30 Days of Night: Light of Day Read Online Free PDF

him. He let go of the wheel but kept his foot on the gas, and the vehicle surged ahead, drifting toward the sidewalk.
    By the time it hit a shop on the next corner, he was out of the seat and sprawled on the cold hard pavement of Park Avenue. He was screaming, but his screams grew ever weaker. He was surrounded, men and women, or males and females anyway, barely human, holding him down while a couple of them opened his veins with those gnarled hands. James Callahan smelled his own blood and knew what it was, and as the klieg lights of life’s soundstage were shut off for the last time, one by one, he knew that he should not have taunted the damn liberals so often, because they had finally had their say, and they weren’t nearly as peace-loving as they had always claimed….

5
    “L EAVE HIM! ” R OCCO ORDERED . Already traffic was piling up on Park, cars screeching to a halt, headlights stabbing toward them. Sirens wailed in the distance, but headed this way. “We don’t want to be caught!”
    “Right,” Caleb said. He drew away from Callahan’s body. Blood slicked his chin and cheeks. “Let’s go.” He touched a long finger to his right cheek, drew some of the blood to his mouth, leaving a pathway where it had been. “He’s a little on the sour side.”
    “I thought so, too,” Dragon Lady said. “Bitter.” She was always the most critical of them. Her constant carping was hard for Rocco to take sometimes, but he loved her in his way, as he did all those in his den.
    Shiloh, Valentine, Brick, and Lothar left the corpse more slowly, reluctant to leave a meal only half-finished. But that had been the plan all along: the very public death of a noted figure. And with much more of the same yet to come.
    Rocco led them down the block, up an alley, over a fence. They had a long distance yet to cover, but they owned the shadows, and it would be a while beforeanyone went from the shock of finding Callahan’s drained husk to searching for his killers.
    Callahan had been the perfect target. They had settled on the plan, then stalked him, learning his habits, studying the route he invariably took home from the studio each weeknight. What made him ideal was not just that he was the host of a top-rated cable news program, but that he had started talking about the
nosferatu
on the air every night. Once the circumstances of his death were revealed—and they would be, the media couldn’t resist such a delicious story—panic would set in.
    Callahan had to die, not because he threatened to expose the existence of vampires, but because his death, carried out in just this way, would confirm their existence for that segment of the public still determined to deny them.
    Some of the undead wanted their existence to remain a secret, the stuff of whispered legend and pulp fiction. Rocco and the others in his den, though, wanted the world to know them, because to know them was to fear them. Other dens had started similar efforts, stepping up their attacks and trying to do so in very public ways. He had heard about actions in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Idaho, and even in other countries: France, Ukraine, Colombia, and more. They longed for general panic. They knew how humanity would respond, once their existencebecame common knowledge. People would stop trusting one another, if they ever had. They would leave their homes armed, if they left at all. In their paranoia and suspicion, they would set upon one another. Vampires could never kill as many humans as humans did themselves, and without a good old-fashioned war under way on American shores, rampant terror would have to do.
    They made their way downtown at a brisk pace, avoiding the busiest streets, taking to the rooftops when they had to. At 43rd, they went underground, ducking into an unused subway tunnel, and they raced along the old tracks, full of vitality from their meal, laughing at the clockwork precision of their plan. “If only you could have seen his