Wanda shoved through her front door and dropped her purse on the table. Her uniform was stiff and grease spattered, and she needed a shower. She came home every night smelling like grease, her fingers burned half the time, her feet aching, and she was tired of it. But it was a job, and if it didn’t pay a lot, it was at least something. A lot of folks didn’t even have that.
“Momma?” she called into the quiet.
A door down the hall creaked and her mother emerged, wearing a threadbare robe and old yellow slippers. Her hair had gone gray and thin, her once rich brown skin ashen. She looked old in a way that she hadn’t, even five years before. “How was work?” she asked wearily.
“Fine,” Wanda said. Wanda’s father had been white, and her skin was lighter than her mother’s. Her hair was straightened, dyed yellow. She was taller than her mother, and heavier, and she couldn’t quite imagine herself ever shrinking down and graying to that extent. But she was only twenty-three. Her mother had put off having children until she was in her midthirties, and Wanda had been the fourth and last. Those four kids, she thought, were the reason for her mother’s dramatic aging. Not a problem she ever wanted to have. “You know, it was work.”
Wanda was about to say something else when there was an insistent knock at the door. This late? Sometimes Suzette from next door came over after work with a bit of neighborhood gossip she couldn’t wait to share.
“I’m going back to bed,” Momma said.
“Goodnight, Momma.” Wanda went to get the door. She glanced through the peephole, sleepy and expecting Suzette, but it was some white man she didn’t know. She tensed and took another look, and then she knew who it was. Onion Ring Boy?! He had come to the restaurant off and on for months, and he always stared at her boobs and tried to act cool. What the fuck was this?
She yanked the door open. “What the hell you doin’ here?” she asked him. “Don’t you—”
And then she saw the razor.
“Shut up, Wanda,” Walker said, already pushing in against her, raising the blade toward her throat.
“Just shut up and get inside. We won’t take long, I promise.”
Wanda took a couple of steps back, a reflex action, but that was enough. Walker and Mitch drove forward, using her own momentum to propel her back. Her mouth was working but no sound came out, which was just fine. Once the door was closed, Walker hooked a leg behind hers and swept it forward, pushing her chest at the same time. Already scared, she went down on the floor. He followed, putting enough weight on her to keep her off balance while he raked the razor across her throat. She managed one strangled cry before he slammed his hand against her chin, pushing her head back.
And for the first time—it had been coming for a while but he hadn’t made the leap, not until he was here with Wanda, Wanda who he was angry with, Wanda who still smelled like the kitchen of Cap’n Bligh’s—he lowered his mouth to the gash he had made, where blood bubbled up like water from a natural spring, and he closed his mouth on it and he drank, right from the source.
Someone screamed.
“She saw you, man!” Mitch said.
Walker looked up from Wanda (blood spilling from his open mouth, coating his chin, spattering his shirt) and saw an old black woman in a tattered robe glaring at him, eyes wide, fists clasped in front of her chest.
“I’m calling the police!” she cried.
“Walker, you gotta do her, too!”
“Shut up, dude! No names!” The name didn’t matter, though; Mitch was right. She had witnessed him slicing Wanda open and feasting on her blood.
He had never killed an old lady, and he hadn’t planned to start. The point of the killing he had done was to become a vampire, and he had mostly killed women he found somewhat attractive, figuring there was something intimate about drinking their blood. With his mouth on Wanda’s neck, one arm pressed against her pillowy breasts, her body still warm and writhing in his grasp, he had been growing aroused.
But the old lady was backing toward an open doorway, and if there was a phone in there, then he and Mitch were only a 911 call away from serious trouble.
“What do we do, Mitch?” he asked/
“You know, Walker.”
“No, what? What? It’s an old lady.”
“So what?”
“I can’t do an old lady, man. I can’t.”
“Walker, she can ID us.”
“I don’t care!”
“You have to!”
“Why me? Why is it always me?” Walker cried.
“You have the razor, your prints are all over it, and you’re soaked in blood. What’s the difference between one and two?”
Walker heaved a sigh, extricated himself from Wanda, and covered the space between them in three big steps. The lady had turned away, shuffling as fast as she could and spewing an obscenity-laden tirade at them as she did. Walker caught her bony shoulder in one hand and spun her around. He pressed her up against the wall, leaning into her with a forearm. She rained ineffectual blows down on him with her thin fists.
“I’m really sorry,” he mumbled.
She spat in his face.
He shifted his forearm so it was against her larynx, crushing it. He didn’t want to open her, to bleed her. That was special.
He closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see the hate in hers, and he held her there until her hands fell to her sides and her feet stopped stamping and kicking, and then he held her a little longer just to be sure. When he looked again, her eyes were wide open, her face purplish, mouth sagging, bloody flecks at its sides. He let her flop to the floor, but he didn’t drink, not this time, not from her.
He did, it seemed, have his limits after all.
32
WALKER COULD BARELY SEE to drive home, his eyes burning with grief and rage, his grip weak on the wheel. They made it somehow, parked the van inside the garage, and then he sat there for a couple of minutes before he had the strength to open his door and walk into the house.
“What have we done?” he asked Mitch when they were inside. “An old lady! That’s not what we talked about.”
“I know,” Mitch said. “But we didn’t have a choice, did we?”
Walker collapsed onto his old butt-sprung sofa and buried his face in his hands. He hated being like this in front of Mitch, whining like some kind of pussy, but he couldn’t make himself stop. It was as if all the murders had been building up inside him like stomach bile, and now they were spewing uncontrollably out of him.
The whole idea might have been stupid from the start. If vampires were looking for them, they didn’t know it. And they had covered their tracks well enough that he didn’t know how a vampire was actually supposed to find them. The cops were definitely looking for them, though—the news was eating up their murders with a spoon, a rich, juicy story the likes of which usually involved Chicago politicians.
Mitch put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing hard. “It’s gonna be okay, man. We’ll meet that guy with the ‘Light of Day’ ad and he’ll turn us, and then we’ll leave this fucked-up life behind for good.”
Walker sniffed and swallowed, rubbed his eyes and looked over at Mitch. “But … what if he’s pissed off when he finds out we’re not really undead? What if he just decides to kill us instead of turning us?”
“One way or another,” Mitch said with a shrug.
“He’ll see we’re sincere, right? That we really want this?”
“Couldn’t say. I hope so. But who knows how a vampire’s mind works?”
“But … if we did all this for nothing … I don’t think I could live with that.”
“All we can do is try, Walker. Like I said, one way or another it’ll be settled when we meet the guy. If he kills us or turns us. Out is out, right? Done is done.”
“I guess so.”
“I’m telling you. Done is done.”
Marina and her team landed in Little Rock, where the local cops showed them what they had on the broad-daylight vampire incident. Some cit
izens had captured bits and pieces of it on mobile phone cameras, and of course when the police arrived their cameras captured the end of it. They had managed to convince the press to call it a case of a drug-maddened murderer, without releasing the more inexplicable elements of it.
When she saw the footage, though, both from the police and the confiscated phones, she knew that the initial reports had been correct. The guy had been a vampire, no doubt about it, and he had been out in daylight without experiencing the traditional spontaneous combustion.
She was sitting in the police captain’s office. He had all the furniture in the room shoved up against the walls, as if he needed the space in the middle clear as a dance floor. He was sitting at his desk, while Marina had a stiff-backed chair next to it instead of facing it. Tony O. leaned against the wall in a vacant spot, as silent and blank as an empty file cabinet. The others waited in a sitting area in front.
The police captain wore an old-fashioned aftershave that reminded Marina of her maternal grandfather, who had worked for most of his life in a Georgia train station. The captain was a lean, sad-faced man with thick gray hair and slumping shoulders. Every time she looked at him she expected him to burst out in tears. Then again, considering what he’d had to witness, he might have been entitled to.
“You’ve got to bury this footage,” she said. “Bury it deep.”
“So you do think it’s really a—”
“I couldn’t say.”
“I read the news, of course. Like everyone else. The controversy—”
“Look,” Marina said. “Vampires aren’t real. You saw what you saw, but there’s a perfectly legitimate explanation for it. You saw the guy’s tox screen, right?” RedBlooded’s “community relations” people had made sure it showed ridiculous amounts of drugs in the man’s system.
“Yes. But I saw the house, too. That poor woman …”
“I know. People can be sickos, no doubt about it. Especially hard-core drug users.” Marina shook her head sadly, a sorrow not entirely faked. Marina had seen that too—the woman whose house had been used as a base, and whose stolen credit card had triggered the search that had revealed Larry Greenbarger as the thief.
Greenbarger had been inside the house. He had some connection, then, with the bloodsucker who had run amuck in the street.
What that connection was, she couldn’t be sure. The house didn’t look like it had been occupied by a whole den. Maybe the two of them had just met somehow and stuck together. That is, until one of them had figured out that he could go out in the sun.
That explanation would have been more convincing if Marina didn’t know that Larry had been an Operation Red-Blooded scientist, a researcher whose field of study was vampire physiology.
Evolution could, she supposed, account for the unknown bloodsucker’s newfound talent. But she didn’t believe that for a minute. No, Larry Greenbarger had definitely been turned, and he was up to something.
Whatever it was, Marina was determined to stop him. She had never liked the guy anyway, and the whole being undead thing just aggravated the hell out of her.
33
“ROCCO, BABY,” SHILOH SAID.
Rocco glanced over and saw her sitting cross-legged on the floor with a laptop braced on her thighs. “Yeah?”
“Look at this here.”
Rocco eased down off a display case and went to her side. “What?”
“This website posting.”
He suppressed a sigh. Shiloh loved hanging out in vampire chat rooms, and he had drummed into her over and over, like she was some fourth-grader, how important it was not to give away any information that the authorities could use to find them. He believed she was being careful, but so far she had never reported learning anything useful, just a lot of stupid arguments, flame wars, and soap opera–worthy nonsense that he couldn’t imagine helped anyone.
“What?” he asked again. Love was a human emotion, not something to which he was susceptible, but he couldn’t deny a certain fondness toward Shiloh. She could get away with just about anything around him, and he always forgave her.
“Just look.”
He read the text above her finger. “Do you yearn to walk in the Light of Day? To feel the sun without peril? It can happen. I can help you come out of the night.”
“What about it?” he asked.
“Don’t you think it’s, I don’t know, interesting?”
“I think it’s bogus.”
“Why, babe?”
“It’s a crock. We can’t go out in the sun. It’s someone trying to get us to fry ourselves.”
“But what if it’s not?” She gazed at him with puppy dog eyes, like she could will him into believing just because she did.
“If it’s not, if it’s for real, then …” Rocco paused to give himself a few seconds to think it over. “Then it changes everything.”
“You really think so?”
“Absolutely. Without the sun holding us back, we win. The end. We’re stronger than the meat, smarter, faster. Without the sun keeping us at bay, then human dominion is at an end.”
“That’s kinda what I was thinking. Pretty sweet, huh?”
“If it’s real, Shiloh.”
“I think it is.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Just a feeling. Intuition, whatever. But I believe it.”
Rocco folded his arms and leaned back against the wall. Other members of the den were watching them now. Probably waiting to see what he would say. He was the undisputed leader, and they all looked to him for guidance on issues large and small, even the new members they had taken on: Chip, Ciara, Kenton, Nightmare, and Angel and Dragon Lady, who was physically stuck at twelve years old, but had been for most of the century. This was probably one of those small issues, but if it was real—and he could barely wrap his mind around that possibility—if it was, then it wasn’t even large, it was huge. As big as they came.
And yet, why would someone post that just for a goof? It wasn’t like he or she was asking vampires to hold their hands to the computer screen to be blessed, and then run outside.
“Write back,” he said after a while. “See what it’s all about.”
“Seriously?”
“Sure, why not. If it’s some sort of scam, we’ll know when we get an answer. If it’s for real … then like I said, it changes the whole game.”
Shiloh graced him with her happiest smile, showing plenty of bloodstained teeth.
A reply came within the hour. Shiloh squealed, waking Rocco, who had drifted off with his head against her hip. “What is it?”
“It’s from Light of Day,” she said.
“Who?”
“That’s what he calls himself. Or his email address, whatever. Light of Day.”
Rocco realized what she meant. “Oh, okay. What’s it say?”
“He says he’s meeting a den in Chicago in a couple of days. It’s kind of a test, he says, and he’s willing to meet with more while he’s there.”
Rocco knew a den in Chicago, one that had been formed by a onetime friend called Lucky Strike. As far as he knew, it was the only active den in that city, or at least the biggest, with seventeen members, last he’d heard.
But those in Chicago were on the opposite side of the philosophical divide. They believed vampires were best off staying in the shadows, remaining feared creatures of legend, rather than declaring all-out war against humanity. Maybe they would see the value of what seemed to be on offer, but Rocco didn’t think so. Coming into the light was the antithesis of what they wanted—the ability to do so would naturally lead to the desire. That would blow the mythological quality they were after.
“I don’t know who he’s talking about,” Rocco said. “But get back to him and see if you can find out when and where they’re meeting. Tell him we’d love to be test subjects, too, only we’re going to have to leave tonight to get there in time.”
“I’ll let him know, Rocco.”
“Good.” He figured
Shiloh would get the information he wanted—he knew from experience that it could be hard to resist a full-on Shiloh charm offensive. He very much wanted to learn what this Light of Day business was all about. If it was real, he wanted to be in on the ground floor. When the ultimate war with the humans finally began, the struggle for nosferatu supremacy would be right on its heels, and something like this could provide an important edge.
And he really wanted to know who this Chicago den was.
34
LARRY GREENBARGER’S TRAIL LED to Kansas City, east to St. Louis, and then northward, through Springfield and Bloomington. He had eluded everyone for longer than expected, but once they knew his pattern he was as easy to track as if he had been tagging his name on walls with pink Day-Glo spray paint. He took a victim, fed, stole whatever cash he could get. Sometimes he spent a day in that victim’s home, other times he used the cash or a stolen credit card to pay for motel rooms and gas. By following the credit cards taken from drained victims, Marina and her team stayed just a step behind him.
A glance at the map showed a possible destination of Chicago. A phone call from Zachary Kleefeld confirmed it.
They were in a van with Jimbo at the wheel, having just left a scene near Decatur. Marina rode in back, between Tony O. and Kat. The landscape was flat, with trees cutting the sunlight into jagged slices that flashed across the windshield. Quarters were cramped, especially with all the gear they carried, but she wanted to be on the ground and ready for action. The air conditioner blew hard but couldn’t erase the male sweat and testosterone as thick as smoke inside the vehicle. The group was smaller than it had been before the massacre at Nags Head, but no less determined.
Marina was more resolute than ever. She had put Barry Wolnitz in danger and had lost him. Then she’d made bad decisions about how to handle the North Carolina situation, and had lost two more of her own. From now on she would carry the memories of all those lost with her, and every vampire she met would have to answer for them.
30 Days of Night: Light of Day Page 16
