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

makeshift bandage fashioned from a strip of cloth torn off a shirt I found lying on the floor.  Sanitary? Probably not. It would absorb the blood, though. That was good enough for me.

I got dressed and grabbed the phones. I hoped Avery could make up for stabbing me by fixing one of them. The way things were going, I had my doubts.

***

I noticed someone standing outside the COM shack. The visibility was so bad I couldn’t see who it was until I got within a few feet.

“What are you doing out here, Jack?” I asked.

“I had to step out a couple minutes. I think Avery was getting ready to, uh, talk to me about Jehovah.”

“Never a bad time for the Lord,” I said, patting him on the arm. “Let’s go in. I’ll bring up my shoulder. That’ll take his mind off proselytizing.”

Jack didn't laugh. “I need to talk to you."

Jack was a chill California guy, or at least that’s what he would say about himself. He didn’t normally get excited about much of anything. He looked like he was sober, too, which in of itself was odd. He was well on his way to being shitfaced an hour earlier. “What’s up?” I asked.

He proceeded to tell me that when he and Tom were checking the transformer they had heard things. “We heard something weird off in the distance. The wind was blowing so hard it was hard to know for sure what it was.”

“Well, what was it?” I asked.

“Look, William… I know I’ve been drinking. I know you know this. But I heard footsteps. I tried to tell Tom, but you know how he gets when he’s working on something. He tunes everything out. That and he drank more than I had.”

That got an eye raise from me. Jack normally outdrank everyone. “Go on.”

“I tried to just concentrate on the work, but I kept hearing shit over and over again. It was snowing so hard and I couldn’t see three feet in front of me. I was about to have a panic attack. Tom just shook his head and laughed at me. The bastard.”

“That’s what you’re freaked out about? You got drunk and heard noises in the dark?”

His cold stare told me there was more. “I wish, bro. I heard snorting. It was loud as dick. Tom even heard it. He stopped cold what he was doing, and the bastard asked me if I heard it. I’m like no shit. To make things worse, he wanted to go check and see what it was.”

“Well?”

“We walked for several minutes on the ice and didn’t see or hear a damn thing. We were getting ready to turn around when we heard a truck rumble to life somewhere out on the ice. Followed by, and I shit you not, what sounded like hundreds of feet pounding on the ice and heading towards the loud diesel.”

Knowing Tom, and especially Jack as I did, part of me thought it was the booze talking. But aside from that, I had too much on my mind to get bogged down by snorts and trucks on the ice. “That’s a lot to take in, man. I can only manage one thing at a time--”

“What if the generators being dead are connected somehow to what we heard?”

“Sabotage?”

“Maybe. That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m pretty sure the only sabotage that’s happened here was perpetrated by the company who makes and sells those janky pieces of crap control boards that keep petering out on us.”

I could tell by the look on his face he thought I wasn’t taking him seriously.

“You know there shouldn’t be anything out on that ice like that, especially a big ass truck that clearly wasn’t on the ice road – just out on the unmaintained ice like that. You don’t do that bro unless you’re trying to do some underhanded shit.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sorry… I just don’t know.”

He searched my face for any signs of how I was processing the information he had given me. The problem was I wasn't processing it. My mind at that point was about as faulty as the generators. It was on overload. There comes a point during a crisis when, and I don't give a crap who you are, you don't have anything in your knowledge bank telling you what to do as the next wave of chaos washes over you. It becomes a pileup of unprocessed clutter in your mind. All I wanted to do was get warm, sit for a few minutes, and forget about everything for a little while.

“Come on, Jack. Let’s go in. I’m nearly frozen to death, and you have to be too.” My hand was on the door handle when I turned to him. “Hang with me, man. I don’t mean to blow you off. I’m trying to do the best I can.”

Not exactly happy with me, he nodded in agreement nonetheless.

***

I handed the phones to Avery. “You mind looking at these? They’re apparently junk, too.”

He nodded, unaffected by being given two more faulty pieces of electronic equipment.

He started taking one of them apart. Not bothering to look up at me, he asked, “Are you okay?”

That perked Jack up a bit. He gave me a wicked grin. “I’ll be okay… stab Titouan next time instead of me.”

Avery cocked his head to the side and said, “Okay.”

Jack wheeled an office chair over to the heater and motioned for me to have a seat. I thanked him. I took off my mitts and tossed them on the floor next to the heater. God, that heat felt good. Jack leaned up against the wall and slid to the floor in a seated position. He had clearly drunk too much, which was one of the reasons I wasn’t taking his story too seriously.

I sat in as near a trance as I’ve ever been in, staring at the dancing flames emanating from the kerosene heater. I don’t know how long I was in my trance. It