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later. She had some cash in her purse, not a lot of it but enough to help pay for expenses on the road. She had a couple of credit cards that he would be able to use for a few days, he figured, at gas pumps and the like. He also realized that to someone with no qualms about killing, much came easily.
    Repeating that basic pattern, Larry traveled by night to Denver and then to a suburban house on that city’s fringe, one surrounded by thick evergreens that blocked the view from any neighboring properties. It was a lucky find, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay indefinitely. But he had found it by killing a widower, on his way home from a bowling alley where he had bowled alone, and Larry guessed the man didn’t have a lot of friends who would be checking in on him.
    What the old geezer did have, stashed in various boxes and jars in his pantry and freezer, was more than forty thousand dollars in cash.
    A lucky find, indeed.
    Spring had come to the Rockies, and Larry found that with his new strength he didn’t need a coat, exceptperhaps on the most arctic of nights. He hunted in shirtsleeves and jeans. His body hadn’t changed much in appearance—a little leaner, a little longer, although still recognizably him, to his eyes—but his strength was multiplied many times, and all his senses were far sharper than ever before.
    He used the widower’s Buick to drive into the city after dark. He parked someplace crowded—he liked the lot across the street from the Tattered Cover, a bookstore that did business well into the night—and struck out on foot in one direction or another. He kept to the shadows, he never attacked if there were witnesses around, and he only chose victims who were by themselves. He wished the vampire who had turned him had stuck around to teach him the rules; these he had made up by himself, because they seemed to be common sense. He knew more than a lot of other newbie bloodsuckers would, he was certain, because of his exposure to vampires as a researcher. But he couldn’t help wondering if there were more steps he should be taking, other ways to protect himself that he hadn’t considered.
    During the days, Larry kept up his researches as well as he could, given his limited resources. Sure that he was being hunted, he made sure to keep away from Operation Red-Blooded’s private computer network. He figured that as long as no one knew the old man whose house he was using was dead, he could use the years-old desktop he had found in the house, and theman’s internet account, to do some rudimentary work online. Mostly, he sat at the man’s kitchen table working out calculations, letting his thoughts race along as they had always done, and jotting down notes that would remind him later what he’d been thinking of. Having set up the most basic lab imaginable using things found in the man’s house and a chemistry set he bought at a 24-hour discount store in the city, he used drops of his own blood and saliva to carry on with his previous studies.
    As a human being, he had been one researcher among many, and for the most part he had been fine with that. Pragmatic enough, anyway, to understand that it was the way things were, and trying to change the way things were was a fool’s game.
    But now he was one of one, in a class by himself, or so he suspected. What were the chances that any other scientist with his background had ever been turned? The opportunity was unparalleled—to study his primary subject from the inside? No biologist studying animals or plants had ever become one. He alone was qualified to uncover the secrets of the vampire life-form, the ones that had been invisible to him before.
    Rather than try to study everything—an impossible task—he had narrowed his focus down to what he thought most immediately crucial: the reaction vampires had to sunlight. He had experimented with it, walking out the back door into morning’s soft daylight. The response was immediate and agonizing.