30 Days of Night: Light of Day (14 page)

“She’s got too much stuff,” Walker said. He read the store names off her bags. “Gap, FYE, Sears, Athlete’s Foot … She’s not just buying for herself, she’s shopping for a family.”

“She’s kinda hot though.”

“She is. That’s not our main consideration though.”

“No reason it doesn’t have to be a side consideration.”

“Dude, I don’t want to add necrophilia to our list of crimes. Or sexual abuse of any kind.”

“Like they wouldn’t throw the book at us if we get caught.”

“There are levels of badness. If we go to prison I don’t mind being known as a stone killer. You get a lot of respect for that. But I don’t want to be known as a pervert.”

“
They’d
get to know you soon enough,” Mitch said.

“Look who’s talking.”

“How’d you get to be so expert on the prison system, anyway? You been watching those
Lockup
shows again?”

“You’d be surprised. There’s a lot of good information on those.”

“You just keep telling yourself that, Walker.”

Walker drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, watching a woman heading into the lot with a single bag in her hands, from Forever 21. She was past twenty-one by a couple of decades, Walker guessed, but she was trim and well put together, a white woman with short blond hair, wearing a red top and white pants. He grabbed binoculars from the floor between the seats, focused in on her. “No wedding ring,” he said.

“She’s sort of MILFy.”

“That a problem?”

“Not for me.”

Walker started the van’s engine, clicked on the lights. “Remember, no funny stuff with her.”

Mitch chuckled. “Gotta love your moral sense, man. Killing’s fine, but touching is out.”

“It is what it is. Anyway, there’s a reason for the killing.”

“I know, I’m just giving you shit.”

During the days, when they weren’t sleeping or working their online auctions, they had been spending most of their time at the various vampire sites they knew. The pushback against Andy’s revelations—plenty of people had posted Andy’s information, although Walker had refused to—had been hard, and still continued. But since then there had been pushback against the pushback. There were people online claiming to be vampires, and others claiming that vampires had never existed and all those who said they were
nosferatu
were liars. It was impossible to tell who was telling the truth. Some accounts, though, by “vampires” and by people who swore they had encountered them in one place or another, seemed more heavily weighted with convincing detail. Walker and Mitch chose to believe those.

If vampires were out there, Walker and Mitch wanted to make contact. They couldn’t exactly post about what they were doing—Mitch pointed out that law enforcement was almost certainly watching the same websites, and however anonymous you thought you were online, someone could always track you down—so they stuck with their original plan. Make the vamps think there were more of their kind in the area, and draw them in. That was the other best reason for sticking to the suburbs—if the real vampires went looking for them in Chicago, they might never know it.

The plan wasn’t without its flaws, but for now it was the best one they had.

The woman had climbed into a red VW Beetle, one of the new ones. That was a good sign, too—people with kids drove sedans or SUVs or minivans. It was hard to shove a whole brood of no-neck monsters into a Bug.

Her lights came on and she pulled out of her parking spot. Halfway across the lot, Walker did the same.

He batted his thumbs against the wheel, nervous now. Nervous and excited.

The killing got easier, the more they did it. The drinking he had kind of come to enjoy. But the part before all that, the hunt, the taking … that was still scary, still tense.

Stiff-armed, he maneuvered the van through the parking lot so that as the woman in the VW made the turn onto Cermak Road, the van was two cars behind.

The blonde lived in La Grange, in a little blue ranch house with a postage stamp yard. She was a patriotic sort, which Walker had started to suspect when he noted the red and white clothes and the red car. The curtains in the front window of her house had red and blue stars on a white background. She had a flag decal on the front door, and a sign declaring I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS stuck into her front yard. Walker didn’t know anyone who didn’t support the troops, but support them or not, it didn’t change the plan.

The house next door had gone into foreclosure, according to a FOR SALE sign on the unkempt lawn, and there were no lights on inside. The neighbors on the right were home, but a bluish glow seeping through curtains suggested that at least some of the house’s occupants were under television hypnosis. Across the street was a house with a double lot, the extra space taken up by grass and trees, and the house next to that had a picket fence around it, as if in defense against having its space swallowed up as well. No lights burned in the front of either of those. The only living person Walker noted was someone inside a garage a couple of houses down. He worked on a car and blared rock music with the big door wide open. That might even be helpful—the guy probably wouldn’t hear anything or come out from under his car, and his noise would help drown out any the blonde might make.

She pulled into a carport beside the house and got out, her Forever 21 bag in one hand. With the other she locked the car doors and shook her keys, isolating the one that would open the house. Walker waited until she had the door open, then pulled into the driveway, behind the Bug, blocking it in. The woman stopped, pinned in the headlights and staring at the van’s windshield. Walker doubted she could see much detail through the high beams.

He got out. “I’m glad we caught you!” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your taillight cover fell off back there a few blocks,” he said. “I guess it came loose, but it didn’t break so I picked it up. Then I was afraid we would lose you.”

“It did?” Keys in one hand, bag held loosely in the other, she stepped back out, leaving the house door open, to check the VW’s rear end.

That gave Walker the time he needed to close the distance. He started toward the car, but then shifted at the last moment, as she was approaching. On a collision course, her eyes widened and her jaw set. “What are you—?”

Walker kept up his fast, steady advance. He brought up his left hand, catching her at the top of the neck and the bottom edge of her jaw, effectively choking off any verbal response. She made a soft, strangled noise and her eyes went even bigger, bulging out as he propelled her backward into her house. He waited just inside for Mitch to catch up, then kicked the door shut. He already had the blade in his right hand, and he flicked it open.

During the instants between when he released her with his left hand and when he slashed across her throat with his right, she found her voice and her defiance. She let out a shrill screech and started punching him with small, bony but surprisingly solid fists. That only lasted a second, though, and then her hands were clasping at her neck, as if she was trying to hold back the flood with her fingers, and blood gurgled up into her mouth, and splashed on her clean entry tiles,
and then she was down, on her stomach on the floor, wasted blood flowing from her throat.

Going back to the van for the pump-and-jug assembly, Walker was surprised to find one of the neighbors from next door, the TV house, standing in the front yard. He was a big guy, about thirty-five, a Bulls T-shirt and khaki shorts barely containing an expansive gut, and he had a Budweiser can in his hairy paw. His sudden appearance startled Walker. “Everything okay over there?” he asked. “I thought I heard Maddie scream.”

“Fine, yeah,” Walker said. He and Mitch had already cooked up a cover story for this sort of encounter, and although it nearly fled his thoughts, he managed to hang onto it and to deliver it in a voice tight with fear. “We’re just … uh, delivering some new electronics and getting them installed for her. I dropped a box and it startled her, but it was just cables and junk, nothing fragile.”

“Cool,” the guy said. “What’d she get?”

“I can’t tell you what a customer bought, sir, that’s confidential. Since you know her, if you come over after we’re done with the install, I’m sure she’d be glad to show off. We’re just a little busy right now.”

The man took a swig of beer, belched, and crushed the can in his fist. “I’ll do that,” he said. “Maddie’s good people.”

“I’m sure she is, sir,” Walker said, agreeing even though he hadn’t had a taste yet. He figured Mitch was
getting his fill, though, and he needed to get inside and make sure he kept focused on what was important. “I should get back to it.”

“Okay,” the guy said. “Take it easy.”

He started toward his own house. Walker opened the van, got out his pumping equipment, and hurried back in.

The pool on the floor had spread, and Walker hoped they could get anything at all out of her.

As he set up the pump, he explained about the neighbor to Mitch.

“Close call, man,” Mitch said.

“Too close.” Walker held out a quaking hand. “I’m still freaked.”

“The story worked, that’s the main thing. The dude left, right?”

“The dude left. The story worked.” Walker had the pump in place and going. After a few moments, maroon liquid lined the sides of the rubber tube. “The story worked. But if we don’t have any more near misses like that, I’ll be a happy guy. Let’s hurry up and get the fuck out of here.”

A
SERIES OF CONFIRMED
vampire attacks around Nags Head, North Carolina, was close enough to home that Marina’s team was able to drive down in their van instead of flying. The bloodsuckers had been preying on wealthy families with beachfront homes, leaving parents and children alike drained in their homes, beached in rolling surf, or floating out with the tides. When Marina and the others came to town, they fanned out to the other homes nestled amidst the dunes, telling the locals they were part of a federal task force aimed at stopping the serial killer who had been terrorizing the neighborhood. They warned off the local media, assuring them that any media presence would inhibit the investigation, but promising exclusive access later—a promise they had no intention of keeping.

The bloodsuckers might have moved on already, of course. But Marina had a gut feeling that they hadn’t. The houses they had hit so far were far enough from their neighbors that vampires could invade one without alerting the rest. The residents were prosperous and healthy, for the most part. The nights here were dark, the sky dotted with stars. It was good hunting
territory, and Marina’s hunch told her the vamps would stick around a while longer.

Some of the residents balked, but enough of them didn’t that when night fell, Marina’s team members were spread throughout houses along the coast. Marina sat on a screened porch listening to the rush and rumble of the surf. Behind her, the lower floor of the house was mostly open, with windows all around, kitchen separated from the living/dining area only by a chest-high counter. You could stand on the porch and look through to the backyard, where a volleyball net wavered in the breeze.

The cries of gulls had tapered off after the sun had fallen, and the occasional vehicles passing on the road came far apart, almost an adjunct to the ocean noises instead of a distraction from them. The Rouleau family, who owned the house, had had seafood for dinner, and the fishy smell lingering in the air mixed with the salt and seaside grasses and ocean smell. The effect was almost artificial, like something pumped into the air at Sea World.

The Rouleaus had gone to a motel for the night. Marina had a radio plugged into her ear, and she could hear the other people on the team talking softly to each other.

She didn’t feel much like slinging the shit, so she kept quiet, responding only when directly addressed. She strained to hear anything out of the ordinary. She had no guarantees that the vampire or vampires would
strike tonight, and no promises that any attack would be at this house instead of one of the others. Her prey might as easily pick one of the houses where the owners had declined the team’s assistance. All she could do was wait and hope.

Midnight came and went. She took off the night vision goggles to give her eyes a rest, rubbed them with the meaty part of her palms. Most of another hour ticked by. Alone with her thoughts, she was haunted by Barry Wolnitz, who had put his trust in her only to end up as a bloodsucker’s lunch. She had known plenty of people who had died, and had killed her fair share, but this one kept coming back to visit. She was disturbed by how much his death affected her. Was it because he was just an innocent victim—the kind of person she should have been trying to save? She killed people like Andy Gray because she had to, because they were interfering with the mission in some way. Barry, on the other hand, could have been helpful, and instead she had led him right into the grave.

She walked around the porch, avoiding the spot where the floorboards creaked. She stretched, going up on tiptoes and reaching for the rafters, then bent at the waist and pressed her fingertips to the floor. She sipped from a bottle of water. The radio chatter had mostly died off. She hoped no one had fallen asleep.

She was about to start checking in with them one by one when a strange noise alerted her. She was sure it was the sound of a shoe scuffing sand. She dropped to a
crouch and scooped up her weapon. She was starting to whisper an alarm when Jimbo’s voice came into her ear.

“My twenty,” he said.

“I got bogies here,” Monte said.

“Same here,” Kat whispered. “Multiples.”

“I’ve got company too,” Marina said. “Is there anyone who doesn’t hear any?”

“Nada here,” Tony H. said.

“I ain’t sure,” R.T. said.

“Hold on,” Tony O. said. “I think there’s something out there.”

Marina yanked the plug from her ear for a moment and listened. There it was again, closer this time. She thought she heard something else that might have been hushed voices. She shoved the earplug back in.

“Multiples here,” she said. “If your station isn’t compromised, head on over to one that is.”