30 Days of Night: Light of Day

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Authors: Jeff Mariotte
Tags: Fiction, General, Media Tie-In, Horror
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get to the trigger. She closed her eyes. They weren’t doing her much good anyway, and she didn’t want to give it any additional ways to trade bodily fluids with her. She didn’t know if vampire spit would harm her, but even Operation Red-Blooded’s researchers admitted they didn’t know everything about how vampirism was transmitted. She didn’t want to be a test case.
    Then she felt another bloodsucker grab her left arm and twist it toward her back. The pain was sudden, excruciating. She could smell the bloody stink of the first one’s breath, closer than ever to her nose and mouth. Its upper lip made contact with hers in a horrible kiss, and she felt its tongue slide against hers. Even if she could bite it, she would get a mouthful of poison blood.
    Instead, she snatched for the knife on her belt. Its blade was eight inches long, the top edge serrated. You couldn’t kill a vampire with it unless you sawed its head off, separating it from its brain. But you could do some serious damage. She freed it from its scabbard with her right hand and stabbed up and forward.
    The knife entered under the vampire’s chin and drove up into its open mouth. It screeched in pain and bucked away. Somebody’s TRU-UV light (maybe her own) flashed over them and in its glow Marina could see the steel blade, slick with blood, behind all those teeth.
    She yanked it out and brought it in closer, slicing below one of the hands in her mouth. She cut wrist. Blood splattered her boots but the thing let go. Marina drove the knife to her left, stabbing the one holding her arm. It released her for an instant, long enough to drop the knife and bring up the gun. Tony, R.T., and John would have to fend for themselves. Marina opened fire, phosphorous rounds hitting vampires and exploding with bright white light and fizzing sounds and gagging smoke.
    As she held the trigger down, she spat and spat, trying to clear any vampire saliva from her mouth. She prayed she hadn’t swallowed.
    Gradually her senses returned and the phosphorus lit the hallway well enough to see. Spider John was down, flesh peeled from his face in curling ribbons. A vampire was drinking from him. Marina swore and fired a quick burst into its head, spraying pieces of it the length of the hallway. R.T. was dazed, but appeared okay. Tony H. had fallen into a corner, where he sat on top of a pile of human corpses. He opened fire with his own gun, and in seconds the hall was clear.
    “John?” he asked.
    “He’s done,” Marina said.
    “Shit.”
    “Yeah. You okay?” she asked. Meaning, did any of them bite you?
    “I’m a little shaken up. Not bit.” Tony put his hand against the corpses to push up off them, and it sank into a soup of decomposing flesh. “Oh, fuck me!”
    “We’ve all got to sterilize ourselves.”
    “Yeah, but … shit, my pants are soaked from sitting on that crap.”
    Marina twitched her light at the pile. The bodies had started to melt into one another. A pool of fluid surrounded them. She tried to swallow a lump in her throat but it wouldn’t go down, and then she remembered she never wanted to swallow anything again as long as she lived, and she spat onto the dead bodies.
    Thunder on the stairs announced newcomers. “Marina! John!” The voice was Monte’s.
    “Clear down here!” Marina returned.
    Monte, Kat, and Tony O. came off the stairs. “Where’s Jimbo?”
    Kat tilted her chin up. “Watching the top of the stairs. We’re fine. Couple hostiles on the upper floor, but they were easy.” She looked at the mess surrounding Marina and Tony H., at Spider John’s body. “You got the worst of it.”
    Marina nodded. “He’s … John is …”
    “Got you,” R.T. said. He held the muzzle of hisweapon a foot from Spider John’s head and squeezed off a burst. Spider John’s head exploded and burned.
    Marines brought back every man, but vampire hunters had to destroy any humans who were compromised. Marina had always understood that, but

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