiming over whatever he saw. That wasn’t his way, though, and he didn’t honestly think it would win her over even if she didn’t see through it. Which, perceptive as she was, she probably would.

  He wasn’t her type of cop, and he wasn’t her type of boyfriend.

  So he suffered in silence, just glad to have the opportunity to work closely with her. Maybe someday, he told himself, she’ll see her mistake. Realize what she’s been missing.

  Maybe she wouldn’t, but Alex couldn’t have continued to function as a homicide detective if he wasn’t also an optimist, so he kept hoping.

  If he couldn’t close this case in a hurry, he might not continue functioning as a homicide detective anyway. The pressure from above was intense, and getting heavier with every passing hour. He turned back to the ravaged corpse, wishing a clue would fall into his waiting hands.

  12

  AFTER HIS SEMISUCCESSFUL rat experiment, Larry Greenbarger spent several more days inside the old man’s house, re-creating his formula, with slight variations, for human use. Or former human use, anyway. He hardly slept, leaving his work only long enough to feed.

  Now he believed he had it right. Had he been back at the Operation Red-Blooded facility, he could have had a selection of captive nosferatu on which to test his work. He hadn’t run across any vampires since that April night, though. He had only one at hand.

  He would have to try the stuff on himself.

  He figured he didn’t have much to lose. If it killed him—well, he was already dead. If he stopped walking around, that would just mean one less vampire in the world. No great loss. He liked being upright and sentient, if not alive, and he enjoyed his own company, but his guess was that if he finally died completely, he wouldn’t be in any position to miss himself. He didn’t have any faith in the idea of an afterlife. If heaven or hell did exist, their keepers wouldn’t let vampires circumvent the system; therefore he didn’t have to worry that by destroying himself he would subject himself to eternal torment. Still, as morning neared, he grew anxious, and when the sun crested the horizon his hands were trembling a little.

  Larry had to reuse the
syringe he had used on the rat, since he hadn’t yet acquired a steady supply of those. He drew some of his formula up into the tube, pushed it down until it squirted, tapped the needle (which he had sterilized with flame). Then he tied off his bicep with a kitchen towel, squeezed his fist until the veins in his forearm popped, and stuck himself.

  A moment’s prick, and then a warm feeling spread through his arm. He began to sweat. The fire inside him heated up, turning his arm red and prickly. Mistake? Maybe. Too soon to tell. Give it time.

  He felt his face flushing, and his chest. The fire moved through his body, but as it did it cooled off again. His arm started to go pale, and in another minute he was back to normal.

  It hadn’t killed him, at least not yet.

  But he didn’t know if it had done anything for him, either.

  Only one way to find out. Larry yanked the back door open and stepped out into the yard, into the morning sunlight, before he could come up with some rationalization why he shouldn’t. His steps were hesitant, faltering, but he was committed. He stood on the lawn, arms out, letting the sun take him.

  He didn’t remember it being so bright before. It hurt his eyes. He squinted, blinking back tears.

  But his flesh didn’t smolder, didn’t smoke or burst into flames.

  He touched his teeth, his face, to make sure he hadn’t accidentally reverted to humanity. Nothing had changed.

  He was nosferatu, but he could walk in the light of day.

  And he hungered.

  He had fed, just before sunrise, because he wanted to be at his strongest. It didn’t matter. He was starving.

  Nobody was outside, that he could see, but he knew there were houses not too very far away, and that they were occupied. People lived in them, bodies full of veins pulsing with rich, fresh blood. The blood that he needed, more than he had ever needed anything. He caught its scent on the air.