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

Daylight, he went on, is to us like a nuclear explosion is to a human. You’ve seen those government film from the fifties and sixties? Hide under your desk, build a shelter beneath your staircase with doors, all that crap? And that one where they showed the effects on a human body? The flash blinds… the heat strips… the blast destroys. Imagine that on your face, Rose. He’d reached out and touched her with his cool fingers. Eyes melt; skin reddens, burns, and then peels; flesh blackens, dries, crumbles; then your bones are given to the sun. Back to dust. We’re made of human stuff, essentially, and we’re all the stuff of the stars .

All this came to Rose in a flash, and even as she saw Marty’s knuckles tighten around the cord she was turning away and squeezing her eyes closed. It’s barely even dawn, she thought, but she was filled with a sudden terror the likes of which she had not experienced since becoming a vampire. It was a mortal terror, the fear of death, and that was the first moment in five years that she had truly understood just how much she wanted to persist. She had never considered suicide, because that was anathema to any true vampire. But she had dwelled for long periods on the uneasiness of her existence.

Now all she wanted was to go on.

She fell to the floor and crawled, pulling a table over and crouching behind it as darkness was driven from the room. The silvery light was gentle and subdued, but it fought against the artificial light, casting smears across the floor that she knew would burn if…

She smelled burning hair and looked down in wonder at her right hand. It was splayed on the carpet, propping her up against the table, and the small hairs on the backs of her fingers were shriveling into blackened points. Rose gasped and snapped her hand back.

Marty grunted as he heaved something big; glass smashed, and then she heard him climbing through the ruined window. She heard a promise she wasn’t sure Marty could keep.

“I’ll be back!” he shouted. And as he went he pulled the cord again, and the heavy curtains closed most of the way.

Rose dashed from the room, hand hurting, skin crawling, and Francesco was already pulling the door shut as she emerged into the hallway.

Hands grabbed her and turned her this way and that.

“Open your eyes!” he commanded, and she did so. Francesco was very close, glancing from one eye to the other and back again. His fingers dug into her arms. He was scared for her.

“I’m okay,” she said, nodding, shaking. Francesco relaxed and let go of her arms.

“Your brother did a good job on you.”

“He didn’t mean to hurt me.”

“He didn’t?” Francesco raised an eyebrow and grabbed her hand, running his fingers across the already reddening skin. The tiny nubs of burnt hairs came off beneath his fingers.

“He’s doing what he thinks is best,” Rose said. “And—who knows?—maybe it is. We can trust him more than Lee, I’ll tell you that. By the time the sun sets, he might know exactly where the Bane is.”

“That’s good news,” Francesco said, but Rose’s half smile did not last long. “ If he comes back,” he continued. “If the woman isn’t already dead, or one of them. If their murderers don’t catch him beforehand—and they will have murderers out there, Rose, doing their bidding. It’s just as Lee said. There are enough sad, lost people who’ll take a promise of immortality as license to do anything.”

“Marty’s careful,” she said, and already she feared for him.

“His life’s changed, and he’s mourning so much. Maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

Francesco turned away and headed for the basement door. Light was moving into the hallway now, and they didn’t have long left.

“Maybe what?” Rose asked again, not moving.

“I was going to say, maybe you should turn him. But he’s all wrong, Rose. He’s angry. Nothing like you.”

You were a gentle woman, Rose, Francesco had told her when she finally asked why he had chosen her to turn. You treated the night with calmness and humility. You were comfortable with your place in things, and knew that it was insignificant. A Humain has to be such a person .

He was right. Marty was very different from her. But there were many more bridges to cross. For the next few, and until dusk, her brother would be on his own.

Marty ran. Being out in the gathering dawn was a good feeling, although as he sprinted along the street he was plagued by guilt and remorse. The brief violence against his sister—unimaginable days ago, yet now so much more brutal than he could bear—had felt necessary at the time. There was no way she was about to let him go of his own accord, and he couldn’t face staying down there with them for another twelve hours, imagining the pain his parents had gone through and dreaming of how empty the bustling city now was for him. He’d hurt her, when she had spent so long looking out for him. He hoped she understood why he had to do it, and he hoped the pain was not too bad. He’d seen her flee across the room and tip the big table on its side to protect herself from the sunlight… and from that action he’d realized for the first time just how alien she now was. There had been wisps of smoke from her hand, and then he was gone, heaving a heavy chair through the window and slicing his right hand on jagged glass as he’d climbed through. The smell of blood! he’d thought as he ran, but of course he was out in the daylight by then, and safe.

I’m sorry, Rose, he kept thinking. He pulled the sleeve of his jacket down to cover the blood across the back of his hand, because he didn’t want anyone stopping him. What do I look like, anyway? he wondered. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d washed, his hair was a greasy mess, and his eyes felt burnt and hollow from crying. His throat was still stinging from whatever Lee had used to knock him out. His head thumped. His mouth was dry. I probably look like a junkie .

Yet the running felt good, as if he could run so far and fast that he’d outpace the grief and chaos that had fallen around him. In the planted square opposite Lee’s house he dashed past an old tramp who was just waking, gathering his bulging plastic bags around him and muttering about thieving squirrels. The old guy watched him go and Marty threw him a half wave, pleased when the man waved back. Out of the square, along a street lined with lawyers’ offices and big glass-fronted real estate agencies, he passed a score of BMWs, Mercedeses, and Porsches, four tires from any one of them probably worth enough to give the old tramp somewhere to sleep and eat for a month. Injustices like this hit Marty a lot, especially living in London, and his dad had always responded with: We all make our own luck in life .

He wondered what his parents had thought about their own luck over the past few years.

Make our own luck, he thought. That’s what he was doing now. He could have stayed back in Lee’s house with them for half a day while the world went on around them, but doing this felt like he was taking action. If he was very lucky and made really good luck for himself today, he might even have the Bane in his possession come nightfall.

Some of this was a distraction from the shattering grief that pressed down on him. Grief was real—his parents’ deaths were real—but pursuing a mythical vampire’s artifact from four thousand years ago, a magical thing that was said to bestow great power on any vampire possessing it… that went to keep some of the reality at bay.

When he reached a main shopping street, he stopped running at last, leaning back against a bank’s wall and checking the cash in his pockets. I’m just someone late for a bus, he thought, but he was no longer concerned about what people thought of him. In Lee’s posh residential neighborhood, he might have turned heads. But anywhere like this in London—with shops and pubs, buses and cabs—he was part of the norm.