A half-smile formed on her lips as she closed her eyes. She used her left hand to steady herself against the table, raised the gun to her head, and pulled the trigger in one quick and efficient motion. Her soon to be lifeless body fell to the floor; a large portion of the right side of her head gone, as a result. She took two weak breaths and died there, just a couple feet away.
I tried to read over what Tish had written, but I couldn’t focus. I threw the notebook on the table, grabbed the bottle of water, and thirstily finished it. Aadesh and I hadn’t said a word to one another since deciding what to do with Tish’s body. It was probably better that way. He saw me take the pill bottle Tish had left behind and looked at me with utter disgust. I hadn’t yet taken a single one of the pills because of that, but it was only a matter of time.
Having finished reading the note as best as I could, I slid it across the table, towards him. “Well?”
“Well, what?” I asked, rubbing my temples.
“Well, whad do we do?”
“I don’t fucking know, Aadesh,” I told him, wiping the sweat from my face with the sleeve of my flannel shirt. “It’s not like we have a whole hell of a lot of options.”
Aadesh angrily picked up the notebook and shook it. “Our friends are alive!”
“You heard what she said. If they have those bastards after them, they probably aren’t now.”
“So we sday here, den?”
“You want to take the note Tish wrote to our enemy in Fairbanks?” I asked, a sarcastic laugh followed.
“No… I wand do look for our friends.”
“Come on, man, Fairbanks isn’t safe. If the Order has the base, they also have the town. There aren’t any Sniffers here. We’re safe here.”
“Nowhere is safe. Dish gave direcdions do a wehicle we can used do drive to Fairbanks. I say we dake id and leave.”
“I’m not going. Our friends are already dead. We have food, electricity, and everything else we need here to last for a long time.”
Aadesh flicked his chin towards the bottle. “You have dem. I guess dad is all you need.”
“I’m losing my sanity right now, talking about this goddamn shit,” I said. I stood up and angrily pushed the chair under the table.
“I do nod know who you are,” he said, shaking his head in disgust.
“This is who I’ve always been, an addict and an asshole. You could ask my parents if they weren’t most certainly dead. They’d tell you.”
He sighed deeply. “Your drugs are hidden behind the udder medical supplies in Miley’s office. Dake dose pills; dake all of dem for all de shid I give. I will be leaving soon.”
I threw a plastic bag full of pill bottles on the table and opened the water bottle I had gotten while I was up. I took one of the pills Tish had left behind and sat back down at the table. From the look on Aadesh’s face, I think he was under the impression that I wouldn’t retrieve my drug stash after he told me where they were, that I would just magically change my mind about things. I was in the wrong frame of mind for that.
But I knew he was going to chase after William, and I also knew he was going to have to take the van from the garage to go look for the vehicle Tish wrote about in the note. I didn’t want to have to look for another vehicle to get around town. I would go and help, and then I would wash my hands of the whole damn thing. “Look, Aadesh, I’ll help you get the Snow Trac… but then you’re on your own. It’s stupid to leave here.”
Looking down at the table, he nodded.
The directions Tish gave us sent us to a part of Barrow I’d never been. As much snow as there was on the road and the fact that it hadn’t seemed to be plowed even before things went dark, meant the way was treacherous and slow going. The desolate landscape was not good for my mood, either. The further we drove down that isolated stretch of snow-covered road, the more my mood sank. The Oxycontin I had taken was doing little to improve that.
Just up ahead lay a single small house, literally out in the middle of nowhere. Beside the house sat an orange tracked vehicle. It looked straight out of the sixties, which it probably was.
We got out of the van, leaving our weapons inside. In those days, we hadn’t yet learned the importance of always having a gun or knife nearby.
I peeked inside the truck, hoping the keys were in it. They weren’t, of course. I didn’t really want to explore the house, but Tish didn’t tell us where the keys were. Aadesh’s worried look told me he felt the same. There was just something about that house that spooked the hell out of me. Darkness enveloped it from every direction. Without the lights from the van, there would’ve been no light to speak of. I couldn’t imagine living there, especially in the winter months. I don’t even remember seeing a security pole outside.
Broken appliances littered the front porch, making the front door inaccessible. We cautiously walked around to the rear of the house, where we found the door busted open. The first thing that came to mind was someone must’ve looted the house. But then after spending just a couple seconds inspecting the door, it seemed that someone had broken out of the house. Not in.
I wanted to turn tail and leave. Get the hell as far away from that place as possible, or at least back to the warm confines of Miley’s office. There was no damn reason to leave, but I knew Aadesh had it in his mind that he was going, and I knew him well enough to know that when he made his mind up, he did something. He had already taken several steps into the house. I cursed him before following him in.
His headlamp focused on a small picture on the living room wall. It looked to be of a young Tish, flanked on both sides by a white man and woman. Other than the one small picture, there didn’t seem to be any decorations of any sort anywhere. Austere as fuck, I thought, as I scanned my surroundings.
“I’m pretty sure they aren’t her biological parents,” I said, thinking aloud more than conversing with Aadesh.
“How are you knowing dad dose people are her parends.”
“I figure if you’re only going to have one picture in your house, it’d be a family photo.” I lingered for a moment longer on the picture before changing the subject. “Let’s just find the damn key and get out of here.”
“I agree.”
In one of the bedrooms, there were some men’s and women’s clothing. Specifically, there were three sets of men’s work clothes; the guy apparently worked at the North Slope Borough, and oddly enough, the name on the work shirt was Eddie. That wasn’t a name you might envision someone having who detested everything about America, but I guess neither was Tish. The woman of the house had maybe three outfits that were very plain and very similar in appearance.
There were two other rooms connected by via the hallway. One of them was empty. When I say empty, I mean completely empty, even devoid of dust. I wondered if it used to be Tish’s room. I didn’t linger on the thought too long or on any section of the house. I really wanted to just get the fuck out of there.
We had one more room in the hallway, a tiny bathroom, and the kitchen left to check for the key. I assumed it wasn’t in the bathroom, so we moved on to the last room beside the kitchen. I began to jiggle the door handle. It was locked. I motioned for Aadesh to stand back, and I kicked the hell out of the door. The only thing that wasn’t shoddy about the entire house was the damn lock. I had to kick the door at least five times to get it to open. It made a hell of a crashing noise when I finally busted the door off its hinges.