30 Days of Night: Light of Day Read online

  Her new assignment, she’d been troubled to learn, entailed plenty of meetings and inter-office politics. She was based in Washington, DC, which she had always hated because the gray- and black-suited men who worked its corridors kept their desires so buttoned up, rather than out in the open where she preferred it. But she was told that she would have leeway to pick her own strike teams, and because she intended to spend as much time as possible in the field, she made sure that she could read the emotional and sexual nature of each of the people on the team she would work with most often.

  She wound up choosing eight agents for her team, seven men and one other woman. Of the men, three wanted to fuck her, and one wanted the team’s other woman (blond and corn-fed, she had the kind of body that would look lush until it went to fat in a few years). One was gay and out: Dan Bradstreet, disturbed or threatened by the man’s homosexuality, had never utilized him to his full potential, but Marina had trained and worked with him and thought he was one of the best field agents in the agency. Another was gay but suppressing it. Marina believed he would be her best asset, because she could channel that suppression into action. The last man was completely asexual, his only passion the destruction of others, and he was a potent if unpredictable weapon. Some of them would require shorter leashes than others, and the men might even become problems if their lust got control of them. Marina would have to keep a close eye on the blonde, too, because Corn-Fed wanted to fuck her as much as any of the guys did, and Marina thought that just might turn out to be an enjoyable idea, at the right time.

  At the moment, instead of being out with her team, she was stuck in a conference room with no windows and pale green concrete block walls and a bunch of bland bureaucrats trying to make her think their jobs were important. It was everything she hated about DC closed up in a single stuffy space.

  “… facility has been completely inventoried,” one of them was saying. His name was Zachary Kleefeld.

  His head was bald, except for a fringe of curly gray hair that cupped the back of his head. He was Acting Director of Operation Red-Blooded, the Director of National Security having removed the last director immediately upon receiving news of the devastating Nevada assault. But he was a numbers man, all about facts and figures but with no passion or real sense of the mission, and Marina doubted he would last a month in that position. “All assets are accounted for except one.”

  “That’s what you call counting the corpses of our coworkers?” Marina asked. “Taking inventory?”

  “With all due respect, Ms. Tanaka-Dunn, the task is much larger than that. Yes, our people on the scene had the unenviable job of counting corpses, as you so inelegantly put it. But they also performed heroically, rescuing sixty-four survivors. There were hard assets to be inventoried, equipment and experimental subjects—”

  “You mean the vampires,” Marina interrupted.

  “Well, among other things, yes. Vampires, and the remains of vampires. The Nevada plant was a biological research facility first and foremost and had to have specimens to study. As I was saying, the team brought out survivors and prepared a thorough report of hard and soft assets, of which you’ve all been given a summary.”

  “But you said something’s missing, Zach? What is that?” The questioner was Lowell Rudin, a pale man with spidery limbs, lank dark hair, and a pinched face. He managed the agency’s relationship with the rest of the national security apparatus, and as a result was barely trusted by many, who saw him as a sort of spy in their midst.

  “Not a what, but a who,” Kleefeld said. “One of our top researchers. I think some of you have met Dr. Lawrence Greenbarger.”

  “Good old Larry,” Natalie Kakonis said. She represented Human Resources, or something like that, but the department had some other name Marina could never keep straight. Marina was brilliant, but preferred not to use precious brain cells memorizing stupid government acronyms. There were three other agency drones in the room, keeping silent for the most part. “I always thought he was …”

  “Crazy?” Marina asked. She had met Greenbarger, and that had been her initial estimation of him. Something was not quite right about him, but she hadn’t had an extended enough time with him to narrow it down further.

  “Let’s just say he’s very smart, but he’s lacking in certain social abilities.”

  “The question is,” Rudin said, “is he a traitor? Did he leave with the attackers, and if so, was it willingly? Have there been any ransom demands made?”

  “I don’t think he left with them,” Kleefeld said. “After the alarm was raised, we repurposed a satellite and we had eyes on the base within the hour. Several hours after the assault force left, a single military truck drove away. We believe Dr. Greenbarger was driving it. We found the truck two days ago in Salt Lake City, with traces of a somewhat grisly cargo—a cargo that helped to complete the inventory, in fact. But we haven’t yet found Greenbarger.”

  “So we don’t know if he’s a traitor,” Rudin said.

  “That’s correct. We don’t know why he hasn’t made contact. But he seems to be on the run, for whatever reason.”

  “We’re working on finding him,” Marina said. She and Kleefeld had been talking about the problem for days, but this was the first the others had heard about it. “We’ll bring him in.”

  “I should hope so,” Rudin said. “I’d hate to have him running around out there telling who knows what to who knows who. Someone like that …”

  “He knows too much, is that what you’re saying?”

  “That pretty well sums it up, Ms. Tanaka-Dunn. I would certainly expect a serious attempt to—”

  Marina cut him off. He didn’t believe her capable of serious, because of the way she looked and the proclivities she liked to indulge. She didn’t know how he could walk, sleep, or sit with a two-by-four up his ass, but she didn’t question him about it in front of their peers. “We’ll find him. We’ve also got other operations in the works.” She made a show of turning to look at the clock on the wall. “In fact, I’ve got to run—we have a situation brewing in New York that I have to look into.”

  “Attend to it, Marina,” Kleefeld said, effectively shutting down any protest from the others. Marina rose from her seat and let them watch her ass as she left the room.

  Dan Bradstreet’s focus had meshed smoothly with the agency’s—research the bloodsuckers, understand them scientifically and sociologically so you could apply old-fashioned intelligence principles against them. Marina was more basic than that. She wanted to destroy the bastards. Every last one of them.

  In New York, she would be going up against an active cell with her new team of hardcore, balls-to-the-wall killers, their first time in action together. This was going to be more fun than that gangbang with a Russian Army brigade, back in her postgrad days, and which still lived on as one of her favorite memories that didn’t involve killing anything.

  There would be killing this time. Lots of it, she hoped.

  Killing gave her a reason to get out of bed every day. And getting paid for it?

  That was even better.

  6

  LARRY GREENBARGER WAS A man of science, not a spy or some sort of action hero. He didn’t know much about how to disappear, how to elude professional pursuit. He had seen a few movies, but those guys always made it look easy and seemed to be able to rope a beautiful woman into helping them. Even human, he wouldn’t have been able to pull that off.

  But he knew he had to stay hidden. Letting Operation Red-Blooded find him now would be suicide. He had driven the stolen military truck to Salt Lake City, feeding en route from the corpses he’d brought along. He dumped it there, in an airport parking lot. During the drive, he had experimented with warming his skin, using the power of his will to restore something close to a human appearance. He could only keep it up for short periods, but it was enough to get a cab from the airport to a cheap motel on the city’s outskirts. The next night he went on the hunt for the first time, catching a woman betw
een a bar and her Jeep. She was drunk, unsteady on her feet, laughing quietly to herself. He waited until she had the driver’s door open, so he could see which vehicle was hers, then attacked.

  She could barely defend herself, and killing her was no problem.

  After he fed and threw her in the back, Larry used her keys to start the vehicle. He found her address on the Jeep’s registration and drove it to her house. She lived alone, which was what he had been hoping for. He carried her body inside and put it in her bed, in case he got hungry again later. She had some cash in her purse, not a lot of it but enough to help pay for expenses on the road. She had a couple of credit cards that he would be able to use for a few days, he figured, at gas pumps and the like. He also realized that to someone with no qualms about killing, much came easily.

  Repeating that basic pattern, Larry traveled by night to Denver and then to a suburban house on that city’s fringe, one surrounded by thick evergreens that blocked the view from any neighboring properties. It was a lucky find, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay indefinitely. But he had found it by killing a widower, on his way home from a bowling alley where he had bowled alone, and Larry guessed the man didn’t have a lot of friends who would be checking in on him.

  What the old geezer did have, stashed in various boxes and jars in his pantry and freezer, was more than forty thousand dollars in cash.

  A lucky find, indeed.

  Spring had come to the Rockies, and Larry found that with his new strength he didn’t need a coat, except perhaps on the most arctic of nights. He hunted in shirtsleeves and jeans. His body hadn’t changed much in appearance—a little leaner, a little longer, although still recognizably him, to his eyes—but his strength was multiplied many times, and all his senses were far sharper than ever before.

  He used the widower’s Buick to drive into the city after dark. He parked someplace crowded—he liked the lot across the street from the Tattered Cover, a bookstore that did business well into the night—and struck out on foot in one direction or another. He kept to the shadows, he never attacked if there were witnesses around, and he only chose victims who were by themselves. He wished the vampire who had turned him had stuck around to teach him the rules; these he had made up by himself, because they seemed to be common sense. He knew more than a lot of other newbie bloodsuckers would, he was certain, because of his exposure to vampires as a researcher. But he couldn’t help wondering if there were more steps he should be taking, other ways to protect himself that he hadn’t considered.

  During the days, Larry kept up his researches as well as he could, given his limited resources. Sure that he was being hunted, he made sure to keep away from Operation Red-Blooded’s private computer network. He figured that as long as no one knew the old man whose house he was using was dead, he could use the years-old desktop he had found in the house, and the man’s internet account, to do some rudimentary work online. Mostly, he sat at the man’s kitchen table working out calculations, letting his thoughts race along as they had always done, and jotting down notes that would remind him later what he’d been thinking of. Having set up the most basic lab imaginable using things found in the man’s house and a chemistry set he bought at a 24-hour discount store in the city, he used drops of his own blood and saliva to carry on with his previous studies.

  As a human being, he had been one researcher among many, and for the most part he had been fine with that. Pragmatic enough, anyway, to understand that it was the way things were, and trying to change the way things were was a fool’s game.

  But now he was one of one, in a class by himself, or so he suspected. What were the chances that any other scientist with his background had ever been turned? The opportunity was unparalleled—to study his primary subject from the inside? No biologist studying animals or plants had ever become one. He alone was qualified to uncover the secrets of the vampire life-form, the ones that had been invisible to him before.

  Rather than try to study everything—an impossible task—he had narrowed his focus down to what he thought most immediately crucial: the reaction vampires had to sunlight. He had experimented with it, walking out the back door into morning’s soft daylight. The response was immediate and agonizing. He felt like a human might when walking into a room superheated to eight hundred degrees. He thought his blood would boil in his veins, his hair would burst into flames, his skin would dry up and peel off in flakes. He could stay out only for seconds, and when he raced back inside, his flesh was literally smoldering. The pain lasted for hours, but by the next morning, after feeding once during the night, he was whole again, with no lasting effects.

  Operation Red-Blooded had done enough research to understand that it was the ultraviolet component of sunlight that vampires couldn’t bear. They had used that knowledge to make weapons, called TRU-UV lights, that mimicked that ultraviolet spectrum exactly. What he needed to find out was why vampires reacted that way, what in the physiological nature of the species made them vulnerable to it.

  Vampirism, Red-Blooded had determined, was caused by the presence in the body of the Immortal Cell. It could be transferred by the intentional exchange of fluids, although it didn’t pass from a vampire into every victim—a new vampire had to have enough blood remaining in his or her body, Larry believed, for the cell to take hold. Most of the people vampires fed from died almost immediately, drained as completely as possible. Larry wasn’t sure why he had been turned instead of killed—another question for that young woman bloodsucker, if he ever found her. Maybe she had been interrupted at the task and had left him inadvertently. He supposed he would probably never know.

  The Immortal Cell only needed to be a single cell at first, but in the new host body it divided and mutated, overpowering any resistance the body’s other cells offered until it had taken over. It mimicked those other cells’ individual functions, but imperfectly, and it added new twists to the mix. Hence the need for blood, the physical changes in the body, the incredible strength, and the aversion to sunlight.

  Any cell could be altered, though; modern medical science had shown that. It could be taken apart, understood, controlled. Once altered, if introduced into a new host body, that body’s changes would not match the traditional vampire physiology. It would become something new, something altogether different.

  If he could eliminate the harshly negative reaction to sunlight, it would be something virtually without limitations.

  To accomplish that, however, he needed a better lab. He had already reached the limit of what he could do with makeshift equipment.

  It was time to go hunting again … but not for a meal this time.

  What he did next, he would do not simply for himself, but for all of his new species.

  7

  ALITTLE ONLINE SLEUTHING confirmed that the University of Colorado at Denver had a medical school. The Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora would doubtless have the items Larry needed.

  He went on a Sunday night, figuring that the campus would be at its most empty then. He parked in the Georgetown visitor parking lot, which had a couple of vehicles in it. It was unlikely that campus police would notice one more, and it wouldn’t matter that he didn’t have a permit. Anyway, he didn’t plan to stay for long. The lot was adjacent to the Bioscience Park Center, a rose colored modern building with plenty of glass. He left the trunk ajar and stole across a grassy lawn to a locked glass door.

  The hard part would be the alarms. He was a biologist, not an electrician, and had not the slightest idea how to circumvent them. The door wouldn’t pose a problem—Larry had yet to encounter a circumstance that pure muscle could solve that he wasn’t strong enough to master—but he was sure that as soon as he broke in, an alarm would sound, or a silent alarm would go off in campus police headquarters. Probably both.

  He could go around the building looking for an open door. But that would increase his chances of being spotted. In a building like this, which contained administrative offices as well as lab space, there might
be a guard on duty in the lobby all the time.

  Maybe this hadn’t been such a great idea after all. He could almost sense the equipment inside, calling out to his experienced hands. He needed a scanning electron microscope, a centrifuge, more, and the computers to run it all. He couldn’t carry it all to the Buick in one trip, even if he could fit it all in. He was certain, though, that it was all sitting around, just inside.

  Larry stood outside the door, undecided. Go in? Or give up for now while he tried to formulate a better plan? Maybe he could buy the stuff online, have it shipped to the old man’s address. He couldn’t use the house indefinitely, though—sooner or later a neighbor would come by or a package would be delivered by someone who knew the old widower, and Larry’s hideout would be compromised.

  No, he had to take whatever he could tonight. If he needed more he would come back, or find a different lab and raid that. Larry would rely on his phenomenal strength and speed to get him in and out safely.

  He grabbed the double door’s two handles and pushed. The lock held for a moment, then gave, breaking with a loud pop, and the doors swung inward. An alarm began to whoop almost instantly, the noise nearly deafening to his newly sensitive ears.

  Wasting no time, Larry ran inside and started kicking in doors. All the rooms on this floor were offices, it seemed. He took the first staircase he came to, running up to the second floor, then passing that and going to the third and top floor. He could smell chemistry being practiced on this floor, the faint, familiar odors as strong to him now as the smell of roaring flames would have been to a human being. Again, he kicked in doors.

  Behind the third door, a rangy young man in a lab coat waited with a steel rod in his fist, held back like a billy club. “What the hell, man?” he asked.

  Larry looked past the man. His gaze landed on exactly the things he sought. “I’m just looking for this place,” he said.