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

He realized that the reddish sheen that had coated his vision since leaving the archaeologist’s house had vanished.

“Hey!” a voice said. It wasn’t too loud, but he knew instantly it was directed at him.

He glanced back, but the man over the street was walking with his head down. If he’d been the one to call, he gave no sign. His right arm swung naturally, his left hand remained down by his side, fingers curled up where they clasped the knife handle.

I can’t believe this, Marty thought, and then he uttered a half-mad chuckle. After everything he’d seen and come to learn, a scumbag mugger stalking him along his own street wasn’t too far out.

Except this was no mugger. He knew that, just as he knew the shadow he’d seen on the rooftop didn’t belong to someone adjusting a chimney or fixing a TV aerial. These were men working directly for the vampires, lowlifes who’d been promised something that put whatever they were asked to do in the shade—money, drugs, women… immortality. And, for them, Marty would surely be a fine prize.

“Hey, dickhead!” the voice came again, and Marty was still looking at the man across the street. He was sure the voice hadn’t come from him, though the guy’s lips did seem to break into a smile.

Marty slowed, only three houses away from his taped-off home now. There was a white van between him and the police car, and farther along the street, he could now see the tall woman. She’d emerged from behind a tree and was staring directly at him. He’d have laughed if his situation hadn’t suddenly become so dire: she was dressed just as she should have been for the movies, with black leather trousers, black T-shirt stretched tight over big tits, and hair tied in a ponytail that hung over her left shoulder. She carried a jacket slung over her right shoulder—leather, black—and she was smiling. It was the smile more than anything that prevented his laughter. It was totally without humanity.

“Yeah,” she said, “talking to you, fuckface.”

Where are the cops?

Marty stepped past the parked van, close enough to his house now to smell the stench of wet ash and charred wood. He tried not to look. There was nothing left to see, he shouldn’t have come here, he was a fucking fool, but still he found it hard not to stare at what had become of his old life. A ruin. A memory. Stained with badness, nothing would be the same again.

“What are you meant to be?” he asked the woman. He glanced to the right. The police car was there, the window on this side closed. He could see the cops now, chatting and laughing. They hadn’t even noticed anything was going on.

Several cars passed along the street, their engines masking the woman’s voice. She was standing just the other side of the closed-off stretch of pavement, twenty feet from him.

“I’m someone you’ll be sorry you met, shithead.” He could see the longing in her eyes now, and he’d seen that look before a hundred times in a hundred pubs and clubs: junkie.

He looked her up and down. “You look like my last wet dream.”

The woman brought a hand up to her right breast and squeezed.

“Wank away,” she said. “But after Duval’s finished with you, you won’t have it in you anymore. Where the hell’ve you been, anyway? Got the boss pissed off.”

Duval, Marty thought, and then he sensed someone closing on him from behind. He spun around, and the man from across the street was standing with the white van between him and the police car, brandishing the knife.

“Somewhere safe,” he said. “Finding stuff out, unlike you.”

The leather-clad woman froze, glancing around the street. “Stuff… ? The Bane… ? You know where… ?”

Marty shook his head. What have I said? He wanted to back away but they had him surrounded. Stupid idiot, what have I said? “No, not that, just… stuff.” But his panic and fluster gave him away.

“You’ll come nice and quiet,” she said, excited now. “Don’t want to upset the neighbors, and—”

“The cops. I’ll call them.” His heart sank. Marty felt sick. What a fucking idiot !

“Do that and my friend Stoner—you saw him, didn’t you, up on the roof?—well, you call to the pigs and he’ll gut them. Both of them. The woman he might take his time over.”

Marty found it in himself to laugh. He was terrified, and mad at himself, but they were almost ridiculous.

“What the fucking hell do you think you are?” he asked, and as they both came for him he made the only decision he could. There was no way he could fight these bastards. They’d beat him, cut him, take him to their fucking leader. But he could get away from them.

“ Vampires! ” he screamed at the top of his voice. “ There are vampires trying to kill me! ” He darted into the road in front of the white van and ran directly toward the police car. He caught the look of shock and confusion on the woman’s face as she stepped out of sight behind a tree, and then from behind the police car came one of the biggest men he’d ever seen. Almost seven feet tall and almost as wide, this had to be Stoner, and for a second Marty thought he might just have signed the cops’ death warrant.

But these were scumbags, not professional criminals, probably more used to mugging pensioners for their weekly payouts so they could score their next hit than taking on a cop.

Stoner’s shock and confusion was apparent, and Marty pointed at him and screamed, “ There! Vampire! He’s going to kill you, look out, he’s got a knife, there, there !” The smoking cop was already half out of the car and on the pavement, and he glanced behind him as Marty pointed.

Stoner turned and ran.

As Marty reached the police car, the driver’s door was opening and the second cop was climbing out. It was a woman, dark hair tied up in a bun, and Marty made another snap decision. They’d try to calm him down, send him on his way, unless he did something…

He ran to the front of the car and kicked in one of the headlights.

“Hey!” the woman cop shouted.

Marty danced to the right and kicked in the other headlight, then started booting the car’s grille.

“Leave it!” the smoking policeman shouted. He threw his cigarette aside, pulled his pepper spray and Marty backed off, hands up, submissive.

“Little shit,” the woman said, checking out the damage.

“ Vampires! ” Marty shouted. But looking around, checking both ways along the street, he saw that the three scumbags had already vanished.

He went to his knees and sat calmly. His heart was thundering, and he wondered what he had just avoided. And that was how, for the first time in his life, Marty Volk was arrested.

“HOLY SHIT,” Lee said, and he looked directly at Francesco.

That’s not good, Rose thought. Not good at all.

Lee had been sitting in the corner for over an hour, working on his laptop. At first she’d sat with him, intrigued by what he was doing and, in truth, impressed. He had one application open, which was scanning police radio and mobile phone traffic in the Greater London area, with word-recognition software running in the background instructed to look for the keywords “Marty,” “Volk,” “Vampire,” “Ashleigh Richards,” and “Otter Street.” With another application, he was trying to build up a picture of Richards’s habitual movements over the last ten years. He’d already managed to find the numbers of six credit and debit cards listed under her name over the past decade, and from these he was establishing a pattern of movement that built an impressive picture of her everyday life.