30 Days of Night: Rumors of the Undead

Excerpted from 30 Days of Night by Stella Olemaun

I can’t be absolutely accurate when it all began. When my life changed forever.

Maybe it was just a day before the sun set on Barrow, Alaska, for the winter dark.

My husband, Eben Olemaun, and I were the sheriff and deputy of Barrow, this remote, northernmost Alaskan town, population four hundred sixty-two after most folks left for the winter. Eben was a native Alaskan, a full-blooded Inuit. He loved Barrow in a way I never quite could, but he helped me learn. I moved on north to here when I left college and my home state of Michigan.

I was avoiding facing my parents. Eben was avoiding growing up. We fell in love the second we met.

He was already a deputy and managed to get me into the law enforcement game as well. I thought initially it was because he was selfish and didn’t want to be away from me, but once he saw I could handle myself, it worked out and eventually we became the first husband/wife sheriff and deputy team in the state of Alaska.

Believe it or not, it could have been a dream life in so many ways. I look back now and I look at the things I complained about: the cold—I thought Michigan winters could be brutal—the extreme time periods of sunlight and darkness, the locals, even Eben’s reluctance to have a child….

Then of course, somewhere very far from us, it seemed like the entire world was on the fast track straight to hell…. What happened two months earlier clear across the country, where the remains of two skyscrapers were being sifted through as part of the largest crime scene on the face of the earth, and the bombs were dropping in retaliation half a world away, locals all jumpy to begin with, some remarking that those responsible could now come scuttling across the tundra to fuck up the pipeline, just you wait and see…

I look back at everything with such different eyes now, and I’d give anything to relive the time before our own little world crashed down around me.

Before darkness came in human form. Before I saw most of the people I knew killed, murdered right before my eyes.

We started getting the calls on the day before the sun was to go down for the next thirty days…sunset until sometime in mid-December.

It seemed to be an annoying but harmless string of vandalism and theft calls. Primarily people began calling the Barrow Sheriff’s Station to report missing cell and satellite phones. At first it all appeared so benign, so odd, but it was also our first big clue that something in Barrow wasn’t right.

Then the citizenry’s computers went missing and, in some cases, smashed. Phone lines were cut. Finally, reports of damaged snowmobiles and other all-terrain vehicles began to pour in.

It seemed like we were under attack ourselves, not by terrorists but by pranksters, kids, maybe dopers. It was so sudden and strange that neither Eben nor I could make any sense of it. But then it hit me—all the signs were there.

We were systematically being cut off from the outside world.

As it turned out, the thefts were (mostly) being perpetrated by a stranger who Eben and I arrested at Sam’s Place, the local eat-and-drink.

The stranger, this straggly biker type with a stench like a rotting corpse, was our first glimpse at what we were up against, our first look into a world I wish we’d never had to witness. This mystery man had been causing some kind of uproar at Sam’s Place, so Eben went down to have a chat.

It seemed it would be like any other arrest. We were fairly used to the ranting and raving of the drunks and drug users. Alcohol was prohibited in Barrow that winter and several before due to the alarming suicide rate incurred by the days and weeks of darkness. All the law did was cause folks to get the drinks and drugs from outside town. As if the cold wasn’t numbing enough…Plus you never knew who it was trying to get in their last fix—someone working the pipeline deciding to venture on the one last bender for a month.

Either way, Eben would straighten him out. That was my husband’s style after all: he’d charm you, and then if that didn’t work, he’d pound you into the ground.

Evidently the man, whose name we never learned, had been yelling obscenities, and making a general nuisance of himself. He was even insisting on having his hamburger served super-rare, still uncooked and dripping with beef blood. Oh yes—drunk and high. Those are the worst ones.

After a heated exchange between Eben and the stranger, I assisted my husband bringing the man into custody. Swearing an oath to uphold the law usually means that confrontations with such characters cannot be avoided, but man, did this one give me the creeps.

This stranger, this horrible man, seemed more than just addled as he sat in the holding cell back at the station.

He openly admitted to the thefts of the phones and townspeople’s personal property (Great! Eben had remarked, grinning. Open-and-shut case then. Thanks for ignoring that ‘can and will be used against you’ thing I mentioned before.)…and hinted at some grand plan by some unnamed person or people.

Eben and I did our best to ignore him.

He went on and on in his cell, warning us about a coming threat that he would not name, then started referring to himself as a scout.

I was thinking, Scout? For what? A movie shoot?

Finally, Eben had had enough. He and the stranger barked at one another through the cell bars—

The power went out. Jesus. That was creepy.

Now the scout laughed, warning us that the time had come for something—something we would be helpless against.

While he threatened and the lights stayed out, all I could think was what I had already begun to fear—we were being cut off from the outside world. All of our lines of communication and travel were being severed one by one; first the cell and satellite phones, then the snowmobiles and snowcats…and finally the lights.

Gus Lambert—a likeable but secretive guy who didn’t come into town very often—was in charge of Barrow’s power station, which sat on the crest of a hill just south of town. If there was trouble with the lights, Gus was the man to check on.

When Eben and I discussed this amongst ourselves, it was like adding gasoline to the fire. The scout went absolutely wild.

"Now you’re catching on. Check on Gus! Board the windows! Sandbag the doors! You’ll try it all! But one by one THEY’LL pick you off and strip the meat from your bones!"

The scout became more and more agitated with every passing moment, screaming, tearing at his greasy hair, throwing himself around the cell, but it was one of the final things he said that will forever haunt me, the first hint of what we would soon be up against.

It’s gonna be beautiful! And then I get to be with them!

Them.

Such a simple, innocuous word, and yet it carried so much weight.

Who the hell did he mean?

I wanted to write him off as a nut, we got lots of them up north, but crazy people don’t carry out such elaborate plans…or do they?

What was happening to my town?

With the lights out and the citizens of Barrow coming into the streets wondering what was going on, Eben and I decided then and there to drive out to the power station…but not before the scout decided to throw us one more unexpected twist.

Right before our eyes, he grabbed hold of the reinforced steel bars of the cell, pulling them apart with his bare hands as if they were made of rubber.

His shoved his manic face through the widening opening, hissing:

You are so FUCKED.

Utterly horrified, I reeled backwards away from the scout, fumbling for my service revolver even as I wondered how much PCP one needed to ingest in order to pull apart the holding cell’s bars.

The madman started crawling through the substantial hole he’d created. Eben stood his ground, stood in the path of the scout, at the same time pulling his own weapon.

Eben gave the scout one warning, which of course went unheeded, and fired a round into the stranger’s head.

To my utter shock, the man didn’t fall right away, but remained on his feet for two more steps and then fell, twitching and what appeared to be clawing at the floor.

I stood over him and saw the exit wound in the back of his head, the sticky matter blown out and clinging to the jagged edges.

And still he moved.

Eben stared down in shock. Is he dead?

Without even thinking about it, I unloaded my clip into the stranger until his head was all but gone. He is now.

I had never done such a thing in my life…and yet I felt no remorse—I knew I’d killed…a monster, something unnatural.

As I fired the last bullets into the head, pulping flesh and bone into one, the stranger still managed to grab my ankle.

Now, looking back though, I must have been in shock as well. Even in that state, I knew this was all impossible, the sickness rising in my belly, the kind of sickness that only comes with fear….

It would only get worse when Eben and I drove out to the power station and found Gus Lambert.

The station was destroyed.

Gus’s severed head—eyes permanently frozen in a rictus of wide-eyed confusion and horror, mouth open as if silently protesting the situation—was left on a pike, gore splattering the snow around it, like a twisted message for us of our impending doom.

The destruction to the power station was thorough. Satellite dishes in pieces, wiring torn and burned, the generator broken into a battered iron hulk. Repairs would take months. But there would be no repairing Gus.

The rest of him was in parts, scattered in the snow.

The sickness brewing in my stomach finally won out, shooting into my throat and bringing me to my knees. In the course of only a few hours, my life in Barrow with Eben was being turned on its head.

Eben and I drove back toward town, freaking out, wondering what the fuck was going on. There had been only three violent deaths, possible homicides, in Barrow in the time I’d served as deputy.

Gus and the stranger in the cell were two of them.

Eben was openly speculating: Some kind of gang? Escaped prisoners? Terrorists trying to get at the pipeline?

Neither he nor I had any way to temper the terrible fear rising in each of us, a fear with no name, and no reason.

Eben, stop the truck! I yelled as we came around the southernmost slope of Barrow.

I saw movement through the trees, something out beyond the frozen paths of trees and frozen hills.

Shapes.

Eben pulled the truck over.

The sun was long gone now—the skies above Alaska and the entire top of the world had gone dark. Eben and I had taken time earlier, before the chaos, to sit on a hill and watch that big yellow ball disappear for the next thirty-plus days. We said, as we did often, how much we loved each other. It is a moment that will drive me for years, if not the rest of my existence.

But right then, there was no light to comfort us, and wouldn’t be for a long time.

We stepped from the vehicle, Eben looking through his pair of well-worn night-vision binoculars to where I was pointing.

I looked out into the darkness with my naked eye. Small shapes were moving in the distance.

When Eben slowly lowered the binoculars, I could see by his expression what he saw.

And for some reason, a line from the play I studied back in college, Macbeth, immediately leapt to mind, crystal clear:

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

Eben didn’t even look at me. Get in the car. he said. We have to warn the others.

1

MORNING SUN, diffused by the yellow brown haze that snugged over the Los Angeles basin like a toxic cap slowly strangling the life out of its citizens, eliminated the Slumber Motel’s only advantage: neon so old it looked retro. It was one of those typical Hollywood joints that tourists sometimes accidentally picked off the Internet. Usually they realized the error of their choice before checking in, and switched to one of the national chains. If they didn’t, then their first night’s lullaby was dealers and hookers plying their trades, the shopping cart people collecting bottles from the trash cans around the vending machines, junkies hitting up guests for smokes and spare change. The cops came around once in a while, but they preferred to stay away if at all possible. Even the scrawny palms shed their fronds and stood bare, jaundiced and sickly, as if they’d rather die than live too close to the faded pastel box.

Andy Gray knew that crime was a given at a place like this. Only the presence of yellow crime scene tape wound around the trunks of the spindly palms and tied to the rusty iron banister and the squad car sitting at the curb with two uniforms inside it were unusual. Andy left his Bureau ride, a standard gray Crown Vic, and walked up to the black-and-white, waving his ID at the two young cops.

They emerged from their car, stretched out the kinks. Help you? the male cop asked.

Andy scanned the man’s brass nameplate. Special Agent Andrew Gray, FBI, he said, passing over the leather folder with his shield and ID card. I need a closer look at the crime scene, Officer Ybarra.

Ybarra checked out Andy’s identification, then smiled broadly. His teeth were white and straight, accentuated by his dark olive skin. His partner, a woman named Coggins, was almost a foot shorter, but solid. She kept her lips pressed together in a thin line as she handed him a clipboard. Andy added his signature to the list of those who had come before him. CSIs have been here all night, Ybarra told him. But they’re gone now, so I guess it’s all yours.

A rookie, then. LA cops had never routinely referred to the criminalists who examined crime scenes as CSIs until the TV show came along. There were too many specialties—medical examiners, latent print examiners, forensic anthropologists, photographers, trace evidence examiners. A cop with more experience might have said, The CSIU has been here all night. The crime scene investigation unit covered all bases, and cops—forever going up against criminal defense attorneys who’d grasp at any straw they were offered—needed to learn to speak precisely. Andy guessed that the CSIU had, in fact, spent the night here, with the possible exception of the medical examiner. MEs only came out when there were dead bodies on hand.

Trouble was, Andy was pretty sure there had been a dead body in that hotel room.

The fact that nobody knew the body was dead was the whole problem.

He turned away from the cops and looked over the scene, trying to take it in as it was now without remembering what he’d been told about the events of the night before. What he’d seen when he got to the LA office.

Jacob Paul Norris. Andy’s partner. Dead man walking.

The science of modern crime scene examination had pretty much been invented by the FBI. He remembered what he had learned at Quantico, that approaching a crime scene with preconceptions blinded you to the reality of the situation. Andy Gray emptied his mind and opened his senses.

The stink of rush hour traffic fumes along Sunset.

Glass on the parking lot surface, glittering in the morning light. Some of it tinged with red.

Blood—pools of it, almost black on the macadam. More splashed against the pale yellow stucco walls.

Small puddles of something else, on the sidewalk that ran along in front of the rooms. A housekeeper’s cart had been caught in the crossfire. The puddles were probably shampoo, cleansers, solvents, something like that. Forensics would confirm that for him.

Chips out of the stucco. Bullet holes. At least a hundred, he guessed.

Motel room windows shattered. Curtains swaying gently in the breeze that also fluttered the crime scene tape, making a noise like a kid with a playing card in his bicycle spokes.

Another smell, metallic, underlying the exhaust fumes. Copper. Blood.

And a third, fainter still. Familiar. Andy searched his memory and came up with it.

Rotting meat.

Staying where he was, Andy turned slowly, taking in the surroundings. A block wall at the end of the parking lot—part of a liquor store. Sunset Boulevard—cars slowing so their occupants could gape at the wreckage of the motel. Like traffic didn’t already suck bad enough. Across the street, a tattoo parlor, then a trendy bar, then the Standard Hotel with its upside-down sign. Cute.

Andy lived in Sacramento with his wife and two daughters, but he’d been spending so much time in LA, he was beginning to hate it as only a native could.

Only days ago, there had been yellow tape around the Standard, too, but the hotel’s owners carried more weight with the city than the Pakistani family that owned the cleverly named Slumber Motel. A woman had been murdered at the Standard. Shot. Didn’t even make the evening news. The Olemaun woman had been checked into the next room, but she’d vanished. She was, officially, a Person of Interest to the LAPD. She had already been that to the Bureau.

Andy shrugged. He’d seen enough out here. He would demand copies of all the CSIU’s reports and fill in any blanks that way. Time to look at what he had really come here for.

Paul’s room.

He returned to the Crown Vic. From a kit in the trunk he took some plastic booties and tied them on around his ankles, covering his shoes. The CSIU had already taken their pictures and measurements and samples, so he wasn’t concerned about Locard’s principle of exchange. Andy wasn’t going to contaminate the crime scene by looking at it, but if the stories he’d heard were true, he had no interest in contaminating his own shoes by stepping into that room unprotected. For the same reason, he tugged on latex gloves. The dark suit was off the rack from JC Penney, and if he got anything on it he could expense the dry cleaning. But the shoes were Bally, a gift from his wife. Not cheap—not on his salary.

So outfitted, he crossed the parking lot to the door of Room 7. The door was closed but not locked. He turned the knob, pushed it open.

Even though the window facing onto the parking lot had been blown out, fresh air still hadn’t cleansed the stench inside. This was where the meat smell had come from, and a lot of the blood. It looked like Paul had been moonlighting as a butcher, running his own slaughterhouse from the room.

The blood was everywhere. Some of it was fresh, still liquid, some brown and crusted on surfaces as if it had been there for days. Spatter on the walls and pictures and mirrors, drip patterns on the ugly gray carpeting and the once white bedspread. Puddles drying on the fake wood veneer of the dresser and the little round dining table.

He continued into the bathroom. A sink with a mirror over it, a toilet, a bathtub with a shower, and a small opaque glass window that probably opened onto the alley. A towel rack that had probably held cheap white hotel towels. The CSIU had taken those. Andy could see spots where they’d swabbed the blood in here, but plenty was left behind. If he had to guess, and Andy Gray didn’t like guessing, he’d say there had been multiple violent deaths in this small, dank room.

The mirror was filmed with red as though somebody had feebly attempted cleaning the gore. Through the crimson screen, Andy caught a glimpse of a man as bland as his name. Short, graying hair; sallow skin; the look of a man who spent too much of his time inside or in the dark. He didn’t want to examine himself any closer and looked away.

The sink looked like a painter had been cleaning brushes in it—a monochromatic painter, at that. Paul’s red period. Even—Andy felt his gorge rise, fought to keep down his coffee-shop breakfast—the sides of the toilet were coated with the stuff. Chips in the porcelain showed bone fragments as well.

Good Lord, what had gone on in here?

Something on the tile floor. Andy bent over, afraid to kneel in this place. Pulled a pen from his pocket and used it to nudge the tiny object. A tuft of fur. He scanned the rest of the floor, still bent over. A tiny tooth in one spot, something else that might have been a cockroach’s carapace. He had been told that they had actually recovered animal parts from here—rats, insects, lizards. All of them ripped open, desiccated.

All of them drained of blood.

Andy stood up again, too fast. The room tilted and he had to catch himself on the edge of the sink. Thank God for the latex gloves, he thought. Would there be any shower long enough and hot enough to scorch him clean after this? It was the oldest cliché in the book, but Andy would never get used to seeing scenes like this. He would worry when his stomach didn’t tighten up.

He had to get out of here. His pores felt clogged with grime, his nose packed with blood. He tasted it. He knew the evidence technicians had taken all of Paul’s belongings—clothing, laptop, briefcase, any notes he might have made. Local cops hated it when the Bureau swept in demanding their evidence, their casework. He didn’t blame them a bit, but he had done it himself and would do it again today. They didn’t know what they were looking at, had no clue what the big picture was, and they could not be allowed to know. LA’s Assistant Director in Charge himself had made that abundantly clear.

So Andy would supplement his walk-through with everything the LAPD’s Hollywood Division had collected, and he would make enemies of the Hollywood cops in the bargain. Cementing the Bureau’s reputation as a bunch of hard-nosed assholes who didn’t care about the cops on the beat. Andy wasn’t really that way, but there was nothing he could do about the perception.

Outside, he peeled off the gloves and booties, wadded them together and shoved them into one of the motel’s outdoor garbage cans. He felt bad for the next homeless person who would reach in there, but not bad enough to want to carry the stuff away with him. The sooner he could put this all behind him, the better he’d like it.

It would not be behind him any time in the near future, he knew.

He still had to find Paul. Now, at least he had a better sense of what he was looking for.

Paul had never come right out and used the word to describe himself. But he and Andy had been on the Stella Olemaun case long enough to know what the word was. What Olemaun claimed it was, anyway, even though Andy had never been willing to accept her terminology.

The phrase Paul preferred, just because of who he was, had been fuckin’ bloodsuckers. To Stella Olemaun, a little more refined—and who wasn’t, compared to Paul Norris?—the word was…no.

No way. I can’t even go there or I’ll just lose my mind.

Special Agent Andrew Gray didn’t believe in anything of the sort.

Some of his colleagues may have been slightly more open-minded, but as far as Andy was concerned, Creature Features stopped running on TV a long time ago, so that was that. Life wasn’t made up of rubber masks, campfire ghost stories, and dimly lit movie theaters; it was all the product of someone else’s overactive imagination. He even hated bringing the girls to see Santa Claus, for Christ’s sake.

Uh-uh. Beyond the garden-variety nutjobs, Bela Lugosi’s dead, Herman Munster’s on Nick at Nite, and everything else is bullshit, he had thought once upon a time.

But…that was before he had seen Paul last night at the local Bureau office.

They’d been partnered up for years. Paul was a lot of things, many of them unpleasant, but he had never been the…the thing that Andy had talked to yesterday.

He had been, in some undeniable, awful fashion, changed.

Recalling the encounter made Andy feel sick. Confused. Frightened. But he had to do it. He had to fill in all the impossible blanks with logic and reason or he would never rest. That was the way Andy was. Everything had to fit somewhere, with a label and clear definition. Andy Gray had no room in his logical brain for anything filed under supernatural…or unnatural.

He waved to the cops, Ybarra and Coggins, started the Crown Vic, pushed down the blinker arm, pulled out into the frantic traffic on Sunset. From here it wasn’t far to Runyon Canyon Park. He could ignore the junkies, look at some patches of real grass and genuine trees, imagine for a minute that he was a long way from the city. He needed that right now, needed dirt under his shoes and the calls of birds other than pigeons and a glimpse of blue sky somewhere in the oppressive LA smog. He needed things that were real. Christ, he’d settle for anything this side of a nightmare.

What he really needed was a hug from Monica, and the laughter of his kids, Sara and Lisa, but he was too unclean even to talk to them. The park would just have to do for now.

As if that could somehow dispel the panic festering deep within him—the kind that would fill his world, seize him up as he drowned in the icy darkness growing inside his head.

Over and over he kept telling himself:

This is not happening.

This is not happening.

This is not happening.

2

THE BUREAU HAD PIONEERED the use of psychiatry in criminal investigations. Every graduate of the Academy had courses in behavioral sciences, abnormal psychology, and the criminal mind. Andy was no exception. He had read, in those courses, about many cases over the years of people who believed themselves to be…those things. These people shunned daylight and drank blood. Some of them had filed their canines into sharp fangs. Some of them had even killed.

Ironically, the problem they all ran up against was that they couldn’t handle the nasty side effects of what they craved. Blood wreaks havoc on the human digestive system. Drinking your own is slightly less harmful, but drinking that of others can lead to a wide array of unpleasant reactions. So their guts protested, their stomachs erupted. Most who tried blood wound up in the hospital. They hated it—the light, the sterility. But at least their lives could be saved, albeit through intravenous feedings.

Eventually, with the help of long hours of therapy, or jail time, most of them were convinced that they were not, in fact, creatures of the night, nocturnal drinkers of blood. Even a little trolling about on the Internet revealed that most of them were just misguided outsiders desperate for attention and a way in, or around, a world that had otherwise rejected them.

But even worse, and Andy had learned this the hard way, for every dozen or so freaks who believed themselves to be the real deal, there was one who thought he or she was the hero of the picture, a hunter of some kind.

On the