30 Days of Night: Light of Day

by Jeff Mariotte

  “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.

  The plan should have been foolproof. It wasn’t as easy to carry out as Walker had hoped, but that didn’t mean the concept was bad.

  He spat on the floor and knelt beside her, trying to avoid broken glass, and he started to cut.

  4

  “YESTERDAY ON THIS BROADCAST I told you that the vampire scourge—if it exists, and isn’t simply a fiction made up by a liberal administration forever looking for new ways to spend your hard-earned tax money—is the inevitable result of a secular society that has turned away from religion and conservative values in favor of an anything-goes approach to governing and to life. When people ignore the teachings and tenets that have brought America so far and focus only on their immediate gratification and self-satisfaction, the results are dire.

  “Needless to say, I got a lot of email from viewers. Some of it was complimentary, and some, mostly from the usual haters on the left, called me the usual names. People, you can save yourselves five minutes—I’ve heard them all before and nothing you write can shock me anymore. And if you are going to write, please consult a dictionary, because with some of you it’s hard to tell exactly which word you’re trying to use. Four-letter words aren’t that easy to misspell, but the lefties always seem able to manage.

  “The point I want to leave you with tonight is this: the liberals and secular humanists among us have once again made America less safe. To make things worse, you can be certain that in the weeks and months to come, we’ll be hearing card-carrying ACLU types telling us that vampires have rights, too, and so-called progressives telling us that we can’t tap their phones or imprison them without trials or use intensive interrogation techniques to find out where vampire cells are or what plans they have. It’ll be up to us, the citizens of Real America, to protect ourselves and our families, because we can’t count on big government to do it for us.

  “Until tomorrow night, this is James Callahan, Mayor of Real America, saying God bless the USA— but keep your powder dry, just in case!”

  Callahan snatched the earpiece from his ear and dropped it on the ground. A tech was there unclipping the unit from his belt as he rose from the chair. “Great show, Mr. C,” she said. Callahan ignored the comment. The tech had a decent rack, but she would be gone by next week, if history was any guide, so he wasn’t going to bother learning her name or conversing with her.

  He brushed past Louis Orszag, the show’s producer, who was feeding him a variation of the same line. Of course it was a great show; he didn’t do bad ones. He had heard it all before, just as he had the insults from the unthinking, unimaginative leftists in the audience. As he had tonight, he liked to mention those degenerates from time to time; it worked them up, kept them from tuning out, and Nielsen didn’t differentiate political leanings when its ratings were reported. He meant to hit management up for a hefty boost when his contract was up for renewal. His dressing room was just across the hall from the set, so he thanked Louis for the feedback and let his door swing shut.

  In his dressing room, he wiped his face down with cold cream to remove the makeup, then took off his jacket and shirt. He hung them on the rack. Someone would come in later and take them away to be laundered. He pulled on a ribbed turtleneck and a leather coat from Barney’s and called Serena to make sure she would be at his place when he got there. Sometimes Callahan needed a little rough sex to come down from the buzz of a show, and she was the best there was, always willing and ready.

  In the studio hallways, he had to run a gauntlet of well-wishers, the kind of people who needed a moment’s contact with a celebrity to validate their existence. He allowed a couple of them to slap his palm as he rushed toward the parking garage.

  James Callahan was the self-proclaimed Mayor of Real America, and as such he felt he had to take seriously the responsibility to be a man of the people. As a result, he declined the limo that the network would happily have provided him, and drove himself to and from work each day. It cut into
his free time, but instead of reading or writing his show during the trip, he spent it listening to talk radio to get a sense of the public’s mood.

  The parking garage was quiet. It was guarded at all times, of course, and well lit, and his reserved space was only steps away from the elevator. He climbed into the H2 and started the engine. He loved the sense of power the big machine gave him, the steady growl of its motor, the elevation from the street. Callahan was not a tall man, although he had broad shoulders and a deep chest and he was a man people noticed when he swept into a room, so he liked being able to look down on pedestrians and most other motorists as he made his way to his Upper East Side Park Avenue brownstone.

  By the time he got there, Herman would have let Serena in and closeted himself in his quarters. She would have some candles lit, the bed turned down, a few toys out, and she would be wearing silk, or maybe leather, and not much of it, at that.

  He heard the first thump on the roof as he passed 60th. Callahan glanced at the ceiling. Maybe some punk had thrown a water balloon or something. It hadn’t sounded like a rock, fortunately. But if it was a paint balloon, or anything that would have caused real damage to the SUV, he would have the network’s security people all over that corner until they found the culprit. As soon as he was safely parked in his private garage, he would stand on the running board and take a look.

  A few blocks farther on he heard another noise. This one was softer, but unmistakable. Maybe he’d been wrong at first—maybe a squirrel or some other varmint had fallen from a tree and managed to hang on to the roof. He sped up a little, hoping to shake it off. He could handle another speeding ticket, if it came to that. Most cops gave him a pass, sometimes in exchange for an autograph, and those tickets he did receive he just handed over to a producer to be paid.

  Between 66th and 67th most of the street lamps were out. He would have to have Herman call the mayor about that. He liked the sidewalks to be well lit when he drove past—a person never knew who might be skulking around in the dark.

  Callahan recalled with fondness a cocktail party at the mayor’s home. He had met Marcella there. Submissive, slender, sexy Marcella had been one of his favorites. He was thinking about the way she used to shrug out of an evening gown when something darted from the shadowed sidewalk.

  He stomped on the brake. The Hummer fishtailed slightly as it lurched to a sudden halt.

  And a face appeared before the windshield, upside down. It stared in at him with malevolent eyes. Not a squirrel, then, or any other kind of urban wildlife. No, this was some sort of freak, a drug addict, most likely.

  Then he noticed the figure pinned in his headlights had a similar look. They both had long faces, open mouths full of teeth, flicking tongues. More of them scurried out of the darkness. Crackheads? Callahan always drove with the doors locked, so when they pawed at the handles, the sturdy SUV forbade them entry. He took his foot off the brake and pressed down on the accelerator. He would just have to run them down if they didn’t get out of his way. The street was empty for blocks—he would find if the creep on the roof could hang on at eighty or ninety miles per hour.

  But as he started to move forward, the driver’s door opened—no, that was the wrong word, the freak outside didn’t open the door but ripped it off, hinges and lock giving with a horrendous scraping, snapping sound. Callahan batted at clawed hands reaching toward him. He let go of the wheel but kept his foot on the gas, and the vehicle surged ahead, drifting toward the sidewalk.

  By the time it hit a shop on the next corner, he was out of the seat and sprawled on the cold hard pavement of Park Avenue. He was screaming, but his screams grew ever weaker. He was surrounded, men and women, or males and females anyway, barely human, holding him down while a couple of them opened his veins with those gnarled hands. James Callahan smelled his own blood and knew what it was, and as the klieg lights of life’s soundstage were shut off for the last time, one by one, he knew that he should not have taunted the damn liberals so often, because they had finally had their say, and they weren’t nearly as peace-loving as they had always claimed….

  5

  “LEAVE HIM!” ROCCO ORDERED. Already traffic was piling up on Park, cars screeching to a halt, headlights stabbing toward them. Sirens wailed in the distance, but headed this way. “We don’t want to be caught!”

  “Right,” Caleb said. He drew away from Callahan’s body. Blood slicked his chin and cheeks. “Let’s go.” He touched a long finger to his right cheek, drew some of the blood to his mouth, leaving a pathway where it had been. “He’s a little on the sour side.”

  “I thought so, too,” Dragon Lady said. “Bitter.” She was always the most critical of them. Her constant carping was hard for Rocco to take sometimes, but he loved her in his way, as he did all those in his den.

  Shiloh, Valentine, Brick, and Lothar left the corpse more slowly, reluctant to leave a meal only half-finished. But that had been the plan all along: the very public death of a noted figure. And with much more of the same yet to come.

  Rocco led them down the block, up an alley, over a fence. They had a long distance yet to cover, but they owned the shadows, and it would be a while before anyone went from the shock of finding Callahan’s drained husk to searching for his killers.

  Callahan had been the perfect target. They had settled on the plan, then stalked him, learning his habits, studying the route he invariably took home from the studio each weeknight. What made him ideal was not just that he was the host of a top-rated cable news program, but that he had started talking about the nosferatu on the air every night. Once the circumstances of his death were revealed—and they would be, the media couldn’t resist such a delicious story—panic would set in.

  Callahan had to die, not because he threatened to expose the existence of vampires, but because his death, carried out in just this way, would confirm their existence for that segment of the public still determined to deny them.

  Some of the undead wanted their existence to remain a secret, the stuff of whispered legend and pulp fiction. Rocco and the others in his den, though, wanted the world to know them, because to know them was to fear them. Other dens had started similar efforts, stepping up their attacks and trying to do so in very public ways. He had heard about actions in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Idaho, and even in other countries: France, Ukraine, Colombia, and more. They longed for general panic. They knew how humanity would respond, once their existence became common knowledge. People would stop trusting one another, if they ever had. They would leave their homes armed, if they left at all. In their paranoia and suspicion, they would set upon one another. Vampires could never kill as many humans as humans did themselves, and without a good old-fashioned war under way on American shores, rampant terror would have to do.

  They made their way downtown at a brisk pace, avoiding the busiest streets, taking to the rooftops when they had to. At 43rd, they went underground, ducking into an unused subway tunnel, and they raced along the old tracks, full of vitality from their meal, laughing at the clockwork precision of their plan. “If only you could have seen his eyes!” Lothar declared at one point. “When I looked down from roof of his car, so wide were they!” He had lived in the United States for most of the last century, but he still spoke the accented, stilted English of the Balkan peasant he had once been. But he was lithe, light on his feet, and could jump like he had springs for legs.

  “I wasn’t positive,” Shiloh said, “because his mouth was full of blood bubbling up from his throat, but I could have sworn he called us hippies. Who talks about hippies anymore?”

  Rocco could understand his error. Shiloh had been a real hippie, turned in 1969, and she still tended to wear patched jeans and loose cotton tops and beads. Sometimes she even stuck flowers in her hair, but they always wilted quickly, so she didn’t try that often these days. She was a chunky girl with long wavy blond hair and football-shaped breasts that she still liked showing off, and she had often told Rocco that those free-l
ove days of the late 1960s had been her favorite times, alive or undead, despite the fact that one of the many men who had tasted her pleasures had also killed her and turned her.

  “He deserved what he got,” Rocco said. He unlocked the passageway that led from the subway tunnel up into their den on the Lower East Side and started up a narrow, winding staircase. “He was an idiot, and the world is better off without him. The good news is that once he and a few more like him die, no one will be able to escape the conclusion we want them to reach. We’re undead … underfed … and we love the red!”

  Men were nothing but dogs.

  Marina Tanaka-Dunn took pride in her appearance, but she made the effort only for her own satisfaction. She believed that most women could have virtually any man they wanted—they didn’t have to be stunning, just readily available. Men might talk as if they had standards, but how many of them would turn down a woman who was standing in front of them?

  Marina was stunning, though: coltish and limber, with perfect features framed by a sleek black mane. Her father had been a Japanese scientist, one of that rare breed of playboy scientists with movie-star looks and the social skills to go with them—and criminal connections that helped finance his research but demanded much in return. Her mother had been a beautiful American journalist who went to Japan to interview him and had never left his side. Marina was a living testament to the power of good genes mixed with a troubled upbringing.

  For years she had thought that nothing could be as fun as sex, particularly those variations typically frowned upon by polite society. That was before she learned to kill. Since then—especially since she began killing bloodsuckers—sex had taken a backseat to dealing in death. Her brains, combined with her bloodthirstiness, had carried her to the top ranks of Operation Red-Blooded, where her title, since Dan Bradstreet had taken up permanent residence in a hospital bed, had been Director of Field Operations.