First goddamn week of winter

hey sat there for a while longer, passing the bottle of J&B back and forth while the camp burned around them. Everyone else was dead, even the guys he had liked.
   It was a disappointing ending. Not an ending at all, really, because he still had none of the answers. Did they win or lose? Was he himself? Or something else? Was this guy, the camp’s big black mechanic, who he said he was? Was anyone really? When you get down to the brass tacks of the thing, maybe we’re all hiding some thing. Maybe there’s a murderous tentacled alien presence lurking inside all of us.
   It hurt his brain to think about the big questions. He failed his way out of first year philosophy and also he was drunk.
   They said they’d wait a while and see what happened. It had been a while and nothing had happened. And they were quickly running out of scotch. He wished he could dig his Apple II out of the wreckage and give the chess simulator a spin. Even down here, in the Antarctic, things were like any place else. Sure, aliens attack, your friends die, things get blown up, but in the end all you got’s another cold, hard morning and an empty bottle.

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