30 Days of Night: Fear of the Dark

2

“YOU SHOULD HAVE LET him die.”

“He’s my brother.”

“You have no human brother! A blood brother, yes. I turned you. Would you do the same to protect me? I wonder.”

“You know I would, Francesco.”

“‘I know you would.’” It was part statement, part echo, but Rose knew that he knew the truth. They were as close as lovers without sex intruding to complicate matters. The same blood ran in their veins. She would do anything for him, and despite his bluster and posturing she knew that he would do the same for her.

“I couldn’t let him die like that. You know it well.”

“I know you’re a fool.”

“What would you do if it was one of your family?”

“My family died out over a hundred years ago,” Francesco said, and there was not a single note of sadness in his voice. “Ypres, the flu, murder, and a suicide finally finished the line.” He chuckled. “I’m the last one left. Irony playing games, perhaps?”

“So you know what happened to them all.” Rose looked straight ahead, but she could not keep the slight smile from her lips. She felt Francesco tense slightly on the bench beside her, and then he chuckled again. It was only in his laughter that he sounded so old.

They were sitting beside a canal; darkness hunkered around them in a hundred shadows. The water stank, rats scuttled to and fro, and smashed bottles and used condoms carpeted the towpath. The canal’s opposite side was lined with dilapidated factory units. The shadow of a forgotten company’s name was picked out by moonlight, and the staggered ridges of a series of pitched roofs were shattered by time and vandals. Weeds had taken root atop the buildings like sparse tufts of hair.

Francesco liked sitting here, and it was the first place she’d come to after leaving Marty. She’d only had to wait for an hour before her friend showed. He hadn’t seemed surprised to find her waiting, but then, he rarely showed much emotion. He claimed that the sixteen decades he’d been a vampire had bled him of trifling sentiment, but she believed he had merely learned to hide it well.

She could smell stale blood on him. He’d fed tonight, from one of the same blood pouches Patrick had stolen from the blood bank three days before. Rose supposed it was a treat, but every time she fed this way, she remembered that one time she’d truly fed. With the memory came a flush of guilt and remorse, and a thrill of excitement and joy that belittled the greatest sex she’d known as a living human. Francesco had found her that night, and held her, and told her that it always took time to adjust. He had not fed on a human for over forty years, or so he claimed. She had no reason to doubt him.

“So we have the problem again,” he said, sighing. “It was inevitable. More has happened to our kind over the last ten years than in the previous hundred. Exposure. Ambition. Both are dangerous.”

“He was strong,” Rose said. “Surprise helped me, but I’m not sure I could beat him next time.” She closed her eyes.

“Strong because he feeds well. I’ve scanned the news but seen nothing yet. Perhaps he’s taking vagrants or runaways, but it’ll be noticed soon enough.”

“But why Marty?”

“Coincidence,” Francesco said. “You said the vampire was surprised. If he’d targeted Marty on purpose, he might have expected you to defend him.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“When you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ll find it everywhere.”

Fucking hell, Rose thought, closing her eyes and sensing the night. She hated it when he fell back on his age. He had wisdom, yes, and knowledge, but when he talked to her like a kid…

She smiled softly. Perhaps he thought of her in the same way that she thought of Marty. A quiet superiority.

“Dawn’s close,” he said. “We should go down. Use the day to talk to the others, and tomorrow night we’ll catch him.”

“How?”

“By using your brother as bait.”

“The bastard will be expecting that.”

“Of course,” Francesco said. “So you’ll be bait as well.” He stood and stretched, and Rose heard his joints clicking, his muscles flexing. She could sense the dawn coming, a soft brightening to the clouds in the east, and for a moment she felt queasy. She hadn’t seen the sun or felt its heat in five years, and she still missed it.

Beneath them, the warren of London’s underworld.

Time to go down.

Marty knew he wouldn’t sleep a wink that night. He entered his house sober, watching the shadows around him, jumping at the slightest sound—a cat bursting from undergrowth in their small front garden, a car horn in the distance. Inside, the familiar shadows and shapes that made up the geography of the house were no longer comforting. They were somewhere for that thing to hide.

But Rose is one too.

He shook his head as he stood in the hallway behind the closed and locked front door and tried to make sense of his night. But there was no sense to be made.

“Marty?”

He jumped, letting out a small strangled cry halfway between laugh and scream.

“Mum! Thought you’d be asleep.” She was standing at the head of the staircase, a vague shape that he knew so well. Comforting. At least that hadn’t changed.

“Just been to the loo. You’re late. Are you drunk?”

“Not at all. And yeah, sorry, Gaz and I were watching a movie and time ran away with us.”

“Just you and Gaz?” There was that tone, the half-playful, half-concerned voice of a mother knowing her son was old enough to be fooling around with girls. It embarrassed him to hell, but he also found it quite sweet.

“Just the two of us. He got really drunk. He’ll have lots of cleaning up to do in the morning, and—”

“It almost is morning, son. Three o’clock. Don’t make a noise when you come to bed, sweetheart.” And she disappeared, shuffling across the landing into her bedroom to get some sleep at last. He felt a pang of guilt, and then he thought of Rose.

I saw Rose tonight, Mum. She’s a vampire, but other than that she’s okay. I’ve always known she wasn’t dead, but never guessed she could be undead. And she saved me from another vampire, a really nasty one, one that wanted to drink my blood and butcher me and… she didn’t. He barked a short laugh, startled at how loud it was, and as he walked through into the kitchen it turned into a silent, shoulder-spasming sob. He rubbed his eyes but the tears kept coming.

“You’d never believe who I saw tonight, Mum,” he whispered, and saying it, however quietly, seemed to settle him a little.

He poured some orange juice, but the darkness pressing against the kitchen window terrified him, so he decided to take the drink upstairs. He made sure all the doors and windows downstairs were locked first, moving quietly so as not to alert his parents to what he was doing. On the landing he passed the closed door to Rose’s old bedroom and a sense of unreality hit him.

She was in there, asleep. She had to be. He’d got really drunk, and on the way home he’d suffered a waking nightmare about Rose disappearing and being presumed dead, her reappearance, the thing that had almost torn him apart for the stuff in his veins… and as he closed his own bedroom door, he just managed to put the glass down before the shakes hit him.

He collapsed on his bed and sobbed into the pillow, desperate for his parents not to hear. If they did and came to see what was wrong, what could he possibly say?

Marty tried to remember what it had been like having Rose in the house. He’d been twelve when she disappeared; she was ten years older, and they’d had so little in common that sometimes they spent days, even weeks without really having conversations. They’d talked, of course—Hey, Hi, Shut up, Get lost—but he could not recall a time when they’d sat in his or her room and really talked. Sometimes she’d chatted at him, telling him about her plans to move to America and become a personal trainer. In his memories she was always doing something to keep fit, whether it was running in the streets or working out in her own room. Her weights were still in there, along with all the other things her parents had never got around to throwing away.

Marty wondered if she wanted her things back. The weights and clothes, the books and CDs, and… and what the fuck would a vampire want with all those things?

He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. It had not been a nightmare, and he hadn’t made it up. Perhaps it was shock, but there was a curious detachment between him and the unreality of what had happened. He remembered the vampire coming at him and Rose barreling into it, their fight, the thing fleeing after calling Rose “Weakling.” And he believed it all. Those couple of times he’d imagined seeing his sister over the past few years probably helped, but what made it easier to accept was the way Rose had changed. He’d recognized her more from her stance and movements than from her face and voice. And although even they were different—he’d never seen her fighting before, and she’d run as if the darkness eased her way—they were still more familiar to him than those dark eyes, so much older than he remembered. They were eyes that had seen things, eyes that craved. As well as scaring him, they made him pity Rose more.

Before tonight, his only thoughts of vampires had had to do with movies and comics. They were cool monsters sometimes, like in Near Dark. Not so cool in that Tom Cruise movie: too many fluffy collars and cuffs. Now he knew them to be real. Doubt had been shoved aside as quickly and surely as that vampire ambushed by his dead sister.

As the night drew on and sleep eluded him, the situation started resolving itself for Marty. Setting to one side Rose’s reappearance and its repercussions, the main factor to consider was the danger he was obviously in. As Rose had suggested, wounded pride and anger might bring that man-thing back for him tomorrow night—she should know—and, alone, there was nothing he could do to protect himself. Leaving was the only way he could ensure his own safety and that of his mother and father.

He had to persuade them to leave. Tomorrow. Without telling them about Rose, or claiming that a vampire had come for him…

And that would be impossible. They were physically attached to this house, the last place that Rose had been seen alive, so much so that he thought the end of the world might be just about the only thing that would persuade them to leave.

So, should he tell them? Sit them down with a cup of tea in the morning and tell them everything that had happened? Daytime would be safe, Rose had told him.

Tomorrow night, death would come for him again.

As dawn stained his curtains pink, Marty tried to think of how he could force his parents to flee the city.

People had written books and made movies about these places, and some of them had been close to the truth. But none had quite reached the level of wonder and horror contained in the city below the city.

Francesco had lived in London for over seventy years, but even he admitted to only knowing a small part of the underworld. Tube tunnels and stations, sewers, air raid shelters, nuclear bunkers, storage tunnels, deep basements, culverts, rivers… there was a whole other city below London, much of it uninhabited, but some of it home to a mix of people. Down-and-outs often slept belowground, venturing down from the open streets above to avoid the cruel coolness of night. Criminals found themselves a convenient hidey-hole or two in which they stored stolen goods or sometimes hid themselves away when the upside grew too hot. There were people who had chosen to live down there as an alternative to the bustle up above, some of them going so far as to construct ”homes” in abandoned tube stations, with furniture, pictures, and working electrical goods. Some said that deeper down amongst the roots of the city lived more basic tribes, some of whom had not seen daylight for generations.

But perhaps that legend had evolved from knowledge of the vampires.

They called themselves Humains: vampires that did not prey on humans. Four of them had adopted a deep basement as a home in the months following Rose’s turning. Francesco and Rose spent most of their days there, along with two others. Patrick was an Irishman, turned just after the Second World War, a quiet man who kept to himself but who so obviously needed company to get by. Patrick had come to London in the eighties after spending years hunting across the rural parts of Ireland, growing more and more disillusioned with his lot. He’d only ever taken sick or old people, hating the dealing of death but driven by what he was and what he must have. It was only in London, when Francesco had found him and shown him a different way, that Patrick had found some form of peace. It was an uneasy peace and, Rose believed, one liable to be upset at any time. Out of all the Humains rose knew, Patrick was perhaps the least human.

The other Humain sharing their hideaway was Jane, a middle-aged woman turned by Patrick in the nineties. Jane had never eaten of a living human, and she was proud of that, often using it to justify herself if there were arguments. Because she sought the recently dead, she often found what she wanted belowground, stalking a sickly person and pouncing at the moment of their passing before the blood stopped flowing and took on the taint of death. Sometimes she was too late and the blood had gone bad in the corrupted body; then she would spend days curled in an agonized ball as the bad blood was purged from her system. Other times, Rose and the others believed, Jane was a little too early. But she would never admit to that.

The journey down felt familiar, but this time the world had changed for Rose yet again. As they descended from the tube station platform, passing through maintenance tunnels and gratings, down a forgotten staircase leading to a station that had never been completed, she brought with her knowledge that someone living knew of her and what she was. Francesco would have more to say about that later. Right now he walked ahead of her, moving with a grace and poise that she had never seen in anyone else. She had always felt that his was a conflicted existence: he fit the vampire mold so well, and yet he denied its basic tenet. She wondered what he thought about during his darkest moments, and whether sometimes… but it was wrong of her to think that way. Francesco was stronger and wiser than them all, and if he did take an occasional warm meal, there would be no reason to lie to them about it.

They crossed the uncompleted station platform, bare concrete crumbling beneath their feet, and approached the doorway at the far end. It was one of six entrances into the subterranean room they used, and all of them were kept guarded. They paused at the door, which stood ajar.

“Seal’s gone,” Francesco said. In the darkness he quickly located a small mark on the metal door frame, a smear of saliva from one of the others dried in a particular shape. “Patrick.”

“Good,” Rose said, and Francesco glanced back at her.

“It won’t even know we exist,” he said. “And even if it does, there’s no way it could find us down here. And even if it could…” His shrug said, You’ve beaten it before.

“Maybe there’s more than one,” she said. “You know what’s been happening out there, in the wider world. Lee’s made it all clear to us.”

Francesco raised one eyebrow and the corner of his mouth, the closest he came to a full smile. “And we’ll be seeing Woodhams tonight,” he said. “I’ve already put a call in. If that vampire’s here for anything other than a random hunt, he should have heard something.”

“We put too much trust in him,” Rose said. Francesco shoved the door open and she followed him inside. “He’s a rat. Surfing the internet, listening for whispers. He sees less daylight than we do, and he’s human.”

“And the fact that he hates vampires with a vengeance makes him our greatest ally.”

“Yeah,” Rose said. She had to admit, the irony always amused her. Woodhams wasn’t a very nice man. And one day, when he found out what they were—which was inevitable—they’d have to deal with him. But for now he was their ears and eyes on the wider world, and it was a world in which much had happened and was still happening.

The time when keeping their heads down would keep them safe seemed to be coming to an end.

A curved staircase led down to the large plant room that they called home. Whatever plant it had been intended for had never been installed, and instead they’d brought down a selection of blankets, mattresses, and folding chairs. There was also a large fridge, the power supply snaking back up through the tunnels to where it was spliced into an underground cable. Patrick had been responsible for that; during the war he’d been an electrical engineer working on aircraft and radar installations.

Rose still remembered the first time Francesco had brought her down here. She was still feverish from the change, shaking with ravenous desire, and she’d vomited when she’d seen the fridge in the corner, laughing afterward because what could she possibly want with salad, or milk, or butter? She’d collapsed in the complete darkness, seeing as though it were daylight. And later, cold blood trickling down her throat and Francesco leaning over her with a plastic bag in one hand, she’d realized the truth.

Nodding at Patrick where he sat upright in a folding chair, glancing at where Jane seemed to be sleeping on a double mattress, Rose went straight to the fridge. She’d already fed that day, but the fight and what came after had drained her. She didn’t feel weak, but she did feel challenged. Her new world had crossed with her old that day, more than it ever had in the five years since she’d become Humain. The fridge hissed cool air as it opened, and she plucked out one of the dozen bags left inside.

“Running low,” she muttered, biting the corner of the bag open. Her jaws and teeth ached, tongue swelling with bloodlust. She faced away from the others as she fed. Unlike them, she still felt something that might have been shame, as if to be seen feeding were like being caught masturbating back when she was human. Francesco said it was her age, and that she would learn contentment. As far as Rose was concerned, that all sounded a bit too fucking Zen for her liking.

The blood settled in her stomach, the power thrummed through her, and she looked to the ceiling and sighed, closing her eyes and seeing the wide, frightened eyes of a man in a suit.

“Rose,” Francesco said, and she was glad. “We need rest, but before that we have to discuss what the night will bring.”

“Death,” Rose said. As she turned, she chuckled at the melodrama in her statement. But Jane was sitting up now, Patrick was staring at her, and she could see that they already had an inkling that something significant had happened.

“We need to gather the others,” Francesco said to the other two. “Two hours, then back here with whoever you can find.”

“What is it?” Jane asked anxiously. Rose could see that the older woman had fed well that night. She looked strong, so she must have caught death just in time.

“A vampire?” Patrick guessed. He looked from Rose to Francesco and back again. “Oh, great. I remember last time.”

“Rose has already met him,” Francesco said. “He’s a true vampire, and he might not be on his own. Lee might have heard something, but either way we’ll likely meet this thing again tonight. We have a plan.” He looked at Rose, an eyebrow raised. “Don’t we, Rose?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “A lure, and bait. Just not sure which one I am yet.”

“You’ll be fine,” Francesco said. He sent Patrick and Jane out into the tunnels to see if they could find any other Humains. There were a dozen more living in London, some willing to be included in group decisions and discussions, others more inclined to live on their own, but all dedicated to preserving their secret and avoiding targeting humans. That was the one principle that did unite them all, however reclusive some might be. Taking humans would bring attention; attention would eventually reveal the truth; and if people knew the truth and believed in them, there would no longer be any fear. Vampires—and that’s what the Humains were, whatever they might call themselves—relied on fear for survival. Without that, there would be only hunting, and violence, and killing. Eventual extinction.

And however conflicted they might be with the facts of their existence, they were nothing if not tenacious.

To begin with, the suit is all she sees. It’s a camouflage and a marker, a shield between the man and his humanity. It makes him an object, not a living, breathing thing, and the briefcase he carries is an extension of that objectivity. It makes what she wants to do all right.

The platform is crushed with people, and she is cold amongst their warmth. Sometimes she’s enveloped in a crush—she doesn’t like it, but she can do little to avoid it—and a pair of startled eyes glance at her. She stares back and they look away, their owner clawing away from her through the crowd. People are everywhere: women with families waiting for them at home; men laughing and muttering and looking forward to seeing their lovers; children chattering excitedly about all the London sights they’ve enjoyed today. The train trundles quickly away, and the crowd moves en masse toward the exit. All of that blood, none of it allowable, but there is the suit, only a few people ahead of her now, heading for the escalators and up into the night. She follows, avoiding the people around her as much as she can and concentrating on the suit. It moves with the crowd but contains nothing like them. They’re all human and protected by the oath Francesco made her take as soon as he’d turned her. They are forbidden.

But the suit is food. She can smell it inside, hear its passage through veins, sense the heart beating in a healthy rhythm.

As she mounts the second escalator and smells the night beyond, she has lived this moment a thousand times before. That does nothing to lessen the thrill of what is to come, and the excitement is real and rich and pure. Everything is familiar—the faces around her; the smells; the electronic adverts promoting books she will never read and shows she will never see; the sense that all these people are cattle, herded this way and that by convention and time and the need to do what is expected—and still the suit draws her on, enticing her with its thrilling warmth.

Her hunger is a solid thing. She’s surprised that the people around her don’t start bleeding beneath its weight. She closes her eyes and someone asks if she’s all right. She glances at the woman and she pulls away, running down the up escalator to annoyed comments from fellow travelers.

Through the station lobby, up the steps, out into the night, pavement thronging and lights glaring, heavy traffic poisoning the air, people talking on mobile phones because they can’t wait five minutes to reach home, and the suit turns left and settles into a steady pace. She doesn’t know how close or far away its home is, but she is settled in her course now, and she’s ready to—

That’s a man in there with a lover and maybe children: someone expecting to see tomorrow.

She coughs and growls, fisting a hand into her stomach to try and ease the hunger throbbing there. Her mouth is aching and she does her best to keep it closed. She wants to slaver, and growls, and feels her tongue swelling and becoming slick with saliva.

The suit turns left, right, passes into and out of a shop carrying a bottle of red wine. She laughs. The suit glances back and she looks away, and now it’s walking more upright, more cautious.

Not much time.

He’s human. You’re not allowed.

Her mouth hangs open now, tongue tasting the air and the blood pulsing through the suit’s veins. Her teeth feel heavy and sharp, and she’s more aware of them than ever before. Someone laughs in the next street and the suit glances that way, as if pleased that there’s still normal laughter somewhere. She can see a nervous smile on the man’s face.

A man, see? A man. Turn and flee, find Francesco, let him teach you what he says you need to know.

But the hunger is strong upon her now, and the suit is leading her toward food. There are no vestiges of her old humanity as she considers what she will do to him; it’s hardly even conscious thought. Instinct takes over as she slips into shadows, darting ahead, past the suit and across a series of rooftops to where she will set her ambush. Cars pass by but no one sees her. She has melded with the early night, and the sunken sun in the west is not even a memory.

There are no more pleas, not even as she recalls this moment. There is simply the hunger, and the blood, and then the suit is in her hands and pressed back against a wall, his eyes wide and his mouth opening to scream in terror. She presses one hand across his mouth and holds his scream inside, feels his heavy breath warm against her palm as for an instant he thinks, perhaps, that this is something else. And as she lurches forward and bites into his neck, it’s as if the blocked scream is building pressure, tensing his muscles, hardening his cock as his neck is constricted, and then softening again as she rips her head sideways and tears out his life. Blood sprays and gushes, muscles relax. His eyes roll and then turn glassy.

There’s no shame or guilt as she feeds. Only instinct.

“They’re here.”

Rose snapped awake. She sat upright and looked around the pitch-black basement. Francesco squatted beside her, and he blinked slowly as he saw her engorged tongue and split lips. He had never commented about her dreams, though he knew what she was reliving. They all understood that their subconscious must battle with decisions they made consciously.

“How many came?”

“All those Patrick and Jane could find.”

“So, how many?”

“Three. Rain, Jack, and Connie.”

Rose nodded and stretched. “Seven of us. Unless that vampire’s bringing an army behind him, that should do.” She looked past Francesco and saw the others gathered around the small table at the center of the room. They sat and stood quietly, the Humains, and she felt a stab of doubt that was becoming all too familiar. Perhaps it was a leftover from her dream, but she had a brief, intense conviction that they were all wrong. That their philosophy was destined to failure.

“We won’t know until tonight.”

“What time is it?”

Francesco looked at the pocket watch he always kept on a chain tucked into his waistcoat pocket. She’d laughed when she first saw it, thinking it was a clichéd affectation. But it had been his mother’s. She had been a nurse during the Napoleonic Wars.

“Almost midday,” he said. “We should really be resting.”

“Not sure I can.” She saw that suit, those eyes, and felt the warm blood flooding around her tongue.

“I was hoping you’d say that.” He held out his hand and took hers. It was not often that any of them welcomed contact, but Francesco had turned her. He was special. He’d told her that he had turned her to replace a mad fool called Chase who had turned back to warm blood and taken six children in six nights. They’d hunted him down and killed him, cutting him into pieces and burying him deep in London’s underworld. Rats and deeper creatures would consume the evidence that he had ever existed.

They approached the assembled Humains, and Rose exchanged nods of greeting.

“You know the basics,” Francesco said. “Now that we’re here together, it’s time to plan.”

As they started talking, and Rose realized what might happen that night, she hoped that Marty had managed to persuade his parents—her old mother and father—to leave the city. She hoped she would never see her living brother again.

But she doubted it.