30 Days of Night: Light of Day

by Jeff Mariotte

  He ran toward the back fence, not bothering to open the gate. He jumped, and his leap carried him high over the fence, with feet to spare. He landed lightly on the other side and kept running. Across a stream, through a patch of forested land (he swatted at a small tree in his way; the trunk splintered and the treetop crashed down). Another fence, this one taller and wrought iron, stood in his way. He didn’t know if he would be able to leap this one so he grabbed one of the iron bars in both hands and shoved it to the side, then did the same to the bar next to it, making a hole big enough to squeeze through. By the time he got to the house he heard people inside shrieking at him, or at each other. He wasn’t listening; the world was a cacophony of sounds, bird noises, voices, distant cars, and everywhere the constant liquid rush of blood moving through veins and arteries.

  Larry approached the back door and pounded on it once with both fists. It was solid wood but it cracked and groaned and the hinges snapped and the whole thing fell inward with a deafening boom. He stepped on the door and found himself inside. A white-haired man faced him with a shotgun in his quaking hands; behind him were a woman about his age, and a younger woman, maybe just a teenager or not much older. Tears glistened on their faces.

  The man spoke, and Larry thought he said “Get out!” But Larry hungered, and there were meals here for the taking. He kept advancing. The man pulled the trigger and the gun roared and Larry was knocked almost off his feet by lead shot, his right arm, held out in front of him, nearly torn off. He ignored the pain and kept going. He noted, almost offhandedly, that the wounds he had suffered were already beginning to close, to heal.

  Larry snatched the shotgun from the man’s hands and hurled it to one side. It smashed through plaster and lodged in the wall, barrel first. The man screamed something else and threw a punch. Larry caught his wrist, yanked on it. The arm separated from the shoulder, flesh tearing, muscle and tendon holding an instant longer but then giving way. Blood showered the floor, delicious blood. Larry didn’t stop to feed, though. As the man fainted and collapsed, Larry brushed him aside and went for the women. They were screaming and battering him with small fists, their blows as meaningless to him as the footfalls of fruit flies. He backhanded the older one, nearly severing her head, then grabbed the younger one and pulled her to him and bit her neck where it met the curve of her shoulder, and he drank deep.

  13

  WHILE HE SAT INSIDE the neighboring home, filling himself and more on his three victims, the rage that had swept over Larry subsided. He realized he was eating himself sick, forcing more and more blood down his throat even though he was fully sated. He pushed the last body, that of the old man, aside, forced himself to his feet, and went to the window.

  Broad daylight outside now, leaves and grass sparkling with dew that caught the morning sun. He had been in this house for most of an hour. The time had passed in a blur, not unlike the frenzy that had brought him here in the first place.

  From the doorway, he surveyed the damage he had caused. The door was utterly destroyed; he was standing on it. The bars of the wrought iron fence bowed out like parentheses. He had cleared an eight-foot fence behind his borrowed house as easily as a track star taking a hurdle. The kitchen of this small house was covered in blood, ceiling, walls, and floor, from the unspeakable damage he had done to the people he’d encountered here.

  Since becoming undead, his physical power had been remarkable. In life he had never been athletic or strong, so he had marveled at the things he could do after his transformation. But even then, he had never been this powerful. Not even close.

  Larry took a couple steps out the doorway, into the sun. He felt its warmth on his bare arms, turned his blood-slicked face to it.

  And he remembered the way his experimental rat had attacked and overpowered a much larger dog, before breaking its tether and racing away.

  Even now, standing for just moments in direct sun, he felt a fury building up in him, a need to crush, to destroy, to maim and murder. Recognizing it, he darted back into the house. There he drove his fists through the wooden doors of a kitchen cabinet, grabbed the supporting posts, and ripped the whole thing from the wall. Dishes and glassware crashed to the bloody floor. He turned to the refrigerator, lifted it from its position next to another cabinet, and hurled it through the back wall and out into the yard.

  His rage abated, Larry stayed in the house and out of the sun for another few minutes, trying to think.

  The formula he had taken was a slightly altered version of what he had given the rat. Both had responded to sunlight with uncontrolled ferocity and impossible strength. But it hadn’t incinerated either of them.

  He knelt on the tacky floor next to the old man and was able to suck a little more blood from the corpse. Was everybody old in this neighborhood? He had thought Colorado full of young and vibrant people, skiers and mountain climbers and bikers, but in this area everyone he encountered had white hair and bodies that had long since given way to age and gravity.

  The blood calmed him more, but he knew he had a problem. He had to get back to the house he had borrowed, had to load up what stolen equipment he could and get out of the area. He had thrown a refrigerator through the wall of this house. If the authorities hadn’t been notified yet, they soon would be. Neighbors didn’t live right on top of each other here, but some things wouldn’t go unnoticed for long. His fit of demolition would draw the police, and they would find the bodies, and a massive hunt would ensue. He wanted to be on his way before it started.

  But if he went back out into the sun, he risked losing control again.

  He went deeper into the house, tugged a bedspread off a bed, and draped it over himself. So shielded, he rushed out into the sun again, through the gap in the fence (he could barely squeeze through it this time, making him wonder how he had done it so easily before), and dashed back to the house he had occupied.

  When the police found what was left of the bodies, they would go over the house with the proverbial finetoothed comb. He would have to burn the place to the ground to hide all traces of his occupation, and even that would be no guarantee. So he would have to count on the fact that he had left the old Larry Greenbarger behind in Nevada, that even finding his fingerprints or hair follicles or whatever else he might have left behind wouldn’t point to where he was going. All those clues would point to was someone presumed to be dead, or at least missing.

  Where he was going, even he didn’t know yet. Away from Colorado, that was all he could say for certain.

  He would need to find himself a new safe place, and soon. Someplace he could continue to study and experiment. He still had a lot of work to do, although he had made undeniable progress.

  In all of history, as far as he knew, no one had come up with a means of enabling the undead to walk in the daylight. He now had done so, but his method was not yet perfect. There had to be a way to tamp down the sudden, out-of-control rage, while still accessing the incredible strength that came with it.

  When he found the way and spread the word to the bloodsucker community, the nature of vampirism would be forever altered.

  Larry had not become part of Operation Red-Blooded out of any special hatred of the undead. He had been skeptical well into the first year of his employment there, until he started interacting with vampires in person. Confronted with the undeniable evidence of their existence, he willingly altered his beliefs. He was a scientist, and Red-Blooded paid him— paid him well—to do science. They assigned a task and then got out of the way and let him work. Few professional scientists he’d known had a better situation.

  So becoming one of them himself had not been as personally repugnant to him as it might have seemed. After all, even as nosferatu, he continued to do science, the kind he liked, with practical real-world applications. It was only the potential beneficiaries of his work who had changed.

  Vampires had always been held back because the sun’s rays could destroy them. That weakness kept them from ever making a real stand
against humanity, from using their greater strength and ruthlessness to completely overwhelm their prey.

  Without that limitation, though … anything was possible. Vampires who could survive the sun—who were, in fact, strengthened by its rays, who could tap into the ferocity it gave them without being so overwhelmed that they lost all control—would be unstoppable. Perfect killing machines.

  Deep in their heart of hearts, every scientist wanted to make a difference.

  Larry Greenbarger knew, finally, that he would.

  In life, he had been one scientist among thousands, if not more. He would never have been an Albert Einstein, a Christiaan Barnard, a Marie Curie. In undeath, however, with his specific background in vampire physiology, he was unique, more significant than he ever had been in life. He would make a big difference indeed. The impact of his work would shake the world, and in very short order. He started loading up the car. As soon as darkness fell, he had to hit the road.

  14

  “YOU CAN’T GIVE THEM anything, Marina,” Zachary Kleefeld said.

  “I know that.”

  “I mean nothing at all. Volunteer nothing. If they ask you what day it is, you have to ask them to state what days it might be so you can choose one of theirs.”

  “Don’t worry, Zach,” Marina said. “I know the score.”

  “But you’ve never done it before. You don’t know what it’s like until you’re sitting in that chair with all those old white men staring at you.”

  “Zach, a vampire tried to tongue-kiss me the other day. I’m just lucky it didn’t actually drool in my mouth. I think I—”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “That’s nothing. Not compared to this. I’ve seen people—hard, experienced people who have been around the block—completely fall apart in that chair.”

  The Acting Director was trying to prepare her for testimony before a Senate subcommittee. The committee’s focus was on homeland security, and they wanted to get to the bottom of the vampire story, once and for all, or so they said. Kleefeld had tried to get himself substituted as a witness, but they had insisted that they wanted to interview a field agent.

  The problem was, Operation Red-Blooded’s official line was that vampires didn’t exist. The agency’s main thrust in recent weeks had been pushing back against the media onslaught, trying to discredit Andy Gray and to drive stories about vampires off the front pages and back into the supermarket tabloids where they belonged.

  If the public came to believe in vampires, not only would mass panic likely come about, but every law enforcement and intelligence operation in the country would want a piece of the battle. Maybe even the military. As long as no one knew they were a threat, Red-Blooded was free to function as it wished. Its funding was black bag, off the books, and they liked it that way. The agency’s existence was so classified that there were people working in the Director of National Security’s office who had never heard of it.

  The subcommittee members were sworn to secrecy, of course. Senators sitting on that panel had security clearance to be there. Every senator could keep a secret, otherwise not one of them would ever be re-elected. But those secrets had a tendency to come out sooner or later, once an administration changed or a senator lost a seat or wrote a tell-all book.

  Which left Marina with a precarious balancing act. She had to convince the subcommittee members that vampires weren’t real but that Operation Red-Blooded needed to be left exactly as it was—or maybe funded a little more heavily—in order to keep them that way.

  When Kleefeld had first described the problem, she openly wondered if there was someone she could kill to make the whole subcommittee disappear.

  Kleefeld had buried his ruddy face in his hands. “Oh my God … you … you can’t kill a senator, Marina,” he had said. “You just have to lie under oath. And you have to do it convincingly, because these people see liars every time they look in the mirror, so they know all the signs.”

  “Lying won’t be a problem,” Marina had said. “I’m good at that.”

  But that hadn’t been reassurance enough for Kleefeld. He had insisted on going over every aspect of her testimony with her, trying to anticipate every question that might conceivably be asked. It always came back around to the tightrope. If vampires are not a problem, why do we need Operation Red-Blooded?

  Because you want to make sure they don’t become a problem was the preferred response. Not quite the same as admitting that they existed—but not so far off, either.

  She got to the Capitol an hour and a half before her testimony was to begin. There were security checkpoints she had to go through. Even though she was licensed to—expected to—carry firearms anywhere, she had left hers locked up in her car. Then she had a private meeting scheduled with Georgia senator Bobby Harlowe, chairman of the subcommittee, to discuss the rules of her appearance. Kleefeld had offered to have an agency attorney with her for that meeting, but she had declined. The lawyer would be at her side during her testimony, and that was good enough for her.

  Marina was not easily impressed, but the vast rotunda of the Capitol always did the trick. She walked slowly through the building, listening to the click of her heels on marble floors, watching people she usually saw only on the evening news. The sense of history was palpable, weighing as delightfully heavily on her as a truffle on her tongue. She was a killer, a brawler, a woman who loved violence and sex with a ferocity that more intellectual pursuits could never inspire. But she had a powerful appreciation for history, too. Although her father had been Japanese and she was raised in both countries, she had grown up thinking of herself as an American, and being in this place forced her to take that citizenship seriously.

  She loved her job because she got paid to kill bloodsuckers. But she loved killing bloodsuckers, in part, because every one she killed meant some number of Americans would not be murdered in the night.

  An aide showed her into Senator Harlowe’s inner office. It was vast, paneled in dark wood, anchored by a desk that must have weighed as much as one of the faces on Mount Rushmore. Fighter planes could have landed on its surface. The senator had animal heads and skins on one wall, four TVs—two of which were tuned to Fox News and CNN even though the sound was muted—a sitting area with rich, comfortable leather furniture, and a full bar.

  “Can I offer you anything to drink, Ms. Tanaka-Dunn?” he asked.

  “Some water would be nice.” No way she was going to drink before giving congressional testimony. She needed to stay sharp, to keep the lies straight.

  “Fine, fine. Have a seat.” He waved toward the sitting area. In a corner formed by a sofa and an overstuffed chair was one of those giant antique globes, the kind on which you expect sea monsters to be painted in the oceans. She sat on the couch and he brought her a glass of water and himself something that looked like bourbon over very few rocks. “We appreciate you coming by today.”

  “I didn’t think I had a choice.”

  “Well, you didn’t. But we appreciate it, just the same.”

  “Anything I can do for my country,” she said.

  Senator Harlowe sat down in the chair. He had difficulty, Marina noticed, tearing his gaze away from her legs. She crossed them one way, then uncrossed them, then crossed them the other. The whole time, he stared, absently licking his lips. Maybe they don’t get a lot of women testifying, she thought.

  Then she thought something else, and uncrossed them again, tilting slightly more toward the good senator.

  Marina wondered if he could have been more obvious. He called to an aide to make sure they weren’t disturbed. He locked the door with a loud click. He grunted and groaned out loud, especially when he took her up against the wall, her back pressed into the musty pelt of some ancient, half-lame creature he had shot. She believed that she had become some sort of trophy, just like the dead animals. After she was gone, he would laugh with his male aides. “See what I bagged today?” he would ask. Hysterical.

  But after his pants were fastened and
her clothes were returned to something resembling the state they had been in originally, he sat down at his huge desk and made a couple of phone calls, while Marina waited in a visitor’s chair. “I don’t think we actually need to have that meeting today,” he had told her. “Operation Red-Blooded is too important to be compromised, and to tell you the truth I don’t entirely trust some of my, ah … colleagues on that panel. Let’s just put through the funding for the next fiscal year and call it a day.”

  Marina had stretched, then made a little wincing noise. “I think I’m just a little bit sore,” she said.

  “Maybe with a five percent increase,” he added with a smile.

  “Thank you, Senator.”

  “And I’m sure we can keep the funding spigot flowing … as long as you stop by for a visit every now and again.” He gave her a smile that was more of a leer, and Marina wondered if there had ever been a woman who thought that was sexy. She supposed a man with his power didn’t need to be genuinely attractive in any other way. “To keep me updated, of course, on all of Red-Blooded’s vital activities in the national interest.”

  “Of course.”

  “Fine,” he said, and started making the calls.

  On her way out of the office he pinched her ass hard enough to leave a mark.

  She didn’t realize it was something men still did in this day and age, but it was fine with her. It would give her something to focus on next time she needed to summon her inner vengeance demon, to beat the life from a bloodsucker.

  And it would make her yet more indispensable to Operation Red-Blooded, and to Zachary Kleefeld, or whoever ended up becoming the organization’s new director once it chewed up and spat out the “Acting Director.”

  She had taken one for the team, and she would no doubt take more. If it would allow her to keep killing bloodsuckers, she was glad to do it.