The Long Dark by Billy Farmer (best book club books for discussion .txt) 📗

turned his face towards the window, and when I took a hard look at Avery’s jerry-rigged door, and prayed to the Gods it would hold.

His skin was gray just like the woman’s in the kitchen. He had the same inhumanly large eyes. The only discernable difference was he was mobile. He sniffed so loud I was sure I heard it from inside the house. His head jerked back towards the street. He bellowed out a terrible guttural sound. After maybe a minute, several other gray things joined him.

My mind raced. What the hell were they doing out there? Had it been one of those things who attacked Tom? And why? What the hell had happened to them? It was contemplations like those that allowed me to recognize just how abnormal things were. It wasn’t just a weird power outage. It was much more dire and inexplicable than that. Of course, there were other clear signs that I missed. My mind was still stuck in the old ways of thinking. The rational days where up was up and down was down. Even missing those clear warnings, I knew enough at that moment to know that my world had changed in a catastrophic way.

I was so absorbed with the gathering outside that I hadn’t even noticed Sam coming to stand beside me. “Jesus, son, ‘is ain’t good.”

“No. It’s not.”

Chapter 6

“We’re sitting ducks in here, William,” Titouan said.

I sucked in a breath and sighed, thinking about what not to say, before deciding on, “I’m open to reasonable ideas.”

“Run out the back door and get our asses to Miley’s as fast as we can.”

“Reasonable, I said. What happens to Tom in your little plan?”

“The greater good,” he replied, stumbling slightly over his words.

“Don’t give me that greater good bullshit. There’s nothing great or good about it.”

“Tit, me and you disagree on ‘bout everythang, and ‘is sure as hell ain’t no different. I can’t believe ‘at even you thanks ‘at’s a option,” Sam said, rubbing his hands together next to the heater. “Tom’s a good man. We can’t just leave ‘im here like a pile of trash.”

“It’s not about what’s best for me. It’s about what’s best for all of us,” he said.

“Since when have you ever cared about this us thing you talk about?” I asked.

“We have a moral dilemma,” Avery said.

“No, we have a dickhead dilemma,” I said.

Avery snapped his fingers while saying, “But Titouan makes a valid point. If we stay, we might all die. If we leave Tom, we could very well escape and live.”

“This isn’t a classroom, Avery. We don’t get to flex our creative minds while exploring fucking existentialism in the abstract. Tom is as real as that seat your ass is planted in. We’re not leaving him. Drop it.”

Titouan glanced at Avery before saying, “This is just the way it is. You may not like it, but if we take Tom, more of us might die.”

“Titouan, if you were in the same predicament as Tom, I wouldn’t leave you behind either. I don’t know what’s going on, but we,” I pointed at each one of them, “are all we’ve got right now. We’ve got to stick together.”

Titouan shrugged and focused his attention elsewhere.

“What’s that noise?” Tish said, breaking the silence that had settled into the room.

Avery slowly turned his head towards me, his eyes big as half dollars.

There was a rhythmic tapping coming from the bedroom adjoining the living room. I quietly walked over to Tish and said, "I'm going see what the hell that is. I need you to try to get Tom up and, if possible, ready to leave."

She nodded.

I took a quick glance out the living room window. For whatever reason the things had become agitated.

“Take the rifle,” Sam said.

“No. Keep it in here.” I flicked my chin in the direction where the things were outside. “You at least know how to use it.”

With the snow having almost completely abated, and with the full moon casting its light through the bedroom window, I saw it as soon as I entered the bedroom. First on the floor, as a long shadow, and finally in the window as a large, human-shaped silhouette. “Mother of God,” I uttered. Paralyzed with fear, I moved no further than the steps I’d already taken.

The person kept an eerie beat as he tapped his forehead against the window pane, over and over again. Without warning, the tapping stopped. The man pressed his face against the glass, his nose facing in the direction where I stood. He sniffed several times, grunted before restarting the tapping.

“William, you gonna want ta come in ‘ere,” Sam said.

Again, the man stopped. “Shh!” I hissed. He sniffed and then snorted, loudly, and began banging his head again. Except this time, he banged harder, to the point I knew the windowpane would soon break.

A cacophony of noise erupted in the living room, punctuated with Sam yelling for me to get my ass in there. Sam’s cry further invigorated head banger.

I ran out of the bedroom, nearly tripping over a rug as I entered the living room. Upon regaining my balance, I saw Tom standing roughly where he’d been lying. He was doubled over, his arms cinched hard around his stomach, and his face was contorted in a mixture of terror and pain. He moaned a gurgling, sickly noise, a frothy dark mixture seeping from the corners of his mouth.

Tish backed away from Tom. His torturous moans subsided as he tracked her movement away from him. His face softened slightly. The look of confusion and hurt partially obscured the pain and fear so vividly on display seconds earlier. For a scant second, they locked glances. Tish sobbed. Tom closed his eyes. He seemed to savor those moments of calm, but they were short-lived. Avery cried out, as he pointed towards something outside the living room window. His mouth moved, but he wasn’t saying anything, not anything that resembled recognizable speech, anyway. There were now fists pounding