The Long Dark

by Billy Farmer

  “It is too cold out here to take the bearings out only to find the control board is bad. I need to check this board before I go any farther,” Avery said, continuing what he was doing, and not bothering to make eye contact with Titouan.

  I asked one more time for Titouan to leave. Much like Avery, he refused to make eye contact. His scowl was focused solely on Avery.

  “This board is bad, as well,” Avery said, looking at me with wide eyes and shaking his head. “We are… we are down for the foreseeable future.”

  There was a quick blur of motion. So taken aback by what was happening, I was late to react to Titouan charging Avery. When I finally did get around to reacting, I slipped and fell to the ground, face planting into the quickly accumulating snow. Luckily Titouan slipped as well, allowing me time to regain my footing. I stretched out my left hand and got enough of his right ankle to make him fall to the ground.

  “You’re sabotaging this shit, aren’t you?” Titouan yelled as he floundered in the snow, slipping and falling at least two times before finally finding his footing.

  By this point, I was back on my feet. Titouan bared his teeth as he shot his hands towards Avery’s throat. I was able to grab hold of him just before he reached his throat. Enraged at being kept away from his target, Titouan kicked, bit, and finally spit in Avery's direction. Apparently, it was an accurate shot as it hit Avery in the only uncovered part of his face besides his eyes: his mouth. Avery coughed and spat.

  Avery wiped his mouth and with wide, angry eyes dashed towards us. I turned Titouan away from Avery just in time that the screwdriver meant for Titouan found another target. A pain shot through my shoulder, down my arm, and into my fingertips. He’d hit a nerve, but with my heavy parka it didn’t feel too deep or like it had done too much damage to my shoulder. Still, it stung like hell.

  In one motion I slung the bastard Titouan as far as I could throw him, then grabbed Avery’s hand and slung him in the other direction. I then plucked the screwdriver from my shoulder and threw it in an angry arc towards the Arctic Ocean.

  "Stop it, you fucking idiots! Jesus!" I screamed. I was getting ready to tell Titouan exactly what I thought of him when I heard someone yell, "What the hell is going on over there?"

  “I’ll tell you what’s going on. Avery’s crazy. He’s sabotaging our equipment… trying to ruin my life,” Titouan yelled angrily, his labored breaths forming ice clouds that obscured his crazed features.

  "Shut up, Titouan. Now," I said, taking a step towards him just in case he refused.

  Avery began to speak, but I told him to shut up too. Turning to Jack and Tom, I said, “I’m glad to see you guys.”

  Jack nodded, a big smile plastered on his face. Tom, on the other hand, looked on in pure disgust.

  I explained what had happened, but I wasn't in the mood for many words. I asked Jack to take Avery back to the COM shack and stay there until Titouan and I got there. We were going to get a satellite phone, and we were going to call Miley. Finally, I told Tom to work with Sam in moving people to the Commons. The worst-case scenario was upon us.

  As Jack guided Avery towards the COM Shack, I heard Avery say something under his breath. “Arnie was special needs. Not Gilbert Grape.”

  Fucking asshole, Titouan.

  Chapter 2

  “What do you mean yours doesn’t work either? That’s impossible.”

  “It means exactly what I said. It doesn’t work.” I held my satellite phone out for him and tried to power it on so he could see. This was after we both put in our spare batteries. “Did Avery sabotage these too?”

  “Things don’t happen just by chance, William.”

  “Look, scapegoating Avery isn’t going to help you, Titouan.”

  “Why would I need to scapegoat him? He’s just bad at his job.”

  “I’ve seen the damn reports you send to corporate. If you knew how to do your job, you’d taken my credentials away when you took over.”

  Titouan’s wind-burned face turned pallid. He began to speak, but then stopped. I let him linger on his thoughts for a few ticks before retaking the conversation and redirecting it in what I hoped would be a more productive direction. What we were dealing with was much bigger than falsified reports and fragile egos. We were dealing with a real emergency, where real people could freeze to death if we didn’t act appropriately. I hated the idea of it, but I needed Titouan to come on board, be on the same page as me. Fighting only wasted time. Time we didn’t have.

  “Besides these phones, did he sabotage my watch and alarm clock, too, Titouan? And maybe it’s sheer coincidence, but Simon told me Harvey’s tablet died when the power went out--”

  “Your watch?”

  "And alarm clock and everything else. All dead." I picked up my watch off the table and tossed it to him. I then pulled the power plug out of the wall, walked over to my desk, grabbed a new battery out of its package, and inserted into the clock. I then tried to give it to Titouan for his inspection.

  He tossed my watch back, but refused to take the clock. Apparently, he got the point.

  Titouan had a seat at my desk. The lamp cast his face in a wicked shadow. He sat there seemingly deep in thought, possibly collecting his next wave of irrational thoughts and readying for the next tirade that would make him forget how he wouldn’t be able to scapegoat his way through this.

  Then something unexpected happened. He rubbed his bare wrist and said, “My watch stopped working too. That’s why I didn’t wear it.”

  “Avery’s my best friend, but I assure you if you had evidence in lieu of irrational hatred, I could easily be swayed away from defending him. But that really doesn’t matter, and neither does the fact that you didn’t order replacement boards. It fucking doesn’t matter. We’re past that. Right now we can only take care of the only variable that matters. Our people. Either of us getting fired or barred from the industry won’t mean shit if someone freezes to death. You can find another damn line of work. If someone dies, well, we can’t let that happen.”

  He got up and walked over to the window. There was nothing to see outside besides snow and darkness, but that didn’t stop him from looking for something. “I don’t know what to do, William.”

  That was the first sign of unfettered weakness I’d ever seen from him. There is such a thing as a leader who is hard, demanding, and difficult to please but who still manages civility and decency. Titouan was rarely civil or decent. He represented everything people hated about their bosses. He was smug, arrogant, and worse, entitled. He got into Wharton because his dad signed some checks. He took my job at the Patch weeks after graduating from Wharton because his dad was friends with Miley, and because he was the largest shareholder besides Miley.

  Titouan thought he'd promenade into the Patch like he did everywhere else, and his dad's power, money, and influence would allow him to do as little or as much as he wanted and succeed no matter which option he chose. He was surprised when that didn't pan out. People like Titouan blame other people when things don't go as planned. People like those who worked at the Patch didn't give a rat's ass about people who blame other people for their own problems. My main role at that point was playing translator and arbiter between the two disparate worlds.

  I wanted to hope that maybe he was coming to his senses. I saw a twenty-five-year-old kid with barely any experience asking, even if it weren't outright, for help. I could let him drown because of his prior transgressions and potentially cause needless pain for my friends and coworkers, or I could help him swim and cause them as little pain as possible. I chose to help him. It certainly wasn't because I had suddenly become deluded enough to think he had a moment of life-altering clarity. I didn't buy that for a second. Potentially humbled for a short time was much more likely. I helped him because of the very reason I was there in the first place, and that was solely because of my friends. Otherwise, I couldn't have cared less if he floundered until he drowned in his own wretched bile.

  I told him to go to t
he Commons and make sure people were as comfortable as possible. I also told him to omit the part, unless asked, about the satellite phones not working. Was that the right thing to do? Probably not, but then there didn’t seem to be any easy or obvious ways of handling crap like that. I was flying by the seat of my pants – we all were.

  Stone-faced and pale, Titouan shook his head and left without saying another word.

  I decided to check the screwdriver wound before talking to Avery. I pulled my parka off, peeled off the thermal shirts I had on underneath, and saw to my surprise that Avery had inflicted a gnarly wound on my shoulder. I probably needed a couple stitches but decided that was too much of a luxury at that point. I couldn't find any Band-Aids, alcohol, or essentially anything I might've used to clean or dress the wound. I ended up using a 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 must’ve been a while because when Avery started speaking, I was disoriented to the point of being startled by his voice.

  “There are multiple resister and capacitor failures in the circuitry of both phones.”

  “IC?” I asked.

  “Simplified, an IC is a processor or microchip.”

  I didn't have to know what either one of those things were to know that was a bad deal. The important part of what he said was that this represented one more piece of the puzzle laid upon the table. I wasn't smart enough to put it together, but I hoped Avery was. "None of this makes any sense," I said.

  Jack was sleeping or passed out by that point, or at least his loud snoring indicated he was.

  “The commonality here is everything I have checked, including the boards in the generators, have bad ICs – chips as you might say. These failures being the result of some random event is simply implausible without applying a root cause.”

  Something appearing to be a smile materialized on his normally stolid face. He gave me a quick glance before waving his hand over the doodads and electronic thingamajigs scattered across his desk. I wasn’t sure what point he was trying to make other than assuming none of it worked, but I already knew that. I waited patiently for him to make his point.

  A wave of irritation washed over his face as he repeated the exaggerated movement with his hand. “Well?” He finally asked.

  “Well what?”

  He waved for the third time—

  “Will you please get on with it?”

  “All of this is Fluke.”

  “What – huh? I thought you said this couldn’t be a random event?”

  “You don’t get it?”


  I sighed. “No… I really don’t.”

  "My voltmeter and oscilloscope are both manufactured by Fluke. It was a play on words, William. Get it now?"

  Sometimes Avery would take a step out of his self-defined world of rules and predictability to take a stab at being funny. He had a difficult time with understanding Sam, but there was something about him that Avery always tried to mimic, at least on some basic level. He almost always failed miserably, but he tried. Normally I would at least try to laugh, but this time I didn't have any patience.

  I rolled my eyes. “Fucking really? Nerd jokes at a time like this. You realize Titouan wouldn’t care if you were tied up and thrown into the Chukchi Sea. Damn, man.”

  “That was bad. Even for you, dude,” Jack said, seemingly jolted out of his booze-induced catatonic state.

  “It is frozen,” Avery said.

  “Huh?” Jack said, confused.

  “The Chukchi Sea is frozen.”

  “I know it’s frozen,” I said, frustrated but still amused because of the expression on Jack’s face.

  Changing the subject, I asked, “I take it you have a theory on what has happened?”

  Showing no expression that would lead anyone to believe he was upset about being rebuked for his lousy joke, he tapped semi-rhythmically on the table with his knuckles. That was always a sure sign of him being nervous about something. He would wiggle a leg, tap on things with his fingers or knuckles, make different noises with his mouth, and a multitude of other ticks. Whatever it was he was thinking he didn't want to share. He began to say something but stopped. Instead, he went about tapping at the desk again, looking back and forth between me and Jack.

  I waited for Avery to gather his thoughts. “Before I delve too deeply, I want to also mention something worth noting.” He pointed to several flashlights and headlamps on the table. “This pile here works.” He pointed to another pile. “These do not.”

  Jack was getting impatient. “You think you can just cut to the chase, bro?”

  Avery went back to tapping. Jack was making him nervous. “Most of the ones still working are of the incandescent variety. I have one working LED flashlight. The others are non-functional. Just as with my test equipment, if it has ICs then it is probably dead right now.”