30 Days of Night: Light of Day Read Free Page A

been made by IDEAL! and sold in 1966 to cash in on the Adam West TV series. The one they had on eBay was in its original packaging and included a batarang, batcuffs, batrope, bat message-sender dart, bat flashlight, bat grappling hook, and for unknown reasons, a gun. Batman never used a gun on the TV show, so Walker didn’t understand why it was there. It was supposed to shoot the message-sender dart, but it was still a gun. Maybe IDEAL! hadn’t trusted kids to buy any play set that didn’t involve firearms. Bidding would get furious in the last hour or so, he expected, and the belt would likely fetch more than five grand.
    “So what’s the matter?”
    “What makes you think something’s the matter?”
    “Walker, look at you. You’re acting like your mom died again.”
    “That’s nice.”
    “I’m just saying.”
    Walker let out a sigh. “It’s the stuff from Andy.”
    “The stuff you were supposed to send out immediately.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Three days ago.”
    “Dude, I know, okay?”
    “So what’s up?”
    “I don’t know if I can do it.”
    “Didn’t you always do whatever Andy told you to?”
    “Yeah …”
    “So what makes this different?”
    “It’s … like I said, now I know they’re real.”
    “And?”
    “There really are vampires. It’s not a myth anymore. It’s for real, and … and they’re bloodthirsty monsters. They kill, they feed, they show no mercy. They’re killing machines, superior to humans in almost every way.”
    “Yeah?”
    “So that fucking rocks!”
    Mitch just looked at him, silently.
    “I mean, don’t you want in?”
    “Meaning what?”
    “Dude, don’t you want to
be
a vampire? Wouldn’t that be better than sitting around this house selling old toys on the internet and eating candy bars?”
    “I guess so.”
    “You guess so.”
    “What do you want me to say?”
    Walker couldn’t believe he had to ask. “Prowling the dark streets, hunting for our meals. Knowing that people cower in fear of us. Seeing that look of terrible recognition in their eyes when they know their lives can be measured in seconds. How could you not want to be part of that?”
    “I guess it sounds pretty cool, when you put it that way.”
    “Of course it does.” He had known Mitch would come around. He always did.
    “So in all that info Andy sent, did he tell you how to find any vampires who could turn us?”
    Andy turned to another auction, a 1965 Gilbert Oddjob action figure, from the James Bond movie
Goldfinger
. Most of the best stuff had been released before he was born, but that didn’t keep him from buying and selling it. This one still had a couple of days to go, and had just passed four hundred bucks. “No,” he said. “Plenty of advice on how to protect yourself against them, but nothing about how to find them.”
    “There are still those message boards and all. I mean, if you’re serious.”
    “Yeah,” Walker said. “Always hard to tell if there are any real vampires on those, or just wannabes. But I’ll keep an eye on them.”
    “You got any other ideas?”
    This question, more than any other, was what had prevented Walker from sleeping during the night. He had rolled around in bed, going over and over theoptions, trying to tease out the pluses and minuses of the plan that had occurred to him. “I have one,” he said.
    “What?”
    “If we want to become vampires, we have to bring vampires to us.”
    “And how do we do that?”
    “We attract them,” Walker said, “by acting like vampires. Starting right now.”

3
    I N HIGH SCHOOL , Walker had asked Missy Darrington to two dances. The first time, during sophomore year, she had turned him down and gone with Chad Benson, who was on the football and track teams and who had, three years after graduating, taken a dozen Ambien tablets, downed a fifth of Jim Beam, and gone for a drive in his father’s restored vintage Thunderbird. Even if the pills-and-alcohol combination had not done him in, the collision