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

Flipping the box over, he saw a familiar name scrawled in fading marker.

Lee knelt and picked up the Bane in his left hand. A rush of despair hit him, and its source was a mystery. He sobbed, coughing up an anguished gasp that seemed to reverberate all around the room. And then he saw the flapping legs of the crippled vampire disappearing beneath the next tier of shelving, and he had purpose.

Dropping his gun, he fell across the space between shelving banks, grasped one ankle, and pulled. The wounded vampire slid out on his stomach, clawed fingers struggling to gain purchase on the floor. When he was clear of the shelving, he rolled onto his back and opened his mouth wide, displaying those terrible teeth.

Lee held the handle that sat at the center of one side of the object, swung it in an arc over his head, and slashed through the vampire’s throat. With one more heavy strike, its spine shattered and its head bounced away, eyes still wide, teeth still chomping.

Lee stared at the Bane, and the slick of impossibly warm blood that coated its surface. He saw his vague reflection in there, and he was human. I’m holding all the power now, he thought. And then he heard the voice.

“Oh, that’s not nice,” it said, and it was the most unnatural voice he’d ever heard, forced from a throat that was made for swallowing blood, not spewing inanities.

To his left stood the tall bald vampire. The decapitated head had struck one of his boots and come to rest looking upward, mouth still moving. The bald vampire’s right hand was buried to the wrist in Connie’s throat. Her body hung limp beside him, legs trailing back and arms hanging down, relaxed fingers just touching the floor.

Lee held the Bane up before him.

The vampire laughed, threw Connie to one side, walked to Lee, and knocked his arm aside as he swung the Bane, sending it clattering from his hand and falling against the leaning tower of shelves.

Lee panicked, reaching for the gun beneath his right arm. The vampire was no longer laughing. His face was split into a grin, all teeth and darkness. He now swiped the gun from Lee’s left hand, and Lee watched it reflecting weak light as it spun out into the room. The vampire watched, too, and that allowed Lee the half second he needed to snatch the other gun from the small of his back and press it into the monster’s gut.

He pulled the trigger twice before the vampire grasped his arm and snapped it at the elbow.

Lee cried out and went to his knees, and the vampire took two swaying steps backwards. He looked down at his gut, and Lee could see all the way through, pale light from beyond finding its way past the swaying curtains of shattered insides and splintered bone. The heavy dumdums had done their job, and there was one more thing to do. With his left hand, he plucked the gun from his right, but only after forcing his clawed, insensitive fingers apart. Every movement was agony. White bone poked through at his right elbow. Head shot, he thought.

The vampire fell, and for one glorious moment Lee thought he had won. But then the monster grabbed the Bane and stood again in one unbelievably quick, fluid movement.

“Human!” he spat.

Lee paused in horror and disbelief, because this could not be.

“Lee!” someone shouted. Rose’s voice. There was a flash and a scream, and then the vampire fell upon him, the Bane falling in an arc toward his face.

He felt it strike. There was no pain—the shock was too great—but he heard his skull rupture, and in the moment before everything ended he thought, My blood on the Bane . There was no implication, only the knowledge. And then there was nothing at all.

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck…

Rose saw the tall vampire pull the object from Lee’s caved-in head, and she knew instantly what it was.

I have to tell you, Rose, that from what I’ve heard of the Bane, and if it’s actually for real, you have to find it before those vampires. You have to .

To her left she saw a flutter of movement, and then a woman vampire disentangled herself from Patrick’s embrace and limped to Duval, her features blurred as a result of terrible violence. She stood close to the tall vampire as he turned around, staring not at his face but at his hand, and the thing he held there.

If Lee had kept hold of it if he’d used it if he’d known how dangerous it could be in his hands …

But perhaps he had. It no longer mattered. Lee was dead, and Rose felt a curious sense of loss that had eluded her upon her parents’ deaths. Maybe, against expectations, they had been friends after all.

Francesco pushed past her and moved to her right, far enough away so that they did not offer an easy target. Patrick was standing to her left, making strange grunting noises as his head jerked at the air like a startled chicken’s. He’d been damaged, but she sensed that he still had some fight in him.

Good. They were going to need it.

“And here we are,” Duval said, his voice like a corpse’s teeth falling onto a gravestone. Here was a creature that should never talk, because his language was something other than words. “The vampires, and the Humains.”

“Humains that have killed enough of you,” Rose said.

Duval shrugged. “We can always swell our ranks. You… you lose a Humain, and your weak philosophy means you can’t replace them. Like this one.” He nodded at Connie’s crumpled corpse. “A child, thin spine, easy to crush. But she had the feel of… thirty years? A lot of vampire knowledge just… gone.” He opened his hand as if releasing a butterfly, and Rose sensed Francesco tensing to attack.

“Back,” Duval said. He held up the Bane. It was an unremarkable thing, considering what it was purported to do. Worked in metal, shaped like two large bowls rim to rim, a handle on one domed side. Its edges glimmered with blood, and Rose sensed something very old emanating from it, as well as something fresher.

“It’s a lump of metal,” Francesco said. He laughed. “You think it gives you any more power than you had before?”

“I feel it,” Duval said, and he sounded so convinced that Rose had little doubt. “It’s filling me with itself. Older than we know, and stronger.” He held it up to the light, turning it this way and that.

“How’d you even know it was here?” Francesco asked, genuinely interested.

“Your human wasn’t the only one who could use the internet. The pet of an associate of mine across the ocean heard… a whisper. Passed the whisper on to me. And here we are.”

“What sort of whisper?”

“The usual,” Duval said. “Rumor of rumors. I’ve been chasing down such Bane whispers for a century.”

Just killing time, Rose thought, her choice of words disturbing more than amusing. There’s the two of them, the three of us… and this has to end soon .

“Well, now you have your lump of metal,” Francesco said. “A piece of rubbish dug up from an old grave, surrounded by myth. And it’s suckers like you that believe it.”

“‘Suckers’?” Duval grinned, and he was all teeth. “Then why are you going through so much to stop us?”

“Just in case,” Francesco said. And then he shrugged. “And because, sometimes, being a Humain gets boring.”

“I don’t believe you,” the vampire said. He looked at Rose, then Patrick, then back to Francesco. “Three of you, two of us. One of you is”—he nodded at Patrick, feigning sadness—“almost finished, it seems. And another”—to Rose—“five years, maybe? Probably less. You fight well, yes. But not when it counts.”

He lowered the Bane and held it out to Bindy. She touched it and gasped, and Rose tried to see what the true effect was. Were the vampires really seeming to swell before her eyes? Did their teeth really seem to grow? Or was it all in her: an expectation of things happening?