Immortal Remains 2 - 30 Days of Night

by Steve Niles

  “What? Did he say what it was?” Stella asked.

  “I couldn’t get any more out of him,” Dane said. “So I figured I had to come here, to make sure he wasn’t talking about yet another attack.”

  “They’ve already tried that,” Eben said. “I don’t think they’ll be in a hurry to do it again.”

  “I know, believe me,” Dane said, remembering. “But this was the only starting point I could think of.”

  A thoughtful expression had settled on Stella’s face. Looking at her, Dane was taken all over again by her brittle beauty, by the grace with which she carried herself. “Thanks for the warning,” she said. “We’ll stay alert.”

  “Which means you can go,” Eben said.

  Dane shook his head. “Not yet. I don’t know if it’s Barrow or something else. I don’t have much to go on, but I don’t think I can leave until I can dig around some. I can’t just let this go.”

  “If you find anything, Dane, let us know,” said Stella.

  “I will. You do the same?”

  “Don’t push it,” Eben said. “You’re lucky I’m not staking you down somewhere right now. Sun’ll be up in about forty minutes.”

  How noble. Eben had not only spared him, but had given him fair warning about the sunrise.

  Eben didn’t like the fact that Dane was in Barrow, he had made that plenty clear—and “didn’t like” was probably putting it far too mildly. Didn’t he understand that Dane shared his agenda? Since Stella had told him everything, as he had put it, she had no doubt also told him that Dane was now on the outs with most vampires.

  Dane didn’t want the race extinguished. Neither, he hoped, did the now vampiric Stella and Eben.

  Dane was obsessive over his desire to have vampires knock off the rampant murder, and he wanted nothing more than a universal change in how they viewed humanity. He would fight for these ideals. Was that what Stella and Eben were about, too? Were they on the same side, perhaps? If such a thing were possible?

  Stella reached out and shook his hand. He’d have preferred a hug, but that would probably have set Eben off again. Eben didn’t offer a hand and neither did Dane, but both men nodded tersely to each other as they parted.

  Dane hurried back to town and his hotel at top speed, barely making it in time to pass the daylight hours.

  In his room, he brought his hand to his nose, catching just the faintest whiff of Stella. He could still remember the taste of her, his first view of her nude body, the way she moved when he was inside her.

  And now she was undead. As long as she had been human and he vampire, there had been no real future.

  Now—if it was what she wanted—they could have forever. Literally forever. He realized that he had never wanted anything quite so much. And he could never ask for it. Not while she had Eben.

  He sat in his darkened room, staring at the wall, wishing.

  19

  AFTER THE SUN SET, Dane went out again. This time he wandered the streets. Getting the lay of the land, as it were. He located the plasma center he’d found listed in the hotel’s phone directory. Two armed guards stood outside its door.

  So it looked like feeding would be a problem, once he used up the supply he’d acquired in Fairbanks. He couldn’t risk killing, not here of all places. And apparently he couldn’t surreptitiously snag a bottle or two of Type O from the blood bank. He’d have to get out into the wilderness, he guessed, catch some wildlife. He could live for a while on animal blood, but he’d be weakened, nauseous. A piss-poor substitute, but better than starving.

  Dane estimated the nighttime temperature to be in the mid-30s. He wore a red nylon parka over a sweater—more than he needed, but he desperately wanted to fit in, and by pulling the parka’s hood up against the stiff wind that blew through town he was also helping to disguise himself.

  He saw a few people out and about, many of them armed with shotguns or at least semiautomatic pistols. A blue neon bear drew his attention to a place called the Polar Bar, which blazed with light from inside. He tried to swallow his anxiety about wading into the thick of the local population and pushed through a heavy wooden door.

  Country music twanged from a jukebox. People—mostly white men, although not exclusively—hunkered in booths with sodas or coffee and hot meals on the tables in front of them. A cheerful guy in a stained white apron dried dishes behind a bar, and when Dane entered he raised an empty glass toward him. “Welcome,” he said. “Sit anywhere you want.”

  “Thanks,” Dane said. He hoped his growing nervousness wasn’t noticeable. He found a table near the window. The inside was paneled with knotty pine and tiled with black and white linoleum squares, but the pine was almost completely obscured by photographs and seemingly random objects—a white kid’s tennis shoe, a French horn, a rifle with the barrel bent at a ninety-degree angle, and much more. Red and green Christmas lights had been strung around the ceiling line sometime in the past decade and then forgotten—now they had faded to barely tinted near white, and almost as many had gone out as remained burning. The bare fluorescent tubes overhead washed down as if to drive away any possible shadows. The lights felt harsh to Dane’s eyes, but they wouldn’t hurt him like an ill-intentioned UV light.

  The guy in the apron dropped a menu on his table. He looked like a partially shaved polar bear himself, burly and with long white Santa Claus hair and beard. “Get you something to drink?”

  “Just coffee,” Dane said. He’d liked it in his human days, and could stomach it now when he had to. As long as he could down some blood on top of it before too long. Otherwise he found it too acidic and it gave him heartburn. He pushed the menu back toward the bartender/waiter. “That should do me for now, thanks.”

  “Coffee it is,” the guy said. “New in town?”

  “Visiting,” Dane said. “Always heard about it, so I wanted to see what it was like. Before the sun goes down.”

  “Good plan,” the guy said. He left to get the coffee. When he brought it back, in a thick white china mug, it steamed. Cream and sugar were already on the table, which Dane didn’t bother with. Again, a little hemoglobin would’ve helped, but that wasn’t available.

  Taking small, slow sips from the cup, Dane looked more closely at the walls. The place was, he gradually realized, a virtual shrine to the memory of the first attack on Barrow. Photos framed in black must have been the deceased. Others he guessed showed survivors. Pictures had been taken of the whole town, in the aftermath, showing the extent of the destruction by fire and explosion. A few pictures depicted survivors in small groups, defiantly holding guns.

  On the wall behind him, where there were no windows, the holiday lights had been strung as a kind of frame around the biggest of the photos. With the sun slanting onto them from one side, Stella and Eben Olemaun smiled at him, wearing crisp sheriff’s uniforms and holding hands.

  “That’s Eben Olemaun and his wife, Stella,” a man said as Dane stared at the photo. “They used to be the law here. Local heroes, both of them.”

  Dane turned and regarded the speaker. His head was shaved and he wore a T-shirt, tight over bulging pecs and enormous biceps. He had draped his parka over the back of his chair. A leather choker hung around his neck with what Dane could only guess was, incredibly, a vampire fang dangling from it. A mostly eaten lunch sat on his table. “So I’ve heard,” Dane replied.

  “You’ve heard of them?” The guy sounded surprised.

  “Well, she wrote that book, right?”

  “30 Days of Night,” the guy said. “But I also understand that was supposedly a novel.”

  “Didn’t read like fiction,” Dane said. “I mean, a good writer can make fact read like fiction sometimes, but this one—it had the feel of reality to it. Maybe not in all the details, but enough of them. After all, there they are, right? Husband and wife sheriffs. Just like in the book.”

  The burly guy thrust an open hand toward Dane. “Name’s Andy Gray,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

 
Dane shook the hand. The grip was powerful for a human’s. “I’m Dane,” he said.

  “You want to join me, Dane? I’m relatively new in town myself. If you have any questions or anything…”

  Dane moved his coffee to Andy Gray’s table. “Thanks,” he said. He had plenty of questions, few of which he would dare ask. He’d been feeling strangely unsettled, and being here, in the midst of people who would love nothing better than to destroy him, with no real idea of why he had come or how to find out, threw him all the more off balance. “I guess…I didn’t quite know what to expect when I got here.”

  “Around here, people get ready for winter,” Andy said with a grin. “No, there’s hunting. Fishing. Global warming’s playing hell with things around here, in some ways—the ice is melting too early in the year, and the local Inupiat people are having a hard time adjusting their fishing season to the constantly shifting conditions. But you can still throw a line in and catch something from time to time, and if you go into the interior more, there’s lots of good river fishing. Snowmobiling if you’re into that. And of course there’s just the natural beauty of the area, the northern lights, wildlife viewing, that kind of thing. Like I said, I’m pretty new here, but I took to it fast.”

  He stopped talking long enough to down some of his meat loaf and mashed potatoes, washing it all down with a Coke.

  “I’m not sure how long I’m staying,” Dane admitted. “Hopefully I’ll get time to do some of that stuff.”

  “Well…do it before the dark comes,” Andy said between chews, wiping his mouth on a napkin. “It’s hard to do any of it then. Except viewing the northern lights, I guess.”

  Dane finished his coffee and put the cup down on the table, then laid a couple of dollars next to it. He sensed there was a lot more to Andy than the guy let on. The fact that he wore a fang like a badge of honor meant something just in itself. “Thanks for the tips,” he said. “I appreciate it.” He paused. “Guess I should have told you up front, too—I did know Stella Olemaun.”

  Andy Gray’s eyes widened in surprise, though he did a good job of keeping it from registering on the rest of his face. “Really. That a fact?”

  Dane waved to the bartender on his way out the door, then stopped, halfway out, and held Andy’s gaze. “I still do,” he said. “I’m at the Top of the World Hotel if you want to talk more later.”

  Andy gave him a nod, and Dane walked outside. The air was a little colder, but the town’s lights kept the darkness at bay.

  Andy Gray watched the man who called himself Dane step through the door of the Polar Bar and disappear. Something about that guy…he couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was definitely more to him than met the eye. He fingered Paul Norris’s fang resting against his chest. He couldn’t be a vampire, no way, not here in the heart of Barrow. Anyway, he didn’t look like one—no fangs, normal human skin tones.

  But it was night. Andy hadn’t been able to adjust to a normal sleeping schedule since he had come to Barrow a while back. Fortunately there were plenty of late-night places like this where a guy could get lunch at midnight or 1:00 AM.

  And Dane hadn’t eaten anything, either. He’d had coffee. Andy picked up the cup, sniffed it. Just coffee. Black.

  It had been a couple of years since he’d been a full-on FBI agent, but certain habits were hard to break. Andy was suspicious by nature, and his years of Bureau training had intensified that trait. He finished his lunch, glanced at the watch on his wrist. Time for another Coke before his workout, if he wanted it. He had started a fitness regime since moving to Barrow that far exceeded what little exercising he had done before, in his old life—when Paul Norris had been alive, and so had Andy’s wife Monica and their girls, Sara and Lisa.

  Andy had not died and been brought back, the way vampires were. But there was an equally strict dividing line between his former life and his new one, and that line was the day he had awakened and found his family murdered while he slumbered, drunk in his own home office.

  For a long time he thought the line was when Paul turned into a vampire. Paul had been his closest friend, his partner, and in many ways he loved Paul more than he’d ever loved Monica.

  Eventually, though, time had showed him that he was wrong. Paul’s change had upset his life, turned it inside out, and shaken all the crap loose. But Andy had retreated into booze and work and research, hiding from his feelings, from real life. It was only when Paul killed Monica and the girls—framing Andy for their murders—that he had thrown off those things and started to remake himself into the person he had become.

  When, after months on the run, Andy, along with John Ikos, finally killed Paul in the fields outside Barrow, he knew that he was complete and that he had finally found someplace to call home.

  He had started rebuilding himself physically then. When he looked at pictures of himself before—thin and pudgy at the same time, soft and sallow—he barely recognized himself. That wasn’t the man who looked back at him from the mirror. The man in the mirror was strong, filled with energy and determination. He had pared away the things that didn’t matter—hair, fears, weaknesses—and worked on building those that did.

  He paid for his meal and went outside to the GMC pickup he had bought here. Four-wheel drive, decent stereo system, shitty mileage, but this was where gas came from, right? Thinking about John Ikos made him want to see the trapper, to tell him about the guy he had just met. John was the old-timer here. If Dane meant anything in these parts, he’d know it.

  Finding Ikos, of course, was different than looking for him. He lived out in the wilderness and he danced to his own tune, no one else’s. Andy headed out the main gate and off the pavement, onto the rutted dirt track that led toward John’s cabin. His headlights cut twin tunnels through the blackness. Wind puffed flurries of snow into his path.

  The trapper’s cabin, built into the side of a low hill and camouflaged by perpetual snowdrifts, was empty. Andy got back in the truck. John wouldn’t carry a cell phone, and there was no signal this far from town anyway. Andy wrote a brief note telling John he wanted to see him and tacked it to the cabin door with a staple he ripped from a gun magazine under his seat.

  He had gone almost a mile back toward town when his headlights swept across two forms, tiny in the vast wilderness.

  The taller of the two was John Ikos.

  Andy didn’t know who the smaller one was—but whoever, or whatever, it was giving John a hard time, writhing and kicking and swinging tiny fists at the big trapper.

  Looks like John’s gone hunting again. Caught himself a live one this time.

  20

  ANDY STOPPED THE TRUCK fifty yards or so away from Ikos and stepped out into his own headlights so the trapper could identify him. “John!” he shouted, waving his arms.

  Ikos gave him a partial left-handed wave in return, but whoever he hung onto used that moment to wriggle from his grasp and break into a desperate sprint.

  “Ah shit…get him!” Ikos shouted.

  Andy started running to intercept the smaller person—it looked like a kid—who veered away from him at about a thirty-degree angle. John Ikos raced behind the kid and a little to his right, herding him Andy’s way. Andy’s feet crunched over hard-packed snow; the cold air he sucked in tore painfully at his lungs. With Ikos running hard behind him, the kid had little choice but to head in Andy’s direction. Close enough for Andy to make a last-second shift, anyway.

  He leapt and caught the kid’s legs. They both crashed to a heap on the hard snow.

  As Andy started clawing his way up the kid’s body, the kid turned and snarled at him, showing long white teeth and wild eyes. Spittle flew from his gnashing jaws.

  “Jesus!” Andy cried. “Vampire!” He almost pissed himself from the instantaneous wave of sheer terror—he would never get used to the sight. His guns were in the truck. The kid, who couldn’t have been older than thirteen or taller than five feet, clawed at Andy. Andy didn’t want to release him, but he didn’t want
those fangs to sink into his flesh, either. He kept a tight grip on the kid’s foot, holding it at arm’s length. The vampire kid kept trying to yank his foot free while bending at the waist, hoping to get his claws into Andy.

  Andy scooted backward on his ass, taking little hops to keep the kid at bay, tugging on his ankle all the while and wondering what had become of John. Finally he realized John stood a few butt scoots behind him, laughing out loud.

  “John, do something!” he shouted.

  John slammed the butt of his shotgun into the vampire kid’s skull and the thing’s mouth went slack. Its eyes rolled up in its head and it dropped back onto the snow.

  “Jesus! Vampire!” John mocked, barely able to catch his breath between roars of laughter. “What do you think I’d catch, just some kid?”

  “I know you usually hunt them,” Andy said, getting to his feet. “I just wasn’t expecting one so small.”

  “You get bitten, don’t matter how big you are, or how old, you can become one, too.”

  The vampire kid stirred, then bolted upright, spitting and drooling blood.

  “We got to get his head off,” John said. “Put him down for good. I’d just shoot him but I’m runnin’ low on ammo, need to make a trip into town.”

  “Well, I don’t have anything on me,” Andy said. “I didn’t think this was a hunting expedition; I was just looking for you.”

  John clutched at his belt, undid the snap over the scabbard he wore. He drew a hunting knife from the scabbard. Andy guessed the blade was about seven inches long, with a serrated back edge. He handed it to Andy. “Here. Use this.”

  Andy turned the wicked tool over in his hands. John swatted the kid with the butt of his gun again, and the kid—not nearly as strong as a full-grown vampire, it appeared—keeled back again.

  Andy glanced up at the tall, bearded hunter. In his ragged skin coat and shaggy mane, he looked like one of the creatures he might have hunted, before he turned his attentions toward vampires. John gave him a nod. Andy knew what it meant. He wanted Andy to do the beheading, and to do it before the kid woke up again.