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

slack face and bloodshot eyes told me his experience was different than mine. Still, he managed a half-smile. Being self-absorbed and generally loathing, his gesture did nothing but piss me off. I popped several more Percocets.

A solitary point of light off in the distance grew as we drove towards it. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Aadesh stealing a long stare. After I refused to utter a solitary word or glance towards him, he pegged the accelerator, causing the old beater to sputter and lurch before finally picking up a couple extra miles per hour.

Not sharing any of his exuberance, I leaned my head back into the worn headrest and waited for the opioids to further cloud my already dimmed expectations of what lay in store for us in Fairbanks.

The sparse landscape of spruce trees, barren, snow-covered landscape, and darkness faded away. It was replaced with big-box stores, expressways, and all the amenities of a large city – large by Alaska standards, anyway. Up ahead lay a long serpentine line of red lights, intermingled with white ones. Aadesh cursed under his breath as we neared what appeared from the distance to be an ordinary traffic jam. It wasn’t.

Cars were scattered all around the freeway and in all manner of directions, some of which were still running. Many more had dead batteries and empty fuel tanks. Some looked to have come to a stop in relative control, while others in much more spectacular fashion. Aadesh meandered the truck in and around the carnage, many times having to leave the road for clear passage. The one thing missing from the scene was people or bodies, for that matter.  I didn’t see anyone dead or alive in the wreckage.

Movement near a big-box store off to our left arrested my attention from the maze of broken and deserted cars. “Turn in. Turn in,” I said, after just a few moments on the expressway.

Confused and paralyzed by my sudden break in non-verbal protocol, Aadesh overshot the entrance. “Hurry, damn it,” I told him. He whipped the truck around hard and crossed over the crowded median to get to the parking lot.

“Jesus Christ, man. I am nod knowing whad I am doing here,” he said as he fought the wheel of the power-steering-less vehicle.

“That way, dude,” I said, pointing in the direction where I thought I’d seen them.

After several minutes of fruitless searching, I told Aadesh to just stop, and we sat idling outside a giant Walmart. The parking lot held maybe twenty cars, most of which were nestled neatly into parking places. One near us looked to have the windows busted out, but nothing else of interest.

“Whad did you see?” Aadesh asked quietly.

“Huh?” I asked, still scanning our surroundings for signs I wasn’t hallucinating.

“Whad did you see?”

“Something.”

“All of dad yelling for only somding? Should we nod condinue our looking, den?”

I shook my head in disgust. “Can we fucking just sit here a damn minute. I need to think.”

“Sure ding. But your being an asshole do me is nod helping dis wery shiddy siduadion. Your addidude condinues being a wery much big problem.”

I felt a stab of pain in the palms of my hands. I looked down to see I had four fingernail-sized slits cut into both of my palms. I had squeezed my fists into such tight balls that my unclipped nails had dug into the skin. Before I had realized it, I yelled, “I said, let me think for a minute!”

Aadesh had learned when he needed to back off. He gripped the steering wheel and focused intently on nothing in particular outside the front windshield. That wasn’t going to work. I was spoiling for a fight. Channeling my best Sam, I vented and vented hard. “You know we’re fucked, right?” I paused, hoping for a reaction. When one didn’t come, I continued, “I mean like a hundred-person gangbang kind of fucked. Snot and tears fucked, man. Can’t you fucking see that?”

“Yed you saw someone, did you nod?”

“Does it really matter what I think I saw? Look around and then tell me that it really truly matters. This ain’t fucking normal, dude. Barrow and Prudhoe Bay weren’t fucking normal either. What I think I saw doesn’t change shit.”

“If you saw someone, Id madders do me. Dad is all I am knowing.”

I began raking my stubbled face. I then sighed before taking another stab at communicating. “I saw maybe two people running away from Walmart.” I traced a horizontal line in the direction in which they had run. “But, for all we know, they were Sniffers. There’s no reason to think otherwise.”

“But we need do know for sure. Dad is all I am say… ing…”

I returned his questioning look, and then verbally acknowledged that I had heard it too. “Yeah, I hear it.”

Feint intermittent pops mixed in with louder, more rapid ones could be heard over the noisy-running truck. Aadesh began to cut the engine, I guessed to get a better listen, but I let him know very quickly not to do so. You never knew if the truck was going to start, which is why we left it running pretty much all the time. We heard gunshots. That’s all we really needed to know.

Over the next half hour, there were thousands of gunshots mixed in with at least three audible explosions. One of which lit up the night sky and giving us a pretty good idea in which direction the battle was taking place.

Aadesh and I never once looked at one another during that time. We were caught in a silent reverie, where each seemed to have latched on to a different notion about what the takeaway was from the gunfire. It confirmed for me just how bad things were. My stomach grew tighter, and my head hurt just a little more with each shot and explosion. For Aadesh, it meant hope. It said there were still people in the fight, that we weren’t alone, and that we needed to join