30 Days of Night: Fear of the Dark

15

“WHAT THE FUCK WAS that?”

Lee was dragging a box from the back of the third tier of shelving when the howl filled the room. He felt it deep inside, caressing his spine and ribs, setting his hair on end and chilling his balls.

Connie and Patrick shared a glance. “We don’t have long,” Connie said.

Lee let go of the box and pulled his guns. They felt good and heavy, grips backed with rubber to cushion against their heavy recoil. He’d read about these .454 rounds stopping a buffalo, and he couldn’t wait to see what they did to a bloodsucker’s face.

Patrick stared at him from across the room, where he was still standing by the door and listening for danger. “Put them away,” he said. “Keep looking. Something happens, I’ll give you time to draw your toys.”

“This toy could take your skull apart.”

“How good’s yer aim, human? How steady’s yer hand.”

Lee laughed, holstered his guns and started searching again. He trusted Patrick that much, at least. If and when the vampires hit this room, he’d have prior warning while the Irish Humain took them on, time at least to draw his guns and get off a few good shots. Body shots first, hopefully, to blast out their spines so that they couldn’t move anymore. Then the head shot.

He dragged a box out and emptied its contents across the floor. They’d stopped trying to search quietly, ceased the orderly hunt, because with the noise going on elsewhere in the building it was only a matter of time before they were found. Lee had thought about why the vampires hadn’t reached this room already, and there was only one explanation: Marty had lied to them about where the Bane was. If Richards had told him the right room number, he’d managed to keep it from the vampires, the consequences of which would be dire for him. He admired the kid’s guts. He felt close to the kid. They were the only humans involved in all this, apart from those scumbag servants the vampires had taken to themselves. And “human” wasn’t a name he’d honor them with.

Even Stella Olemaun.

“Fuck it,” he said again. It was becoming a refrain, and for some foolish reason it brought a trace of comfort. Fuck it. Fuck everything. He couldn’t let what had happened affect what would happen, however much he’d been deceived, lied to, and manipulated. And really, the Humains had only used him for purposes he’d support, hadn’t they?

Kicking through the box’s contents, he saw nothing that might be the Bane, or contain it. He moved on to the next shelf. Connie was drawing closer, and soon they’d meet in the middle of the room, searching the last shelving stack together, reaching the final box, and if nothing came to light, then they’d have to assume the Bane wasn’t here at all… or they’d missed it.

From Ashleigh Richards’s archived blog, he’d gleaned only the vaguest of descriptions: damned round thing.

Next box.

Through Assyria, into Greek and Roman sculpture, and Rose saw a fleeting shadow disappearing into a stair area. She followed, the smell of blood bringing her up short. A guard lay dead at the feet of a Greek god, taken apart like a lion’s kill.

“Rose,” Francesco said. He grabbed her arm and ran on, but she’d seen the way he looked at her. He knows. He can sense the blood on my breath. But that didn’t matter right then.

They descended two flights of stairs, Francesco swinging around the junction without pause. It was too late for care or caution. This was a running fight now, with the Bane as prize for whoever reached the end first. Rose hoped that Marty had not got in the way already, but she knew it was a vain hope. Even if they had kept him alive upon arrival, once they had the Bane they’d have no purpose for him anymore. He’d die. Or maybe they’d turn him, to replace one of those she and the Humains had killed.

She would do whatever she could to stop either possibility, but if it was a choice of two, she would give him death.

At the bottom of the stairs they emerged into a junction of three corridors. Francesco faced one corridor, turned, took a few steps along another. Rose scanned the floor for any trace of the vampires’ presence, trying to sense which way they had gone, where they had disturbed air in their passing. She wanted to run and fight, but she knew these few seconds were vital. If they chose the wrong direction, that might lose them the prize.

Francesco paused and tilted his head to one side. Then he nodded to Rose and rushed off along one of the corridors. She followed, and after turning one corner Francesco stopped outside a room, pointing at the ruptured lock.

“Hope you choke,” she heard from within, and it was Marty, and she burst through the door and located him instantly, hunkered down in a corner with one of the male vampires crouched over him, his arm raised and fingers clawed ready to deliver a hacking swipe.

“Eyes!” Francesco said softly. She closed her eyes and clapped her hands over them, heard Click click, and then the vampire’s screams.

Her own exposed skin burning, Rose ran, opening her eyes to the vaguely lit room and smelling the stench of the vampire’s scorched eye sockets. Marty was a shadow in the corner—she could smell his blood, feel his pain—but she could not let that distract her. Not yet.

She struck the vampire hard and shoved him across the room, heels plowing furrows through piles of ransacked boxes and their shattered contents, her fingers curling into his throat and closing, fingertips touching in cool wetness.

He hit a tier of shelving and grunted, and Rose punched him hard in the face. She felt her fingers and hand shredded by his teeth, but she grasped his jaw and pulled down on it with all her weight. He thrashed, hands battering her back and shoulders, and then her head. But by then she’d unhinged his jaw and all but torn it off. She let him fall and kicked him over onto his side.

“Head,” Francesco said, but he didn’t have to tell her. Rose knew very well how to finish him off.

Afterward, she went to Marty and knelt before him. He was bleeding from a dozen places, and his eyes were only open a crack.

“Marty?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“Dandy.”

“What room, Marty?” Francesco was beside them now, and for an instant Rose resented the fact that he wasn’t at all interested in her brother’s well-being. But there was so much more going on here.

“Seventy-two.” His voice was fading, and his eyelids fluttered as they closed.

“Marty, did he bite you?” Her brother didn’t answer, so Rose grabbed him by the shoulders and shook, ignoring the warmth of his blood on her right hand. “Marty!”

“Nah,” he said, shaking his head and wincing at the pain it caused him.

“Rose,” Francesco said, stern. “You have to leave him for now.”

Marty had slipped into unconsciousness. Blood loss, pain, shock, fear—they’d all combined to usher him into the dark, and even if awake there was little he could do to help them anymore.

“I’ll come back for you, Marty,” she said. She picked him up and slid him onto an empty shelf at eye level, shoving some torn boxes in after him. It was poor camouflage, but it would have to do for now.

As she turned, she caught Francesco looking at her. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Come on.”

They left to find room seventy-two.

He’d thought that he would have time. But he almost didn’t.

The door smashed open and Lee spun around, glimpsing Patrick falling beneath a shadowy shape and two more vampires entering behind him. One of them was tall and bald but for a tied-back Mohawk, and he was the least-human vampire Lee had ever seen. His eyes were black pits in his pale face, like coals pressed into the face of the most grotesque snowman ever built, and his long arms tore the air before him as he went for Connie. It was her size that prevented her from having her throat torn out immediately; she fell between the shelving tiers she was working and scampered away out of sight.

The third vampire scanned the room quickly, growled, and came for Lee.

He dropped the box he’d been holding. Something inside shattered as it hit the floor, and he held his breath, knowing that the next two seconds would decide his fate. Quickly but calmly, he drew the pistol from the holster beneath his left arm, dropping into a shooting stance as he brought it up and out, cupping his right hand with his left, and firing before consciously taking aim. He’d been a crack shot ten years before when he’d left the SIS, and he’d kept up the practice in his soundproofed basement, working so hard that gunplay eventually became natural for him. The gun was an extension of his hand and he punched with it, once, twice, tracking the shadow as it thrashed in midair and fell amongst a mess of torn boxes and spilled contents.

The gunshots were explosive, the recoil punching back into his shoulder and chest, and his hearing only faded back in slowly, whistling and humming as sound returned from a distance.

Lee gasped and sucked in another breath, then took two steps forward. The vampire was writhing on the floor, arms thrashing through the detritus as it tried to drag itself away. One bullet had blasted away most of its left hip, taking out a chunk of meat and bone that spattered somewhere across the room. The other had struck its stomach; judging from the exit wound on its back, Lee guessed it had shattered the base of the creature’s spine.

Good. Fucker. One more shot and—

A whole tier of shelving to his left started to tumble, frame tilting, shelves falling like scattered playing cards. Lee retreated a little, left arm held up to ward off the metal falling toward him. He let off a wild shot at the crippled vampire, but his line of sight was already blocked by the fallen shelving, its base now lifted from the floor and propped against the next tier.

Lee ducked down as the tier jarred to a halt at an angle just above his head. Then he went on his hands and knees and followed the vampire. He could hear the noise of fighting from elsewhere through the hum of his damaged hearing, but he could do little to help Patrick and Connie. His only hope was that they were stronger than the vampires… but surely that was a vain hope? Humains denied much of their nature, and that could not help but make them weak.

He squeezed beneath the tilted tier, gun hand held before him, and when he saw a shadow shifting to his right, he fired twice. There was no sign that he’d hit anything. On the other side, he felt around on the floor to heave himself upright. He felt the edge of a broken metal container and his hand slipped inside, touching something wet and thick.

Blood. But warm?

In the poor light it was difficult to see, but he thought the box had likely fallen from the very top of the shelving tier as it had been knocked aside. Right then, many things should have crossed Lee’s mind: What pushed the tier over? Where did Connie and that vampire go? I should take it and run, hide, because I know what this is really, don’t I? I know what this is. But instead he tipped the box and spilled its contents, then tugged at the thick wet cloth that wrapped a heavy, circular object. The cloth fell apart in his hand. Wet, rotten, it crumbled in shreds to the floor, exposing a glimmering arc of metal underneath.

Flipping the box over, he saw a familiar name scrawled in fading marker.

Lee knelt and picked up the Bane in his left hand. A rush of despair hit him, and its source was a mystery. He sobbed, coughing up an anguished gasp that seemed to reverberate all around the room. And then he saw the flapping legs of the crippled vampire disappearing beneath the next tier of shelving, and he had purpose.

Dropping his gun, he fell across the space between shelving banks, grasped one ankle, and pulled. The wounded vampire slid out on his stomach, clawed fingers struggling to gain purchase on the floor. When he was clear of the shelving, he rolled onto his back and opened his mouth wide, displaying those terrible teeth.

Lee held the handle that sat at the center of one side of the object, swung it in an arc over his head, and slashed through the vampire’s throat. With one more heavy strike, its spine shattered and its head bounced away, eyes still wide, teeth still chomping.

Lee stared at the Bane, and the slick of impossibly warm blood that coated its surface. He saw his vague reflection in there, and he was human. I’m holding all the power now, he thought. And then he heard the voice.

“Oh, that’s not nice,” it said, and it was the most unnatural voice he’d ever heard, forced from a throat that was made for swallowing blood, not spewing inanities.

To his left stood the tall bald vampire. The decapitated head had struck one of his boots and come to rest looking upward, mouth still moving. The bald vampire’s right hand was buried to the wrist in Connie’s throat. Her body hung limp beside him, legs trailing back and arms hanging down, relaxed fingers just touching the floor.

Lee held the Bane up before him.

The vampire laughed, threw Connie to one side, walked to Lee, and knocked his arm aside as he swung the Bane, sending it clattering from his hand and falling against the leaning tower of shelves.

Lee panicked, reaching for the gun beneath his right arm. The vampire was no longer laughing. His face was split into a grin, all teeth and darkness. He now swiped the gun from Lee’s left hand, and Lee watched it reflecting weak light as it spun out into the room. The vampire watched, too, and that allowed Lee the half second he needed to snatch the other gun from the small of his back and press it into the monster’s gut.

He pulled the trigger twice before the vampire grasped his arm and snapped it at the elbow.

Lee cried out and went to his knees, and the vampire took two swaying steps backwards. He looked down at his gut, and Lee could see all the way through, pale light from beyond finding its way past the swaying curtains of shattered insides and splintered bone. The heavy dumdums had done their job, and there was one more thing to do. With his left hand, he plucked the gun from his right, but only after forcing his clawed, insensitive fingers apart. Every movement was agony. White bone poked through at his right elbow. Head shot, he thought.

The vampire fell, and for one glorious moment Lee thought he had won. But then the monster grabbed the Bane and stood again in one unbelievably quick, fluid movement.

“Human!” he spat.

Lee paused in horror and disbelief, because this could not be.

“Lee!” someone shouted. Rose’s voice. There was a flash and a scream, and then the vampire fell upon him, the Bane falling in an arc toward his face.

He felt it strike. There was no pain—the shock was too great—but he heard his skull rupture, and in the moment before everything ended he thought, My blood on the Bane. There was no implication, only the knowledge. And then there was nothing at all.

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck…

Rose saw the tall vampire pull the object from Lee’s caved-in head, and she knew instantly what it was.

I have to tell you, Rose, that from what I’ve heard of the Bane, and if it’s actually for real, you have to find it before those vampires. You have to.

To her left she saw a flutter of movement, and then a woman vampire disentangled herself from Patrick’s embrace and limped to Duval, her features blurred as a result of terrible violence. She stood close to the tall vampire as he turned around, staring not at his face but at his hand, and the thing he held there.

If Lee had kept hold of it if he’d used it if he’d known how dangerous it could be in his hands…

But perhaps he had. It no longer mattered. Lee was dead, and Rose felt a curious sense of loss that had eluded her upon her parents’ deaths. Maybe, against expectations, they had been friends after all.

Francesco pushed past her and moved to her right, far enough away so that they did not offer an easy target. Patrick was standing to her left, making strange grunting noises as his head jerked at the air like a startled chicken’s. He’d been damaged, but she sensed that he still had some fight in him.

Good. They were going to need it.

“And here we are,” Duval said, his voice like a corpse’s teeth falling onto a gravestone. Here was a creature that should never talk, because his language was something other than words. “The vampires, and the Humains.”

“Humains that have killed enough of you,” Rose said.

Duval shrugged. “We can always swell our ranks. You… you lose a Humain, and your weak philosophy means you can’t replace them. Like this one.” He nodded at Connie’s crumpled corpse. “A child, thin spine, easy to crush. But she had the feel of… thirty years? A lot of vampire knowledge just… gone.” He opened his hand as if releasing a butterfly, and Rose sensed Francesco tensing to attack.

“Back,” Duval said. He held up the Bane. It was an unremarkable thing, considering what it was purported to do. Worked in metal, shaped like two large bowls rim to rim, a handle on one domed side. Its edges glimmered with blood, and Rose sensed something very old emanating from it, as well as something fresher.

“It’s a lump of metal,” Francesco said. He laughed. “You think it gives you any more power than you had before?”

“I feel it,” Duval said, and he sounded so convinced that Rose had little doubt. “It’s filling me with itself. Older than we know, and stronger.” He held it up to the light, turning it this way and that.

“How’d you even know it was here?” Francesco asked, genuinely interested.

“Your human wasn’t the only one who could use the internet. The pet of an associate of mine across the ocean heard… a whisper. Passed the whisper on to me. And here we are.”

“What sort of whisper?”

“The usual,” Duval said. “Rumor of rumors. I’ve been chasing down such Bane whispers for a century.”

Just killing time, Rose thought, her choice of words disturbing more than amusing. There’s the two of them, the three of us… and this has to end soon.

“Well, now you have your lump of metal,” Francesco said. “A piece of rubbish dug up from an old grave, surrounded by myth. And it’s suckers like you that believe it.”

“‘Suckers’?” Duval grinned, and he was all teeth. “Then why are you going through so much to stop us?”

“Just in case,” Francesco said. And then he shrugged. “And because, sometimes, being a Humain gets boring.”

“I don’t believe you,” the vampire said. He looked at Rose, then Patrick, then back to Francesco. “Three of you, two of us. One of you is”—he nodded at Patrick, feigning sadness—“almost finished, it seems. And another”—to Rose—“five years, maybe? Probably less. You fight well, yes. But not when it counts.”

He lowered the Bane and held it out to Bindy. She touched it and gasped, and Rose tried to see what the true effect was. Were the vampires really seeming to swell before her eyes? Did their teeth really seem to grow? Or was it all in her: an expectation of things happening?

“Francesco?” she whispered.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait.” She heard the caution in his voice as well, and realized that he had no idea what was about to happen. Then: “When I give the word, we rush them.”

“Yes,” Rose said, and she glanced at Patrick to see if he’d heard. He nodded strangely. His left arm was twitching, left leg seemingly hanging limp and taking no weight. She thought perhaps his neck was broken.

“Ready…” Francesco said, and then there was a sound behind them.

Rose spun around and Marty was there, shuffling into the room with an old spearhead clasped in one hand, the other hugged his chest, holding in the pain. Rose was so shocked that for a second she couldn’t move, and that was all her brother needed to pass close to Patrick and start along the aisle beside the tumbled shelves.

Duval sighed. “If a job’s worth doing…” He nodded at Bindy, and she grinned horribly as she advanced on the bloodstained boy.

Marty paused and dropped the spearhead. It clanged off a fallen metal shelf, the sound surprisingly loud. He swayed, looking down at the floor, and Rose knew that he was about to faint.

“Leave him,” she said, pleading. “He’s just a—”

Bindy leapt, hands reaching, jaws stretching, and Marty stepped to one side faster than Rose could follow. He punched the falling woman, using her own momentum to drive his clawed hand into her stomach, and as she doubled over his forearm Marty growled, new teeth bared in pink, split gums.

“What—” Francesco said.

Marty chewed away the back of Bindy’s neck with one massive bite, exposing her spine and the base of her skull. Then he drove his other hand up through the wound and pulled, dragging out a handful of brain.

“Oh, Marty,” Rose said, but he was not looking at her. As he shoved the dead vampire aside, flicking the mess of her brains from his hand, he turned to face Duval.

“You killed my parents,” he said. “So come on, then, fucker.”

Duval grinned, lifted the Bane, and did as he was invited.

Maybe it was the rage that made him unbeatable.

Upon waking back in that deserted ransacked room, and realizing what had happened, Marty’s first instinct had been to exult. The grief of his parents’ deaths, which he had somehow been keeping at bay, was lessened now, a remote thing that seemed as if it had happened years ago, not days. The pain from Duval’s tortures, both physical and mental, had similarly faded. He had slid from the shelf and stood tall, taking in his surroundings even though the lights were now off. And he had felt more in control than he ever had before.

And then the rage had started to build as he thought of that vampire biting into him. He’d thought he wanted it, but the vampire had given him no choice. He had asked Rose to turn him, and that would have been his long-lost sister—his guardian angel—not that monster. Choice had been taken from him, along with whatever was left of his life. Undeath stretched before him. And, knowing that, he wasn’t at all sure he had ever wanted it at all.

It was only a short walk to room seventy-two, but in that time his rage built and his old, human self remained, an angry force that he was not sure he could ever shed. Humain? he thought, and he wondered at Rose’s turning. Had she felt like this? Perhaps he would get to ask her.

But first, the monster needed to pay.

On the way, he slipped through a door into a darkened room, all pains and injuries vanished, now that he was something else. He’d never felt such power. It took seconds to find what he was looking for, an unremarkable old weapon wrapped in oilcloth. He would not need it… it was just a part of the play.

Then room seventy-two, and his easy killing of the vampire bitch, and Rose’s gasped Oh, Marty as he stood facing the monster Duval. Those two words cast one sliver of doubt, but he flicked the mess of brain and shattered bone from his hand and said, “Come on, then, fucker.”

Duval lifted the thing in his hands and came at him.

Marty stepped quickly to the side, kicking out at Duval’s legs and hearing bones snap. The vampire screeched and swung the Bane again, and Marty held up his right arm to deflect it, feeling flesh part and bone rupture as it passed through with ease. His forearm and hand flopped down useless, but he did not back away. With the Bane still swinging away from him, Marty leapt for it, closing his good hand around Duval’s on the handle and letting his weight do the work.

“No!” Duval screamed, and as they toppled the Bane fell away from both of them.

Marty sprawled on his stomach. The ancient artifact rolled away from them, coming to rest against the tilted shelf tier, and as he got to his knees to go after it Duval fell on him. Pressed against the floor, the vampire’s weight forcing him down, he was powerless to protect himself against the assault.

Duval was a ravening animal, claws slashing, teeth piercing, legs coming up to kick and pummel. Marty felt the impacts but the pain was remote, a vague niggle in his vampiric brain. The damage being wrought on his body registered more, but even that was something distant and obscure, as if he were watching someone else being attacked. He gathered his strength, pulling his senses inward until they concentrated on one point. Even being torn to shreds, Marty could not help but wonder at what he had become.

“Marty, gimme ten!” Rose shouted, and as distant memories of hide-and-seek sang in, Marty squeezed his eyes closed.

Straddling his back, Duval screamed as UV light filled the demolished room.

“Found you!” Rose said, her own voice pained, and Marty opened his eyes again and bucked the vampire from his back. Duval was holding the burnt remnants of his eyes within their sockets with the splayed fingers of one hand while the other thrashed at the air, searching for Marty and ready to deliver the killing blow. And Marty could have taken one step closer and killed him then. He felt the power in his good hand, the astounding strength that would enable him to punch through the older vampire’s head and scatter his brains across the floor. But instead of one step, he took three.

One, to pick up the Bane.

A second to turn and hold the object to one side, hand curled around the handle, and the sudden impact of what he was holding—the object of these last few days’ trials and deaths, including the brutal murders of his parents—struck him hard, adding to the strength gathered at his core.

And the final step back toward Duval, swinging the Bane and meeting the vampire’s neck even as he launched himself at Marty. The dull, blood-smeared edge of the old weapon passed through Duval’s throat and shattered his spine, and as he completed his leap his head tilted back and rested between his shoulder blades, and he fell and writhed on the floor at Marty’s feet.

Marty looked at the others, the three of them watching him with some measure of amazement and, from Rose, both pride and sadness. With one kick, he parted the remaining scraps of flesh and skin and the tied Mohawk, and Duval’s head bounced away beneath the fallen shelving. His body slumped down into a sitting position, seeming to shrink from the darkness.

The Bane was heavy in Marty’s hand. The weight of Duval’s smeared blood made it heavier.

“Rose,” Marty said, and his voice was deeper than ever before.

“Oh, Marty,” she said again. And for the life of him, he couldn’t understand why she was so sad.