Free 30 Days of Night: Light of Day by Jeff Mariotte Page B

is no vampire,” Mitch said.
    “Don’t you think I know that?”
    “Why are you going so fast, then?”
    “Mitch, if he was a vampire there wouldn’t be a problem, right?”
    “You think?”
    “That’s the whole reason we’re doing this, isn’t it? To meet vampires? I’m only afraid of people who aren’t, at this point.”
    “You were running pretty hard there.”
    “Like you weren’t?”
    “I just want to know you’re going to go through with this. You’re not going to wimp out when things get too real.”
    “No way,” Walker said. “I am in this, Mitch. All the way.”
    “Just making sure,” Mitch said. “Maybe you should slow down, man. It’d suck to be stopped for speeding with a bottle full of blood in the seat.”
    “Yeah,” Walker said. He eased off the gas. “You’re right, dude, thanks.”
    As they made their way out of the city, he finally gave voice to a thought that had been nagging at him. “What if we catch something from these city chicks?” he asked. “I think in the suburbs there are fewer diseases.”
    “We talked about that,” Mitch said. “It’s easier to get caught there.”
    “Maybe so, but it seems like I’m always the one doing the dangerous work anyway.”
    “Man, if either of us is busted, we both go down. Even if you held the blade, I’m an accessory, right?”
    “Yeah, I guess.”
    “For sure. I say we stick to the city. How many vampires you think hang out in the ’burbs? We want them to be able to find us, right? Isn’t that the whole idea?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Okay then.”
    But driving toward home, doubts surfaced again in Walker’s consciousness. He feared that he was alreadybecoming addicted to the hunt, to the kill, to the burning sensation of blood running down his throat. But if this plan was all wrong, if they weren’t going to draw real vampires to them, then he didn’t want to be hooked on that.
    If there were no real vampires …
    “What if Andy’s wrong?” he asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know, the government swears he’s a nutbag. So what if they’re right and he’s wrong? There are no vampires and the whole deal was just some elaborate construction that he put together.”
    “Do you believe that?”
    “I don’t know what to believe. I’m just saying.”
    “If you think that, then I don’t know what to say. I mean, we’ve been doing this because we thought they were real.”
    “Yeah,” Walker said. He slammed his palm against the steering wheel. “Maybe they are! Probably. But what if they’re not? What if Andy played us all for suckers?”
    “Maybe we should pick up the pace,” Mitch said. “Do one every night. Make sure we get noticed.”
    “Or caught.”
    “Chance we gotta take. You don’t win if you don’t play.”
    “I don’t want to go to jail.”
    “Like you’re not already in jail. Sitting in your little house selling other people’s old shit on eBay.”
    “It’s just—”
    “Walker, you want to live, you have to take some chances. Maybe if you want to really live, you have to die first.”
    “I guess.”
    “Tell you what. When we get home, we’ll check on some of those message boards and websites. We’ll keep checking back there, looking for proof one way or the other. If something convinces us that they don’t exist, then we’ll quit what we’re doing. Cold turkey. We’ll go back to our old lives and forget we ever did this.”
    “Right, that’ll be easy.”
    Mitch ignored his sarcasm. “But if we’re convinced they’re real, then we step it up a notch. Back to the city every night. Really try to draw one in.”
    Mitch could be convincing. He could be an asshole, too, punching Walker’s buttons like nobody else. Walker gave up trying to argue. “Okay,” he said. “It’s a plan.”

11
    T HE FIFTH PARTIALLY DRAINED female body turned up in an apartment four blocks from the University of Chicago campus on a morning in mid-May. By the time detectives Alex Ziccaria and