30 Days of Night: Light of Day Read Online Free

?”
    “Turn around. Hands behind your back.”
    She swallowed but complied, shuffling around on legs that threatened to give way beneath her. Trembling hands offered themselves behind her back. Walker couldn’t help enjoying her terror, her sense of helplessness, as he snapped handcuffs around her wrists. They had come from a sex shop in the city, but they were the real thing.
    Beside her door there was a short section of wall, blocking the view of the dining room from the doorway. Three sections of textured mirror were hung on it, her parents’ idea of style, Walker supposed. But Missy hadn’t taken them down when her mom had finally moved into a nursing home, so she was just as much to blame. He pressed her up against the wall, leaning into her with all his weight.
    “Walker, I’m going to scream if you don’t cut this out.”
    Holding her in place with his bulk, he opened the glass bottle of chloroform that he had made following directions he’d found on the internet, and he doused a rag with it. Then he shoved the gun back into his pocket and clamped the wet rag over her nose and mouth. She bucked against him, making spitting and gagging noises, but he held it in place. It seemed to take a very long time, but finally her knees buckled and she went limp in his arms. He lowered her to the floor, checked for a pulse by pressing his hand against her left breast, which he knew wasn’t the best way to find one but which satisfied a long-held desire. She was alive, breathing softly, but unconscious.
    Walker let Mitch in. They got her out to the car and drove her back to Walker’s house. Walker had a garage there with an automatic opener and a doorway to the inside, so nobody watching would have seen them take her from the car and carry her in. Then it was down to the basement, where she was securely bound and gagged.
    “What are you waiting for, Walker?”
    It was about the fiftieth time Mitch had asked that question. Missy had awakened downstairs—they could hear her struggling, kicking and writhing in her bonds. Walker’s answer wasn’t any better than it had been. “I don’t know! I just don’t know if this is the right thing to do.”
    “You said if we act like vampires, we’ll attract them.”
    “I know what I said. But how will this attract them to us? We made sure nobody saw us, nobody knew what we did. How will they know what we did, or where to find us? If they’re even real, that is.”
    “If? Man, I thought you were sure!”
    “I was!”
    During the time they had been considering their plan, the media had run with the vampire story. Walker knew from the online forums and vampire blogs that he wasn’t the only one to receive the data packet. It had been big news, but mostly in a mocking way. Cable news channels and tabloid papers covered it nonstop, but nobody seemed to take it seriously. Law enforcement and other government officials had pushed back hard, saying that Andy Gray was a rogue agent who had suffered a mental breakdown, murdered his own family, and then used his computer skills to play out his sick fantasies on a big stage. Rumors had spread that the whole thing was a viral marketing campaign for a low-budget vampire flick, shot
Blair Witch
–style, and the video that had seemed so convincing was just bits of the movie.
    All of it had since shaken Walker’s confidence. Not enough to get him to call off the plan, because once he had settled on Missy Darrington as their first victim, nothing could have dissuaded him. Now, though, faced with the reality of what he had done, and what he had yet to do, his certainty had turned to ice water in his guts.
    “Well, you can’t ever let her out of this house,” Mitch reminded him. “She knows you.”
    “I know that!”
    “So one way or another, you have to get it done. You might as well go through with the original plan.”
    “I will, dude. Just … give me a few minutes.”
    “You want to still be at it when the sun comes