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

“Been? Been?”

“Has anyone come and asked you… asked for her recently? Anyone… I don’t know. Strange? At night?”

“Night’s when it comes back to me,” she said, staring down at her hand. “The blood. That’s when the blood comes back.”

“I really need to talk to you,” Marty said, and he had a sense that he was getting through to her.

Her face slackened, and at first he thought it was tension leaving her. But it was not that at all. It was everything else falling away—awareness, presence, intelligence. And as she dropped the rag and brought the small, stumpy gun from her pocket, Marty wished he’d listened to his big sister.

“ICAN BRING IT down here,” Lee said. “The whole house is wireless. But I barely use half the rooms, so I just keep it in my office. Haven’t used it for a year or more.”

“You know it still works?”

“It’ll need plugging in,” he said, shrugging. “But no reason it shouldn’t.”

“No,” Francesco said.

“You’d rather just sit here and—”

“Yes.” And it looked like the tall vampire would be happy doing just that. Dawn was three hours ago now, and Lee had hardly seen him move a muscle. Francesco had had his eyes closed all that time, but never for a moment had Lee assumed he was asleep. He was starting to think they never slept.

“Fine. Let’s just sit here and waste a day, then.”

“It won’t be wasted,” Rose said. “Marty’s out there.”

“And who knows what’s happening to him? Let me get my laptop. I can scan police channels, try and keep a tab on what’s going on. I can even search for the Bane.”

“From down here?” Francesco asked. He opened his eyes at last.

“You forget who I used to work for. I have a name, an address, and an occupation. I can find out who she’s worked for, where she worked, what digs she took part in, where the stuff she dug up was cataloged and stored, what color underwear she was wearing at the time. I’m not saying it’s definite, but if there’s a trail of any sort, I’ll find it.”

“Maybe he’s right.” Rose was pacing the basement, slowly but consistently. Lee wondered what she was thinking. Speculating what it would be like chained up down here like a fucking animal, probably.

“You’ll run,” Francesco said. “No.” And he closed his eyes and sat back again, leaning against the damp basement wall.

“The vampires will be underground somewhere too,” Rose said.

“And the fucks they’ll have working for them?” Lee asked.

“Marty’s smart.”

“Has he ever killed anyone?” Rose glared at Lee, then looked away sharply. Ahh, Lee thought. Sore spot . He’d keep that in reserve for another time. But the smugness vanished quickly as he realized what that look meant: Rose had killed someone.

“Of course not,” she said.

“He might have to. Think what that could do to the boy.”

Rose didn’t reply, but went and squatted in front of Francesco so that Lee couldn’t see either of their faces. They conversed so quietly that he couldn’t hear; then, after a short silence, Rose stood and returned to him.

“If you make a run for it, we’ll find you. We’ll do things to you that even vampires haven’t dreamt of. You understand?”

“Yeah,” Lee said. She stood so close that he could feel the coolness coming off her. He found himself leaning forward. Then she turned and started up the basement staircase.

Lee followed. At the top he asked, “So, what did you say to him?”

“None of your fucking business.”

Lee squeezed past Rose and opened the door. She retreated several steps from the daylight. And for the next couple of minutes his life, and his destiny, would be his own.

She made him step inside.

All Marty wanted to do was run. He’d never had a gun pointed at him before. His mate Gaz claimed he had—said a bunch of gangbangers mugged him on his way home from a concert one night—but Marty had never been sure whether to believe him. There were guns in London, of course, but they were more prevalent in organized crime than street gangs. The gangs usually just dealt in blades.

It was a strange feeling, informed completely by his knowledge of movies and books. He’d spent months watching Vic Mackey on The Shield, wondering how many hours of training it had taken for the actor to hold his gun correctly. He’d stared down the end of Dirty Harry’s Magnum many times. But here he was, looking into the business end of an ugly, snub-nosed thing, held by a woman who was shaking so much her teeth clattered, and it was like nothing he had ever imagined. It was much worse.

“I said in!” she cried.

“Okay. Okay.” Marty started lifting his hands in the universal warding-off gesture, as if flesh and bone could stop a bullet.

“Keep your hands down. Three… three seconds. And then…” She waved the gun, and for a terrible second Marty thought it was going to go off.

He stepped through the front door. The smell hit him then, a stench of rot and neglect that made him gag.

“Keep walking,” Ashleigh Richards said. She slammed the door and the corridor grew darker.

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where do you want me to walk?”

The skin between his shoulder blades tickled as though caressed with hot metal. He tried breathing through his mouth, but that way he tasted the stench as well, a greasy film on his tongue that he could almost chew. His heart thumped, and because he was breathing harder and faster he smelled more. Something ran across the corridor ahead of him, down beside the narrow staircase; too small to be a cat, too large to be a mouse.

The woman said nothing. She’s trying to find the strength to pull the trigger, Marty thought, and he started turning around, wincing against the explosion of the gun and the bright pain that would follow. He’d often wondered about death, and pain, and how fast it would have to be to feel nothing. It was said that a decapitated head remained conscious for several seconds afterward, and there must be pain there, surely? Get shot in the heart and death is almost instantaneous, but the body must realize what has happened. The time delay between sending an impulse and your finger moving was so small as to be unnoticeable, so pain flowing the other way must be the same.

When she shot him, he’d have time to scream before he died.

But the woman was no longer pointing the gun at him. She’d lost it somewhere—dropped it into the pile of unopened mail, perhaps, or slipped it back into her jacket pocket—and she was rubbing at her left hand again. She’d retrieved the stained towel to do so.

“There are faces out in the streets,” she said. “Watching from the shadows. They’ve been watching for a long time.”

Faces? “How long?”

“Years.” She frowned and stopped wiping. “Who are you? What are you doing in my house?” He saw how lost she was then. He’d never met an insane person—at least, no one who wore their madness on the outside—and he felt an instant rush of pity. He’d gone through phases of worry about both his parents: they’d get cancer, they’d be mugged and killed, they’d get Alzheimer’s. Their premature deaths meant that none of these possible fates would come to fruition, but the idea of Alzheimer’s had been worst.

“You told me to come in,” he said. “You pointed a gun at me.”

“Gun,” she said. “I thought… thought you were one of the faces.”

“No, I’m Marty.” Against his better judgment he held out his hand. Ashleigh stopped rubbing again and grinned at him.

“Oh, no. No, I can’t possibly give you the gun.”