Read Online Extinction by J.T. Brannan - Free Book Online Page B

swivel chair beneath him as he made a straight line with his body from his toes to his fingertips.
    How long had he been here? As he settled back into the uncomfortable chair behind his workstation, Murray did the calculation.
Fourteen hours
. Fourteen hours behind this damned desk, crunching numbers.
    It wasn’t that he didn’t have any other option; he could have signed off six hours ago. But where was there to go? The research base was in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and there was a blizzard coming down outside that was ferocious. All personnel had been confined to base for their own safety for the duration of the storm. Murray’s apartment in the small town of Allenburg was more than a forty-minute drive away, and he resigned himself to the fact that he wouldn’t be seeing it again for some time. Not that it was anything special anyway.
    Accommodation was laid on for them at the base – bunkhouse dorms like you’d get in an army barracks – but he wanted to avoid going there until the last possible minute. And so he had volunteered for overtime, and was going to put in another two hours before he’d head off to the bunkhouse. As he stretched out again, he wasn’t sure which was worse – the swivel chair here, or the iron cot in the staff dormitory.
    At least there was work to be done. Ever since Karl Janklow had been lost in an avalanche a few days ago, there had been two jobs to be getting on with. In fact, Karl’s tragic death was one of the reasons the staff were now confined to base. The weather had been bad then too, and poor visibility was the probable reason for Karl losing control of his car. It was too short notice to get a replacement, and Murray had therefore been doing Karl’s job as well as his own ever since.
    It upset Murray to think of Karl. They’d been sitting across from one another for over a year now, trading jokes and banter. Karl lived – had lived, Murray corrected himself sadly – in Allenburg too, and the pair had regularly met up for nights on the town. Allenburg wasn’t exactly the most exciting town on earth, but the nights had been good, and more often than not had ended in female company. At least they had for Murray, blessed as he was with his rough good looks, lilting baritone voice, and an ability to charm anyone he met. Karl, smart and funny though he was, had never had the same kind of appeal. Whereas people were always surprised that Murray was a computer technician – with a doctorate from the country’s leading technical university, no less – somehow they would always be able to guess what Karl did for a living.
    Damn
, Murray thought as he looked over at the empty workstation opposite him.
I miss him
. Good ol’ Karl, computer geek extraordinaire.
My friend
.
    Murray pushed Karl from his mind, telling himself that these things happened. People died. The world went on. It was the nature of things, and the world couldn’t be any other way. What had his father said when he’d asked him, all those years ago, why people died?
    ‘Jack,’ his father had said, placing both of his big workman’s hands on his five-year-old son’s shoulders, ‘if we all lived forever, how would we find the space? The food? The world’s only so big. That’s just the way it is.’
    It was logical really, and he’d never asked again. Not when his mother had been taken from him two years later, when a car had hit her at sixty miles per hour and shattered every bone in her body. Not when his sister had drowned whilst trying to save her dog when she was just twelve years old. And not when his father was on his own deathbed, dying of blood poisoning from unregulated chemical leakages at the factory he had worked at his entire life. He had cried, he had grieved, he had felt all the things a normal person would, but that was life. There was no other way.
    When he’d applied for the job here, the location had not bothered him in the slightest – it wasn’t as if he had anyone to