“Praise be,” Avery said, again moving between the two seats. He pointed to somewhere out the front window.
“Holy shit,” I said. Avery muttered something, but I was too happy to worry about offending his intermittent religiosity.
Sam let out a sigh of relief and then smacked the steering wheel with the palms of his hands. The faint glow of lights could be seen in the general direction of Prudhoe Bay (or Dead Horse). After another mile or so, we began to see more lights off to our right. That was the larger part of town. If you could call Prudhoe Bay a town, that is. It was more of a work camp than anything. Much like the Patch, and Alaska in general, people came from all over to work in oil and gas. Demographics aside, damn was I glad to see, at least from the outside, what looked like a sliver of normalcy.
We pulled near the gas pumps. “Do you have a card?” Sam asked after we sat idling for a few moments, making sure there weren’t any Grays nearby.
I looked at Sam like he was joking. “Yeah, I really didn’t think to bring my wallet…”
He wasn’t joking.
He punched the steering wheel again. This time for a different reason than last. Anger.
There were several trucks nearby. If all else failed we could siphon gas from them, but that would take time and energy. One of them we had a lot more of than the other. “Sam, you stay here. Avery and I will figure something out.”
I noticed him wiping his eyes. “’Preciate it.”
I patted Sam on the shoulder. “We got this.”
“Yeah.”
I turned to Avery. “Grab your gun, bud. Looks like we’re going to have to siphon some gas.”
“We are at a gas station.”
“Yeah, well, Avery, we don’t exactly have a way to pay for gas. We have plenty of cash, but there isn’t anyone here to take it.”
Avery rummaged through his pockets. “Use my card.”
If it weren’t for the fact that I loved Avery, and that I also was ecstatic that I didn’t have to go through all the trouble of siphoning fuel, I would’ve punched him. Still, I had to hold my breath for a few seconds, so I wouldn’t say anything hurtful. “Thanks… bud…”
“Put the phone away. We have to watch each other’s back.”
The power might’ve been on, but the streets were empty. No one stirred. Prudhoe Bay was a ghost town. I hadn’t ever been there, but I imagined there had to be more people than we saw, which was zero. The only audible sounds were the howling of the wind and the occasional flap of a loose piece of tin roofing on a dilapidated building next to the gas station.
“There is so much—.”
“You can’t learn if you’re dead. Focus.”
He put the phone in his pocket and held the shotgun at a more formidable position. That was the good news. The bad news was without the phone occupying his time, he had time to share his thought processes with me. “I cannot believe you have not asked about something you surely have on your mind?” He asked, rotating his head back and forth too much like a radar dish, as he scanned the area.
Puzzled, I asked, “I have a lot of stuff on my mind.”
“If we were attacked with an EMP, why would there be power here?”
“I’ll be honest, Avery, I have lots of things competing for my attention, but since you brought it up. Why?”
“The container is full.”
“Thanks for the heads up,” I said, as I shook off the diesel that ran off onto my boot.
I wiped the containers off and put them in the back of the Ripsaw. I then wiped my boots before reluctantly reminding Avery about the EMP.
“Yes, well, I do not know why there is electricity here.”
“Really, dude, if you didn’t know, why would you bring it up?”
“I suspected you were thinking about it.”
“Well, now that we have that out of the way, I can clear that off my things to worry about list – you know, now that I know as much as I did before.”
Avery flashed a rare smile. “I am working through a string of messages I believe answers the question of why Barrow and the Patch are dark. I believe there was either a test or perhaps more accurately, a feint that took place. Roughly around zero hour, when things went dark, 997231 received two messages. They both consisted of one word: ‘maengmog.’ The word means blindness. 997231 then sent the same word to someone who I believe was higher up the chain of command.”
“We know they knocked the power out in Barrow and the Patch, but what exactly does that have to do with the power still working here?”
“A message was sent from 997231—”
“Can we call him something besides the number?”
Avery sighed. “A message was sent to Donald from who I assume was his superior that read, ‘Enemy alerted. Mobilization eminent. Success.’”
“So, you don’t believe there was an EMP?”
“I do believe there was an EMP.”
“Huh?”
“The power loss at the Patch and in Barrow, I believe, was the result of an EMP attack.”
“But why only attack…” Avery recognized that I was figuring out what he was getting at. He almost smiled. Not even smugly. He seemed genuinely happy. “It was all a trick to get our military mobilized towards a threat, but a smaller threat in the grand scheme of things?”
“Hence, why I used the word feint, formerly.”
“That means back home is probably as fucked as what it is here.”
Avery’s smile faded. “Most likely.”
Something else dawned on me. The radar dish in Barrow must’ve been important. The damn thing was on fire, yet those bastards thought it was important enough, even with bullets flying, to hitch it up and get it the hell out of there. “That radar dish… or whatever the hell it was. Could have that been the weapon?”
“I did not see it. I have no way of knowing, other than there must be a reason why, one, it was on fire, and, two, why the Russians were there and why they took it. It had to be important. That is all I can say.”
“Do you think any of that information would be on the phone?”
“Perhaps, there are thousands of messages I have not translated. If I had the internet, I could use a translator tool and expedite the process exponentially.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be great.”
“The power being on as it is, there stands some chance that the internet might also be on.”
“One of the hotels in town?”
“Yes.”
As soon as we had taken our seats inside the cab, Sam began questioning our conversation. “We can drive on down the road, away from ’is shithole, and take a nap. Ain’t no sense of runnin over ’ere ta ’at side of town and take unneeded chances. Let’s get on down the road a bit, and rest ’ere. We can go from ’ere.”
“The internet would quicken the process, by magnitudes, of translating these messages.”
“With all ’is shit goin on you really thank ’ey goin ta be internet over ’ere?”
“The power is on. Maybe,” I told him.
“What ’bout you, boy? You thank it will?”
“I have no way of knowing. There is a possibility.”
“We gonna take ’at chance on a possibility?”
“I think the reward is worth it, but I want this to be a group decision.”
Sam smirked.
“Sam, is there something you want to say to me? This would be a good time as any.”
“Nah, son… Just worried ’bout thangs is all.”
There was an uneasiness in his eyes. “You have a say in this, Sam.”
“We good. We good.”
I shook my head and sighed. “Let’s go.”
We followed Sag River Road too far to the south. Apparently, I wasn’t smart enough to use the GPS because we inadvertently got on the Dalton Highway without my realizing it. Instead of backtracking, we made a hard right and drove over the runway to get to Prudhoe Bay Hotel, which showed up on the GPS as a local attraction.