B Farmer - Descent

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.