Days of Night
The first murder at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Just 157 winter residents. The perpetrator has to be one of them.
When retired police detective Joe Heller is called in to investigate what might be Antarctica’s first murder, he quickly discovers that winter at McMurdo Station comes with a unique set of challenges: darkness, isolation, and the eccentric behavior of the research facility’s inhabitants. But a difficult investigation turns much tougher when all communication with the outside world is suddenly cut off.
While Heller works diligently to reconstruct the scene of the crime, evidence mounts that a pathogenic event could be ravaging the rest of the planet. As night descends, fear mounts, and confusion reigns, the killer strikes again. If this is a global cataclysm, is someone now picking off the human race’s few remaining survivors? Is this the end of the world—or just the end of Joe Heller’s?
Sample of Days of Night
He’s a scientist. A biologist. So he’s cursed with knowing.
The sudden profuse sweat, out here in fifty below. The sheen of it across his face, his hands; his arms and legs suddenly soaked in it beneath his heavy clothing.
He tears a glove off to see the telltale sign he suspects. His fingers suddenly gray. Blood circulation to his hands stopped. Far more sudden and severe than the white of frostbite.
He knows too that the angry, shocking look and color of his skin—his hands, his abdomen, his neck—will retreat to normal, to undetectable, in the fifty-below temperature. It’s visible to him momentarily. It will never be visible to anyone else.
He can picture it. He’s cursed with knowing.
The steady, relentless spread from his veins to his organs—lower intestine, bladder, pancreas, upper intestine.
He can visualize the different cells of each organ, their different mechanisms, taking it in, trying to defend themselves, being overwhelmed, passing the compound on, helpless, defenseless, ambushed.
He knows by the sudden painful bloat of his stomach that all his organs have gone into free fall together.
He can feel the paralysis set in. Extremities first—toes, fingers, like frostbite but hot, sizzling, followed by nothing, no feeling.
He’s cursed with knowing—by the pace of it, climbing his biceps, climbing his thighs, like a liquid knife cutting through the nerves, like a mad explorer slashing forward—that he has maybe a minute left. He knows he has been poisoned.
He knows he will soon feel a shortness of breath as the poison—whatever it is—finishes its journey through his bloodstream to his heart.
There it is. The shortness of breath.
He can picture his bronchial cells, their own version of violent protest, their own shutdown.
He feels dizziness but no need to vomit. He knows, from this, that he will not be expelling any of the poison that way. It acted too fast to let his stomach and intestines defend themselves. Which eliminates certain classes of poisons but leaves plenty of other possibilities.
He can think of a dozen poisons that could have this effect. He doesn’t know how this one got into his system. Or how it lay in wait, to unleash at this perfect time and temperature, when he is by himself, out in fifty below.
He knows he will lose muscle control in a half minute or so and will find himself facedown on the frozen tundra.
He is facedown on the frozen tundra.
He never liked it here. Some people thrive here. For him it was too alien, uncomfortable, challenging.
He knows he’s about to black out. No blood flow to the brain.
He’s a scientist. A biologist.
He knows this is where the knowing ends.
He knows it’s the last thing he’ll be cursed with knowing.