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

“Call the others,” Francesco said to Rose. “Tell them to meet us at the museum at dusk.”

“But Marty—”

“Is locked away safe and sound. And come dusk, while they’re trying to get to him, we’ll be getting inside the museum to find the Bane.”

“He’s bait.”

“Not anymore, Rose. He’s expendable. You know it.”

Rose closed her eyes and felt her fury rising. Marty had played his part, true. They knew where the Bane was being kept, and though finding it in the massive museum would be no easy task, it was a priority. She would go with the others, for whom her mortal brother’s safety was now secondary. But she would never let him go so easily.

She opened her eyes and nodded, then started dialing Connie’s number again.

They paced the room. He couldn’t blame them. What must it be like being so beholden to what the sun was doing and whether the darkness was deep? He watched them, fascinated and disgusted, and at the same time he worked. On his knees sat the tool through which he had access to the whole world. Day or night, good weather or bad, could not hold him back, because he knew his way without having to move an inch.

He knew which building the Bane was in, but not where it was. He hoped that in the brief time between now and dusk, he could find out. The British Museum had hundreds of rooms and millions of specimens and artifacts, both on display and locked away down in the basements and sublevels where research was carried out. It could take weeks to find something in there. And Lee didn’t have that long.

He opened a new window on his computer and it was his window. A tap on the cursor pad would close it down and hide it. Everything else he was doing was for them, but this one was for him. The most important thing.

Five minutes’ searching gave him Ashleigh Richards’s archived blogs from eight years before. They were hidden away on a locked site, but relevant word searches, combined with knowledge of which ISPs she’d been using at the time, brought them up. He used more word-filtering software to scan each blog for keywords and, finding none, he thought about how he could expand the search.

“Blood.” That was the obvious word. It appeared seventeen times, and he narrowed the search to blogs written post–Wiltshire dig. There were three. He opened each in turn and scanned them, and soon found what he was looking for.

But he had to be careful. He tapped the pad and closed the window, surfing police bands some more, trying to find out more about the gunfire. It seemed everything on that had gone quiet, but he’d already set up a notifier for when it started appearing on news sources. Rose sat beside him for a moment, checking out what he was looking at but saying nothing. He’d become less than useful to them now, he guessed. She soon stood and started pacing again, and then he realized uncomfortably that neither of them had fed that night.

Did a vampire need blood every night? Could they go a few days between feedings if necessary? Was it different for these who called themselves Humains? He didn’t know any answers, and that annoyed him. After so long obsessing about vampires, he still knew so little.

But now, opening the window on his laptop again and reading one of Ashleigh Richards’s final sane blogs, he started to know more than them.

After memorizing its vital contents, he copied the web address into another, more malicious piece of software he’d acquired recently. At the touch of the ENTER button, those blogs were sent a unique, constantly reconfiguring virus that accessed and corrupted them beyond repair.

Really, it had been the only thing Marty could do. If he’d tried to run, they’d have caught him and taken him away. And if he’d simply approached the police for help, maybe that big bastard Stoner really would have attacked and killed the two cops. He couldn’t have faced having that on his conscience, and if they’d managed to grab him …

The vampires had already killed both of his parents. As soon as they had what they wanted out of him, Marty had no doubt that this Duval character the woman had mentioned would have killed him too. Slowly. Horribly. It was the memory of his parents that had made his final decision.

He’d want them to be proud of him.

So he sat in his cell, relieved that he’d managed to get the text message off to Rose before they’d taken his mobile. That had been from the back of their car, spelling out the message with one hand while the male cop kept glancing over his shoulder. Vampires? he’d said, but he hadn’t laughed. Too pissed off at the damage to their car, most likely.

Once at the station, Marty had asked for his phone call and they’d laughed, telling him he needed time to cool down in his cell before they started questioning him.

He’d never been in a police cell before. His friend Gaz had, for a couple of hours one evening after he’d given a policeman some lip in town after drinking too much cider. They’d let him out soon after with a warning, and he’d told Marty that it had scared the shit out of him.

The cell was small and contained a low-level concrete plinth with a thin, worn mattress and a blanket. Beside the plinth at the back was a toilet pan with an old-fashioned overhead flush. Other than that, there was nothing, not even a window or a light switch. He’d lain down for a while but had been unable to sleep. Then he’d tried pacing, but he had to turn around after four steps and the constant turning made him dizzy. So he simply sat on the hard bed, knees pulled up to his chest, and hoped that he’d done enough.

He had one visit, from a woman police constable who brought him a plastic cup of water and took his shoes. He asked her when he’d be seen and what was happening, but she acted as if he weren’t even there. She pointed a camera at him and took a snap, not even bothering to check whether it had come out well before closing and locking the door again.

Marty almost shouted after her, but he knew it would do no good.

After almost two hours, he had to give in to nature’s demand and relieve himself. And it was as he was standing pissing that he heard the first signs of commotion from outside.

The walls must have been thick, and probably strengthened with steel and plaster reinforcement, but he heard the first gunshots. There was more than one… it was a rattle, short and sharp and brutal. Then another, and another, and by the time he’d zipped up, the shouting had begun.

There was no way of telling which direction any of the noise came from. It seemed to enter his cell through a high-level air vent, so he stood on the solid bed to try and hear better. They were definitely gunshots, and it sounded like multiple weapons. Machine guns. He’d never heard one fired in real life, but there was no other explanation.

Some of the shouting turned to screams.

There was a brief silence, during which Marty realized how heavy and fast he was breathing. Then the shooting started again, and that was when he realized this might be all for him.

The idea came as a shock and it knocked him from his feet. He curled into a ball on his bed, listening to shouting, guns firing, people dying, and thinking of that tall woman’s face and Stoner’s daunting size. If this was them, what could the vampires have possibly offered to make them do this?

Something Rose wouldn’t offer me, he thought, and with that came the understanding that there were many people who’d be susceptible to such persuasions. The vampires had only to trawl London’s underside to find people willing to kill for them.

Someone ran along the corridor outside the cells. Heavy boots struck concrete, a door opened and slammed in the distance, and then it was quiet outside once more until the shouting began. The man must have been in the cell next door to Marty. He cursed and swore, screaming and roaring, most of his words unintelligible. A persistent banging commenced, closer to Marty than the gunshots and detectable through the floor. The man next door was kicking and punching his cell door.