Tim Lebbon - 30 Days of Night - Fear of the Dark

“He really never knew?” Marty said.

Rose shrugged.

“You only ever met him at night?”

“We were all doing this secretly. We had lives to lead. So he thought.”

“He’s passionate about this.” Marty held his head and closed his eyes, smelling once again the powerful, nose-burning stench of the chloroform. “You sure he’ll keep his word?”

“Of course. Francesco and I are his regular contacts. But he’s also met Jane and Patrick, and he knows there are others. Now he knows we’re all… Humains.”

“And his garlic and holy water don’t work.”

Rose giggled. Marty’s eyes snapped open. That sounded so much like his sister—like the old Rose. She broke off, no longer smiling, and looked at him, and perhaps an old memory of how things had been had struck her as well. How different she must be, he thought. It was terrifying.

“I’m amazed he was that naïve, actually,” she said. “The ways to kill vampires are far less fanciful.”

“What are they?” Marty asked. He was holding his head, eyes half-closed, and it took a moment for the heavy silence to impress itself upon him. He froze and looked at Rose. She was glaring at him. “What?”

“Never ask that again,” she said softly. “Understand? One of the others hears you asking that and…” She looked away.

“Sorry,” Marty said. He was upset that Rose could even think of things that way, but perhaps he was forgetting the dire situation he was in. Behind his headache lay the terrible grief, still a solid wall of darkness surrounding him but not yet crushing him down. Shouldn’t I be crying? he thought. Useless? Unable to function? But he remembered when his mum’s mother had died when he was ten, and he’d asked her why she wasn’t crying. I’m crying inside, she’d told him. Everyone handles grief differently. I loved her deeply, and there are no doubts about that, so I’ll not feel guilty that I’m not a useless crying mess right now. And if tomorrow I am one, I won’t feel guilty then, either . At the time he’d found some of that difficult to understand: when someone died on TV, everyone who knew them cried and held each other and wailed. But he’d come to learn that not everything was like on TV.

“So, what happens now?” he asked.

“For tonight, we stay here. Patrick, Jane, and Connie are out in the streets, in other parts of London.”

“Why?”

“Decoys, in part. And also trying to find out more about the vampires, and their numbers.”

“You think they know about Lee?”

“If they did, we’d have found that out by now.”

“So they don’t know where this Bane thing is, then.”

“Not sure,” Rose replied. “We know so little.” She seemed to be looking past Marty, and he saw the distance in her eyes that set her apart from the sister he’d once known. He had to keep reminding himself that this was no longer the Rose he knew and loved. She was someone else who had his sister’s memories, something else making new memories of its own.

“I don’t know what to do now,” he said softly. “People’ll be looking for me, right? Family and friends. The house is burnt, and the cops’ll be looking too.”

“We’ll work something out.”

Marty thought about that. We’ll work something out. What was there that they could work out? It seemed quite clear from Francesco’s attitude that Rose shouldn’t have anything to do with him. He had no idea what was going to happen in the next five minutes, let alone five days or five years. What could they possibly… ?

But there was that one thing he’d been thinking about. The thing that made his once-special sister so special again.

“We could.” He stared at her until she caught his eye.

“What, Marty?”

“We could work something out.” He was fingering the collar of his shirt, thinking, What am I doing? But the idea had been with him for a while now. Certainly since he’d woken and crawled downstairs to warn them that Lee knew. And in truth, from the moment he’d seen Rose fighting off that thing that attacked him—her strength and power, grace and brutality—the idea had been with him, though subconsciously at best.

Rose moved. He was shocked by her speed: one moment she was in the chair opposite him, the next she filled his field of vision, her face pressed so close to his that he thought she was going to kiss… or bite.

“You have no fucking idea,” she said. “Listen to me, Marty, and make sure you listen well…” She trailed off for a moment and she was still there, the only thing Marty could see, and he could smell her, too… nothing like his sister.

“R-Rose…”

“Your mother’s dead. You’re alive. I’m neither. I can’t begin to make you understand what that means, but I can try. And if you trust me, you’ll pay attention. Do you trust me, Marty?”

“I don’t want to hear—”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes. I trust you.”

“Okay, then. Here goes. Some days I drink rats’ blood. I hunt them down in sewers and tube stations. They eat dead things down there, and live in the shit and piss of six million Londoners, and I drink their blood. It’s stale and rancid, but it’s warm, and it’s food. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, Patrick will score a hit on a blood bank. He has his ways and means, which he refuses to tell us, but he’ll come back with bags of the good stuff, freely given. That makes us strong. But sometimes it tastes too good. So then it’s back to the rats, and sometimes a cat or a dog if I’m really lucky.

“You’re seventeen and you’ve already seen too much. But time will dilute all this awful stuff. You can look forward to so much more than me, Marty. When the sun rises tomorrow, you can go outside and walk through the streets, seeing London as it’s meant to be seen. The parks, the architecture, the people. One day you’ll fall in love and feel the warmth of someone’s heart thudding beside your own. You’ll make love and have children…” She trailed off again, but she was still pressed too close for Marty to see her expression.

“But you’re so removed,” he said softly. “You live by your own rules, do what—”

“No! I live by rules my condition demands. I’ll never walk in sunlight or fall in love. You can relish life, Marty, but I can only crave the blood of the living.”

“But you said you—”

“We go against our base desires. It’s a choice we make, and a good one. But the hunger’s always there.”

Marty turned away, angry at Rose for telling him so much. “I’m not a fool. I don’t see glamour. But I also don’t see what I have left.”

“Choice,” Rose said. Marty felt a breeze against his cheek, and when he turned back to Rose she was sitting in her chair again, as relaxed as if she hadn’t moved at all.

“You’ve made a choice as well,” he said.

Rose sighed and shook her head. “You’re so fucking human.”

“Thanks, Sis.” He looked for a smile but there was none; Rose’s face was as grim as ever. So he closed his eyes instead, the headache still throbbing and his throat dry and sore. And he thought of his dead mother and missing father, and what was left behind for him.

Not much.

He held back the tears, but he was crying inside.

She carried him up to a bedroom and laid him out on a bed, her baby brother who was now slightly taller than her and so much more vulnerable. He was awake as she left the room but they didn’t exchange a word.

She performed a circuit of the house, checking the window and door locks, amused to see the little crosses fixed across each frame, but a little saddened as well. Lee had been leading what he thought was such an honest, responsible life, and now all that had been turned upside down. He was a ruined man making the most of what he had left, and they had misled him for longer than she had known him. He’ll do well by us now, she thought. But she couldn’t help but feel anything except doom in the man’s future. His life had gone through upheaval ten years before, and now they had shattered it again.