Within twenty more minutes, I saw evidence of the sea wall. The euphoria of having found it washed over me, but it was short-lived.
We ditched the loader and made our way towards the sea wall, the jagged shards of ice stabbed at our legs as we stumbled our way over the treacherous sea ice. The lone beacon lay somewhere off to our right.
No streetlights. No people about. Nothing but darkness lay before us. “Fuck,” I uttered as we shambled over the last, especially rough section of ice before reaching the sea wall.
“Jesus,” Aadesh said.
“Yeah.”
“Whad is wery much happening? Dis is crazy shid.”
“Same as the Patch looks like.”
“So, we have been addacked?” Aadesh asked as he stepped in place and rubbed the backs of his legs.
I assumed he was asking a rhetorical question. I focused on the fact that he had to be nearly frozen. “You going to be alright?”
“I am a liddle cold, bud I will most cerdainly be okay.”
“I think you’re a little more than cold, bro.”
“I am freezing, bud I’m drying do remain posidive.”
“We’d still be out there on the ice if it weren’t for you.”
Aadesh shuttered. “We god lucky. I could nod see shid oud dere.”
I laughed. “Well, you saw what mattered most.”
“Dad is drue, I am supposing.”
“What now?” I asked, clueless about what came next.
Aadesh shook his head. “Nod in my job descripdion.”
“Yeah, well, I ain’t nobody who should be telling anybody else what to do.”
Aadesh blew into his gloved hands and continued walking in place but didn’t speak.
A low rumbling sound came from somewhere to our left. “Get down,” I said, as headlights bathed the area in front of us with light. Two large trucks screamed unsafely past. Aadesh was about to speak when I shushed him. I patted him on the shoulder, cupped my ear, and pointed the opposite way the trucks had come. With the overcast sky and lack of a moon, it was impossible to see what I knew I heard.
First, it came in the form of pounding footfalls. Then one Sniffer, ten, and finally who knew how many. Some of them were running, but many more shambling their way past. A churning, grunting gaggle of bodies ambled by in a procession that lasted at least ten minutes. I lay, and I’m sure Aadesh shared the sentiment, there thinking any second would be my last; that they would be alerted to our smell, and, well, things would end badly. There was no place to hide and no place to run. We might’ve been able to make our way back to the loader, but the ice was rough going. I wouldn’t have bet very much on our chances, especially given Aadesh’s already frozen legs.
Frozen and demoralized, we waited them out. Once they were gone, we continued lying there, not saying a word until maybe a half-hour had passed. “Fuck this shit,” I whispered to myself as much to Aadesh.
Aadesh had had enough of being tough. “I am freezing.”
“I know. I know. So am I.”
The sound of shots in the distance rang out. “It keeps getting worse, doesn’t it.”
“Aboud as bad as my feed are killing me. I am dinking I will be having the frosdbide.”
I sighed. “Miley’s is three or four miles from here. You think you can make that?”
Aadesh thought about it for a moment. “I will wery much dry do do dad. I dink my legs will be feeling bedder if I were do move dem.”
I took a shot at a joke, but I didn’t feel it at all. “Get your running boots on, then.”
He looked down at his feet.
“Dude, it’s a joke. You know, haha?”
“I was playing pard in your joke. I know how dey work.”
I laughed. He smiled real big. “We’ll see if we’re still joking when we get to Miley’s.”
“I am dinking if.”
No smiles.
I had been in Barrow on several occasions. Usually, my visits there would be in the form of telling the guy who picked me up where to take me. I never once drove myself in Barrow, but because I had been there a few times, I knew the basic layout. I also knew that if we turned right from where we then were, we could follow Stevenson Street all the way to the airport. From there, we would just take whatever road or street that ran parallel with the airport straight to Miley’s, but that was a long way around. I just didn’t think Aadesh could hold out. He was too cold. Hell, I wasn’t even sure I could.
We could cut off a mile or so by trying to walk as the crow flies. That meant first finding the Top of the World Hotel, which wouldn’t be hard because it was the tallest building in Barrow. And then heading east on a diagonal line, over one of the many frozen lagoons, to the rear of Miley’s office building. That was the plan, anyway, or one of the plans.
I thought way too long about what to do, running scenario after scenario in my head until I’d lost track of what I was debating to begin with. Honestly, I didn’t want to make any of those decisions. I wished William was there. Hell, even Titouan. Aadesh rarely went to Barrow, so I knew he didn’t have much of a clue about anything. The call was going to be mine to make.
“We’re going to head in the direction of the hotel, okay?”
“I am nod even caring. I am ready do be moving.”
There were a few ramshackle houses just ahead. I was about to ask Aadesh if he wanted to see if we might knock on doors until we found someone who would help. With all the shit that was going on, I doubted we would get anything except a gun barrel pointed at us. I did have a few hundred dollars in my wallet. I was more than willing to part with some of it if they would just let us get warm. I’d give them all of it for some good news.
The notion of getting help quickly disappeared as we walked near the first shack. The door was wide open. Another house’s door looked to have been completely broken out of instead of broken in. Aadesh and I hurried our pace.
The glowing beacon that had saved our ass came into view. A truck looked to have collided into the side of a house and caught fire. The adjacent structure was also ablaze. There were three other buildings close enough that they weren’t safe. The whole goddamn town was probably going to burn, and I didn’t much care. At least we could see where in the hell we were going.
We were maybe fifteen feet away from the fire when I heard Aadesh Gasp. We had focused so hard on the burning structures that neither of us had seen the figures standing on the opposite side of the building until we were within a stone’s throw away.
“Easy…. Easy,” I whispered.
One of the Sniffers turned our way. She seemed perplexed, even to the point of turning back to the fire for a moment. I was hopeful the fire was too much of a distraction for her. But after a second or two, her head whipped back in our direction for a second look. Without warning, she raised her face to the sky, sniffed long and hard, and screamed a terrible high-pitched scream. “Fucking run!” I yelled.
Aadesh let out a whimper of pain as he fell into a semi-sprint behind me. “Come on,” I urged.
The woman was quick. She was on Aadesh. He turned around to slap her, grasping hands away from him. Howls came from back at the burning building. “Fuck!”
I wheeled around and slammed the butt of my rifle into the lady’s face, instantly stopping her head’s momentum. Her legs were another matter. They continued on their original path. The result was a wrestling dropkick that only landed when she smacked the ground with a thud. I smashed the butt of my rifle into her face multiple times.
“The hotel,” I said. “If we can make it there, we might have a chance.”
Aadesh grunted something in Hindi. Didn’t have a clue what he said, but it didn’t sound positive. Whether it was him just being so cold or whatever the reason, he was having a difficult time running.