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

there, the woman, at my urging, listlessly dusted the snow off her child. After wiping the child’s face, she tried to clean her own, but the smooth fabric of her coat, coupled with the weird coating on her sleeves, didn’t function well as a snot rag. Instead of wiping the snot and tears away, her coat sleeve had the effect of smearing them all over her face.

The woman wasn’t much of a talker. I asked her on at least two occasions if she had been injured. She stared blankly in any direction but mine, not bothering acknowledging my spoken words. I hoped it was just shock and that she would come around. I focused instead on things that aimed to do harm to us while she re-swaddled her baby in a pair of thick, pink blankets. After waiting for her to finish with the child, I asked her if she was ready to continue. She looked irked for being asked. She did however give me a slight nod.

I had walked several feet before noticing she wasn’t following me. Instead, she stood under the portico, fidgeting with something in her pocket. I couldn’t see what the hell she was doing, but it wasn’t nearly as important as getting her ass going. I quickly walked to where she stood and reiterated how she needed to follow me. She gathered up what resolve she could muster and finally did as I asked.

The woman cleared her throat. I looked at her, expecting her to say something, but she didn’t. We walked a bit farther before she finally spoke. “Where are we going?”

I knew she had a child, but she was really dragging ass. Not only that, but on the rare occasion she did talk to me, she spoke too loudly because she wouldn’t, for whatever reason, walk closely with me. I stopped. Once she finally got close enough to properly communicate, I said, “The pancake.”

“What’s the pancake?”

That was weird, I thought. The joke of Barrow had been Miley’s building. One of the local tour companies had even added the monstrosity as a stop. When we were on leave in town, and one of the locals heard we worked for Miley, laughs and jeers almost always followed. I assumed everyone knew about the pancake. “You not from around here?” I asked, curious.

She paused for a moment, and I wondered if she was going to stonewall me some more. Instead, she finally said, “My husband and I just moved back from Dillingham to help out with his sick parents. Why?” She replied, barely audible this time and near emotionless.

“Just curious.”

Miley’s office building was called the pancake because it looked like three huge, double-wide trailers had their roofs lopped off and were then stacked on top of one another. Throw in an industrial strength double-door on the bottom floor, a few narrow windows with garishly ornate shutters, some underpinning that matched the shutters to try to hide the metal stilts that elevated it above the permafrost, this God-awful orange paint to round out the decor, and that was Miley’s office building.

She gave me a quick glance before looking away.

“We’re going to Miley Corp. It’s where I work. It’s not too far from here.”

“I think I know the place, now that you mention it,” She paused. “I’m… I’m glad we’re going there. It seems like a safe place,” she said, trying to contort her face in something bordering on a smile.

Something struck me as off about her, but I couldn’t put my finger on what that something was. “Yeah.”

We crouched against a fence extending a good portion of the northern perimeter of the runway, presumably erected to keep fools and drunks from getting hit by planes on landings and takeoffs. H Street was just a few feet away from us on our left, and Miley’s office was not much more than a block away to the east, on the other side of D Street.

If we had gotten there before the snow had begun falling again, I would’ve almost certainly been able to see Miley’s office building from where we stood, but with the fresh round of thick snow I could barely see twenty feet in front of me. “We’re going to have to move. I can’t see anything from here.”

“I won’t be able to keep her from crying,” she said sharply.

I nodded. “I should probably know your name. If I I’ve got to call for you or something, it’s just going to be a little weird, saying, hey, you,” I said, kind of sort of trying to cut the tension.

She acted like she didn’t want to tell me it, but after an awkward few seconds, she finally said it was Kelley.

“Well, Kelley, my name is William. If the baby cries, we’ll figure something out, okay?”

She was a woman of few words. She didn’t bother replying to me. Instead, she indicated she had heard me by slightly nodding her head, not bothering to even make eye contact. She was sort of an angry Avery, I thought.

Over the howl of the wind, I thought I heard voices just up the street from us. “Did you hear that?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

I’d like to say I was a great leader during those early days. I could imagine my dopey self on a poster.  I’d be holding a pistol or maybe a big-ass sword. Maybe there’d be a woman holding onto my leg; hell, maybe it would be Kelley - lord knows she was pretty enough to be on a poster.  I’d point that big-ass sword in the direction of my enemies, and my army of lesser men would charge into the void and vanquish them. That would be kick ass. It would also be the biggest lie ever told.

The reality of the situation? My leadership was less optimal, as Avery might call it, than I might’ve liked to paint it. Sam probably would’ve called it “hog shit in a nun’s bellybutton” or some other nonsensical way of describing my