by Billy Farmer
THE LONG DARK
Descent
Book: 1 of 3
A novel by B.J. Farmer
Edited by: Jeff Ford
Cover by: Alex Saskalidis @ 187Designz
Facebook: www.facebook.com/B.J.FarmerAuthor
Website: billyjoefarmer.com
Email: [email protected]
Dedicated to my love, Amanda.
Text Copyright © 2020, B.J. Farmer
Chapter 1
I vividly remember sitting at my tiny desk, in my tiny room, on the tiny, frigid island made of rock and gravel, scrutinizing the totality of my life choices. Cooped up on a five-acre island for twenty-four hours of darkness every day, you tend to ruminate about such things. I kept telling myself one more rotation and then I'd never work another oil-drilling job ever again. I'd tell Miley to fuck off, and we'd go our separate ways. I’d take Avery with me, and we would find something else to do, even if it meant selling use cars in Pignuts, Arkansas. Couldn’t be any worse than what we were already doing.
I should’ve told Miley no to begin with. If it weren't for my friends, I would have. Miley closed the drilling operation I ran in East Texas. It was the only job I stayed long enough to get close to people, and of course, it was on the list to be shit canned. Pretty fitting, I guess, considering most of my adult life followed the arc of Miley's whims and needs. He never much cared about my feelings, or anyone else's for that matter. It was all about the money, baby.
I shook my head and sighed. I needed to stop thinking about things that depressed me, and I desperately needed to get some sleep before I started eating. When I was younger, I caroused with hookers, drank, took drugs, and did whatever the hell I wanted, no matter the harm to myself or others. But I grew up a lot during my time in East Texas. I started taking things seriously, and mostly got my mind right and my shit straight.
The loneliness and desolation I felt at the God-forsaken place people were calling the Patch reignited and reinvigorated my tendencies towards self-destructive behavior. Instead of paying dick goblins to cut lines of cocaine and rub their stinky titties in my face, I stayed in my room during my free time and ate myself into a stupor. That night, however, I chose to go to bed without gorging myself. Baby steps.
I made sure the alarms were set on both my watch and nightstand alarm. At that point during the rotation I was so worn out and depressed that one alarm just wouldn’t cut it. I might not have been so exhausted had the emergency light not burned so damn red and bright, keeping me awake and pissed off a good part of the night.
Is it an emergency light if it shines all the time? It's more like a shine-until-there’s-an-actual-emergency light: you know, just in case.
I asked Tom to take the bulb out, but he wouldn’t because he said it was against OSHA regulations. I could deal with a minor safety violation, especially if it meant I got a decent night’s sleep once in a while. I guessed the real reason Tom refused was because he wanted to see my fat ass fall off the ladder trying to take the bulb out. I showed him. I never messed with it.
Red light be damned, I eventually drifted off to sleep. I’m not sure for how long, but at some point I awoke to complete darkness. I wasn't sure if I was in the midst of a pleasant dream where the red light was magically snuffed out by OSHA hating pixies, or if I was awake and simply having the good fortune of the bulb having burned out. Either way, I was not sleeping, and it was out.
Not sure what time it was, I reached for my watch only to knock it to the floor. “Shit,” I muttered as I nearly tumbled out of bed after it. Stumbling to my feet, I bent over where I thought it should’ve fallen only to misjudge my location and hit my head on the corner of the table. Staggering backward, I nearly tripped over my boots before finally catching my balance. I shook my head, trying to clear the light show taking place from all the stars I saw. I had been knocked out several times in my life, but never by a table – one not thrown at me anyway. I nearly marked that one off my bucket list.
Seriously, I thought. A warm trickle of blood flowed from a burgeoning knot above my right eye. I filled the room with a stream of curse words. After taking a few moments to clear my head and wipe the blood from my forehead and eye, I decided to find my flashlight before doing much more pitch-dark exploration.
I staggered through the darkness towards my desk, leaving a wake of destruction in my path. Anything that could be knocked over, spilled, or otherwise broken asunder was. After several minutes of probing the dark, cluttered recesses in and around my desk, I finally found what I was looking for. Click… only it didn’t work.
I bashed the bastard but pounding it on the desk wasn’t nearly as effective as I’d hoped. It was dead. I just bought the damn thing the last time I was in Barrow, too. Cost me nearly fifty bucks. If Miley hadn’t been such a tight ass, I wouldn’t have needed to buy one for myself. I hoped Avery would have extra.
I blindly probed the floor until I found my watch. I was beginning to think the OSHA hating pixies were responsible for more than the emergency light. I pushed buttons hard, fast, two at a time, and every combination possible before concluding the damn thing had stopped working. My watch was dead, too.
Minutes later, and without breaking or lacerating any important body parts, I found my alarm clock. “Nothing fucking works,” I growled, as I tossed the clock across the room. Okay, I might’ve bashed it against the wall.
Aside from wondering what the hell was going on, I ran through my very small catalogue of things that might’ve caused everything to just die. As you should expect, I didn’t have a clue. The only thing I could think of, and that was only because Avery had just brought it up a day earlier, was the issue of static electricity. I didn’t know what the hell it was, but it sounded good at that moment.
It was time to find Avery. My speculating was getting me nowhere.
I stood in the center of the room, trying to get my bearings. It should’ve been much easier, especially given the cramped confines of my office/bedroom, but my head was still spinning from the trauma I received from the corner of the table. I needed my clothes. For someone who had learned to become organized and always prepared for the work side of my life, I never quite managed to transfer those positive qualities to my personal life. Lucky for me, I had slovenly shed my clothes near the door earlier that night.
I was putting on my second thermal shirt when something occurred to me. The used-to-be menacing red emergency light was out. After all the sleepless nights it stops working when I could’ve actually used it. You can’t make this shit up.
Within a few minutes I was dressed and ready, minus one balaclava. I assumed Avery would get the power back up quickly. I would just find it when the lights get turned back on. Luckily, I had an old headlamp in the pocket of my parka, but, of course, the batteries were dead. The headlamp, I think, summed life up on the Patch pretty accurately: something you think should be good ends up being bad, or at least not what you expected.
Having only taken a couple steps outside, I was missing my balaclava. The wind pummeled my bare skin with wave after wave of frigid hitchhikers. I pulled the hell out of my hood strings until I looked like Kenny from South Park. A few steps later I realized the only thing the taut hood did, besides make me look ridiculous, was put undesired pressure on my head wound. It sure as hell wasn’t stopping the sleet from pelting my bare skin.
Being sleep deprived as I was, I had a bit of a manic moment. I laughed as I remembered a conversation I had with Miley years earlier. It was before East Texas. It was even before I became drill super intendent. It was right before he sent his first exploratory crew to Barrow. He wanted me to go with one of the teams that had mapped promising drilling locations in the Arctic Ocean. I had just done
a winter rotation in North Dakota, so I told him I was sick of snow. He smiled at me and said, “Good. It doesn’t snow that much above the Arctic Circle.” I called bullshit on that, but he wouldn’t relent, saying, “No, seriously, it’s too cold and dry to snow in the winter months. I’m not fucking with you.” Luckily, he ended up needing me somewhere else, so I didn’t go.
Hysterics aside, it is rare for it to snow above the Arctic Circle. Under normal conditions, it’s just too cold and dry to get any appreciable precipitation. But that winter it was warm – very warm. Now when I say warm, I don’t mean pull out your tiniest thong kind of warm. It’s still cold as Titouan’s icy heart, but it wasn’t too cold to precipitate. Meteorologists marveled at how much snow had fallen and how much was still in the forecast.
***
Titouan told Avery not to sleep at the COM shack. I personally didn’t care where he slept, so I never made him sleep where he didn’t want to. That and he told me he hated sleeping there and he would quit if I made him. When I asked him what the problem was, he said he didn’t appreciate his bunkmate’s propensity for farting. His exact words were, "A grown man's affinity for releasing gas should not extend to the subconsciousness of sleep. I should not have to pay for his nocturnal, gaseous incontinence."
I mean how do you argue with that? Long story short, I knew to walk over to the COM shack rather than the nest where almost everyone else slept.
It was a brief walk over from my office, but the snowfall bizarrely worsened in those short two minutes. I could barely find the entrance it was snowing so hard. The door (the one Avery felt the need to put a “Pull” sign on after Sam pushed on it one too many times) was difficult to open because of the growing pile of drift snow in front of it. I cleared some of the snow away with my boot before trying to open it again. Once I had cleared enough to get inside, I was greeted with several loud bangs.
"Who is there?" Avery asked, sounding like a kid whose nightlight had gone out.
“It’s me.”
“You scared me. I thought you were Titouan.”
I laughed. “No, not Titouan. He’ll be here sooner than later, you can bet on that.”
Even though I knew Avery had electric lanterns, the COM shack was pitch dark. I guess he had been falling over crap looking for them, which leads us to the first thing you should know about Avery. Not only did he tend to be disheveled in appearance, he tended to be equally disorganized. Titouan and I told him to organize his workspace on numerous occasions. He obviously never got around to it.
“What the hell are you doing in here, besides clearly not keeping things organized?”
“Finally,” he said. I heard a click, and then another one. Once he was sure the flashlight wouldn’t turn on, he began to tap it with the palm of his hand. When that didn’t bring about the desired effect, he slammed it against the table. He learned that from me.
“Chill, bud... come on.”
Agitated, he said, “My flashlight always works.”
Avery becomes attached to things. I guess that’s maybe another thing you should know about him. His flashlight used to be black. But at that point, it had been used so much it was silver – or whatever the hell color aluminum is.
“Stop fixating on the damn thing. We’re wasting time here. Time we don’t have.”
My words having, initially at least, fallen on deaf ears, he flicked the switch several more times, before finally giving up. He placed the flashlight gently on the table and began searching in earnest for alternative light sources.
Avery was a jack-of-all-trades guy when it came to electronics and communications. Since Miley ran a lean operation, Avery was a perfect fit, even though Miley himself would’ve most certainly disagreed. Actually, Miley thought he was an “overpaid geek.” But Miley had a ridiculous aversion to anything or anyone he thought didn’t add value to his business. He’d say, "If your hands aren't in the oil, all you're doing is costing me money. Not making it."
“We need to hurry, Avery,” I reiterated.
“None of these are working.”
“Change the batteries.”
A few more bangs and a couple thuds later, a beam of light struck me in the face. “Jesus, Avery.”
“Looks like you have some dried blood on your face. You will probably get an infection.”
I waved him off. I had no intention of regaling him the great battle of the sharp corner.
Of the fifteen or so lanterns, headlamps, and flashlights he found, only six worked. We also found two large floodlights in the storage room that was connected to the COM Shack. Neither had bulbs. Avery said Tom had needed them for something, so he had taken them. It was a moot point, really, as there was no electricity to power them. Still, Titouan was going to look at the totality of Avery’s preparedness, and it wasn’t pretty.
Avery clucked his tongue several times before speaking. “Only one of our newer LED lamps work, and none of the flashlights. Whereas, all of the older incandescent one’s work. It is very strange, William. Very strange.”
I grabbed one of the beaten up flashlights and the batteries for my headlamp before saying, “Knowing Miley he bought the cheapest shit he could find. We’ll worry about this stuff later. We gotta get to work, bud.”
“I ordered the newer LED flashlights and lamps.”
Of course, I knew he had. I had signed off on the requisitions. I was pretending he hadn’t, I guess, to make him seem less incompetent. “We’re making things worse by standing around.”
He began to say something, but I quickly cut him off. He slung his work bag on his shoulder, grabbed as many of the working lamps as he could carry, and stomped off towards the exit.
With the night-shift people not having anything to do because of the power outage, they had started milling around the Patch, trying to figure out what had happened. I heard a mixture of emotions coming from people. Some were happy as hell being out of work, while others were thinking about the end of rotation bonus and blaming Avery more every second there was no production. I quickened my pace.
There are a couple other things you need to know about Avery. One, he’s smart. He had a near perfect score on his SAT. Where you come from that might not be a big deal, but the area in Southern Indiana where we lived wasn’t exactly known for coveting higher learning. The biggest academic pursuit was contemplating who would host the next mud bog.
Two, you’ve seen the prototypical nerd, right? The type with the pocket protector and trousers pulled up so high and tight it would take a Come-Along and a front-end loader to de-wedge the bastards? Well, he’s not exactly like that. He’s more of a mismatched sock, crazy disheveled hair, bad at social cues, X-Files shirt wearing kind of nerd. Let’s say he didn’t always fit in with the people he worked with in the oil fields. If it weren’t for me, I’m pretty sure he’d have suffered his fair share of blackened eyes and bruises because he lacked verbal filters.
It didn’t take long for him to figure out something was wrong with the first generator. “Dang,” he said. He opened the control box panel. “Shine the light here,” he said, pointing a shadow-obscured finger where he needed the light.
Apparently, I was inept at shining a flashlight.
“Just give it to me,” he snapped.
Okay, there's a third thing you need to know about Avery. He was on his way to finding God by that point. Not your garden variety, worship on Easter and Christmas finding God, have you. Not that easy. He found the Jehovah's Witness brand of God – or maybe they found him? Either way, as he said on numerous occasions, "Cussing was the antithesis of the exaltation of God." What's ironic about him finding God, though, was his startling lack of conversion where his temper was concerned. Sam liked to rile Avery up by citing scripture that admonished his tantrums. Avery would try to ignore him, but I knew (and so did Sam) that it bothered him greatly.
Irritated because I hadn’t given him the flashlight fast enough, he grabbed it from me. He circled the generator a couple times, pushing buttons
inside the control panel, but nothing happened. Giving up on that one, he moved on to the second generator, where he went through the same routine with the same results. Aggravated, Avery slicked his mop of hair back with his two hands and said, “I do not know how, but it looks like more board failures. I need to run tests to be sure.”
“Run your tests,” I told him. “I’m going to go find Titouan and bring him back here, assuming he’s not already on his way over.” Looking at him in a way I knew he would take serious, I said, “If you determine these,” I pointed towards the generators, “are down because of the boards, you wait until I get back before telling him. Understand?”
He nodded. I started to walk away when he called out to me.
“William,” he said. “Generator number one has a new board. Generator number three’s board is a week and six days old. As prone to failure as these boards have been, the current failure rate is outside the normal distribution by at least three deviations. I know what I am doing here.”
Avery had a very narrow band of emotions. The bookends of that spectrum were ferocious and cold: he was quick to anger and slow to empathize. This made it difficult for people to relate to him, much less like him. Titouan’s issues with Avery weren’t based on Avery’s lack of interpersonal communications and poor relationship building skills. Titouan needed a patsy.
Avery didn’t have the faculty of manipulation, dishonesty, and underhandedness to understand Titouan’s real motives. He couldn’t understand how Titouan wasn’t so much impugning his ability to carry out his job as he was using Avery’s mostly minor lapses as a way to fix his own managerial misjudgments, while also staying in the good graces of Miley, who had already shared his displeasure about Avery. Win win for Titouan.
Titouan tried to hide the production reports from me, but I had access to the network drive at corporate headquarters. I saw the downtime reports. Beginning the day after Titouan had culled several workers due to what he claimed were productivity gains, there had been a marked increase in downtime at the Patch. In nearly every instance, the downtime was attributed to activities related directly to Avery and the maintenance department. Avery handled communications, networking, and mostly all the electrical work, including all the power generation. At that point, I was mostly running the maintenance department. Not only could Titouan knock off Avery, but I was also in his crosshairs. Again, win win.