30 Days of Night: Fear of the Dark

11

“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.

To begin with, at the turn of the decade, there were three train routes that she traveled a lot, all of them to and from London: Yorkshire, Monmouthshire, and Wiltshire. Lee established that she had family living in Yorkshire, and that the other two counties were work related. She holidayed in Cornwall, and also made trips to the States, Canada, Greece, South Africa, and Nepal. From this larger picture, he started pinpointing more defined aspects of her life. There were over three hundred purchases made at a bakery just off New Oxford Street between 2000 and 2003, as well as numerous shopping receipts from various shops in that area. Lee could even narrow down these purchases to specific times and days, and the bakery purchases were usually made around lunchtime.

From around 2003 onward, the trail became more difficult to follow. Her traveling seemed to lessen, and card purchases ceased. He could track her cash withdrawals, all of them from the same ATM in the same bank in Colliers Wood, and it seemed obvious that she’d started buying everything with cash. Utility bills showed that she’d remained in the same house where she’d lived for years, and gas and electric usage had increased steadily throughout 2003. From then until now, as far as they could gather, she had remained at home.

The changes in her habits had begun soon after the King of Stonehenge dig.

“British Museum,” he said when Rose asked where she’d worked. “Already brought up her tax records.”

As for where the Bane might be located, the museum was an obvious first choice, but there were still dozens of potential sites in and around London. Knowing more about Ashleigh Richards still told them nothing about where she had possibly hidden the relic.

When Lee started finding and tracking Richards’s family and friends in London, Rose moved away and left him to it. She was hungry, and there was nothing here to feed upon. Nothing allowable, anyway. Francesco sat where he’d come to rest as soon as they’d entered the basement, back against the damp wall and eyes closed. For Rose, the fact that they never needed rest had been one of the most shocking aspects of becoming a vampire; with a body that never tired, the only pressing requirement was food. She used to enjoy drinking, but that was no longer a necessity, nor even a pleasure. She’d liked sex, but though she still indulged from time to time, the drive seemed to have dwindled with the beating of her heart.

She knew that Francesco was resting his mind rather than his body. And she wondered, as ever, whether the passing of so much time could tire a mind whose body was still young and vigorous.

“He’s very good,” Rose said, sitting next to the old Humain.

“I know. That’s why we use him.”

“‘Use him,’” she echoed, not liking the term. But she could not deny its truth.

She had sat silently with the vampire who had turned her five years before, closing her own eyes but unable to rest her mind.

And then that comment from Lee. “Holy shit.” And he looked directly at Francesco.

“What is it?” Rose said, leaping to her feet and crossing the basement in less than a second. Lee drew back, like a startled cat in a car’s headlamps, clawing at the headphones strapped across his head.

Francesco was beside her then, though she hadn’t even heard him move.

“What is it?” she asked again.

“Marty’s name was mentioned,” Lee said. He pulled the headphones from the laptop and hit a button. At first, all Rose heard was a shower of white noise interspersed with crackles and electronic squawks. But then she heard it properly, and the voices emerged.

“…station. Right nutter, kicked… lights in. You wouldn’t believe… shouting about vampires… got in car willingly enough. Couple of hours ago now, but… still shaking. Said his name was Volk. Wasn’t that the family… house that burnt… ?”

“Christ,” Rose muttered. “Can you tell where that’s coming from?”

“Hang on.” Lee tapped away on his laptop and a map of London popped up on the screen. It rotated counterclockwise, slowly, and when it had described a full circle, the map increased in size. Rose watched, her eye already on the place she suspected, and as the map zeroed in she was sure.

“Home,” she said.

“So now the police have him because he’s been talking about vampires,” Francesco said. He stood quietly for a while, and Lee lowered the volume on the police-band scanner.

“He won’t—”

“He’s not our problem anymore,” the tall vampire said.

“What if he leads them here?” Lee asked.

“It’ll be dusk in a couple of hours. By the time they’ve calmed him down, booked him in, let him stew in a cell for a while…” Francesco shrugged. “Besides, they’ll think he’s mad.”

“I’m sure,” Rose said. “But what if he got to the woman first?”

“He didn’t.” Francesco gestured at the laptop. “He went home. Like any animal facing extreme circumstances.”

“No,” Rose said. “He’s been gone seven hours. Something must have happened.”

“What do you mean?” Lee asked. “What something?”

“Why would he have gotten himself arrested?”

“Protection,” Francesco said.

“From what?”

Us, he was going to say, and she saw it on his lips. But then he frowned and turned away.

“We can’t tell whether he got himself arrested,” Lee said.

“We can.” Francesco was facing the far wall now, where hooks were embedded in reinforced concrete padstones, and thick chains hung ready to restrain vampires they would never touch. “Rose is right. We have to assume he reached the archaeologist.”

“He’ll be safe in jail,” Rose said. “Dusk comes, we go and get him out.”

“How?” Lee spurted. “You’re going to do a prison break, are you?”

“We have our means,” Francesco murmured. “Rose, call the others, tell them what’s happening. Lee, can you find out which police station he’s being held in?”

“They’re taking him to Lewisham.”

“Rose, tell them to meet us close to Lewisham Police Station an hour after dusk.”

Rose was already dialing Connie’s number, still going through what might have happened to make Marty give himself up like that. He’d been frustrated that she wouldn’t even consider turning him, yes, but she couldn’t imagine his reaction being that extreme. She’d sensed grief over their parents circling him, held back perhaps by his perception of her own reaction to their deaths. He must have been confused by her lack of regret or sadness, and perhaps this added to the surreality of the situation. That in turn might help maintain the protective wall he seemed to be holding around himself.

Her finger hovered over the last digit, then she canceled the number, turning to Francesco at the same time he looked up at her with dawning realization.

“They’ll have followed him,” she said.

“Yes, of course. Whoever scared him.”

“What are you on about?” Lee asked.

“Marty got himself arrested because he was frightened,” Rose said. “Stupid going back home, but there must have been someone waiting there in case he showed up.”

“Servants to the vampires?” Lee asked.

“Slaves,” Francesco said.

“But he’ll be safe in a police station,” Rose said.

Francesco raised an eyebrow. “Who can tell if—?”

Her cell phone buzzed as a text message came in. “Marty,” she said, looking at the screen and frowning. “Sent two damn hours ago. It says, She took it to British Museum. Will be back soon. Going home first to see what’s left.”

“Two hours ago?” Francesco asked.

“Must’ve been just before they arrested him,” Lee said. “Crappy phone signal. But I knew it was the museum!”

“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.

The shooting continued but it was more fragmented now, and Marty assumed it was because the number of targets was fewer.

Rose, come and get me, he thought. You’re my guardian angel, my protector, you’ve kept me alive when Mum and Dad have been killed so come and get me now, bring your friends and come and get me. But outside it must still be daylight. There was no Rose, and no guardian angel.

A door thumped open, a pause, and then there was a brief rattle of gunfire from close by. The shouting man next door quietened for a moment, then started banging again, and Marty was sure he was yelling, Let me out, let me out, over and over.

Then he heard a sound that was already familiar—a cell door smashing open. Soon after that, another burst of gunfire.

After a few seconds, another cell door opened. The shouting man was silenced at last by a gunshot.

Marty heard keys scrape at his door and then it swung outward, crashing against the wall, and framed in the doorway was the woman police constable who had brought him a drink only an hour before. She still didn’t speak, but looked utterly terrified, blood streaking the left side of her face. Behind her, the massive bulk of Stoner suddenly filled the doorway.

He pushed the WPC into the room, bent to look inside, saw Marty, grinned, then shot the WPC in the back of the head.

Marty squeezed his eyes closed, but not quite quickly enough. He saw what the bullet did to her face, and felt the spray of blood and other stuff patter across his own face and throat.

“Got him!” Stoner shouted, his voice surprisingly high. Then, more quietly, “After this, you better know where the Bane is. Come here, you little fuck.”

“Eat shit,” Marty said, eyes still squeezed shut. He was shaking, and what he’d said even surprised himself. A huge hand closed around his ankle and pulled him from the raised cot. He flipped back and banged his head, groaning as his senses started to swim, then drown.

Moments later, he was being dragged across the floor behind Stoner. To his left and right, Marty saw several bodies, some of them still moving. Then he was lifted up again and propped against a notice board, Stoner holding him there with one big hand.

“Duval wants a chat,” the tall woman from his street said, so matter-of-fact that Marty half smiled. She was high as a kite.

The woman grinned at his smile and whispered, “It’s almost dusk.”