30 Days of Night: Light of Day

by Jeff Mariotte

  “We’re in the right place,” Marina declared. “Let’s mop this up.”

  9

  WHILE TONY O., KAT, Jimbo, and Monte went up the stairs, Marina, Tony H., R.T., and Spider John descended into the house’s basement. It was impossible to tell from the odor which level got the most use, because the house was rank, disgusting from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. They should have been wearing Hazmat gear, Marina thought, not tactical, but it was too late to change. Vampires must have been using this place for years.

  With every step down, the air seemed to grow thicker. The stairs were slick, some of the blood coating them still liquid, but even though her hands were gloved she didn’t want to touch the walls to steady herself. Instead she took careful steps, knees flexed, bending over slightly to see what was coming. She didn’t want anyone taking her out at the knees. Her TRU-UV light beamed out ahead of her.

  There was no electricity on in the house, and before heading down the three of them had donned night vision goggles. The goggles relied on ambient light, although very low levels of it were needed, so in absolute blackness they wouldn’t be any help. But the TRU-UV lights gave off enough illumination that Marina could see clearly, albeit with a greenish glow.

  At the bottom of the stairs they found a narrow hallway. The bloodsuckers attacked as soon the agents were in the hall with nowhere to retreat to except back to the stairs. They swarmed the three agents, hissing and screaming. In the confined space, shooting was dangerous. Clawed hands gripped Marina’s legs and something ripped the night vision goggles from her head. She swung her weapon about, trying to cut the dark with her TRU-UV everywhere at once, but the creatures moved so fast that it just glanced off them.

  Marina opened her mouth to shout to the others, but as soon as she did a hand was jammed into it. She didn’t dare bite down and risk breaking its skin. She tried to shove the bloodsucker away, but it was far stronger than she was. The vampire shoved another hand in there and started prying her jaws apart, pressing her against a wall at the same time. She tried to scream but could only make weak squeaking sounds, more than drowned out by the general commotion. A vampire still had her legs, pulling her off balance, and R.T., Spider John, and Tony H. were similarly overwhelmed. No help was coming from there.

  The thing kept pushing her mouth open. Its head moved in close, in spite of her efforts to hold it at bay. A special Kevlar collar ringed her neck, so she wasn’t worried about being bitten. But she sensed the creature right before her face. Then she felt saliva strike her cheeks, and she realized Jesus Christ it was trying to spit into her open mouth.

  Marina kicked backward, at the bloodsucker behind her, then lashed out toward the one in front. She couldn’t spit with those hands in her mouth, but she whipped her head from side to side, trying to break its grip. The gun was useless, trapped under her arm where she couldn’t even get to the trigger. She closed her eyes. They weren’t doing her much good anyway, and she didn’t want to give it any additional ways to trade bodily fluids with her. She didn’t know if vampire spit would harm her, but even Operation Red-Blooded’s researchers admitted they didn’t know everything about how vampirism was transmitted. She didn’t want to be a test case.

  Then she felt another bloodsucker grab her left arm and twist it toward her back. The pain was sudden, excruciating. She could smell the bloody stink of the first one’s breath, closer than ever to her nose and mouth. Its upper lip made contact with hers in a horrible kiss, and she felt its tongue slide against hers. Even if she could bite it, she would get a mouthful of poison blood.

  Instead, she snatched for the knife on her belt. Its blade was eight inches long, the top edge serrated. You couldn’t kill a vampire with it unless you sawed its head off, separating it from its brain. But you could do some serious damage. She freed it from its scabbard with her right hand and stabbed up and forward.

  The knife entered under the vampire’s chin and drove up into its open mouth. It screeched in pain and bucked away. Somebody’s TRU-UV light (maybe her own) flashed over them and in its glow Marina could see the steel blade, slick with blood, behind all those teeth.

  She yanked it out and brought it in closer, slicing below one of the hands in her mouth. She cut wrist. Blood splattered her boots but the thing let go. Marina drove the knife to her left, stabbing the one holding her arm. It released her for an instant, long enough to drop the knife and bring up the gun. Tony, R.T., and John would have to fend for themselves. Marina opened fire, phosphorous rounds hitting vampires and exploding with bright white light and fizzing sounds and gagging smoke.

  As she held the trigger down, she spat and spat, trying to clear any vampire saliva from her mouth. She prayed she hadn’t swallowed.

  Gradually her senses returned and the phosphorus lit the hallway well enough to see. Spider John was down, flesh peeled from his face in curling ribbons. A vampire was drinking from him. Marina swore and fired a quick burst into its head, spraying pieces of it the length of the hallway. R.T. was dazed, but appeared okay. Tony H. had fallen into a corner, where he sat on top of a pile of human corpses. He opened fire with his own gun, and in seconds the hall was clear.

  “John?” he asked.

  “He’s done,” Marina said.

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. You okay?” she asked. Meaning, did any of them bite you?

  “I’m a little shaken up. Not bit.” Tony put his hand against the corpses to push up off them, and it sank into a soup of decomposing flesh. “Oh, fuck me!”

  “We’ve all got to sterilize ourselves.”

  “Yeah, but … shit, my pants are soaked from sitting on that crap.”

  Marina twitched her light at the pile. The bodies had started to melt into one another. A pool of fluid surrounded them. She tried to swallow a lump in her throat but it wouldn’t go down, and then she remembered she never wanted to swallow anything again as long as she lived, and she spat onto the dead bodies.

  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 o
wn 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.

  10

  “THAT ONE!” MITCH 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.