The Long Dark by B.J. Farmer (reading women .TXT) 📕

“No, there was just much more room there.”

Sam laughed. “Oh.”

Kelley said she had placed the sound devices at the airport as she was told, but almost no Grays responded to them. The few who did kicked and beat them until they no longer worked. They then ran off.

“The way you talk, their entire operation was a disaster, but we know that’s not true,” Titouan said.

He was right. While I was pointing out how this or that didn’t work, the reality of the situation was, even if the Order did have weaknesses, they had turned most of the inhabitants of Barrow into mindless monsters. So, no matter their shortcomings, the Grays just being Grays, was enough to destroy our civilization.

And they weren’t wholly incompetent from an organizational standpoint either. At least not in the beginning. We only lived because the Order needed us to be test dummies. That and we had a separate supply of drinking water. Kelley said she was supposed to round up a small group of people, even if it meant her own, and run another test on them. They were getting ready to ask (or force, if Bob was right) for volunteers when Kelley was told a group of people perfect for the test had entered Barrow.

I didn’t tell them at the time because they were under enough stress, but we had been tracked since the moment we left the Patch. After the failed airport test, the leadership wanted answers. And why wouldn’t they? The failed experiment and the dangers the Grays represented had caused issues all up and down the leadership hierarchy, especially in Barrow.

Even with all that, Kelley had made sure to tell me, “How could we complete our mission without the aid of the byeongsa? There would be millions of you against thousands of us.” She, along with others, believed the Grays had been tampered with. That must’ve been the case, because “their Dear Leader would’ve never given them a defective army,” she had told me. But that seemed untrue. Almost every instruction she was given on how to operate the Grays seemed wrong.

“How were they ever going to?”

I turned to face Titouan. “Huh?”

“Win without the Grays.”

“I have no clue,” I told him.

Sam sucked air between his teeth before saying, “Crazy, crazy, shit right ‘ere.”

I remember sitting in my seat and shaking my head against the headrest. I knew crazier shit that I hadn’t even told them yet. I crosschecked all of it in my mind before uttering another word, making sure I hadn’t gone crazy. Like I would’ve known. That I only felt like I was teetering towards madness told me I wasn’t all the way there yet. I hoped.

I began again. I told them about the second test the leadership wanted to run:

Kelley managed with much struggle to get the Grays in an area just ahead of us. Just before we got there, though, they began wondering off, lured off by noises or whatever else that grabbed their attention. Only one stayed. The one who attacked Tom. Kelley said he was one of the smarter ones. He did what he was intended to do, which led me to agree with Kelley, that perhaps the agent was tampered with.

“Who in the hell would’ve known how ta mess ‘em up?”

“Sabotage, you mean,” Avery said, taking a break with the phone long enough to be an ass.

Watching Sam making a fist and flicking a half-smile towards Avery, I said, “Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe the CIA or maybe someone in the Order.”

“It would have to be someone who knew the vast complexities of whatever agent was used,” Avery said, matter-of-factly. “Just any rube could not, I assure you, do it.”

“Let’s save that conversation for another time.”

Avery muttered something before going back to what he was doing.

Kelley chased the unruly Grays to a house down the street from where Tom was attacked. They were pounding on a door when she got there. She thought it likely someone hadn’t drunk the water and was hiding. Instead, she found one of her comrades holed up inside with what used to be an entire family. The dumb ass had apparently forgotten to smear himself with repellent, and the Grays had chased him into the house. To his credit, Kelley said he had killed two of the three people inside. To his detriment, he hadn’t managed to work up the nerve to kill the child.

If things weren’t already ridiculous enough, she decided that the best thing he could do to restore his honor was to kill himself. The fucked-up part was -- I mean the more fucked up part -- she wanted him to do it in a way that helped her. I didn’t know how, and for whatever reason didn’t ask, but she knew we were headed to Miley’s. I guess it made sense that Miley Industries owned the Patch, and since we were from there, it wasn’t a wild assumption to believe that would be the place we would go, especially given there were no other more appealing locations in Barrow. Whatever it was, she created a scenario she hoped would garner our help and allow her to go there with us.

“That was the house with the crying baby, then?” Titouan asked.

“Yes,” I said.

I told them that we already knew what Kelley’s motivation was. Rescuing Bob. The guy at the house was a bit harder to understand and explain. To regular people, the notion of sacrificing your life because of honor seems so ridiculous. Yet history is rife with examples of people dying (and killing) because of it. Before the world fell, people of religious fervor killed out of honor way too often. Think about the Bushido Code samurais lived by. They would rather fall on their own swords than dishonor themselves and their families. I tried to explain how I thought the guy in the house kind of fell on his own sword.

The next bit was incredibly challenging to explain